SOCIETY
Fallen tharavads
THE Nayars of Kerala were a distinct community with their own marital scheme, marumakkathayam or matrilineal system of inheritance and unique customs and rituals. Under matriliny, the entire family, numbering 70 to 80, lived together in a joint family called the tharavadu, which comprised of the mother, her brothers and sisters and their children. The eldest brother was the head of the family, called the karanavar and was responsible for managing the family estate and "exercised the same authority over the kindred as a Roman patriarch over his consanguinal and affinal kins and slaves" (p.95).
To belong to a tharavadu meant wealth, status, power and privilege. Lineage was through women and the children belonged to the mother's family. All the family properties were jointly owned and women enjoyed equal rights with men. Nayar men were landlords, warriors or part of the militia or even members of the suicide squad called Chavers, which took able-bodied young men away from home. Thus the family system may have arisen from a need to protect the family and property from disintegration and destruction while the men were away.
However, this empowering system disintegrated with time. The period of wars was over. Land ceiling laws reduced the extent of possession under the tharavadu and they gradually dwindled in size and wealth. Economic changes in society and ideological and cultural perspectives acquired by the educated middle class and the changes in the value system affected the joint family tharavads. The unitary nuclear family suited people better.
The historical reasons for the legal abolition of matriliny in the 20th Century are meticulously analysed in this book. Kerala's tharavads had always fascinated a large number of anthropologists, historians and sociologists and a good number of studies have come out. This is because Nayars "constituted a large section of the landed elite in Malabar". The second reason, according to the author, is that "legislations relating to the Nayar tharavadu formed the model for family-centred laws regulating similar changes in other communities of Kerala. Matrilineal kinship was relatively unknown in the rest of India, though it was not unusual in Kerala itself. In the 19th Century, nearly half of the Keralites of different castes and communities were matrilineal".
The book examines the changes in the period from 1850 to 1940; it brings out the changes in family, notions of property, land rights, sexuality, gender and caste. Parallel attitudinal changes brought about by an English sense legal morality are also covered to explore the evolution of changes in the socio-economic system. The structure of the matrilineal tharavadu changed between the 18th and the 20th Century, which concurrently affected the rights of women within the household. The very structure of the matrilineal kinship also underwent tremendous change. The reasons for these are manifold and it is in this perspective that the author's analysis is incisive and path-breaking. She refutes the postulate that Nayar women were polyandrous and that "at any given time they could have up to eight lovers/ husband". The real reason for the disappearance of the tharavadu was the selfishness and the untold greed for money in siblings in matrilineal families.
The new laws and legal procedures that were introduced in Malabar and also in Travancore and Cochin from the 19th Century onwards had an adverse impact on the rights of women in Nayar tharavads. Nayar reform movements challenged the unmitigated powers of the karanavar. Patriarchal values influenced men and women alike. Women supported the partition of joint family systems and in the 1930s women took the initiative in the partition of many tharavads. In Travancore, within five years of the Marumakkathayam Law of 1933, which sanctioned the dismantling of the tharavadu and the partition of property, 32,900 families were partitioned. Rules of matrilineal kinship were twisted and interpreted and adapted to political, economic and legal exigencies.
The Kerala Legislature's abolition of matrilineal kinship, which varied enormously across time and regions, was the culmination and a predictable consequence of two centuries of legal change and social reforms. Presently, matrilineal kinship occupies merely a shadowy and at times nostalgic part of collective Keralite memory. Tharavads have even become part of the tourist package! The author's extensive research and exhaustive references make the book a highly commendable one though in parts it sounds very academic and thus of interest only to a limited readership.
K. KUNHIKRISHNAN
There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar c.1850-1940, G. Arunima, Orient Longman, Rs. 450.
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