In the past several articles, I described the influence of pharaonic Egypt on Kerala’s culture including festivals, civil calendars, dress, agrarian economy, modes of transportation, toponyms, religious cults, language, and worship rituals. In this article, I feature its influence on two aspects of Kerala that cannot be found anywhere else: thara and tharawad.
The modern usage of thara in Malayalam is as a word for ‘foundation.’ However, in ancient times, it was also the smallest unit of land division. A number of thara formed a desham and two or more desham constituted a nad. Each thara was centered around a tharawad and administered by a karanavar, whereas each desham was under a deshavazhi and each nad ruled by a nadvazhi. These feudal leadership positions were hereditary, deriving their authority from customs of antiquity.
The use of thara as an administrative division is first referenced in Keralolpatthi, an ancient folktale about the fascinating story of Kerala’s origin penned into modern Malayalam by an unknown author. Keralolpatthi is no ordinary folktale; it does not have demons and other fantastical creatures; it does not feature divine intervention, but for Parasurama, a Puranic avatar of Lord Vishnu, who is really a thinly veiled representative of a group rather than a single individual. Its universally criticized fault — that it claims Parasurama created Kerala out of the sea by throwing an axe into the ocean — does not actually feature in it; that incredible story belongs to the Sanskrit Kerala Mahatmyam and other Puranas.
Keralolpatthi, on the other hand, actually reads like a baffling history text, confusing only because the words used in it are archaic, misplaced, and sometimes plainly meaningless to the context. It is almost as though it was translated from a different language by someone with barely working knowledge of the original tongue. According to The Translator’s Handbook, translation is not straightforward; it involves “more than replacing one word in the source language with another word in the target language.” Every single word must be constantly judged in the context of its original culture to choose the right translation in the context of the target culture. Translating from a symbolic language or poetic verse is even more error prone. When the source language of the symbolic poem is extinct in its original form, the difficulties become worse.
Kerala’s folktale probably existed in its original tongue either in texts that are now lost, or, like folktales all over the world, in oral tradition, passed down from one generation to the next through songs or grandmothers’ tales. Whoever translated it into modern Sanskritized Malayalam probably wrote with a poor understanding of the original language, and indifferent ignorance of ancient culture, applying the semantics and social context of their present to the words and story of centuries past. In all fairness, by the time Keralolpatthi froze into its written form in 1868, the language was so different from its ancient form that the translators must have had no recourse apart from their own circumstances to explain the lore. Given these barriers, it is not surprising that Keralolpatthi reads as it does.
According to this folktale, brahmins and other people from a distant land were brought to Kerala as colonizers. “Thara [was] created, and nayan-mar were established in the thara and instructed to be the kann, kayy, and kalpana of the land.” Scholars point to these words as the source of the authority for the rule of the deshavazhi and nadvazhi, translating the words kann, kayy, and kalpana in modern Malayalam as ‘eyes’ ‘hands,’ and ‘edict,’ respectively. While Kerala’s feudal system is undoubtedly connected to the initial colonization, it is not straightforward to connect ‘eyes,’ ‘hands,’ and ‘edict’ with feudal rule.
Yet, it is possible that those words could have meant something else in old Malayalam that would tie them more literally to Kerala’s feudal rule. Human settlement in Kerala, and indeed, Kerala’s feudal civilization, predate brahmin immigration by hundreds if not thousands of years. As I wrote in The Samantha, ancient Egyptian nobles could appear as brahmins when viewed through the brahmin-centered worldview of the folktale’s translator. Besides, in ancient Egyptian, qnn, khai, and khalb-n, which are phonetically close to kann, kayy, and kalpana, translate respectively as ‘superiority,’ ‘appear gloriously [in relation to coronation of a king],’ and ‘bow (in awe) for,’ which make more sense in the context of establishing rulers in a colony and with the subsequent feudal culture of the land than ‘eyes,’ ‘hands,’ and ‘edict.’
In a similar vein, nayan-mar are believed to refer to the native Nayar of Kerala. If so, there is another interesting connection: in Egyptian, the word nay translates to ‘travel by sailboat,’ which makes sense in the context of the folktale, according to which sailors became settlers in the land. Perhaps Egyptian nay even forms the etymological root of the term nayar, rather than Sanskrit naga ‘snake,’ or nayak ‘leader,’ or the so-called Scythian tribe neuri. If so, and if the folktale is true — as many folktales usually are — then it is very likely that it describes the tale of ancient Egyptians who sailed across the Indian Ocean and became the first human settlers in Kerala.
