by Anita Nair
Until recently, it was considered almost heretical to suggest that all is not as well with women in the state as development data seem to indicate. And that there is more to the status of women than literacy and education, work participation, fertility rate, and other conventional measures of women’s advancement, not to mention the mythical matrilineal tradition.
Fortunately, there are emerging signs that this reality is now fairly widely accepted, even in official circles, both within the state and elsewhere. There are also encouraging signals that indicate formal recognition of the need to get beyond exclusive concern with the material conditions of women’s lives and to focus attention on issues relating to the equally important question of the position of women in society. So there is hope yet for a future in which women in Kerala will be truly empowered and not merely living in a fool’s paradise.
Where ‘Everything is Different’
Abu Abraham
For me, as for most Malayalis, there is Kerala and there is India. The two are one, of course, but Kerala is so different from the rest of the country and so unique in its landscape, culture and history that a Malayali grows up having a mental distinction between Kerala and the rest of India. This feeling of difference has nothing to do with any lack of identity with other parts of the country, nor do Malayalis feel any less loyal to India that is Bharat. Indeed, the Hindu traditions alone keep Kerala closely bound with the rest of India. After all, Shankaracharya did not come from nowhere. He was the product of a long process of cultural development and spiritual traditions that must have begun in Vedic times.
In geological terms, Kerala seems to be a later addition to the great Indian landmass. There is evidence that the inland towns of Kottayam and Tripunithura were seaports in the days when the Greeks sailed the Arabian Sea. The low-lying areas that now separate these places from the ocean were formed by currents off the coast, which swept the sand and silt flowing down the rivers, from east to west, into long banks parallel to the shore. In this manner, the backwaters and large lakes like Vembanad, stretching from Kochi to Kottayam, and the Ashtamudi at Kollam were formed.
The story of Parasurama, an incarnation of Vishnu, is a mythical version of the geological events of antiquity. Subramaniam, the peacock-riding son of Shiva, persuades Varuna, the god of the sea, to give Parasurama all the land he could cover with a throw of his axe, starting from the Western Ghats where he dwelt. Parasurama cast his axe, which landed near Kanyakumari, and the whole strip of land now known as Kerala rose from the sea. Parasurama then settled on this land some sixty-four Namboodri Brahmin families who had been faithful to the teachings of the Rig Veda and when he left, gave them sovereign rights.
Parasurama was the sixth incarnation of Vishnu, but it is a previous incarnation (the fifth) that Malayalis recall annually at the time of Onam, a festival that coincides with the harvest in late summer. Vishnu takes on the form of a dwarf, Vamana, and sets out to subdue the great Asura king, Bali or Mahabali, whose magical powers and popularity among the people had made the Brahminical deities jealous. Vamana asks Mahabali, known for his generosity and good government, for a gift of land, just as much as he could cover in three paces. When Bali innocently agrees, Vamana begins to grow until he is a giant, and his first stride covers the whole earth. Bali is thus forced to go to the infernal regions and returns to Kerala once a year to see how the people are faring. The Onam festival is an occasion for Malayalis to show, through feasting and dancing, how happy they are to welcome Bali again.
The story of Mahabali is regarded as a piece of mythological history representing the conquest of the native Dravidian culture by the Aryan teachers from the north, who brought with them the Vedic religion and the Sanskrit language and who, incidentally, introduced a caste system which never existed before. Caste, in a multitude of social divisions and cultural practices, later became the curse of Kerala.
The legends of Parasurama and Mahabali were, it is obvious, created by the Brahmin intruders to perpetuate their claim over the land as well as their social hegemony.
The later ‘invaders’ did not seek to dominate; they were traders. For at least two thousand years, the coastal ports of Kodungallur (Cranganore) and Kochi (Cochin) have seen the arrival of ships from West Asia and Europe, bringing travellers more varied and numerous than those who rode into India from the northwest. And unlike the experience of Punjab, these intrusions into Kerala were almost entirely peaceful.
