These Kerala women changed history by wearing blouses to Velur temple in 1956

TNM spoke to 83-year-old Meenakshi, who was among the 23 women who wore blouses to the temple in Velur, Thrissur for the first time.

Twilight had fallen that February evening when 17-year-old Meenakshi Vellarottil stepped out of the house and walked towards the Manimalarkavu Devi Temple. It was the Bharani of Kumbham in the Malayalam calendar, the day when the big kuthira vela (horse festival) was held at the temple in Velur, Thrissur. Meenakshi walked alongside 22 other women, casting nervous glances about her. All the women were wearing red blouses, mundum neriyathum (traditional two-piece worn like a Sari), and two to four pieces of jewellery each. They were carrying thaalams (plates carrying lamps and flowers) for a ritual at the festival, accompanied by chenda melam (percussion).

Meenakshi Vellarottil

The year was 1956 and the women were about to make history.

Women had been carrying the thaalam for the three-day festival for years before that. But never before had any of them worn blouses, or covered their breasts. The women doing the rituals had also belonged to the dominant Nair caste. But in 1956, for the first time, a bunch of women walked towards the temple wearing blouses, and they belonged to different castes – oppressed ones among them.

“There were policemen to protect us. Communist leaders of the day had led us. They had at first tried to talk to the temple committee about it. But the committee was made of Namboodiris and Nairs – dominant caste members. They saw the others as slaves. Members of the oppressed caste had to stand outside the temple gate and name their demands. Women performing the thaalapoli (ritual with the thaalam) had to do so without blouses. This had to change. It was anacharam (a malpractice). 

Communist leaders, including women, went from home to home, convincing young women to go to the temple wearing blouses. I was one among the women who agreed to go,” says Meenakshi, who is now turning 83.

She, along with Communist leader KS Sankaran – one of the leaders of the protest -- was honoured by the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (PuKaSa), an association of artists and writers, on March 2, the 65th anniversary of the historic day.

The incident in 1956 came to be called the Velur maaru marakkal (breast-covering) protest. It was not properly documented because there was not much noise about it back then. “There were police on either side. I remember how the ones with us gave sharp replies to the opposition. Someone said, the Devi (goddess) does not like the women to wear blouses when they took the thaalam. A policeman with us said, ‘It is not the Devi that does not like it, it is you’. And indeed there would be so many men crowding around the temple premises that day. In my home, they wouldn’t allow young women to go to the temple festival after evening because there’d be so many men,” Meenakshi says.

Velathu Lekshmikutty, another Communist leader of the time, led the women's procession. Born to the oppressed Ezhava community, she has been fighting the malpractice since 1952. 

History should not sleep but stay awake to remind the young of today what their ancestors once went through to win the rights they enjoy, says Suresh Puthukulangara, Thrissur district member of PuKaSa, which observed the 65th anniversary of the Velur protest. "These are the people who witnessed history. You need to honour them. The Velur protest may not have made a lot of noise but it made a big difference. Today’s generation has it so easy they have little awareness of the system back then," he says.

The Velur maaru marakkal protest happened nearly a century after the more famous Channar Lahala fought by women of the Nadar community for the right to cover their upper bodies. It was also a couple of decades after the Travancore King Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma passed the temple entry proclamation, allowing people of oppressed castes to enter temples in Travancore.

This would have reduced the resistance during the Velur protest, Suresh reckons.  

Meenakshi being honoured by Minister AC Moideen on March 2

Soon after the women's rituals were over, there would be a procession of horses from several regions. “I’d like to think the name Velur came because it is a place of so many festivals. It’s also a place of many protests. The maaru marakkal protest was led by Communist leader and former Member of Legislative Assembly ASN Nambisan. Other leaders include KS Sankaran, CP Jose, and Arumugham,” Suresh adds. 

When the 23 women reached the temple, there were others who had begun the rituals without blouses as was the custom. Among the women wearing blouses, two dropped their thaalam and ran away out of fear. Some of them were very young. “We were aged between 16 and 32. I was scared too but I held on bravely. And we ended that decades-long anacharam by doing so. From the next year on, women performed the rituals wearing blouses. And people of all castes entered the temple. At last, we learned to live together as humans,” Meenakshi says spiritedly.

