Every year, on the Uthrattathi asterism after Tiruonam in the Malayalam month of Chingam, the town of Aranmula on the banks of River Pampa in Kerala is witness to a spectacular display unparalleled anywhere else in the world: the Aranmula boat race. It is the oldest and most celebrated boat festival of Kerala. Folklore and tradition connect it to a temple on the riverbanks dedicated to Lord Parthasarathi, locally known as Tiru Aranmula Appan ‘revered lord of Aranmula.’ By tradition a religious festival, it is sponsored by donations offered to the temple deity for this purpose by devotees from all over the land. Part of the festivities include a sumptuous feast, called valla sadya ‘boat feast.’
The boats in the race are of a unique design called palliyodam, which is a particular variety of chundan ‘snake boats’ used specifically for the Aranmula boat race. Each boat is about 100 to 138 feet in length, with a narrow, tapered bow and the stern rising to a height of about twenty feet. The towering stern is usually embellished with burnished brass and decorated with streamers and golden lace. Four helmsmen at the rear steer the boat with twelve feet long rudder paddles, while around sixty to eighty oarsmen row to the beat of vanchi-patt ‘boat music’ belted out by a singer perched on a platform in the middle.
Due to the sanctity associated with the palliyodam, only bare chested and bare footed men, dressed in traditional white mund, are allowed on board. While boat races are common all over the world, the spectacle of this peculiar snake boat race with its double rows of bare chested oarsmen clad in white mund on a gigantic boat evokes the wooden boat models buried in Egyptian tombs with their double rows of oarsmen dressed in white mnkht.
In pharaonic Egypt, boats were used for religious purposes, particularly in pilgrimages, among the best-documented of these being the annual “Abydos voyage,” a ceremonial boat voyage to worship the ancient god Osiris Khentiamenti — a merged form of Osiris and Anubis — at Abydos, dating as early as 2300 BCE. This ceremonial ritual voyage involved taking an image of Osiris out of his temple at Abydos, transporting it in a ceremonial coffin on a ritual boat to the mythical site of his tomb, and then in a symbolic rendering of his rebirth, bringing it back to the temple in triumph. Indeed, based on Raymond Faulkner’s Middle Egyptian Dictionary, the Egyptian term for ‘he of the embalming place,’ an epithet of Anubis, was paly-od.
As remarkable as this lexical parallel is the striking physical resemblance of Kerala’s palliyodam, and its secular version, the chundan boat, to the solar boat of Pharaoh Khufu of ancient Egypt. The solar boat, like the palliyodam, is around 140 feet in length and provided with twelve large oars and two larger steering paddles. It is a “magnificent specimen of shipbuilding,” according to Steve Vinson, made of Lebanese cedar in a vil-shape, an example of vadj (also called vdjan) type of divine boats associated with gods and pharaohs used in pharaonic Egypt since at least 2300 BCE. Like the chundan boats of Kerala, the vil-shaped vadj-type boats of Egypt had a long, narrow hull with an upright post at one end.
Interestingly, on a side note, vil is the Malayalam word for ‘bow,’ and villal is ‘hollow’, both of which match the semantics of the Egyptian vil in the context of bow-shaped hollow boats. Vadj and vdjan are semantically similar to Malayalam vanchi, ‘a type of boat,’ and could likely have been the etymological source of the latter. An alternate pronunciation of Egyptian hieroglyphs corresponding to vadj is valdj, phonetically similar to Malayalam valach, ‘curved’, a possible root for Malayalam vallam ‘canoe.’
In general, boats in ancient Egypt, as in ancient Kerala, were crucially important to many aspects of economic, political, and religious life. Their significance, originating in pre-dynastic times, lasted till the end of Egypt’s pharaonic, traditional, native culture around 300 CE. Images of boats carrying everyday cargo became common in Egyptian tomb art even as early as 2500 BCE, and Egyptian epigraphic records mention the use of boats for basic transportation, including for cargo such as grain and stones.
In Kerala — at least in Cochin province — roads suitable for wheeled traffic were constructed only in the late 1800’s; prior to their arrival, inland traffic was carried on almost entirely by means of boats on backwaters and rivers. At least as late as 1911, passenger ferry boats, such as cabin boats rowed by several oarsmen, plied the waterways. A third of the typical ferry boat’s length was taken up by a covered matting of kadjan thatch for passengers, exactly in the style of the Egyptian transport boats exemplified so expertly in the miniature wooden tomb models of Egypt, such as the “Travelling boat, Meketre” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see picture above).
Larger cargo boats, called kettu-vallam, some of them more than sixty feet in length, were used to carry cargo. These boats were the most common means of distribution for everyday goods, including agricultural produce, across the state. When roads and a faster pace of life obsoleted these cargo boats, they took on new life as ‘house boats’ for Kerala’s flourishing tourism industry.
One last tidbit about water borne vessels — large Egyptian ocean going ships were imported into Egypt around 2500 BCE from a city which the Egyptians called kbn and the city’s natives called ku-ub-la — ancient Byblos, modern Jbail, around 20 miles north of Beirut in Lebanon. The city was the seat of Phoenicians, erstwhile masters of the oceans, famous in those days for their expertise in ship-building and marine navigation. The ships were made by sewing together planks of wood with rope. By 2000 BCE, the Egyptians were calling their ocean going vessels kaban-boats, because such “sewn ships had made the Byblos run for some five hundred years.” By 1800 BCE, the Egyptians had changed their pronunciation of the city’s name to kapal (or at the very least kapan), and presumably the name of the ships too that originated from there. Remarkably, that term seems to have survived more than three thousand years into modern Malayalam as the word for large ocean going vessels: kappal.
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