In my previous articles on Kerala’s feudal system, The Nomarch and Soldiers, I touched on the system of distributed power in ancient Kerala: The king was hardly the supreme ruler. Neither was he powerful in governance, for he relied on the many nadvazhi to administer the length and breadth of his kingdom; nor was he the head of any military, for he kept no standing army, depending instead on the nadvazhi, yet again, to supply him with troops against foreign aggression. In this article, I describe his powerlessness in yet another arena: the economy, where neither the king nor the nadvazhi had absolute power, because the bulk of the native economy, agrarian in basis and redistributive in nature, was run by powerful boards attached to temples and comprised of the eminent nobles of the region: local kings in all but name.
Temples in ancient Kerala were not merely religious centers for the community; they functioned as agrarian redistributive facilities too, administered by temple boards in a system unique to Kerala in all of India. Various theories have been proposed to explain this arrangement: Kerala was supposedly a theocracy, in which ruling brahmin priests, whose power derived from land ownership, demised large tracts of land to temples as a means to protect their power, associating with secular non-brahmin leaders in the process to secure their possessions. Another theory was that temples were founded and endowed by people who elected themselves as members of temple boards, whose autonomy rulers preserved in the name of Hinduism. More recent post-colonial theories proposed that brahmin priests, using temple structures and rituals, usurped productive land from chiefs, merchants and administrators through the Bhakti movement.
These theories, while shedding light on the prevalence of brahmin influence in Kerala ca. 500–1800 CE, fail to satisfactorily explain the uniqueness of Kerala’s temple administration when compared with the rest of south India, where Brahmanism was just as prevalent. They do not clarify how brahmin temple priests, without any army, could have maintained their autonomy against powerful military chieftains who vied with the rulers themselves for political dominance. In neighboring Tamil Nadu, where temples were governed by relatively powerless temple boards headed exclusively by brahmin priests and supported by ample patronage from Hindu kings, the temples were not autonomous at all, proving that religion, by itself, was not a factor in the temple boards’ autonomy. Besides, leaders in Kerala’s secular provincial government enjoyed certain limited but important religious roles in temples, heading temple boards and managing temple lands alongside brahmin priests, weakening the argument that brahmins were the only temple leaders. Given this power-sharing arrangement, usurpation of land by unarmed priests based exclusively on the Bhakti movement seems unbelievable, to say the least.
Unlike anywhere else in India, temples in ancient Kerala had enormous economic clout, functioning as agrarian corporations, holding and managing vast tracts of agricultural resources, leasing out portions to tenants and the rest to be worked on by serfs. The agricultural lands were administered by the temple board comprising not only the priests of the temple but also the landed aristocracy of the region. In rare cases, the king appointed his own officers to the board under an authority called koyma. The board was called ur, the members were called uralar, and their hereditary right to the board was called urayma. The uralar were charged with overseeing all operations of the temple, including apportioning land leases, collecting revenue, and managing temple workers and tenants.
Harvest from temple lands was measured, accounted, and stored at large processing facilities called pura (such as nelpura, uralpura, patthayapura) associated with the temples. Wages were paid from these facilities to temple workers in the form of rations. Large temples had many dependents, including subordinate priests, administrators, garland makers, drummers, stage performers, vendors, and menial laborers. Such temples employed some workers on a permanent roster and others on a temporary as-needed basis for festivals and other occasions. To give an idea of the scale, the Srivallabha temple of central Travancore employed around 200 priestly personnel and many more non-priestly workers around 900–1000 CE.
In marked contrast to temples elsewhere in India, Kerala’s temples were politically autonomous too, exercising independent executive and judicial powers over their land and workers, as borne out by considerable epigraphic evidence in the form of board decisions called kaccham. The important decisions were initially written up on palm leaves and then transcribed on stone to be displayed at the temple gateway. The most important of these kaccham was the Muzhikkulam kaccham, which decreed gargantuan punishments for those, including aristocrats, who interfered with the temple board’s business. These kaccham show not only the manner of publicizing the boards’ decisions, but also the power of the temple boards to manage their own affairs.
While land donation was necessarily the only means for temples to possess land anywhere, Kerala’s system differed from other land donation schemes in that such donated land was not taxed to the royal exchequer, and it was also leased back to its agents. Whereas donating land to temples in the Chola kingdom functioned as a marker of political power and prestige — wealthier patrons could afford greater charity, donating land in Kerala during the same time period was a tactic to gain freedom from political oppression, a consequence that naturally followed from the temples’ political and economic autonomy.