Her health does not allow her to step out for many activities as she used to. But she felt she had to attend the 65th anniversary celebrations of that Bharani day in Kumbham. Among all the women who daringly stood wearing red blouses that day, hardly anyone remains alive to tell the tale.

Belatedly, members of PuKaSa learned that there were two more women alive – Kanjiraparambil Neeli and Poovathingal Kalyani. They were honoured at their home on Saturday evening.   

(Source: TNM)

What non-Malayalis don't get about Kerala

'A House for Mr Misra' by Jaishree Misra is an an interesting attempt to learn some facets of Kerala that's more like a patchwork quilt with appliqué work, depending on how you look. Here's an excerpt from the book:   

The fast-changing culture of Kerala was clearly exercising the police force in more ways than one. When we went to supervise the construction, we found that the beach was a magnet for young, illicit love, especially in the hot afternoon sun when no one else came to the beach and college lectures were at their most boring. They sat there, under brightly coloured umbrellas, motorcycle helmets flung on the sand, holding hands and canoodling and doing all the things young lovers do with such rash hope. What these hapless folk did not know was that the Vettukaud police liked nothing better than to round up young lovers and haul them off to the police station for a good ticking off. I had seen a few such youngsters sitting wide-eyed with fear in the back of a police jeep, and was tempted to halt their progress to ask why the police force was wasting its time when there were murderous motorists to catch (perhaps even murderous murderers) but, alas, I lacked the gumption. I had, after all, only very recently been described as “law-abiding” by one of their own kind and wasn’t in a hurry to disabuse them of this notion.

This is the thing that’s so difficult to explain to non-Malayalis. The strong streak of conservatism that overshadows and negates all those statistics that Keralites love bragging about; enviable demographics around education and health and child mortality and women’s empowerment that are shared with developed countries. A subtle example of that conservatism emerged in a conversation with a friend who recounted visiting an elderly relative that morning. When she arrived at her aunt’s house, she found that the lady had gone for a walk.

“Ah, nice. Does she walk with friends?” my friend asked her uncle.

“Friends!?” the man responded, a touch horrified. “No, no, no such thing as friends and all such nonsense. Luckily, my wife doesn’t waste time that way. I allow her to go for a walk every morning because the exercise is good for her.”

See what I mean by “subtle conservatism”? So subtle as to be nearly invisible when we’re talking about women who enjoy all the obvious trappings of emancipation. Malayali women come across as particularly fortunate when compared to their sisters in other Indian states (the best example being offered by Mr M’s home state of Uttar Pradesh) who continue to be severely downtrodden by deep-rooted patriarchy and chauvinism that take much more obvious forms. But stating with pride that a wife has “no friends” and is “allowed” to go for a walk every morning? The worst chauvinists are those who do not even recognise their own chauvinism.

Kerala is indubitably a good aberration in modern India and most people are aware that it is the only state to have achieved total literacy many years ago (not an untrue claim, although the measure of literacy is sometimes merely the ability to sign one’s name).

Most non-Malayalis also have a vague notion about the matrilineal system followed by the state’s large Nair community and genuinely believe that Kerala’s women are highly educated and empowered beings. Again, this is not untrue. Most women in Kerala, especially the poor, go out to work and proudly bring home their own bacon/beef/fish.

The problem, however, is that this veneer of feminism is a double-edged and very sharp sword. Perhaps its history does go all the way back to the matrilineal system, but the very act of empowering women to own their own homes and earn their own money would appear to have emasculated some men to the extent that they feel little responsibility towards home, hearth and even, sometimes, their own children. My maid’s husband was a shining example of that pathetic male species, lurching drunkenly back to her house whenever he was in need of money or medication and raining blows on her if she got mouthy or refused help.

This male apathy extends, unsurprisingly, to unemployment, alcoholism and sometimes results tragically in suicide (few know that Kerala’s suicide figures are amongst the highest in India).

