This article is a continuation of the previous one Thara and Tharawad, in which I introduced the terms thara ‘land division’ and tharawad ‘administrative center,’ segueing into the topic of this article: the feudal system of ancient Kerala before the state’s democratic unification in 1956. This topic is a fairly lengthy one, and so, I will be writing about it in two parts: this first part focuses on the overall structure, and the next part focuses on the military.
While feudalism in various forms has existed all over the world during different periods in history, Kerala, since very ancient times, had been governed by a peculiarly complex feudal system that flourished at the provincial level despite the constant churn of kingdoms and governments at the regional level. This feudal system was quite different from the more widely known semi-feudalism associated with agrarian land ownership that existed elsewhere in India. It was different too from the simpler king-chieftain (nayaka) feudalism of some neighboring regions, such as the Vijayanagara and Tamil kingdoms.
Before democracy in modern form, territorial administration in ancient Kerala was decentralized, with the land divided into provinces called nad administered by chieftains called nadvazhi, who vested in their person the civil, religious, and military leadership of their dominion. The nad was sub-divided into regions called desham, each ruled by a deshavazhi, who was to the lesser desham exactly what the nadvazhi was to the greater nad. The deshavazhi ruled on behalf of the nadvazhi, who in turn paid homage to the king. Where there was no deshavazhi, the king appointed an officer of the court, called parvattikar as manager of one or more villages according to their size. Each desham was composed of several thara governed by administrators called karanavar. The karanavar, deshavazhi, and nadvazhi were hereditary chiefs, serving as judges and magistrates within their respective jurisdictions. Thus, the thara as the basic unit of administration and nad as its largest counterpart formed a linked system of decentralized governance.
In contrast, in the rest of India, particularly in the north, following in the style of Kautilya’s Arthashastra (ca. 300 BCE), governments were far more tightly centralized monarchies, in which the king’s whims colored his administration’s policies, bearing significantly on the daily lives of citizens. Although kingdoms were divided into administrative divisions, they were all part of a central bureaucracy, accountable in every way to the king’s appointed officers. Not so in Kerala, where the king needed special authority called koyma even to appoint his chosen officers to provincial temple boards.
Unlike anywhere else in India, the nadvazhi and deshavazhi served as autonomous heads of temple boards in Kerala, with the right to officiate temple festivals. These aristocratic nobles administered temple lands (devaswom), their own estates (jenmom), and in some cases, crown lands (rajaswom), within their respective domains, owing allegiance to each other through ties of blood, marriage, sworn loyalty, or simply by virtue of ancient customs from time immemorial.
Aristocrats of ancient Egypt before Roman subjugation in 30 BCE lived in remarkably similar style. In pharaonic Egypt too, like in Kerala, although land was divided among three sovereign institutions — king, temples, and nobles, it was in actuality controlled by the same community of aristocratic nobles, who straddled varied roles of court officials, temple managers, and bureaucrats thereby intertwining the three institutions into one unified whole. Like in ancient Kerala, Egyptian administration before 2200 BCE was decentralized to a large extent. The kingdom was divided into provinces called nomes by Egyptologists, each nome having its own deities, totems, and a ruler, similar to the nadvazhi, called ‘nomarch’ by modern-day Egyptologists.
Like the nadvazhi, the office of the nomarch was mostly hereditary and particularly powerful, rooted not in the central pharaoh’s court, but in the rural areas where their family lived. They ruled their provinces, overseeing courts, treasury, militia, archives, and storehouses in their jurisdiction on behalf of the pharaoh, in remarkably similar style to the nadvazhi of ancient Kerala. While commoners looked to the nomarch for control of regional matters and to maintain peace in the land, the nomarchs were answerable to the pharaoh’s vizier and to the royal treasury on affairs within their domain. The pharaoh’s central administration supervised local centers and agents by appointing supra-regional authorities where necessary; like the parvattikar of Kerala, their presence was not pervasive, being confined to a few domains in the kingdom.
Administrative centers called hwt and hwt-aat (likely pronounced hawad and hawaad respectively) formed the centers of bureaucratic governance in ancient Egypt, evolving into the tharawad (literally ta-r-hwt-aat ‘land division administrative center’) of ancient Kerala. Another administrative center was the pr ‘house’ of officials and provincial magnates, which housed granaries storing cereal grains to pay government workers and dependents, probably evolving into the pura ‘granary’ of Kerala, such as the pathayapura, nelpura, and uralpura, having the exact same functions. A redistributive system through temples and agricultural temple lands was the prevalent form of economic governance in ancient Egypt, as in ancient Kerala. To this end, pharaohs built temples and shrines in provinces all across the kingdom not only as a symbolic representation of their power, but as a practical tool to manage the agrarian economy through temple boards and harvest-taxes called smw (perhaps pronounced swom), in a manner replicated exactly in the deva-swom and raja-swom of Kerala.
Kinship, not authoritarianism, formed the backbone of governance and social organization, a system much like the sambandham of Kerala’s kings with the women of powerful feudal families. Nomarchs hailed from aristocratic clans, often related to the pharaoh by blood or marriage, in a broad, engrained structure of hierarchical households with personal ties that could be manipulated to various ends. Strengthening links between the court and the provinces, the pharaoh granted priestly titles in royal cults to provincial nobles — a custom prevalent in Kerala too, as exemplified in the title of Tacchudaya Kaimal, awarded by the king of Travancore at Koodalmanikyam Temple in Irinjalakuda. This practice differentiated yet entwined provincial administration with the central court of the pharaoh through a network of close relations.
The titles of prominent bureaucrats in Kerala were closely tied to analogous titles in pharaonic Egypt. For example, acchan was a high title of certain Nayar chiefs, such as Mangat Acchan and Paliath Acchan, who were viziers of kings in Kerala; achun (or achnu) and achu were titles of administrators, judges, and chiefs in Egypt ca. 2000–1700 BCE. In other examples, tampan and tampuran were epithets of nadvazhi in Kerala, the latter being of higher status than the former; the words literally translate to ‘master of the land’ and ‘great master of the land’ respectively in Egyptian. pad, a title that appeared in a variety of contexts, such as tirumulpad, mulpad, nambutiripad, was used to refer to ‘one in authority’ in Kerala. Likewise, pad in Egyptian expressed the most senior rank of nobility and usually appeared first in a title sequence. In one example, irypat meant ‘hereditary noble,’ ‘member of the elite,’ ‘chief heir,’ or ‘prince.’
I end this part of the topic with an interesting tidbit about the title nambiti, which evolved into a caste name in Kerala. The men of the nambiti community once held prominent militia and bureaucratic positions under the king. According to legend, the nambiti was originally a brahmin who degraded himself by executing a king. Remarkably, in ancient Egypt, nmti was the title of the pharaoh’s official executioner — an important military position, which could explain not only their princely status in Kerala, but also the curious legend of their origins, albeit skewed a bit in translation.
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