Ancient Kerala was an agrarian society, and laborers who worked the land belonged to communities called Parayan and Pulayan.¹ According to the peculiar culture of ancient Kerala, these communities held a monopoly over agrarian labor; the privilege, so to speak, to agricultural work that was entitled to wages. Before the British abolished slavery in Malabar, these agricultural serfs were tied to the land, forbidden to relocate, and inured to serve the owner of the land, whoever that may be. Curiously, the abolition served to worsen their condition, for while it freed them from the land and the landlord, it also took away their monopoly and consequently, their right to reasonable wages.²
Like the other native communities in Kerala, they followed matrilineal inheritance, but unlike more prosperous families, the wife lived with her husband and earned separate wages by her own labor.³ While Euro-centric ethnographers of the early 1900’s and their native followers were quick to put these communities into racial buckets such as “Dravidian,” “Tuanean,” and “Negrito” based on the color of their skin and the size of their skull, a different approach in terms of linguistics and cultural comparisons could put their origins in ancient Egypt, along with the other natives of Kerala. In ancient Egyptian, the term for “agricultural laborer” was paray or alternatively, palay.⁴ In Papyrus Lansing dating to ca. 1800 BCE, a papyrus extolling the scribal vocation in comparison to many other professions, the agricultural laborer paray is described as a toiler who does the hardest labor of all.⁵ Like the erstwhile agrarian serfs of Kerala, the ancient Egyptian laborer was also tied to the land, forbidden to relocate, and eligible to wages in kind.⁶
Modern historians of Kerala tend to look east across the Sahyadri mountains for origin stories of the natives, overlooking that in ancient times, before roads were carved through dense and dangerous forests, the ocean was perhaps an easier route for human migration. If indeed it was human migration from Egypt that populated Kerala, then, that the agricultural laborers, tied to the land, migrated with all the other native communities from nobles to soldiers, suggests that entire villages likely relocated as such to Kerala, an endeavor at once startling in its scope, revolutionary for its age, and courageous in its execution.
Notes
[1] In very old texts, the two names are used interchangeably. Anantha Iyer, 1909, The Tribes and Castes of Cochin, 2 vols. Repr. 1981, 1:68 (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications). The Pulayan community in the northern parts of Kerala are called Cheruman or Cherumakkal. 1:87.
[2] Iyer, Tribes and Castes, 1:95–96. Iyer mentions that among the Pulayans, the elderly folks “still say that they were better off in the days previous to their emancipation, for they were then well fed, married and looked after by their masters, while they are now left to a great extent to shift for themselves.”
[3] Iyer, Tribes and Castes, 1:74–75.
[4] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/860218. The hieroglyph for [r] was also pronounced as [l].
[5] Blackman, Aylward M. and T. Eric Peet. 1925. “Papyrus Lansing: A Translation with Notes.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 11(3/4): 284–298. The name of the community in Kerala thus likely derives from their job title.
[6] Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, 1883, A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, translated and edited by Walter Armstrong, 2 vols., 1: 31 (London: Chapman & Hall).