An unexpected offshoot of this — in an odd reversal of the Gulf rush — is that the state has become something of a Mecca for large numbers of migrant workers from other states who now flock to Kerala in search of well-paid work.

They come from as far away as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and even Nepal and, at the present time, number an enormous band of 2.5 million people, mostly single men between the ages of 20 and 30.

Like migratory birds, their arrival is in times of good weather and rich pickings, specifically during those five months from October to March when the tourist season fills up Kerala’s resorts and the demand for exotic food is high.

We soon became frequent day-trippers to Varkala, one such seaside resort just up the coast from us that had a couple of calm blue bays perfect for sea-swimming. In October, we discovered that it was a popular destination for young back-packing Westerners escaping the European winters. As a result, by November, up cropped row upon row of temporary Goa-style shacks along the eating strip on the cliff. Every single one of them was manned by non-Kerala staff and Mr M plunged with great glee into the joy of being able to chat in Hindi, his mother-tongue.

I noticed the torrent of words that he had been stocking up behind Malayalam floodgates as he jabbered non-stop that November afternoon. Less than a week later, he was asking, “When can we go to Varkala again?”

Thanks to those 2.5 million North Indian migrants, he did not have to travel to Varkala every time he wanted to speak Hindi, however. Even our new electrician, a man called Cleatus, turned up with an apprentice in tow who turned out to be from Mr M’s state of UP.

“Cleatus? Is that a Malayali name?” Mr M asked, still unfamiliar with the inventiveness of Kerala Christian nomenclature (our neighbours included a “Bosco”, a “Jijo”, a “Joji”, a “Donaald” and even a rather Asterix-ish “Scholastica”).

“Yes, I am full Malayali,” Cleatus replied.

“But your employee here is from UP.”

“Ah yes, I refuse to employ Malayalis, lazy bastards,” Cleatus explained. Mr M found this hilarious, naturally, and got chatting animatedly to the pair of them.

“So you communicate with each other in Hindi then?” he asked.

“Well, I learnt Hindi in Goa,” Cleatus replied. “Worked there many years before coming back here, you see. You worked in London, sir? You are English?”

“No, no, not English. I’m full Indian too. Though not Malayali, alas,” Mr M replied. He then turned to the apprentice, “And have you learnt any Malayalam?” he asked.

“Him? Malayalam?” Cleatus interjected, thumping his apprentice on the back. “Is he capable of learning anything, I ask you? He’s a UP-wallah, sir. Stupid bastards, the lot of them.”

Most non-Malayalis also have a vague notion about the matrilineal system followed by the state’s large Nair community and genuinely believe that Kerala’s women are highly educated and empowered beings. Photo: PTI

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Talking of stupid bastards

As mentioned earlier, Kerala’s muddled alcohol policy went through a number of baffling changes before getting finally derailed by a change of government. Its latest avatar was, however, totally nobbled by a Supreme Court ruling in 2017, which disallowed any commercial establishment anywhere in the country from selling alcohol if said establishment fell within 500 metres of a highway. Good intentions, but we all know that the road to perdition (or, in this case, highway to hell) is paved with etc etc.

Now, anyone familiar with the narrow shape of Kerala will know that the state is energetically criss-crossed by several state and national highways. If you spit hard enough, chances are your spittle will fall on a highway of some description. Uncle was particularly devastated to find that his beloved club (Trivandrum Tennis Club) was found to lie on one such highway. Even more gallingly, said highway veered off at a nearby roundabout, turning right rather than going straight as one would reasonably expect, leading to the scandalous outcome that the other two clubs in town (Trivandrum Club and Sri Moolam Club) were not sitting on highways. The iniquitousness of this travesty had reduced many a TTC member to bitter tears, I am reliably informed.

Anyway, overnight, Kerala was back (pretty much) to its dry state, this time by default. This was terrible news for the tourist trade — one of the last successful industries left in the state due to the havoc created by unions. Of the Supreme Court decision, even the principal secretary of tourism used the media to gloomily declare, “This is the death knell as far as Kerala Tourism is concerned.” Certainly, the numbers would appear to bear this out. Two years after the implementation of the 2014 alcohol ban, foreign tourist arrivals decreased from 7.6 per cent to 6.2 per cent.