From the days of Cleopatra, there is evidence of traders from the West coming to the Konkan and Malabar coasts. The earliest travellers were Arabs who were probably sailing to India in search of spices long before Cleopatra’s time. The Greeks of Alexandria provide the first historical data on the Malabar coast. Later visits came from the Romans, the Muslims of Egypt and Iran, and the Chinese who renewed the European connection in the thirteenth century. They were followed by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danes, and finally the British, who presided over the native states of Travancore and Cochin along with Malabar (the northern part of Kerala) from 1791 onwards, when the East India Company’s forces defeated Tipu Sultan’s invading army and drove them over the Ghats and back to Mysore.
In many ways, these foreign contacts benefited Kerala and shaped its way of life and personality. As a result of commerce with the Western and Arab traders, Kerala developed a plantation system in the foothills of the Sahyadri mountains and a form of agriculture in the coastal areas based on cash crops. Kerala’s economy is dependent on pepper, cardamom, rubber and tea and, of course, coconut, which provides coir and copra (dried kernel from which oil is extracted). The intensity of cultivation has made Kerala evergreen, with an elaborate system of canals through which, in the past, country boats carried goods for export to the little ports along the coast. The whole landscape is, in a sense, a reflection of its commercial history.
The coconut, incidentally, is not native to Kerala. Botanists think that it must have been brought from Indonesia either directly or via Sri Lanka. An old folk song of the Ezhava community says, ‘Our ancestors of old, had their home in the land of Ceylon.’ The fact that the Ezhavas of Kerala have been traditionally coconut cutters and toddy tappers emphasizes this connection. The origin of the Ezhavas (or Thiyas as they are known in Malabar) is obscure. But ‘Thiya’ is said to be a corruption of dweepa (island), suggesting that they were Sri Lankans.
As for toddy, its potency and flavour seem to have been appreciated by Malayalis and foreigners alike since ancient times. Marco Polo, in his account of his visit to the region, referred to a wine made out of sugar, but it could only have been arrack made from toddy, or sugarcane from which jaggery is prepared.
Marco Polo reached Kerala from China and, for such a widely travelled gentleman, his astonishment was great when he saw Kerala. He wrote: ‘Everything is different from what it is with us and excels both in size and beauty. They have no fruit the same as ours, no beast, no bird. This is a consequence of the extreme heat. They have no grain excepting only rice. They make wine out of sugar, and a very good drink it is, and makes a man drunk sooner than grape wine. All that a human body needs for living is to be had in profusion and very cheap with the one exception of grain other than rice. They have no lack of skilled astrologers. They have physicians who are adept at preserving the human body in health. They are all black-skinned and go stark naked, both males and females, except for gay loincloths. They regard no form of lechery or sexual indulgence as sin.’
St. Thomas the Apostle is believed to have landed at Muziris (now Cranganore or Kodungallur) in 52 AD. His conversions created what is known as the earlier Christian community, the Church of St. Thomas or the Syrian Christian Church. Though there is no historical proof of St. Thomas’ arrival, there is ample evidence of a well-established Church from the second century onwards.
St. Thomas, according to legend, preached the Gospel with great patience, and it was eight months before he could form his first congregation. During his stay in the Jewish quarters, he succe
ssfully converted the local raja, along with four hundred Hindus and forty Jews. He founded seven churches in towns along the coast. He is believed to have gone from Kerala to China and later returned to India, landing on the Coromandel coast where he was slain by hostile Hindus and buried in Mylapore, Madras. St. Thomas’ conversions are recorded in a Brahmin account in the Keralolpati, according to which a certain Thoman ‘who was an opponent of all Vedas’ converted ‘many prominent people in the land’, including the reigning king, Bana Perumal.