It may be that down the centuries, the folktale maintained its original words, but their meaning evolved away from their initial import, like in any other language. For example, qaih means ‘arms’ in Egyptian just as in Malayalam, and it is probable that unlike this meaning which survived, the one used in the folktale, with a different spelling but similar pronunciation, was lost. Consequently, later interpretations changed into gibberish, requiring poetic imagination to tie the words to their context. But some words undoubtedly retained their original form and meaning, for Egyptian ta-r, phonetically similar to Malayalam thara, meant ‘land division’ in Egyptian, just as it did in Malayalam. Indeed, around 2900-2000 BCE, governance in Egypt was through provincial hwt (or hwt-aat, likely pronounced hawad or hawaad) ‘administrative center,’ suggesting that ta-r-hwt (or ta-r-hwt-aat) meaning ‘land division administrative center’ was the name of a pharaonic Egyptian administrative office.
Yet, unlike the thara, which was merely a land division, the tharawad of Kerala was also the center of the matrilineal family consisting of the women in the family, their descendants, and their male siblings, all tracing their ancestry from a common female, living together as a joint family managed by the eldest maternal uncle under the leadership of a matriarch. The tharawad was the physical and metaphysical ancestral home, linking the current generation to their ancestors not merely by blood but by soil as well, for it also signified the estates belonging to the family. Indeed, hwt also meant ‘house’ in Egyptian, and thr meant ‘family,’ so that thr-hwt translated as ‘family house.’ Thus, these two different meanings of the Malayalam word tharawad, one administrative and the other familial, likely derived from their Egyptian counterparts: one, ta-r-hwt (or ta-r-hwt-aat) ‘land division administrative center’ and another, thr-hwt ‘family house.’
Judging from these linguistic similarities, the basic fundamental units of Kerala’s social structure as indicated by the thara and the tharawad evidently have pharaonic Egyptian connections. Kerala’s ancient folktale even seems to suggest that Egyptian sailors may have been the first settlers in Kerala. Indeed, pharaonic Egypt seems to saturate all aspects of ancient Kerala’s culture, economy, and society, suggesting that such influence could not have grown merely on the strength of trade alone. How and when could such a pervasive, deep, ancient link have forged across the vast, formidable space of the Indian Ocean? I will explore this question in later articles.
Bibliography:
Allen, James. 2010. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to The Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barbosa, Duarte. 1518. The Book of Duarte Barbosa. Translated by Mansel Longworth Dames. 2 vols., repr. 1921. London: Hakluyt Society.
Burrow, T., and M. B. Emeneau. 1984. A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press. Available at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/burrow/. Updated February 2021.
Faulkner, Raymond. 1962. A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. Repr. 1991. Oxford: Griffith Institute.
García, Juan. 2013. “The Territorial Administration of the Kingdom in the 3rd Millennium.” In Ancient Egyptian Administration. Edited by Juan García, 85–154. Leiden: Brill.
Keralolpatthi: The Origin of Malabar. 1868. [In Malayalam]. Mangalore: Pfleiderer & Riehm.
Lopez Palma, Helena. 2015. “Egyptian fractional numerals: the grammar of Egyptian NPs and statements with fractional number expressions.” Lingua Aegyptia, vol. 23: 197–228.
Menon, Padmanabha. 1929. A History of Kerala written in the form of Notes on Visscher’s Letters from Malabar. 4 vols. Rev. ed. 2013. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
Moore, Melinda. 1985. “A New Look at the Nayar Taravad.” Man, New Series, vol. 20, no. 3: 523–41.
Nair, K.K. 2013. By Sweat and Sword: Trade, Diplomacy and War in Kerala Through the Ages. New Delhi: Manohar.
Sherrif, K.M. 2006. “Towards a Theory of Rewriting: Drawing from the Indian Practice.” Translation Today, vol. 3, nos. 1 & 2: 176–82.
Soffer, Morry. 2006. The Translator’s Handbook. Rockville: Schreiber Publishing, Inc.
Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Version 15, Oct. 31, 2014. Edited by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Last Accessed June 20, 2021. https://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/.
Winterbotham, H.M. 1891. “Memorandum of the President.” In Malabar Marriage Commission, Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission. Madras: G.W. Taylor.
Witzel, Michael. 2001. “Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts.” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, vol. 7, no. 3: 1–115.
