Indian Antiquary Vol 52

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 187

JULY, 1923]
SOME DISCURSIVE COMMENTS ON BARBOSA
171
facts in any part of India," with the absurd result that such classes in the South as the Nâyars have been ranked by the orthodox as Sûdras and have so been held to be inferior. I have often wondered how much harm has been done in the ages right up to the present day by assuming the Code to consist of anything but mere monastic "councils of perfection." On pp. 55, 66, Barbosa has a few remarks in connection with the Nâyars on South Indian "Devil-worship" and on the Hindu Doctrine of Rebirth, which are not quite correct, though left unannotated.
The Nâyars are essentially a military body by tradition and extraordinarily arrogant where inferior castes are concerned; and both Barbosa's and Mr. Fawcett's (p. 49) remarks on their former and present treatment of "Low-castes" contain a lesson to those who would accuse the European in India of arrogance towards the native Indians of any degree. There has never been anything in the actions of Europeans in this respect approaching that of one native Indian towards another.
In another sense it may be remarked that well known to the Nâyars were both the boycott and the strike-very old social weapons in India, noticed incidentally by many travellersand Barbosa's accounts of the methods adopted by Nâyar soldiers to recover arrears of pay would spell terror if applied by European armies for a like purpose, though it is possible that similar practices were in vogue when mercenary forces were the fashion.
Barbosa has on p. 57 a remark which is more than merely interesting, as the earliest European instance of an observation, common more than three centuries later on, with quite as much error in it. He is talking of the "Cuiavem " or potters (Kuswan or Kuyavan). He says "They do not differ from the Nayres (Nâyars), yet by reason of a fault which they committed, they remain separate from them." This kind of folk-genealogy to bolster up a claim to "better days" in the past is very common in India and in the middle of the last century there was brought about the accidental collection of many such instances as that quoted unwittingly by Barbosa. Someone in high office directed Settlement (of Land Revenue) officials to find out the origin of caste names in the course of their enquiries into tenant right. The result was the record in innumerable Reports, in the Panjab at any rate, of childish accounts of caste origin, based on absurdly false etymology, and put forward in every case in order to raise the social status of the narrators. Anyone interested can collect them for himself from the official Settlement Reports of the period. It is very interesting to find that this particular method of gulling the inexpert European enquirer is as old as Barbosa himself. That the Kûyavan did differ from the Nâyar comes out naïvely in a remark in Ramusio's version of Barbosa: "Those who are sprung from them may not adopt any other caste or occupation" (p. 57).
On the whole Barbosa's observations on such castes as Kuyavan Vannathân and Châliyan, when compared with the modern Gazetteers, seem to infer that they and the Nâyars have an origin similar to that of the Rajpût clans further North.
Indeed, I am tempted here to note as a possible contribution to the ethnology of the Coast, that what we know of the Nâyars, the soldiers and "middle class" of the West Coast-the Kuswans or Kuyavans, the potters, the Cuiavem of Barbosa-the Vannathâns (p. 58), special washermen for the Nâyars who thus avoid caste pollution-and the Châliyans (p. 59) weavers, whose presence does not pollute the Nâyars-all connected with them in the business of lifeshows that they form together what further North would be called a Rajpût Clan and their followers. In fact, I am inclined to look upon the Nayars as indigenous Rajputs (there are others in India) and the rest as their followers in true Rajpût fashion, although the very