Much before Christianity came to Kerala, it is possible that there was a Jewish community living in Kodungallur and Kochi. The Black Jews of Kerala (of whom few are now left because they have migrated to Israel) are believed, according to their own tradition, to be part of the diaspora (dispersal), arriving from Yemen and Babylon. The White Jews, who came from Iran and Iraq after the rise of Islam, dispute the claim of the Black Jews, describing them as local serfs who converted. The social customs of the Black Jews are no different from other Malayalis, whereas the Whites wear western clothes and prefer to remain as an alien community. There has been strict segregation between the two groups. They never intermarried and even in the common cemetery in Kochi there is a high wall that separates the Blacks from the Whites.
Marco Polo was not the only Italian traveller who recorded his impressions of Kerala. Nicholas Conti wrote in 1440 that Cochin was a city five miles in circumference. He remarked, ‘China was a good place to make money in and Cochin to spend it,’ though we are not told what attractions he found in the city. Marco Polo described how pepper was grown, indigo extracted, and mentioned calico, the cloth that got its name from Calicut (Kozhikode).
From Italian accounts of the fifteenth century, we get some idea of the Muslim and Christian communities. They speak of the wealth of the Muslim merchants who imported luxury articles like cloth of gold and silk in exchange for spices. Such accounts aroused the interest of the Portuguese. Until then, it was Venice that had a virtual monopoly of the spice trade to Europe. The Portuguese having decided on their imperialistic maritime adventures, presumably in order to gain prestige and power and not wishing to be overlooked by neighbouring Spain, sent a nobleman, Joas Peres Covilhao, on a reconnaissance mission in 1487. Covilhao died in Abyssinia on his return journey before he could give the king an account of his expedition. Nevertheless, the king went ahead with his plans for an expedition around the Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal in July 1497 with the banner of the Cross flying from his masthead. Successive Popes had given such adventurers rights over all territories discovered in Asia and Africa. The Portuguese, it appears, sincerely believed it was their duty to find new lands to be proselytized and turned over to the Roman Church.
Vasco da Gama was received by the Zamorin at a ceremonial durbar, which provided the strange spectacle of a European dressed elaborately in blue satin and velvet and a brocaded cloak, meeting a king dressed in simple clothes but adorned with glittering jewellery. Vasco da Gama, with his long beard which he had vowed not to cut until he returned to Portugal, made his entrance behind a band of trumpeters. He was accompanied by pages carrying gifts that included a gold chair on which the Zamorin obligingly sat to conduct the audience.
There is an elaborate and detailed description of the king, his dress, the jewellery and pearls around his neck and arms and in his pierced ears, and his long black hair, which was gathered up and tied into a knot at the top of his head. For such vivid descriptions we are indebted to the Portuguese chronicles of the time, for they give us a glimpse into life in Kerala as it was then.
The Zamorin did not show much enthusiasm for the Portuguese overtures for trade and business. Neither he nor the Arabs trusted them, and the Arab merchants had warned him of the ambitions of the Portuguese. Vasco da Gama then took five hostages and sailed away to Kannur, further north, where the local prince, a rival of the Zamorin, welcomed him. By manipulating the hostility between the princes, the Portuguese established their presence on the Malabar coast. In 1500, a large expedition of thirteen ships arrived from Portugal under the command of Pedro Alvarez Cabral, whose arrogance and brutality were typical of later Portuguese behaviour in Kerala. He began by seizing an Arab ship that was loading pepper, and the Arabs killed fifty Portuguese in the battle that followed. More and more ships began to arrive from Portugal and the Portuguese hold on the Malabar coast continued until 1571 when the Zamorin’s forces made them abandon their effort to control the region.
The religious bigotry of the Portuguese was such that they persecuted the Jews according to the policy of their government back home. They offended the Christians who at first seemed to be their allies. When the Jesuits arrived in 1542, Francis Xavier travelled along the Kerala coast and through mass conversion among fishermen and untouchables in the Travancore state and Kanyakumari, established the first Latin Catholic church in India. They found, however, that the Syrian Christians were disinclined to embrace Roman Catholicism. While for fishermen, Christianity was an escape from caste, the Syrian Christians had experienced no such oppression, for they had lived from early times virtually as part of the larger Hindu community in customs, manners and culture.
