A matrilineal memoir from Malabar.
Here's a deeply personal, unique family story that weaves through generations of memories and tells the story of women who grew up in a matrilineal household in Malabar.
In the lush and storied land of North Malabar, once folded into the cartography of the Madras Presidency, the coastal towns of Kannur, Tellicherry, Mahe, Dharmadam and Vadagara pulsed with the rhythms of trade winds and the slow churn of history. It was here that the Thiyas, a matrilineal community, quietly nurtured generations of women who seemed at once deeply rooted in tradition yet ahead of their time. While colonial and princely India largely imagined women as secondary - cloistered, ornamental, dependent - these women of Malabar were charting another path, their lives infused with a dignity and autonomy that puzzled outsiders yet seemed entirely natural to them.
Marriage itself took on a form that confounded the prevailing norms. A Thiya wedding, until not too many generations ago, was orchestrated not by the bride's family but by the groom's family. There was no exchange of dowry, no parade of trunks laden with silks, brass lamps or carved furniture. Instead, the groom's family gathered the trousseau and his sister or aunt procured sarees, blouses, underskirts and even undergarments - an unspoken gesture of solidarity between women across households. The gold tali chain too, came from the groom's side and the only wealth the bride carried was the jewellery she wore on her wedding day. Yet she did not enter her new life impoverished, for her maternal home remained her anchor, the enduring source of both emotional and material support.
Education was not merely encouraged but regarded as essential. In this community, there was no bifurcation between sons and daughters in their schooling. My great grandmother, improbably modern for her times, attended a French convent in Mahe in the 1880s. Another ancestor, equally resolute, went to the Sacred Heart's Convent in Tellicherry, making her daily pilgrimage to school in a jutka vandi, its wheels rattling against red laterite roads. My grandmother Leela, who wrote in English with a grace and precision that could rival professional scribes, left behind delicate blue inland letters addressed to me when I lived in the Assistant Commissioner's residence in Ranikhet.
Those letters still survive, paper ghosts whispering across time. Her coconut toffee recipe - soft, pale pink, tinged with cochineal - remains etched in memory, just as much a part of of her legacy as the upright bookstand, the card table and the long reclining chairs of our ancestral home in Calicut. As children, we consumed not only kilos of banana chips but also her carefully inked letters, a form of nourishment as important as food itself.
Among my father's aunts, education blossomed into eccentric brilliance. Janaki Ammal, the renowned cytogeneticist, once confessed in her journal that she read each of Shakespeare's plays twice in order to fully absorb them, her appetite for literature as methodical as her science. Another aunt, Sumitra, offered in her diary a confession both tender and defiant : "I am suffering from womb pain. I just want to lie in bed and read". When the British decreed English proficiency as a requirement for government service in North Malabar, it was the Thiyas - unencumbered by caste pride in Sanskrit or Malayalam - who seized the colonial tongues swiftly, transforming it into a tool of aspiration. Letters to our educated aunts were invariably addressed with degrees appended : Miss V Radha, BA for learning itself was a form of adornment.
The sense of practicality that defined these women extended even to the rituals of death. My grandmother, with characteristic clarity, declared she wished not to be cremated but buried beneath the Malgova mango tree in our compound. "Let my body be of some use", she said, her words a premonition of sustainability before the word entered common parlance. In that gesture of becoming nourishment for the earth, she enacted a philosophy that lay dormant in the soil of Malabar, where mango groves and coconut palms held the wisdom of centuries.
.....to be contd.
Courtesy. Lata Govind
Tailpiece.
Got up at 5, sent out all the morning messages, switched on the hymns on the home theatre, lit up the puja room lamp, opened up the house for the day.
Walked within the house, recited my prayers.
A quiet Friday.
Sumathi chechi was cremated at the Santhi kavaadam, Thiruvananthapuram by a half past 9, this morning.
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