Temple workers were particularly privileged: Their necessary expenses were paid from temple rations, and they enjoyed agricultural revenue from temple lands in the form of a stated allowance of paddy and other necessaries of life through a hereditary kazhakam ‘temple service.’ In addition, karayma leases on temple fields were granted by trustees to certain temple workers for performing specified duties; many temple positions came with hereditary endowments of land, products to be received, and a certain amount of reversion of offerings. Proving an example of their protected status, a copper plate record from Tirukkadittanam Temple (ca. 986 CE) reveals that even temple chiefs may not take over any land leases given to temple drummers. The temple work was also typically given to families rather than to individuals, and it was immaterial whether the designated person or his dependents fulfilled the official duties.
While different from anywhere else in India, such temple administration in Kerala shared remarkable similarities with practices in pharaonic Egypt. Temples in Egypt too functioned as agrarian corporations, holding and managing vast tracts of agricultural resources, leasing out a portion of the temple land to tenants, who paid rent in the form of harvest tax, smw (likely pronounced som or swom), while the rest of the land was worked on by serfs. The Egyptian temples also served as redistribution centers, with harvest from temple lands measured, accounted, and stored at large storage and processing centers. Wages were paid from these facilities to temple workers in the form of rations. The existence of such redistribution circuits relying on production centers belonging to temples in pharaonic Egypt is confirmed by numerous archaeological records.
In ancient Egypt, vast fields allocated to temples were controlled by a board comprised of the chief priest of the temple and powerful local families, just like in Kerala. Grain harvested from these fields was stored in large facilities called pr (similar to Kerala’s pura). The local elites as well as the king donated land to the temples. The king, through his peculiar status as head of all temples in the land, similar to the koyma of Kerala kings, installed his own officers from the royal administration in some — but not all — provincial temple boards depending on the specific conditions in each province. The temple board managed farming operations, and the surrounding villages provided peasants for labor.
Certain priestly titles suggested allocation of religious roles to secular officials; for example, vrma was a religious title held by very high-ranking officials of the Old Kingdom working in a double capacity as high priests and temple administrators at Heliopolis, as I also wrote in The Samantha. Around 2500–2300 BCE, this religious title was also associated with civil and administrative duties, including leading construction activities and mining expeditions for the king. Besides, like Koratti Kaimal of Annamanada Temple and Valiya Thampuran of Kodungallur Bhagavathi Temple, the Egyptian nomarch was the chief of all temples within his domain, with the right of offering to the gods upon grand occasions, and superintending feasts and festivals in honor of the deities.
A smaller temple possessing only a little land and maintaining only a small staff had a correspondingly small board confined to verifying regular crop harvesting and overseeing religious services and ceremonies. A large temple, on the other hand, had numerous administrative staff; the temple of Amun at Thebes, for example, employed a large workforce including chieftains of the domain, chief scribe, accounting clerks, military chiefs, stewards, superintendents, and police chief, each such high administrator overseeing a veritable army of lieutenants, scribes, and subalterns.
Decrees by the temple board were called waccha (note the similarity to the Kerala kaccham); such a decree inscribed on limestone dating to ca. 2500 BCE was recovered from the Temple of Min in Koptos. It was specifically directed that the decree was to be placed at the gateway of the temple on a stone stela. The original decree was written on papyrus. Another decree from the Temple of Osiris at Abydos (also ca. 2500 BCE) provided for gargantuan punishments to those, including aristocrats, who interfered with the temple’s works, remarkably similar in form and content to the Muzhikkulam kaccham of Kerala.
Egyptian priests were privileged in society: they were exempt from individual taxes; their necessary expenses were paid from temple rations; and they enjoyed agricultural revenue from temple lands in the form of a stated allowance of grain and all the other necessaries of life. Temple work was hereditarily assigned to families, rather than to individuals. There was a large branch of law in Egypt dealing with religious endowments, stating, like the copper plate of Tirukkadittanam Temple, that donations to temple workers may not to be alienated.
These remarkable parallels between the temple institutions of pharaonic Egypt and Kerala, not merely in the overarching structure, but even in the minutiae of operations, prove that the system in Kerala derived from pharaonic Egypt and not from elsewhere in India, as is currently believed. So what, one may ask? Apart from the dangers inherent in deception by a false history, is this: Temples large and small dot the landscape of Egypt on either side of the Nile River; yet, they are rubble today, turned to stone and dust by the ravages of wind, time, and shifting cultures; quaint vestiges of a former era, run over by irreverent gawking tourists taking selfies before the once stately walls and sacred rooms. Temples large and small dot Kerala’s landscape too. They have outlasted their ancient counterparts across the Indian Ocean by thousands of years, taking on new mantles, new meanings, new myths, new lives in the process. If studying the past has any meaning, it is that historical knowledge informs the present, permitting a vision of a future that is not an inevitable consequence of the past. So, while the ruined temples of ancient Egypt present a stark warning for what could be, perhaps the vibrant temples of today’s Kerala present the possibility of a different destiny.
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