This might not sound like too devastating a slide until somebody informs you that in 2010 the number had been a glorious 18.3 per cent. In direct consequence, the foreign exchange earnings went from 15 per cent in 2014 to 11.5 per cent in 2016 and is no doubt headed firmly south as I write.

When will our governments realise that bans do not miraculously stop people from indulging in banned substances, merely driving them to carry on their activities underground? A few ingenious ideas swiftly emerged among bar-owners, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

My favourite one came from a roadside hotelier near Ernakulam who, rather than running around squawking in blind panic, calmly set about building a walled labyrinth between the highway and his bar. The papers were full of aerial images of this charming cement construction vaguely reminiscent of the hedge follies of ancient English gardens. It even made it to the pages of The Guardian. By creating this labyrinth, the bar-owner had cannily increased the distance from the highway to the door of his establishment to just over 500m. The local police station confirmed that this was perfectly lawful as the ruling did not measure the distance between road and bar as the crow flies but in distance walked. (See, that thing again: for every clever law, there will be a cleverer solution floating around somewhere when you’re dealing with Malayalis.)

Even if such bans did achieve the happy result of people shunning the amber nectar, a government simply cannot instruct foreign tourists to steer clear of alcohol during the one luxury holiday they have saved up for all year. Kerala, going by the tourism department’s own prize-winning advertising campaign, offers a lush green paradise, restful and easy-going, crammed with fresh healthful seafood served aboard converted rice-boats that chug lazily along palm-fringed backwaters.

Try asking the average Western tourist to board one such boat on a hot afternoon and fail to stick a chilled and gently sweating bottle of beer in his hand... I guarantee trouble ahead.

Government bodies should remember: tourists are not exactly coming to Kerala for the customer service.

We found that out for ourselves whenever we ate out, increasingly accustomed to being told that this or that was not on the menu. Given the hot climate, the most puzzling of such permanently non-available items was ice as Malayalis seemed strangely unacquainted with small cubes of frozen water that, in England or America or even in Delhi was brought to your table in massive buckets. Whenever (which was often) Mr M asked for ice in a Kerala watering hole, we were met with expressions on a procession of waiters’ faces that ranged from mystified to baffled to downright antagonistic. It had got so bad that the minute Mr M uttered the word “ice”, it triggered a migraine response somewhere deep inside my head.

One evening, a new neighbourhood restaurant took star rating in our numerous experiences of poor customer service.

We’d taken a large group of friends and family with us on this occasion. Once we’d settled around a large table in the garden, there rose the question of drinks. We knew there would be no point asking for ice or even for beers as this was, no, not bordering a highway, but merely an unlicensed establishment.

“Do you have Diet Coke?” Mr M asked.

“No, sir, ” was the response.

“Diet Pepsi?”

“No, sir, only normal Pepsi.”

“Fresh lime soda?”

“No, sir.”

“Okay, what do you have then?”

“We can get you fresh lime water,” the waiter said decisively.

Mr M was always unwilling to be taken in by assurances of “filter water”. He decided to push it. “Well, if you can make fresh lime water, surely you could get a couple of bottles of soda from the shop next door and make fresh lime soda, couldn’t you?”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Why not?”

I started to shift in my seat, aware that from this point we were a hair’s breadth away from storming out, friends, family and all. And we hadn’t even gotten around to mentioning the word “ice”. That familiar old migraine was rearing its head somewhere at the back of my own. I was also keenly conscious that Mother and Aunt, with various pairs of bad knees and ankles between them, were in no position to do very effective storming.

“Your water is filtered, isn’t it?” I asked, trying to distract and symbolically using some of said substance to douse the flames that were just about to leap to life. But the waiter, silly man, had no idea I was at this point in time his best decoy.

He ignored me and kept his eyes on Mr M in an admirable effort at being manful. “Sir, there is no one to go to the shop for soda, sir.”

