As I wrote in my article, Syrian Merchants, Phoenicians likely settled in Kerala around the same time that the Egyptian pharaoh abandoned his suzerainty over his distant colony, ca. early to late 1800 BCE. The pharaoh probably left the risky trans-oceanic export of valuable goods from Kerala in the expert seafaring hands of Phoenician merchant-sailors but retained control over their trading activities through the aazhi raja in Kerala and his counterpart, ‘ruler of Phoenicians’ in Egypt. This ancient presence of Phoenicians alongside native Egyptians on the Malabar coast explains much in the cultural amalgamation of the Nayar community and Orthodox Syrian Christians in Kerala, who shared “a common world,” according to Roger Hedlund, including many customs and practices in dress, names, ornaments, food and drink habits, socio-religious ceremonies, art, and architecture.
Interestingly, it may also shed light on a popular mystery associated with Sabarimala Shastav: One of the many folktales that surround Prince Manikantan before his deification as Sabarimala Shastav is the story of his friendship with a sailor by the name Wawar, son of Fatima and Zaydali. Their ancient friendship is commemorated in modern times by a ritual called petta thullal, performed at the Wawar Masjid in Erumeli as part of the annual festival at Sabarimala Temple. According to current beliefs, Wawar was an Arab Muslim, the legends apparently going so far as to claim him as a Muslim saint who emigrated from Arabia to spread Islam. His friendship with Manikantan is spoken of today as a model of Kerala’s religious syncretism. But there are some who, for bigoted reasons, refuse to believe that Wawar was a Muslim. The latter may perhaps be right, but for the wrong reasons.
Centuries before Islam was founded, before the Malabar coast became a majority Hindu region, the ancestors of many present-day Muslims lived in Kerala, but not as members of the Nayar community. Rather, they were descendants of Phoenicians and Minaeans who had settled long ago on the Malabar coast to conduct trade with their large commercial ocean-going fleets of trading ships and vast network of merchants along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. They lived in separate, semi-autonomous enclaves called cheri, paying tribute to the local king, but left to their own devices for the most part. This custom likely derived from pharaonic Egypt, where Egyptians, considering themselves different from foreign races, subject to different laws and order of things, gave foreigners within Egypt’s boundary the dignity of self-rule.
At different times in Kerala’s history, as immigrants landed on the coast from disparate nations, local kings allowed them to form autonomous communities of their own. For example, a deed evidenced by a copper-plate inscription dating to ca. 850 CE by the nadvazhi of Kollam, Ayyan Adigal, grants semi-autonomous authority over the Syriac Christian settlement there to the Syriac Christian merchant Mar Sapir Iso. Another grant pertaining to the Jews in Kerala explicitly clarifies that only the community elders had the right to punish one of their own. Until the Portuguese and later Europeans came on the scene, these disparate immigrant communities got on well with each other, enabling Kerala’s trade and its economy to flourish. Sadly, according to Padmanabha Menon writing in 1937, “a hundred and odd years of British domination wiped this [form of] sovereign administration off the face of Malabar so completely that the present-day Christian, Jew and Nayar of Kerala have no idea whatever of the position their forefathers occupied in the body politic.”
Much archeological and epigraphic evidence, along with folktales and community lore suggest that people from many different communities of the ancient, civilized world inhabited Kerala centuries before any of the three major modern religions — Christianity, Islam and Hinduism reached its shores. Indeed, Kerala may be one of the oldest continuously populated regions in modern India, and remarkably, it has never been one culturally homogeneous entity in almost all its long history. The different groups of people who have called Kerala home have lived amicably together for millennia, sharing traditions, festivals, food, loves, and lives, while maintaining their distinct identities, respecting each other’s spaces, resources, trades, and ways far longer than any of the politically divisive religions of today. Modern trends to force the land’s incredibly ancient and rich traditions into the oppressively spare molds of relatively recent religious ideologies, to rip apart the natural seams of the multifaceted fabric that is Kerala’s society, to clamor for a uniform norm when the innate state of the human mind is variety in all its infinite manifestations — these are not merely exercises in futility, these are a recipe for historical tragedy.
The Minaeans who settled in Kerala during ancient times were people who were either of the same stock as the Phoenicians, or who collaborated significantly with them in trade. In the wake of a falling out between Egyptians and Phoenicians around 1200 BCE, and the consequent decline of Egyptian sea expeditions, maritime trading nations arose in southwest Arabia and Yemen, including in Ma’in, the homeland of Minaeans, along the eastern flank of the Red Sea. By around 450 BCE, following their increasing ties to the Indian Ocean spice trade, many Minaeans had migrated to Egypt proper, as attested by Herodotus in his travelogue. At that time, eastern Egypt between the Nile and Red Sea was essentially “Arabian,” a term he used to refer to all non-native tribes, including Sabaeans, Minaeans, Qatabanians, and Hadramis.
Corroborating the Minaean presence around the Red Sea and Egypt, a third century BCE coffin of a Minaean frankincense merchant named Zayd’il was found in the Egyptian city of Memphis. Minaean contacts with Egypt are confirmed from southern Arabia too, where early Minaean inscriptions mention Egyptian expeditions. Considering that ancient traders operated between trading diasporas of their own community members, the Minaeans’ trade connections with Egypt around the Red Sea were no doubt echoed across the Indian Ocean in their diaspora on the Malabar coast.
Therefore, it may be that Wawar’s father Zaydali was a merchant from one of the “Arabian” tribes, perhaps a Minaean like Zayd’il, the third century BCE Minaean merchant from Memphis, and Wawar was likely a sea going Minaean friend of the Egyptian-Malabar aristocrat Manikantan. Indeed, Wawar might not even have been a proper name, for wawr was an Egyptian title that meant ‘unique one of the great,’ probably a posthumous nod to his friendship with the deified prince. Much later, around seventh century CE, when the inhabitants of southwest Arabia stopped worshiping their tribal deity Wadd and converted to Islam, their brethren in the Minaean communities of Kerala must have converted too — as attested by the first mosque built in Kodungallur during that period by the “Arabian” Malik bin Habib. Perhaps it was around the same time that descendants of the original Egyptian settlers began worshiping Durga in place of Hathor under the influence of Brahmanism.
Thus, the present-day successors of Wawar’s community are Muslims, whereas those of Manikantan’s are Hindus. Ironically, neither was Wawar a Muslim when he was alive, nor was Manikantan a Hindu when he was first deified.
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