This article is a continuation of my previous one, The Nomarch and the Nadvazhi, about ancient Kerala’s feudal system. As I wrote in my previous article, the nadvazhi was a provincial chief who ruled on behalf of the king. His was a powerful role, in part because he was also the military chief of his administrative province. Strangely, the king did not keep a standing army; instead, he employed a small set of guardsmen, and relied on the nadvazhi for additional troops in times of wars. The nadvazhi was bound to furnish a certain number of soldiers to the king when called upon, and attend the king in wars, marching with all the fighting men of his domain wherever he was directed. Each thara, desham and nad –the territorial subdivisions of the land, were required to train and maintain their fighting men in a state of perpetual readiness for battle. As a result, land was divided in Kerala not into social villages, but rather, into military divisions.
The soldiers, drawn from honorable families who worked in the military as a hereditary profession, were subjected to martial training from their earliest youth. They learnt no trade other than arms; they were sent to military school called kalari to learn all manner of feats of agility and gymnastics for the use of their weapons: bows, clubs, lances, and sword and buckler. The kurup was the director of the martial arts school, entrusted with the responsibility of training young recruits. The officers of different military divisions held their dignities as hereditary in their respective families. They were administrators and landlords when not engaged in war for the king.
During the period between ca. 2900 BCE and 1400 BCE, Egypt followed exactly such a militia based military organization. The only ranked officer in the militia army was a general overseer of soldiers, who was an administrator when not engaged in war. His was a hereditary office passing from one generation to the next, on par with that of the vizier, the highest civil administrator of the land. The nomarchs, who were similar to the nadvazhi of Kerala in all respects, were likewise responsible for raising a provincial army that could be summoned in times of war. Like in Kerala, the land was divided into military divisions under the command of the nomarch, each division required to send troops when called to war. These militia troops generally marched behind their respective nomarchs and disbanded after the war. Amenemhet was one such nomarch of Beni Hasan under Pharaoh Senwsret I. He led army units in Nubian campaigns from his own territory, organized expeditions for trade, and handled operations in royal quarries and mines.
The soldiers came from families whose hereditary calling was war. Military men in Egypt, including the pharaoh, were sent from a very young age to martial schools to be trained in war. Like the kurup of Kerala, the Egyptian khrp was the director of these young recruits, charged with their military training. Each soldier was obliged to provide himself with the necessary weapons, to be in a state of constant readiness to be called to duty. Many nomarchs were known for their military prowess and were particularly enlisted to aid the pharaohs during periods of unrest.
Such a form of decentralized governance with no central army had its own drawbacks. Nomarchs vied for power with the pharaoh. They also fought amongst each other to gain regional power to such an extent that the pharaoh’s power collapsed around 2200 BCE. Egypt became an agglomeration of different provinces for more than a hundred chaotic years before it was unified again around 2000 BCE. Indeed, exactly like Egypt during this period, ancient Kerala was also an agglomeration of various provinces ruled by different chieftains constantly vying with each other for power, racked by mutual jealousies and petty vendettas, and every so often, one or the other of them would gain sufficient prominence to conquer a few others and declare himself king. Moroccan traveler Ibn Batuta says of this situation in Kerala in 1324 CE: “In the country of Malabar are twelve kings, the greatest of whom has fifty thousand troops at his command, and the least five thousand or thereabouts.” When the Portuguese arrived more than a hundred and fifty years later, the situation had deteriorated even further: they found seventeen such principalities.
In Egypt, the provincial army eventually disbanded due to increasing threat of foreign invasions and inherent inefficiencies in mobilizing an army for every battle. By around 1400 BCE, the Egyptian militia had given way to a national standing army, with permanent garrisons stationed in many towns. The deterioration of the provincial army was also influenced by the decline of the nomarchs earlier, around 1880–1830 BCE, when Pharaoh Senwsret III consolidated power at the central court with a new bureaucratic system charged with provincial affairs, making the office of the nomarch redundant and unimportant. Although nomes continued to exist, nomarchs were not in charge of them any longer; instead, central administrators directly under the vizier were appointed to oversee clusters of nomes. This eclipse of nomarchs was not reflected in faraway Kerala, where the nadvazhi continued to exert his sovereign prominence well into the nineteenth century CE.
Assuming that Egypt exerted hegemony over Kerala at some point in time sufficient for cultural diffusion to occur, this divergence of Kerala’s provincial governance from Egypt’s perhaps suggests a timeframe for the end of the pharaoh’s formal suzerainty over Kerala. Kerala’s folktale Keralolpatthi is also clear on this point: although the land was initially ruled by a faraway king’s viceroys for years, there came a time when the last of them, Cheraman Perumal, entrusted the reins of government to local rulers and left for good. He is believed to have sailed to Mecca on an Arabian ship, and his tomb is believed to lie buried in Oman. However, Mecca is not on the seacoast; so, Cheraman must have sailed to Jeddah, the port nearest Mecca. He must have disembarked there, as travelers did in those days, to board another ship for the onward journey, because the Arabian sailing ships of those days could not navigate the reef-filled northern waters of the Red Sea.
If indeed Cheraman had been the Egyptian pharaoh’s last viceroy in Kerala, he would have departed around 1900 BCE, before Senwsret III’s reforms, long before any modern religion touched the shores of the Malabar coast. He did not die in Kerala; that much is true. But his tomb is probably not in the desert of Oman, either. Rather, it is most likely in the sands of Egypt, where he lies buried among the tombs of his ancestors, probably in a sarcophagus made of ebony and teak harvested from his distant province across the seas, embalmed with the resin and incense and black pepper he spent his life to win.
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