In my previous articles, I wrote about Phoenician and Minaean immigrants in Kerala who had formed trading diasporas since very ancient times, putting Kerala on the global Indian Ocean trade map. Through their commerce, religions, and culture, they influenced Kerala’s history to a significant extent. Yet, their impact on the indigenous traditions of the land was not as transformational as that of the Nambuthiri brahmins, who like them, were immigrants in Kerala once upon a time.
Contrary to widespread beliefs, the Nambuthiri brahmins were by no means the original settlers, for Kerala was already a prosperous trading nation with a working economy based on trade and agriculture before their arrival. Historical records clearly place the Nambuthiri brahmins after the Buddhists in Kerala’s history. Emperor Ashoka’s inscription in 257 BCE addressing the kings of south India, including “Keralaputra,” in the same sentence that he addresses non-Buddhist Greek states, suggests that Kerala was not majority Buddhist at that time, and thus certainly not yet Brahmanized.
In fact, Brahmanism emerged in pan-India only during the last few centuries preceding the Common Era as a regional ideology centered around the northwestern Gangetic plains. By ninth century CE, when Kerala saw the initial signs of a wave of Brahmanism, the rest of India had already experienced extraordinary cultural changes: The Vedic period had given way to Jain and Buddhist, and finally to Brahmanic culture. Civilizations had come and gone. The Mauryan Empire had risen and fallen as had the Gupta Empire several centuries later. The Deccan had exploded in a parade of dynasties one following the other in close succession. Wars had been fought and won and lost. Global trade had brought prosperity to the land, and in its wake, foreign predators.
But hemmed in by the enormous peaks of the Sahyadri mountains on its eastern frontier and by the vast, formidable waters of the Indian Ocean on its western flank, the sliver of seacoast that was Kerala was isolated from the tsunamic changes happening in the rest of inland India. Being accessible mainly by sea, it was virtually a cultural island for millennia. One of the very few land routes into Kerala from the east was the Palakkad pass, a low mountain gap in the Sahyadri, around thirty kilometers wide, connecting present-day Palakkad in Kerala with Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. The Palakkad pass was an ancient inland trade route for various goods from the eastern part of peninsular India, most notably stone beads from Arikamedu, destined to Muziris on the western seaboard, from where they were distributed all across the known world. Among those who made their way to Kerala through this wild and dangerous road — along with the carnelian beads — were the Nambuthiri brahmins in the fourth century CE.
According to the Nambuthiri community’s lore, the brahmin king Mayurasharma of the Kadamba dynasty in Karnataka (ca. 350 CE), failing to find suitable Vedic brahmin priests in his kingdom, persuaded a few from Ahicchatra in north India to settle along the southern and western borders of his kingdom in a bid to brahmanize the region. If the Nambuthiri lore is correct, they probably settled in Kerala too around the same time. Analysis of their customs indicate that they migrated to Kerala after Buddhism had influenced Brahmanism everywhere, but before certain customs, such as the sarvasvadana form of marriage and dvayamushyamana form of adoption went out of vogue in the brahmin community elsewhere around 400 CE.
Epigraphic evidence indicates that during 600 CE, royal patronage in Kerala extended to three religions: native, Jainism and Buddhism; Brahmanism was not overly evident during this time. Yet, the meteoric rise of Sanskrit in literature a mere 200 years later suggests a rapidly growing influence of Brahmanism. By the close of 1200 CE, the majority religion in Kerala had changed to Hinduism, with deities worshiped in temples taking Hindu forms. Despite the dramatic pace of the change, Brahmanization, far from exemplifying a clash between Vedic Hinduism and native traditions was more likely a “strategy and negotiation, social fluidity and cultural creativity.” It subtly and profoundly changed the native way of thought; in this process, local gods were maintained and adopted by the brahmins but translated into or identified with Puranic gods.
During this liminal period of brahmanization, Kerala’s native culture was supplanted by a set of Brahmanical cultural features, including personal names, toponyms, images, cults, social behavior, attitudes, and literature in a slow, gradual, and peaceful process, so that there was no sharp temporal differentiating point between a pre-Brahmanical Kerala and a post-Brahmanical one. Thus, temple inscriptions dating to around 1000–1300 CE show evidence of both native and Brahmanized culture in the names of temple donors and deities, and in the words of the inscriptions: Native names such as Adicchan, Ambiran, Ankappan, Itti, Kandan, Nainar, and Tuppan are alongside Sanskrit names such as Damodaran, Devan, Narayanan, Raman, Shankaran and Shekharan and yet other syncretized names, such as Pozhan Kumaran, Shankaran Sattan, and Kunran Raman. Words such as wattam ‘temple’ likely deriving from Egyptian Hwt ‘temple,’ were in vogue instead of Sanskrit kshetram ‘temple’ prevalent today. The deities were called bhataraka, bhatarar, ayyan, nambiyatiyar, maviyakki rather than by Puranic names, vishnu, shiva, krishna, lakshmi, durga.
The spread of Brahmanism was not by violence, as was the case with Islam in north India; nor was it by imposition, as with Christianity in Europe during the Roman Empire; neither was it spread by missionaries as in Buddhism. No one seemingly “converted” to Brahmanism in the ordinary sense of the term; yet, it seeped into the social fabric, dyeing everything it touched with the hues of the Puranas. Based on analysis of paleography and the development of Brahmanized Puranic lore of south India, all that is certain is that Brahmanization occurred in a post-Jain, post-Buddhist culture. More than that remains uncertain and poorly understood. Considering that the seventh century CE was a “golden age of Jainism” in Kerala, it is highly likely that the majority of cultural conversion to Brahmanism occurred after 800 CE, indeed, probably around the time when the Malayalam calendar was reset, heralding the start of a new era in Kerala’s history.
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