“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget . . . what it was.” Milan Kundera’s words were thrust at the intentional rewriting of Czechoslovakia’s native history by an authoritarian Soviet government. These words could as well be applied to the rewriting of Kerala’s history by brahmins between the fourth and the sixteenth century CE through twin intertwined processes called Sanskritization and Brahmanization. The former refers to a bottom-up process in which castes lower in the social hierarchy move up by adopting practices of those higher, whereas Brahmanization is a top-down process, in which local religious traditions are syncretized and aligned with Brahmanical religion.
Sanskritization and Brahmanization of native culture were not limited to Kerala alone; the entirety of south India went through it as corroborated by the Skanda Purana (among other texts), which is a compilation of local lore from different areas of note, Brahmanized to force a fictionalized narrative of a homogeneous culture. In this fiction, the Brahmanized society was viewed as a pyramidal hierarchy with the brahmin on the top and the sudra at the bottom. Through Sanskritization, those lower on the hierarchy could move up vertically by willingly renouncing their native rituals, customs, traditions, and values to adopt Brahmanical ways. Thus, for example, buying into the myth of belonging to an antaralar ‘intermediate’ caste between brahmins and sudras, some in the ambalavasi and samantha communities in Kerala adopted the sacred thread of Nambuthiri brahmins although their matrilineal, pharaonic Egyptian heritage had absolutely no history of Vedic Hinduism.
In order to present Sanskritization as a legitimate path, the target culture had to be Brahmanized first. The brahmins had to become an integral part of society so that they would be viewed as one of the natives; yet, at the same time, they were to be seen as different by virtue of their higher status. The process by which this dichotomy was historically achieved in south India was by translating local lore into Sanskrit to conform them to a larger Hindu tradition while simultaneously injecting it with Puranic motifs and brahmin glory. Thus, Parasurama, brahmin avatar of the Puranic god Vishnu, became the creator of Kerala; by that one act of historical appropriation, any tie to a non-Hindu past was utterly severed.
Yet, the past could not have been rewritten so blatantly had not historical loss of memory resulted from social amnesia. Languages changed, old words took on new meanings, creative storytellers reinterpreted oral myths, natural calamities damaged historical documents, time eroded memories, new prejudices colored old beliefs, shifting economies altered public sentiment, and the contemporary rhetoric of the historical writer’s present subtly influenced his words about the past. Before long, the story told became different from what actually had come to pass. Perhaps Puranic stories might have filled this void of collective memory, breathing new life into the jaded, albeit authentic, version of native history.
In the more everyday sphere, Sanskritizing involved translating native names in local lore into Sanskrit by various means: altering the whole name by either linear translation (e.g., Panaikkad ‘palm forest’ = Talavrnda ‘palm forest’) or mistranslation (e.g., Kocci ‘small’ = Balapuri ‘small town’); partially translating a compound word (e.g., Konkanahalli = Konkanapura); perverting mythological native names with the closest sounding Sanskrit terms and corresponding meanings to localize north Indian mythology (e.g., Pandiyan = Pandya, hence derived from Pandu); and substituting the native name by an entirely new, unrelated Sanskrit name.
During this period of slow cultural amalgamation (ca. 800 CE — present), both the Nambuthiri community and the native Nayar experienced, to varying extents, all three major responses to culture-contact that appear in a hybrid culture: cultural borrowing, cultural mixing, and cultural translating. The native culture borrowed heavily from Brahmanical tropes such as the Puranas but continued its own traditions and rituals. There was significant cultural mixing, as demonstrated by the Nambuthiri’s adoption of native ways in public forum such as temples, while maintaining their Vedic identities in the private sphere of their brahmin communities. Cultural translation also occurred, native deities being translated into the Hindu pantheon in a process similar to the translation of Caananite goddesses Astarte, Qadesh, and Anat into the Egyptian goddess Hathor around 1500 BCE in Egypt, and later in the Hellenization of Phoenicia, whereby under Greek influence, religious motifs changed outwardly without a corresponding conversion in rituals.
