Should I call myself a Nair?
Exploring the much-confused and even more maligned Nair identity
There are few other ‘surnames’ that can be as casteist as the common ‘Nair’, ‘Menon’, ‘Pillai’ and ‘Namboothiri’ in Kerala today.
While surnames that assert so-called ‘caste supremacy’ are rampant across south Indian states — from Iyer and Iyengar to Reddy — there seems to be unabashed glee in naming and shaming the ‘Nair’ and ‘Menon.’
That is as much do with a lack of understanding of who or what ‘Nairs’ are, as to the prejudicial notions that prevail even today of every ‘Nair’ bearing the crown of the superior caste complex.
A history of assumptions
The caste system of India is one rickety mess. Indians get it, outsiders simply don’t.
The ridiculousness that (Indian) human beings can be classified into four groups — Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vyshyas and Shudras — is compounded further by the fact that this allegedly ‘Brahmanical’ invention has had little relevance in south India — particularly, Kerala, where the four-caste system just did not fit into the social order.
Though Nairs in Kerala are typically associated and described as the ‘warriors’ of yore, alias the king’s henchmen, they were never considered as Kshatriyas. But then, Nairs were not one monolithic community of people with all men being warriors. No, not at all.
Historians like to cite the early references of Nairs, especially the Nareae, described by Pliny the Elder (AED 23 -79), the Roman naval commander, naturalist and philosopher in his book, Naturalis Historia (Natural History).
He writes: “Below these deserts, again, are the Maltecorab, the Singae, the Marohae, the Rarungse, and the Morontes…. After them come the Nareae, who are bounded by Capitalia, the most lofty of all the Indian peaks : the in-
habitants who dwell on the other side of it have extensive mines of gold and silver.”
In their ‘copious translation,’ John Bostock and HT Riley add: “These people are supposed by Hardouin to have occupied the southern parts of the peninsula now known as Bisnagar, Calicut, and the Deccan, with the Malabar and Coromandel coasts.”
Also frequently cited is the reference to Nayres in ‘The Lusaid’, the epic by Luís Vaz de Camões (also Camoens), regarded as the greatest Portuguese poet, whose father reportedly left his family to pursue riches in India and died in Goa, while he himself enlisted in the military after reportedly falling in love with Princess Maria, the sister of John III of Portugal, which led to his expulsion from Lisbon.
On his first overseas expedition to Goa, he battled the natives of the Malabar Coast — which probably led to give us the now most-quoted lines that talks of the class distinctions in Malabar in the 16th century:
“Polias, the labouring lower clans are named;
“By the proud Nayres the noble rank is claimed:
“The toils of culture and of art they scorn:
“The warrior’s plumes their haughty brows adorn…..
……..ever armed they stand;
“Around the king, a stern barbarian band.”
There are, of course, other accounts of the origins of Nairs, mostly clouded with time, and skewed and twisted as per the prejudices of the writers.
For example, in his book, ‘Nair’, Raghu Palat writes: ‘The Chinese traveller Fa-hien who visited Kerala in 409 AD says ‘Nair ranks with kings’. However, there are few accounts that I could cross-verify about Fa-hien even having visited Kerala unless he took a detour en route to his much-documented visit to Sri Lanka.
Then, there are references or assumptions of Nairs being descendants of ‘Ayars,’ a group of people who resided in the Lothal area (of Gujarat and South Rajasthan) or are the erstwhile Nagas or have derived from the “Maravars of Tinnevelly’ or the name evolving from ‘Nayaka’ — those who led wars or again a derivation of ‘Nayanars’.
There are allusions of Nairs having come from Nepal. Most of the stories are often hyped up to give a ‘higher caste’ aura to Nairs, which takes us back to the much-confused caste narrative.
Nairs: A caste or race?
Are Nairs really a caste? Or was the name generically attributed to a good majority of people to denote a race. Raghu Palat is unambiguous. He writes: “The Nairs are not a caste. The Nairs are a race.”
F Fawcett is not so convinced: He describes Nairs as a caste, next to the Brahmins in the pecking order, and goes on to define many clans under Nairs.
In his seminal book ‘The Nayars of Malabar’, Fawcett ranks ‘Nayars’ after the Nambutiris in Malabar’ and write, ‘they occupy the same position in the Native States of Cochin and Travancore.”
William Logan in his Malabar Manual describes them as the ‘militia of the district’ who had an important socio-political function.
He writes: “From the earliest times down to the end of the 18th century, the Nayar tara and nad organisation kept the country from oppression and tyranny on the part of the rulers, and it is to this fact, more than to any other is due, the comparative prosperity which the Malayali country so long enjoyed, and which made of Calicut at one time the great emporium of trade between the East and the West.”
Logan too calls the Nair a caste — as he writes: “The tara was the Nayar territorial unit of organisation and was governed by representatives of the caste, who were styled Karanavar or elders.”
According to Logan, the name Nair implies that they were ‘the leaders of the peoples’ originally organised into ‘Six Hundreds’ — “each 600 assigned to the protection of all the people in a nad or county.”