Mr M’s hackles were by now sky-high. “Okay, how about this? I will go to the shop and use MY money to buy a couple of bottles of soda. Then I will bring them back and YOU can take them to the kitchen and ask them to make us seven fresh lime sodas. Do YOU think you could ask THEM to do that, huh?”

Everyone at the table jumped a little at the shouted use of each pronoun. The waiter, unused to having seven sets of terrified eyes fixed on him, awaiting his response in breathless anticipation, chose the wisest form of least resistance.

He backed down, mumbling, “I will go and check, sir.”

But Mr M was really into his pronouns now. “Check with WHOM?”

“Manager, sir.”

Mr M was clearly too thirsty to wait for the manager and jumped up to depart for the shop next door. By the time he reappeared carrying two large litre bottles of soda, the manager was at our table, being sweet-talked by various female members of my family. We had managed to soften him considerably for, as soon as Mr M came, he accepted the bottles of soda with a charming smile and promised us our drinks in ten minutes.

Pleased with this small victory, Mr M beamed around the table, accepting the congratulations. At this point Uncle joined us, coming straight from the bar at Trivandrum Tennis Club in a slightly belligerent state. After Mr M had narrated our experience, he turned to the waiter who was still hovering, notebook and pencil at the ready.

“You don’t serve hard drinks?” Uncle demanded.

“No, sir.”

“You don’t serve soft drinks,” Uncle continued. Now the hapless waiter took refuge in polite silence. “Then let me ask you this. WHAT do you serve?”

Aunt patted Uncle’s arm and, as is his wont, he swiftly subsided. “Let’s order food,” she said, using her maternal voice, which always worked a treat on him.

“My order is very simple,” Uncle said. “Fish curry and rice.”

“You have fish curry and rice?” aunt asked the waiter, though it was only a rhetorical question as there could be few establishments in Kerala that did not serve fish curry and rice.

“We have fish curry, madam. But no rice, sorry, madam. Rice we only make at lunchtime.”

Our friend Rema, probably taking her cue from Mr M, leapt out of her chair. “Then let me come into the kitchen and make some rice for you,” she said.

Of course, Rema was pressed back into her chair and the restaurant did eventually come up with the goods, serving Uncle a bowl of steaming rice to accompany his fish curry. But the question remains: why does customer service have to be beaten thus out of a Kerala establishment?

I have a long-winded theory about a proud race that has never encountered domination or suffering and, therefore, does not know how to serve and kowtow and gratify. But Mr M has a simpler explanation. Just blame the Commies, he says.

(Source: Daily O)

Kerala and the myth of matriarchy

First let’s get one myth out of the way: Kerala is not, and never was, a matriarchal society. Matriarchy implies power in the hands of a woman who is the head of the household.  Some communities in Kerala did have a matrilineal system. This meant that the property passed from mother to daughter. In patrilineal societies it passed from father to son. But in the matrilineal joint families of Kerala, patriarchs — not matriarchs — actually ruled the roost.

Actually the matrilineal Nair tharawad which has been romanticised in many a film has its roots in patriarchy. The Nair men were warriors who led dangerous and uncertain lives. The idea of having all the women in the family living under a single roof and ensuring the property passed from mother to daughter was designed to keep the property and the women safe. There were no disputes over property from outsiders entering the family as the women stayed in their own homes not out of choice, but because that was what they were expected to do.

The traditional sambandam system of marriage they followed also meant they were not bound to one man for life but could change partners.  Again did they have a choice?  Not really. The Karanavan decided on when a relationship had to end and who the next partner would be. The children belonged to the mother and her tharawad.

The upper caste Nambudiris who followed a patriarchal system exploited this situation in their own way. According to their tradition, only the eldest son of the family could marry within his own caste and only his children had rights over the family property. The other sons therefore would go in for a sambandam marriage with Nair women, comfortable in the knowledge that they would have no responsibility towards the children born out of such unions as they would be brought up in their mothers’ families. As a result of this, many Nambudiri women remained unmarried and locked in their homes.  Also many times the lower caste women were forced to leave their existing partners and enter into a sambandam with an upper caste man.

