The Parasol Women of Kerala | Papri Sri Raman

BOOK REVIEW

Revolution Within
Nampudiri Women as Agents of Social Reform in Kerala
by T K Anandi
Tulika Books
2024, 200 pages
Hardcover ISBN 978-81-958394-8-3
Price: Rs 850

THIS IS A story of lost agency. A story of the shadows under the lamp. Painstakingly crafted by T K Anandi, a meticulous gender researcher, now a consultant to Kerala’s Gender Council. The book comes at a time when women of Kerala are under the spotlight, after the Kerala government was forced in August 2024 by the State Information Commission to make public the Hema Committee report on sexual violence and gender discrimination in the popular Malayalam film industry.

Interestingly, Anandi quotes Bipin Chandra, the historian author of ‘Making of Modern India: From Marx to Gandhi’, to point out, ‘Colonialism and Capitalism are products of a common historical process’. She also quotes T K Oommen from ‘Protests and Change: Studies in Social Movements’, to add, ‘Any study of social movements should take into account the historicity.’ It is the study of the ‘dialectics between historicity, social structure….’ The book also quotes Pandam Vasudevan Nampudiri from ‘Jaathiyum Manushyanum (caste and the Human Being, 1930)’ to emphasise, ‘Manhood needs no caste, no religion/And so, we all should shatter all these’. It takes note of EMS Namboodiripad’s Ongallur call to the Nampudiri community to ‘leave aside Nampudiri-hood and start living like human beings’. This book opens our eyes to the lives of the Nampudiris who were not quite ‘human beings’, something called the ‘Nampudirihood’ and their women until, say, the 1940s.

Today, Kerala is considered a benchmark State in healthcare, education, social consciousness, with flagship empowerment programmes like the Kudumbashree, so one picked up this volume with the thought that at best a study of women of a Brahminical community will be a study of women’s personal empowerment stories. As a reader, yes, I was not prepared for another story of the widows of Vrindavan, Mathura, Benares, India’s temple towns (Studies on Widows, Meera Khanna, NHRC report). This story is more silent than the infamous tales of India’s abandoned widows, but it is equally bad.

Nampudiris are Brahmins, the highest in the echelon of the Hindu caste order. They are the Sanskrit pundits and the erudite holders of traditional inherited knowledge, the oral libraries of our scriptures. The book begins modestly with a description of ‘illams’, their traditional homesteads, some structures 1,400 years old. The description is not about the architectural framework, it is about a people who lived within; the women and the girl child lurking in their shadows. The married women and older spinsters in the illams were known as ‘Antharjanams’, a word derived from the Sanskrit word, ‘Anthapura’, describing the interior space for women; in the modern vocabulary, the harem. This is a medieval space, and the insides of the illams were no less obsolete spaces, devoid of basic considerations and what today we call ‘equal’ rights.

The question in a reader’s mind is likely be, how is it possible that the highest in the caste ladder, the most educated and the community that had the most opportunity for many centuries, thought so regressively, without any concept of fairness, kindness, good health and logic, practiced inhuman customs, not necessarily blindly, operated so anti-socially, and got away with calling themselves the ‘best’ among humankind in their limited space, one corner of this vast subcontinent. It is the understanding of the historicity that connects the dots in one of the haziest phases of ‘cast consciousness’.

In her book, Anandi talks of the ‘vedic schools’, exclusively for Nampudiri boys and men. Her book is also an essay on the pitfalls of patriarchy, divesting the reader of any illusion that Kerala had a matrilineal society; by its very nature progressive and mindful of the interest of the ‘female’ in the community. Obviously, the patriarchy of the Nampudiri community came from and were instilled in the unnis, youngsters, in these so-called ‘vedic schools’ that were said to impart knowledge of the Vedas, Sanskrit, the scriptures and the mantras. Don’t ask which Veda prescribes ‘clotheslessness’ for the Antharjanams; remember, Hindu epics like the Mahabharata is the story of a war fought over an attempt to de-clothe a wife.

So, what happened to the Vedas and Sanskrit while they travelled south? What happened to the Dwijas, the twice born? The scholar Peggy Mohan, in her book, ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’ has two insightful chapters, ‘The Hidden Story of Sanskrit’ and ‘How the Namboodiri Brahmins Changed Malayalam’, which provide a few of the dots that connect the story of the Nampudiri women, in Anandi’s book.

Peggy talks about the linguistic research of Madhav Deshpande, who was not afraid to say that the ‘aura’ of Sanskrit grew post-William Jones and the western theory of a pure ‘Aryans’ race in India. Deshpande said, the earliest Sanskrit of the earliest form of Rigveda was an oral-recited-audio language that was ‘not fully Indian’. This raised hackles among the purists. ‘Not fully Indian’ meant, the language of a migrating community from outside of the subcontinent. Anthropologists often refer to them as Scythians, Sakas, Ashvakas and various Eurasian communities. The gene trail of Rahul Sankrityayan’s 1943 Volga to Ganga stories. But studies of mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), transmitted from mother to children, did not support migration. So the question was, what kind of migration, where is the DNA of the migrating community?