In one example of cultural translation in Phoenicia, the “Great Mother,” who was a divinity worshiped by ancient Phrygians over many centuries, transformed from a standing deity holding a bird of prey to a sitting one dressed in Greek robes with a lion at her feet. In another example, Greek healing deity Asklepios absorbed the cult of Eshmon, the native deity of healing, which preceded him in many Phoenician towns. In yet another example, Melqart, Baal of Tyre, who was transformed into Greek Heracles, persisted in his Phoenician form alongside his Greek avatar into the Roman conquest. Likewise in Kerala, the angry lion-headed Seshmet became Durga in her ugra ‘angry’ form (as I wrote in Eye of the Sun); goddess Seshat in Mridanga Saileshwari Temple transformed to goddess Saraswati (as I wrote in Pazhassi); pnw in Panniyur Varahamurthy Temple transformed to Varaha (as I wrote in The Mythical Mouse); and Shastav became Hariharasuta, the divine child of Vishnu and Shiva (as I wrote in Shastav).
In matters of daily life, Kerala reacted to the socially elevated Nambuthiri presence in exactly the same manner as pharaonic Egypt did to the conquering Greeks around 330 BCE. Alexander’s conquest of Egypt precipitated mass immigration of Greeks into Egypt. Despite Egyptian bias against foreigners, the Greek-speaking immigrants, perhaps because of their higher social status following the conquest, did not remain separate from the existing population, but married into Egyptian families, just as the Nambuthiri did following their social elevation. Under matrilineal ways, the offspring of Egyptian women and Greek men remained Egyptian, like the Nayar offspring of Nayar women and Nambuthiri men. A few centuries before the Greek conquest of Egypt, ca. 700–332 BCE, Greeks who had immigrated into Egypt for trade and other purposes had taken on Egyptian names and operated within Egyptian cultural practices. In contrast, during the Hellenization of Egypt (ca. 332–30 BCE) Greeks adopted Egyptian practices to a certain extent, while Egyptians acquired Greek literacy. In like manner, during the Brahmanical transformation of Kerala, the Nambuthiri adopted some Nayar practices — temple rituals and sambandham, for example, while the Nayar learnt Sanskrit Puranas.
Just as Greek became the language for upward social mobility in pharaonic Egypt in the third century BCE, Sanskrit became the lingua franca of the elites in Brahmanical Kerala in seventeenth century CE. Indeed, the similarities ran strong even in naming conventions: the male offspring in Egyptian families tended to get Greek names while the females retained Egyptian names, just as in the Cochin Royal Family, where men were given Brahmanized names such as Rama and Ravi, while women retained their native names Manku, Ikku, Kunjipilla, and Kavu. Meanwhile, during this mutual assimilation of Brahmanic and native cultures, Izhava, Muslims, and Christians in Kerala remained closed to outside influences, much like Jews and Persians in Egypt during Hellenization.
Nevertheless, Brahmanization differed from Hellenization in the nature of the process: while the latter was mostly a rapid progression driven by military conquest, the former pursued a more democratic route, working slowly through subtle economic and political influence over more than a millennium. The purported objective of Brahmanization, like Hellenization, was to “de-barbarize” local deities, break them out of local contexts and incorporate them into larger Hindu networks, enabling to root and concurrently exalt brahmin power in the land.
Incredibly, this process of Brahmanization continues even today. In 2017, when the Travancore Devasvom Board decided to install a statue of Mahabali outside a temple for the dwarf god Vamana at Thrikkakara in Ernakulam district, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a religio-political group which seeks to unify Hindu ideologies all over India, protested because Mahabali was an Asura king in Puranic lore, contrary to his benevolent image in the Onam traditions of Kerala. In response typical of the times, a “change.org petition was filed by [one] Anish Nair,” who wanted a temple consecrated to Mahabali, rather than merely a statue, “to push back the forces of Vamana, the forces of Brahmanism.”
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