Some other communities including Moppalas and even the royal families followed a matrilineal system of inheritance. But there were others like the rich and powerful Syrian Christians, who were Nambudiri converts, followed the usual patrilineal system complete with heavy dowries and women being denied any share in the property.

When I first landed in Kerala in 1970, I expected to find a society where women enjoyed much more freedom than in my own home state of Karnataka or even the land of my ancestors, Tamil Nadu. The ground reality however, was very different.

Of course by 1970, the Marumakathayam or matrilineal system was slowly fading into oblivion, though the final death knell was only sounded in 1976 with the abolition of joint families in Kerala. But most of the women I met were already ultra conservative and adhering to the norms of behaviour dictated by a patriarchal society. The tharawads were dying, small families had branched out on their own and most of the women were reluctant to talk about their rather unique past.

There were many paradoxes. I found it very strange that in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala where I lived, not a single woman rode a cycle or drove a car. Many women were educated and held jobs, but they were very specific “acceptable” jobs like teacher, doctor, nurse or at best engineer. They dressed conservatively, mostly in white clothes.

I met women in politics like the fiery Gowri Amma (the indomitable LDF leader) and the graceful Lakshmi Menon who among other things was a Rajya Sabha member, a minister and Padma Bhushan awardee. I interviewed iconic sportswomen like PT Usha and Valsamma. I talked to women circus artistes from Kerala who wore skimpy clothes and performed under big tents across the country. And the nurses who came from Kerala villages and went out to work in the most remote regions across the world.

As a journalist, I got to meet women from every walk of life. I realised that the matrilineal system had strengthened some, especially those who were brave or strong enough to use the wealth in their possession to get educated and free themselves from traditional shackles. But there was also the flip side of the coin. Like in any other patriarchal society of that era, husbands and fathers would tell me smugly that they “allowed” their women to work but only in ”safe” and “acceptable” jobs.

I wrote about Mary Roy, the mother of the fiery free-spirited Arundhati Roy. Mary was then fighting her family to get a share of their huge ancestral property. The Syrian Christian community to which she belonged was governed by an archaic British law which stated that a woman could get one fourth the share of her father’s property of Rs 4000, whichever was less! Mary who had married a Bengali man of her own choice had been cut off without any dowry which was considered to be the girl’s share of the ancestral property. When her marriage failed, and she returned to her parental home with two small children, her brothers cited the archaic law to deny her her share. When I met her, she had already independently established the well-known Corpus Christy school in Kottayam but was still fighting a fierce battle to win Syrian Christian women their right to get an equal share. Indira Jaisingh offered her help and finally, many years later, Mary won the case. During that time, I met many Syrian Christian women… unmarried, divorced or widowed… who had been denied any share in their family’ property and did not have the means or courage o fight their families.

I also met women who had once lived in matrilineal tharawads. Many of them spoke of oppression, of strict norms of behaviour and no personal freedom within the joint family. I remember in particular one old woman who told me of how she was forced by the Karanavan to separate from the man who had been her loving partner for several years. She was made to enter into a relationship with a Namboodiri who was so particular about “pollution” that he would live in a separate house in the compound, cook his own food and bathe after sleeping with her. He went away after a couple of years leaving her with two children who had never seen their father.

This was also the period when the “Gulf Migration” was at its peak. In Varkala, I met many poor Muslim women who had pledged their jewels and taken huge loans to help their husbands get visas and passports to go to the fabled lands where the streets were presumably lined with petro dollars. While the husbands were away, these women toiled alone to pay back loans, educate children sometimes build houses with money their husband brought. Hard though it was this life gave them a certain amount of independence. And when the husband returned it was back to the kitchen for them with no acknowledgement for the stellar roles they had played. Many slid into depression as they were forced to return to a life of repression and abuse.

This piece cannot be complete without talking about women in the Malayalam films. As a film critic, I have watched and analysed Malayalam films now for more than four decades. Many of them are outstanding and far superior to other mainstream cinema in terms of production values, thematic content as well as controlled narration.

