My past few articles were on the festivals of Kerala — Onam, Thiruvathira and Vishu, all of which suggest trans-oceanic influence by pharaonic Egypt predating Hinduism in Kerala by thousands of years. This article focuses on yet another such influence, this time on more mundane matters, namely daily wear. While India in general is known the world over for its colorful ethnic wear, its vibrant fabrics, its dizzying array of color in dress and ornaments, Kerala stands starkly apart with its traditional garb of austere white cloth. Indeed, the only color one can find is in its religious traditions, which explodes in hues of red, green, and black.
In both Kerala and pharaonic Egypt, the common attire among the natives from the king down to the peasant was a plain white rectangular length of cloth wrapped around the waist or chest. As a rule, it was wrapped around the body so that the edge of the sheet would be in the front. It was wrapped right over left in pharaonic Egypt, which is the norm in Kerala today among Muslims; non-Muslims wrap it the other way, with the left over right. The cloth was called mnkht in ancient Egyptian (hieroglyph consonants were written without intervening vowels) and mund in Malayalam.
This garment was the standard male attire for all classes in both lands, though the quality of the linen and the exact style varied according to one’s status. Below is a photo of statue of a bureaucrat who lived ca. 1800 BCE in pharaonic Egypt, presumably a man rich enough to commission his own statue. He wraps his long mnkht right over left, and but for that small discrepancy, may be quite mistaken for a Malayalee aristocrat of the early 1900’s in Kerala.
Below is a similarly dressed man, a scribe from more than five hundred years earlier, in color, so there can be no doubt about the color of the Egyptian mnkht.
Current day Egyptologists marvel at the simplicity of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh’s attire, much like Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama did in Kerala in 1493, when he was greeted by a similarly attired samutiri of Kozhikode, “naked down to the waist, covering [the] lower extremities with very fine cotton.” Ibn Batuta, the Moroccan traveler who sojourned in Kerala more than a century earlier around 1330 CE, was surprised too, and said of the king’s appearance: “his clothing consisted of a great piece of white stuff rolled about him from the navel to the knees, and a little scrap of turban on his head, his feet were bare and a young slave carried an umbrella over him.”
Centuries later, in 1860, Fedor Jagor, a German ethnologist, took a photo of the naduvazhi ‘provincial ruler’ of Kondungallur (see below). In the photo, the naduvazhi is dressed like the king of Ibn Batuta’s time almost half a millennium earlier: in a mund is tied around his waist. He is dressed no differently than his retainers who stand beside him; indeed, he is dressed no differently than the Egyptian bureaucrat of 1800 BCE, more than three thousand years prior. The Kodungallur naduvazhi ruled the land for the king, yet the only difference in attire between the lord and his servants were a few necklaces and his cloth cap — a symbol of status, like the nms of the Egyptian pharaoh.
Workmen in Egypt, as in Kerala, had merely a cloth round the hips, sufficient to sit on, with its ends tied over the waist, like a kilt. This mode of wearing differed from other places, for example, the rest of India, where men, laborers included, typically wore a cloth in a ‘dhoti’ style, with the upper ends tucked in at the waist and lower ends of the front portion drawn up between the legs and tucked in at the back, like pants.
Women of Kerala were not differently dressed than the men, for their robe was a single garment worn around the body. Queens were no less simple; in 1925, Mahatma Gandhi, visiting Queen Sethu Lakshmi Bayi of Travancore was astounded to be ushered into the presence of “a modest young woman who relied not upon jewels or gaudy dress for beauty but on her own naturally well-formed features and exactness of manners. Her room was as plainly furnished as she was plainly dressed. Her severe simplicity became an object of [his] envy.”
Likewise in Egypt, women wore the cloth without plaits, folds, or wrinkles. It was tied under the breasts and was long enough to extend to the ankles. In Kerala by the 1800’s, it was tied around the waist, and the breasts were sometimes covered with a loose piece of another mund, a shorter rougher towel, or a fine semi-transparent shawl called neriyath.
Indeed, the similarities between the ancient Egyptian mnkht and the Kerala mund are striking. Many specimens of cloth from archeological finds in Egypt were found to be bordered with colored stripes of various patterns, and in some, alternating with narrow lines of another color, the width of the patterns varying from “half an inch to an inch and a quarter” (see first picture above). These stripes were produced in the loom by previously dyed colored yarn. The traditional white mund of Kerala is also identically made even to this day, the rectangular cloth being plain white (or cream) and bordered with colored stripes called kara made of previously dyed yarn. The kara colors and color combinations vary according to the style of the times; the more expensive ones typically worn during festive occasions nowadays include gold thread.
Curiously, some Egyptian cloth specimens have been found imprinted in a corner with a mark in black ink (see above picture), which Egyptologists presume to be emblems of quality or ownership. But were they? As bizarre as the coincidence may be, marks similar to these could be found in many a mund of Kerala even as recently as fifty years ago. Those of us old enough to remember can no doubt attest that the marks were definitely not emblems of quality; they were identifiers of some sort, perhaps marks of ownership, for they were made by the traditional washermen who laundered these clothes. Could this have been the case for the Egyptian mnkht too?
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