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SEPTEMBER, 1895.)
EARLY SOVEREIGNS OF TRAVANCORE.
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SOME EARLY SOVEREIGNS OF TRAVANCORE. BY P. SUNDARAM PILLAI, M. A
Preface. THE late Maharaja of Travancore observed, in one of his public lectures, that if India
I could be considered a microcosm of the world, Travancore could be with greater justification regarded as the epitome of all India. The observation was made with special reference to the variegated natural featares of Travancore and to her equally rich and varied flora and fatina. It is, however, no less applicable to her population. It would be difficult, indeed, to find elsewhere in India, in so limited an area, a people so varied and typical af the mixed races that inhabit it. The two predominant factors of Indian civilization - the Aryan and the Pre-Aryan - are to be found in Travancore in every degree of fusion. From the aboriginal Kişikâr, or hillman, to the Vaidika Nambûri Brahmana, what stages of the meeting and mingling of the two races can we not perceive in the endless distinctions of caste 60 eminently characteristic of the extreme South of India ? The subtle forces set in motion by the great Aryan race to subdue and absorb into its own polity the earlier races of India may be still seen at full work in Travancore. And there, again, may be seen, taking place under the very eyes of the observer, the gradual evolution of all the forms of marriage known to the student, endogamous, exogamous, polyandrous, "polygamous, punaluan, and what not. Arrested in conseqnence at different stages of their natural growth, may be seen also all conceivable laws of inheritance. Equally diversified and full of philological import is the language of the country. Exactly ns the practised ear perceives all possible stages of corruption between pure Tamil and pure Malayalam, on passing from one end of the land to the other, - say from Cape Comorin to Paravůr; so also may the critical student notice all varieties of mongrel mixtures of Sansksit and Tamil, as he descends from the proud poems of the erudite few to the popular ditties of the illiterate many, -from a Bhúshá-Sáluntalam, for instance, to a Torrampartu. Every phase, too, in the evolution of that all-embracing conglomeration of faiths, ceremonies, and philosophier, called the Hindû Religion, from the grossest fetishism, worship of trees, of snakes, of evil spirits and what not, to the highest Vedantic school of Samkaracharya, - himself supposed to be a native of the place, - finds in Travancore its votary to this day, - not to speak of the numerous representatives of foreign religions, such as the Syrian Christians, who claim to have received their gospel direct from Saint Thomas himself. With regard to manners, customs, dress, and ornaments, infinite is the variety that obtains. Each caste would appear to have been bent upon originating and appropriating to itself a particular form of these natural adjuncts of social organization. Even more tempting than all this pleasing variety, is, to the student of Indian ethnology, the general air of primitive simplicity that, despite its complications, pervades the entire society, its language and institutions, its manners and traditions. And the air of primitiveness is by no means deceptive. Most of these social peculiarities are in truth but strange survivals of what at different stages was the rule in all India, at any rate in the peninsular portion of it. Endless particulars from the daily routine of individual and social life might be given to illustrate how strangely things survive in this land, though long extinct elsewhere; but suffice it here to say that Travancore seems to have played, in Indian anthropology, the part of a happy and undisturbed fossiliferons stratum. And it is easy to understand why it should have been so. No internal revolution seems to have ever convulsed her social system so as to efface the past, to which her own remarkably conservative nature inclined her to steadfastly adhere; and as for the violent changes outside her domains, they seem to have never reached her till their fury was spent, so that
1 Vide L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society. Punaluan is the Pandava type (a form of polyandry).
This term means "song on the apparition," and narrates the story of Silappadigaram, the ancient Tamil epic. It is being fast supplanted in popular favour by more modern songs and seems to have but a short term of life now before it.