But the underlying sexism is always present.  Even in so-called women oriented films, in the name of giving a realistic picture of a woman’s plight, women are abused physically, called names and bullied into subservience. Most top directors, heroes and script writers have at one time or another been guilty of this. And sexism when packed into an otherwise gripping and realistic narrative is far more insidious than the crude sexism of “comedy” characters or melodramatic villains.

And then there were the “soft porn” films of the 1980s which under the guise of exploring women’s sexuality or exploitation packed the script with crude sex scenes and vulgar dialogue. To add masala to such films, extra “hot” scenes were shot often using body doubles of famous actors and interpolated after the film was passed by the censors. A point was reached when Malayalam films became synonymous with porn as these films made their way into cheap theaters across the country.

Everyday sexism on the streets, misogynistic portrayal of women in the media, abusive behavior within families…these are not restricted to Kerala alone. They are national and international problems. And they will continue to plague us until society learns to stop objectifying women and give them the respect they deserve.

(Source: First Post)

Live-in relationships...an extension of Sambandham marriages in Kerala?

An interesting article written by Sreelata Menon, who has worked at Onlooker and World Trade magazines before teaching History to undergraduates and doing a stint in an advertising agency. She is also the author of Freelance Writing for the Newbie Writer, and her books also include Guru Nanak and Indira Gandhi for Penguin-Puffin.

She was dressed simply in a two-piece mundu set with white jasmine flowers adorning her long plait – which was all the ornament she had on, other than perhaps a broad gold chain. And to my young eyes she looked lovely. Like the pretty bride she was. As for him, I must say I was more than a wee bit disappointed. He looked much older. To someone who was just beginning to understand the nuances of romance, it was a little dampening to find that the groom was nowhere like the heroes of the Mills & Boon romances sneakily borrowed from her mother. And I wondered how she had agreed to it. But she was coy and shy. He was tender and caring. The gentleness with which he caressingly spoke to her and her blushing responses would have made one truly believe it was a match made in heaven. And thus it was for the next few days that he was there and perhaps over the next maybe 20 years when he visited her home.

Years and many weddings later I realised that the protocol followed was quite unlike not only the naach-gaana-sangeet-mehendi of every ceremony of today but also what came after.

There was no bidai; no setting up house together, and more importantly, no nuclear in-laws as we know them now.
This coming together of a couple belonged to another time, another era.

Over the centuries, the Nairs – the martial nobility of Kerala – have followed a system of matrimony that has evolved from an arrangement known as Sambandham. An astrologer usually fixes the date and on that day the groom would arrive at the bride’s residence accompanied by some maternal male relatives. He would sit under a decorated canopy while the bride was brought out by a female elder to the sound of conch shells and nagaswaram. At the appointed time, he would hand over two pieces of gold bordered cloth to the bride and in return the bride would give him a thamboolam consisting of betel leaves and supari. This was all that was required to cement the union.

There were no priests, no mangalsutra, no exchange of rings and certainly no chanting of mantras. Only a lamp lit next to an ornate gold and black drum filled with rice and sheaves of banana florets that held pride of place (even to this day all Nair wedding ceremonies are similar in nature, but with the ring and mangalsutra as add-ons). It was always followed by a sumptuous feast – the sadhya. And since all girls needed to marry ‘up’, the more prominent the Nair family or higher in caste they were, they married Brahmins or Nampoothiris (caste wise higher than Nairs) and more often than not, became the second or even third wives of well-placed much older Brahmin or Nampoothiri men who already had a wife or two and children of their own caste.

And what I had witnessed that day – I must have been 12 or 13 then – was one such Sambandham, my grandaunt’s. But it was a Sambandham that had evolved with time to become more regularised and permanent than in the past, because my grandaunt went on to bear many children who grew up in her home under the matrilineal system, while her husband (with his first wife and children at home) visited ever so often. It was all very civilised and even had all of them come calling once in a while.

Sambandham marriages were contractual and could be dissolved at will with neither party being victimised.
They were quite regulated, because there had to be some rituals for the bride, omitting which could lead to excommunication.

Couples in a live-in relationship today are possibly playing out the Sambandham of yore but without the benefits or disadvantages of a joint family or a ceremony. Do you agree?