Letter from India: Rajah for a Day.

Byline: Shashi Tharoor

"The palace?" the excitement in my mother's voice was palpable. "We're going to stay at the palace?"

"I suppose so," I replied. In booking my annual holiday in India, I opted this year for a change from the usual round of visits to friends and relatives. My mother, my sons and I would instead play tourist in our native Kerala--and check into the tony resorts that have recently sprung up around the state. How, I wondered, had the backwater I knew as a kid become India's No. 1 tourist destination, above the Taj Mahal?

My parents were born in villages in Palakkad, Kerala's rice bowl. They moved away as teenagers, which meant they kept having to go back to visit. So when my sisters and I were growing up, whether in Bombay or abroad, we always knew where we'd spend our annual family holidays--not in some exotic locale like London or the Caribbean but back "home" in rural Kerala. There we'd grumble about the privations of village life, the lack of mod cons, the ubiquitous mosquitoes. "This annual migration," I told my father when I was 13, "is for the birds."

And yet as adults we fell into the same pattern. Expats ourselves, my sisters and I each winter round up our British- and American-reared children and head for Kerala, rather self-consciously "renewing our roots" and instilling in the new generation our same sense of obligation.

But this time, as we visited our crumbling 200-year-old ancestral home in a seemingly timeless village, it was Kerala that had changed. Savvy tourism promoters have lately come to appreciate the region's exceptional beauty--lush green fields, temperate winters, golden beaches. And because Kerala is also the spiritual center of the ancient life ...