Ali Baba's cave

Three generations of a business family in Kerala have built up a unique collection of crystal, ivory and ceramics - and a museum to house it

A walk through Alappuzha in Kerala, which the tourist brochures are fond of hailing as the “Venice of the East” for its network of waterways, will take you along canals and over bridges, past beautiful churches and warehouses dating back to the days when the town was a thriving centre of trade.

These sights the brochures and magazines prepare you for. But close to the centre of the town is the more unusual sight — only less surprising than the giant gorilla a jewellery chain has chosen to install outside an outlet — of an imposing white building with pristine Grecian pillars and statues.

This semi-circular building houses a unique museum showcasing artefacts collected by three generations of a single family. It contains one of the world’s largest collections of Swarovski crystal.

I had read fleetingly about the Revi Karuna Karan Memorial Museum, opened in 2006 by Betty Karan in memory of her late husband. The Karunakarans were the first Indians to manufacture and export coir, starting in 1905, and their travels took them to different corners of the globe. I was curious to see what their collection would be like.

The entry fee is a steep Rs 100. Each group of visitors is accompanied by a guide (“Or you won’t understand anything,” I am told, though most of the exhibits are labelled).

The ground floor of the 20,000 sq ft museum is dominated by a pale-green 1948 Buick Super, which looks in mint condition. The car was imported by Karan’s father, and it is still in running condition, says the guide.

The rest of the sprawling space is filled with beautiful antique furniture, mostly from Europe, arranged against the walls: quaint writing desks, cupboards from Portugal, a hat stand, a small church organ... There is even a silver-coated sofa set from China. Many of the walls have antique Tanjore paintings.

It is hard to take all of it in, especially with the guide trying to jog us through saying that there is much more to see (and implying that we should get a move on instead of dawdling over a particularly lovely piece). We go up the sweeping staircase to the rooms upstairs, which turn out to be even more of an Ali Baba’s cave.

The first floor has three wings. One is dedicated to ivory. This collection is believed to be among the largest in the country, because the Karunakarans have been collecting since before the ivory trade was banned. A second wing houses the family’s famed Swarovski collection, as well as crystal by Daum and Lalique.

The third section is devoted to porcelain, with figures and objects by France’s Lladro, Herend of Hungary, Italy’s Capo de Monte, Germany’s Meissen, and Versace and Armani. Some of the figurines are carved with impossible delicacy — some figures wear lace so fine that it is hard to believe it is not cloth. There are also Russian icons, Fabergé eggs and Wedgwood crockery.

There is a separate Kerala room, with antique vessels and ornaments, and even a traditional wooden boat. It is a lot to absorb in one go, especially glass cupboard after glass cupboard of porcelain and crystal, but definitely worth the entrance fee.

‘I was worried I would not have enough to fill two floors’

Sometimes, people passing the museum make the sign of of the crucifix, thinking it’s a church,” says Betty Karan with a smile.

We are sitting in the verandah of her house, right behind the museum. Karan, now the chairman of the Karan Group, is charming and formidable. She lets herself be interviewed only after she has questioned me.

“I picked up things during my travels because I loved them,” she says. The artefacts were previously distributed among the family’s various houses in Kerala. Many of the pieces, she says, were bought by her husband’s stepmother, who was Dutch, especially the Lladro and Swarovski. Her husband’s mother, who was German, brought a lot of Meissen, which was the first European company to manufacture porcelain. The bulk of the ivory was bought by her husband’s grandfather.

Karan herself is one of the 250 original members of the Swarovski Crystal Society, which now has 600,000 members.

“You will also find pieces in the museum that might not be expensive but which are special to me, and unique,” she says, “like a carving by a double-amputee who was sitting outside a church in Peru.”

Some pieces have sentimental value, like the Buick, which was the car she rode in as a bride, and which she has driven as well.

The one piece she regrets not having bought earlier is a Ravi Varma painting. “I had the opportunity to buy three 30 years ago at a distress sale by a friend, but I didn’t because he was not so famous then... and also because I did not want to buy from a friend,” she says.

The number of artefacts do not leave one with a sense that anything is missing, especially after a walk through a couple of Karan’s own rooms reveals many more objets d’art in the house. “When I had the museum built, a nephew advised me to make it three storeys,” she says, “but back then, I was worried I would not have enough for the first two floors.” That worry was unfounded.