Nambiar Erotic

In the northern third of Kerala, Nambiar is a surname that still tells people where a family once stood. The Nambiars are a branch of the Nairs, the old martial and landholding caste cluster of the Malabar coast, and around Kannur, Thalassery and Kasaragod they were for centuries the local gentry: estate holders, militia commanders, ministers to the rajas of Kolathunadu, Kadathanadu and the northern Kottayam. In one small territory, Iruvazhinadu, inland from Mahe, a group of Nambiar houses governed in their own right.

They speak Malayalam, a Dravidian language, in the North Malabar dialect that other Keralites recognize at once. They are Hindu, and religion here has a local shape. Many old Nambiar households keep a family shrine where theyyam is staged each season: a night-long ritual in which a performer from a lower-ranked hereditary community is painted, crowned and addressed as the deity in person. For those hours the landlord's family bows to a man their ancestors outranked, a reversal North Malabar takes entirely seriously.

What set Nambiars, like other Nairs, apart from most of India was matriliny. Name and property passed through the mother's line, the joint household or tharavad was managed by the senior maternal uncle, and a man's heirs were his sister's children, not his own. North Malabar added a twist: wives generally moved to the husband's house, yet their children still belonged to the mother's tharavad. Law dismantled the system over the twentieth century, first allowing partition in the 1930s and abolishing the joint family in the 1970s. Land reform in the same decade took away the tenanted estates that had underwritten the class.

Two earlier shocks matter too. The Mysorean invasions under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in the late eighteenth century broke much of the Nair aristocracy's grip on Malabar, and the British finished the job. When Pazhassi Raja of Kottayam fought the East India Company, his minister Kannavath Sankaran Nambiar was captured and hanged in 1801. He is still remembered locally as a martyr.

One confusion is worth clearing up. A separate temple-service community, the Ambalavasi Nambiars, shares the name. They are the hereditary players of the mizhavu drum in Sanskrit theater, and the poet Kunchan Nambiar belonged to them, not to the Nair group. Today's Nair Nambiars are mostly salaried professionals, teachers, officers and Gulf migrants, with a long record in the armed forces and civil service. The old houses with their tiled roofs and serpent groves survive, some carefully kept, some locked up while the family lives in Bangalore or Dubai.