I spent many days contemplating the cover of my latest book, An Untold History of Kerala. As the title states, the book covers an intriguing topic that has not been studied in any depth by any historian in any educational institution anywhere in the world — Kerala’s cultural connections with ancient Egypt. I wanted to tell the gist of my book with a single image on the cover page. Something that would not only persuasively suggest the content, but also cover the time frame I wanted to point to. “Look here,” I wanted to say with that image, “and see Kerala with fresh eyes.”
The traditional narrative of Kerala’s history tells a story of immigrant brahmin priests who crossed over the Sahyadri mountains from the east and created the fabric of Kerala’s society. Facts and logic, on the other hand, loudly and clearly oppose this simple narrative. Yet, the popular conception of the ancient brahmin immigrant priest remains.
The story I hope to convey through my book points to immigrant sailors from across the ocean in the west; men and women who braved the storms and the waters to harvest forest treasures for their prosperous kingdom. Whether or not they created the fabric of Kerala’s society, they deeply influenced Kerala’s culture in more ways than one, influence that extraordinarily remains to this day.
What single image could show both these countervailing narratives? One answer — the ancient pharaonic Egyptian priest, Ka-aper.
Ka-aper was a lector priest in Egypt during the Old Kingdom, around 2400 BCE, his title in Egyptian corresponding to Malayalam bhattatiri. He was a learned scholar, a man who conducted rites in the Egyptian temples of his times. He was an aristocrat too, rich enough to have a tomb in present day Saqqara, at the entrance to which later archeologists found a wooden statue in his image. Ka-aper is represented in a striding pose, holding a staff in his left hand. He wraps a short cloth around his waist. His eyes are inlaid with calcite, rock crystal and black stone, and outlined with copper. The statue is so life-like that when workmen in later excavations discovered it, they thought it resembled the mayor of their village and named the statue in his honor as “Sheikh el-Balad.”
The mayor is not the only person Ka-aper resembles. He is also startlingly similar to a typical erstwhile Kerala temple priest in many ways — his title, attire, demeanor, stance, and facial features. No one can bridge the Kerala-Egyptian connection as well as this learned scholar. So, I painted him in watercolors as an image between the realism of flesh and its representation in wood; a person who looks like him, yet not; an Egyptian priest, yet not unlike a Kerala one too; a representative perhaps of immigrant priests from across the ocean who created the fabric of Kerala’s society. May he carry my tale far and wide, spreading the extraordinary story of Kerala’s untold history.
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