In 1599, Alexis de Menezes, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Goa and Primate of all the East, arrived in Cochin with the intent of finally forcing the Syrian Christians to accept the Latin rite. He persuaded the Raja of Cochin to threaten punishment to any of his subjects who refused to submit to the Roman Church. The Portuguese burnt almost all the records of early Christianity, which they considered heretical writings. In the end, except for a small section of Christians who followed the Nestorian doctrines and whose bishops came from Babylon, the Syrian Christians bowed to Rome.
Then, in 1653, the Portuguese arrested at sea, off Cochin, a Nestorian bishop, Atahallah, travelling in disguise from the Persian Gulf. He was sent to Goa and handed over to the Inquisition, after which he was despatched to Lisbon and then to Rome, where he vanished. Atahallah, on his way from Lisbon to Rome, had sent a letter to Archdeacon Thomas, the leading Syrian Christian priest in Kerala, and it created a sensation in Cochin. Twenty thousand Christians marched to demand the bishop’s release. The Portuguese blandly told them that he had drowned. The angry Christians then went to a church in Cochin outside which stood a leaning Cross on which they tied ropes. The huge crowd touched it and swore they would not accept Roman rule. The Cross stands even today as a historic monument—the Koonan Kurishu or Crooked Cross—marking the resurrection of an independent native Church on the Malabar coast.
There is one thing that should be said in favour of the Portuguese—they were not racist. They never ordered a colour bar. On the contrary, they encouraged soldiers and civil servants to marry women from Kerala. Malayalis, so long as they were Christians, had equal rights with Whites in the municipality they set up in Cochin. Converts were often given high military and civil posts, and some were even given titles. Francis Xavier’s mass conversions among the low caste fishermen of Travancore were perhaps the first blows in the battle against untouchability. Caste was an all-pervading evil in Kerala until recently. When, a hundred years ago, Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala, he described the place as a madhouse. There was not only untouchability, but also ‘unapproachability’ and ‘unseeability’. But today, due to a long tradition of free popular education as well as the continuous struggle of the lower castes, Kerala can almost claim to be a classless, if not casteless, society. The emancipation of the Ezhavas under the leadership of Sri Narayana Guru, who began his religious movement with the slogan, ‘One God, one people, one religion’, brought about the removal of most of the barriers that caste had set up against them.
The high literacy (almost a hundred per cent) as well as the new prosperity and egalitarianism that characterize modern Kerala have much to do with its being a coastal region with a long history of contact with other regions of the world, in the West as well as in the East. Foreign contacts kept the people alive to new ideas and ways o
f life. While they have been devoted to their cultural traditions and are to a large extent conservative in their social attitudes, Malayalis are at the same time cosmopolitan adventurers, travelling to different parts of the world to make a living and even settling away from home. The Gulf and the United States are their Meccas today and they have succeeded remarkably in the professions they have chosen.
The young Malayali today is privileged to live in a society that is going through a cultural renaissance, where the traditional arts are being revived and the Malayalam language being enriched with new writing. In literature and in films, Kerala has found a vast reservoir of talent that is speeding the new movement.
Kerala’s peculiar history with its age-old tradition of religious tolerance (and even active help from Hindu rajas to other religious communities like Jews, Muslims and Christians) has had much to do with its present status, which is that of a highly educated, cultured and secular state. Religious and communal conflicts are so rare in Kerala that one can say, as Marco Polo said, that here ‘everything is different’.
The First Lessons
O.V. Vijayan
This extract is taken from The Legends of Khasak, published by Penguin Books India.
The rains were over, the skies shone, and Khasak readied itself for Onam, the festival of thanksgiving. Children went up into the hills at sunrise to gather flowers. For ten days they would arrange colourful designs in their yards with flower petals to welcome the deities of the festival. Ravi heard the children sing on the hillsides, and for a fleeting moment they touched him with the joy of a hundred home-comings. The moment passed, and once again he was the fugitive. A fugitive had no home, and a sarai no festival.