Peggy then quotes Prof Michael Witzel, who placed this ‘migration of Sanskrit’ speaking people to less than 2000 years before Christ – not that ancient as made out to be – at the end of the Harappan civilization, when the river Saraswati still flowed, as mentioned in the Rigveda. These ‘vedic’ people were pre-urban, occupying post-urban spaces, the Harappan city spaces at the end of the Neolithic period. They are classified as belonging to the early Bronze age, but they, unlike the Harappans, had no script. It is a 2017 study, that of the Y chromosome transmission, that gives proof of the ‘vedic’ migration, if we can call it that. They called themselves Brahmins, who brought with them the first ‘veda’ in a spoken language – that was the first Sanskrit. No written records of this.

Peggy theorises, these pastoral groups were ‘mostly all male’ migrants who came on horse-back and stayed on, tempted by the ‘cows’, milk- and meat-yielding animals that the primarily matrilineal communities in the subcontinent domesticated. The all-male groups settled with the women of the subcontinent, and it is only the third-fourth generation Sanskrit, the language of the father, that began to see the need of a script. It is X generations later that Panini, a scholar from Gandhara, set grammar to Sanskrit. Much later came the palm-leaf records of written Sanskrit, much corrupted and much evolved, and finally came the written scriptures, through university efforts over several centuries in the early Common Era. Peggy writes, ‘the strongest image we take away from Kerala is that of the matrix as a Malayali matriarch, a woman that has been there since earliest times, making space for new “sons-in-law” in an orderly way…’ that let her old world continue. Peggy Mohan concludes, ‘through Kerala what we get is a clue to only the first part of the Sanskrit story: the trickling of the Vedic men over a span of time and their settling down with respect and prestige to become the protectors of kings. We do not get to the era that followed….’

The unfinished story – of the great torque that took place to create a self-destructing community, promoting inbreeding to the extent that by the early twentieth century, there weren’t enough community people and with an unsustainable economy – may one day move forward, telling us what happened after the sixth century CE, that resulted in the Nampudiri form of patriarchy Anandi tells us about. A social order where only the eldest sibling could marry into the caste, all younger brothers had to find sexual relationships elsewhere. The Nair community, with a matrilineal inheritance system, obliged. The eldest Nampudiri brother owned the land, the temple, the temple-land, the worship, the rituals and the laws, including the social norms. The women, the wives, yes, the many wives had no agency at all, no say. If they even went to the temple, they had to be accompanied by companion maids and hold parasols to hide their faces.

A few lines of what Anandi recounts: When girls and Antharjanams prayed, they would always say, ‘Lord! May we always get food and clothes.’ She quotes from *Yogakshemam, to describes an occasion at the Guruvayoor temple where new clothes were being given away for Onam. ‘…there was a long queue of Antharjanams, many of whom had walked long distances to reach there and many of whom were so poorly clothed that they even found it difficult to cover their nudity.’ For Antharjanams, ‘marriage was only a displacement from their maternal to the husband’s home. In both places she was only a dependent with just the basic rights to food, clothing and a roof over her head…. Having sex was according to the taste and need of the Nampudiri’. They had almost no sex life, and when a Nampudiri died, he left behind half a dozen widows of all ages. To see a widow was bad luck, and no doubt, they were shunned, often thrown out of the illam, with no food, no clothes and no shelter.

Anandi fills her narrative with innumerable such accounts, first-hand stories, an exhaustive case study of the Sreekrishnapuram village and the Vellinezhi women’s movement’s plea protesting patriarchal rhetorics against their cause. She quotes Devaki Nilayamgode (of ‘Antharjanams: Memoirs of a Namboodiri Woman’ fame) who wrote a very vivid account of life in a Nampudiri family in her Malayalam book, Nashtabodhangalillathe. Anandi also records the contributions of various social movements that brought light of awareness to these illams. Colonialism, British laws, English education, land reforms, Nair community reforms that proscribed marrying their daughters to polygamous Nampudiris, the rights assertions by the younger siblings among Nampudiris, the early freedom movement, the ‘satyagrahas’, all contributed to bring about the ‘revolution within’ among the Antharjanams Anandi skillfully paints.

While I will leave you to read about the changes that the women themselves demanded and brought about through their own activism, I would like to tell you that Anandi does not forget to mention Kuriedath Thathrikutty whose story comes from the ‘smartha vicharam’ (a trial document of an adulterous woman). With hundreds of young widows and unmarried women in the community, if a Nampudiri woman was suspected to have so much as glanced towards another male, she was deemed to be adulterous. fwifeThathrikutty was 18 and beautiful. She belonged to the Kalpakasseri Illam from Ezhumangadu village. She was married to a 60-year-old Nampudiri, used to bringing home prostitutes. Thathrikutty opposed this and by the age of 23, her husband left her. She then began her own sex work business. The story goes, it was her old husband who came to her as a prostitute, who then accused her of adultery. Of course, the community ostracised her and hauled her to the king’s court. Accepting the charges, in open court, Thathrikutty began recounting her liaisons with 64 men, including the king. The trial was, naturally, halted. Lalithambika Antharjanam’s story, ‘Pratikaaradevata’ is Thathrikutty’s story.

For any sociological study on Indian communities and any feminist research, T K Anadi’s book is an informative and enriching contribution, for historical pursuits too. And its beautiful jacket makes for a visual delight on any bookshelf.

 *‘Namboothiri Yogakshema Mahaasabha’ was a Sabha to create awareness among the Nampudiris and the young men gathered under this umbrella started a monthly publication called ‘Yogakshemam’.

(Review author: Papri Sri Raman is a senior journalist, manuscript editor, and author)