However, Fawcett and Logan go on to describe that all Nairs were not warriors. Underlining the different vocations that various clans of ‘Nairs’ were engaged in: Fawcett observes: “… the precise number of these clans cannot be given, as it is disputed whether certain of them have a right to belong to the cognate Nayar body.”
In fact, Nairs involved in the not-so-menial jobs were irked at others calling themselves ‘Nairs’ with as Fawcett writing: “I have been told by Nayars of the superior clans that they do not admit the Vattakkkad (…the clan that produces gingelly or cooanut oil with with the oil mill)to be Nayars and say they have adopted the honorific affix ‘Nayar’ to their names quite recently.”
What all these imply is that Nairs never conformed to the typical 4-caste norm of the wider India nor were all Nairs warriors.
They could very have been a race, as Palat suggests, perhaps people who migrated to the south-west of India and then assimilated with the ‘aboriginals’ over time to evolve as a mixed breed of people engaged in all vocations that any evolving community demanded.
Their ‘warrior’ traits could also very have meant subjugation of the true inhabitants of the soil. And with Brahmanical interpretations polluting the popular narrative, we are left with accounts that could very well have been clouded by the social order of that time.
After all, history does not come without loopholes and none of what we read or hear need be the absolute truth. We can, at best, go by material that is available and make inferences that suit our own prejudices — in turn, corrupting history for our future generations.
Back to the 4-caste order: Typically, being known as Kshatriyas was the prerogative of the Varmas, the rulers of the land — though, not as watertight and in absolute terms as in the North — while ‘Brahmins’ — several of them imports from north of India — ruled the temples, and, in turn, the kings. And, further on, though many Nairs were no doubt merchants, they did not fall into ‘Vyshyas’ either.
That meant, Nairs in the typical 4-caste system of India, should ideally have been — or are — the Shudras — the lowest-class. But alas, one of the many clans of Nairs went by the name ‘Shudra’.
Had Nairs been living in north India, most would invariably have been lumped under “Shudras’ — especially the Nairs who worked as barbers, weavers and what not, and perhaps the ‘warrior’ Nairs might have found themselves been described as ‘Kshatriyas.’
The untouchability paradox
One of the defining features of the Indian caste-system was untouchability — which simply put is that the so-called upper caste men kept their distance from the ‘lower caste’ for fear of their superior airs being defiled.
Yet the Brahmin men of Kerala had no qualms in feasting on Nair women — who were at one time considered to be the most liberated in Kerala, with the freedom to have sex at will with the men of choice (as is well documented in William Logan’s Malabar Manual and later attributed by one of the characters in Shashi Tharoor MP’s fictional, The Great Indian Novel, much to the chagrin of current-day Nairs.)
It is important to elaborate on the Tharoor controversy because it shows how words and history can be distorted for whatever selfish interests. If this can happen right and now, in an era where information is freely accessible, imagine how our history must have been contaminated over the years.
Tharoor’s character says in the fictional novel: “In Kerala, the men of the Nair community only learnt their wives are free to receive them by seeing another man’s slippers are not outside her door.”
The Nairs went to town offended not realising that it was not Tharoor-speak but a character-speak. Is there dichotomy? Of course. Not unless you believe that every word of fiction by an author represents the absolute views of the writer.
Back to the course of history: though Brahmins devoured the Hindu women, when it came to children borne out of such conjugal expeditions, the Brahmins stood their moral high ground.
As Fawcett writes: “.. a Nambutiri Brahman father cannot touch his own children by his Nayar consort without bathing afterwards to remove the pollution.”
All historians and British documentarians are unanimous in their views of the liberated Nair women — perhaps the result of the custom of Nair girls being married before 10, ‘deflowered by her husband’ but never afterwards cohabiting with her, as observed by Fawcett quoting, Francis Buchanan, the author of A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar. The Nair girl, however, could “admit a lover of her own or a higher caste.”
Did that make these Nair women something akin to Devdasis and whores? Were they really sexually liberated or where they nothing but objects of fancy for the Brahmins, who through the matrilineal order, ensured that their wealth did not pass on to other communities?
So, where does the Nair hegemony really come into play? It could very well have to do with the few privileged Nairs, the ‘Six Hundreds’ that Logan refers to, who were granted administrative powers by the rulers to lord over parcels of land for the principal purpose of tax extortion.
They were clearly not the majority of the Nairs — and most other Nair clans continued to live a sustenance lifestyle not much different from those who were ‘beneath’ their social pecking order.
They too suffered a share of untouchability; the difference was that they had to move away a few steps lesser than the others when encountering a Brahmin.
No wonder then that the Nair ‘pramanis’ — the people who were blessed with parochial lordship — took their power for granted.
With ‘tax targets’, no doubt, as their incentive to stay in power, they would have unleashed reigns of terror that benefited individual families — and never the entire Nairs of Kerala.
More Nairs lived in penury while a few of them occupied privileged positions.
Yet, when it came to ‘socialisation’ and ‘upliftment’ — the economically underprivileged Nairs found themselves to be ‘undeserving’ in modern India.
(To be contd…)
*Nayars of Malabar, F Fawcett, Madras Government Museum Bullettin, Vol 111 No 3
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