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A lost song - Dhana dhanya sasialatha

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There is a song I've been searching for many years. My late mother used to sing it but no one in her family remembers it now.  Some people say the song used to be played on All India Radio in the 1950s and 60s when Kerala state was newly formed. Others say it used to be sung in school assemblies even till the 1970s. But I haven't been able to get the lyrics or a recording or a reference. From what I can gather, the song is an adaptation of  a Bengali original written by Dwijendralal Roy in the late 19th or early 20th century and which is still popular. I particularly like this version by a Bangladeshi group: The Malayalam version is lost. Here is what I remember of it from my mother's singing. If anyone reading this remembers the rest or can point me to a recording or a reference, it would be wonderful to recover the song and sing it again! Lyrics (part): Dhana dhanya sasialatha sulalitham manoharam Keralatheeram modhakaram vinobhavan bhayam (vignyanada saram?) Keralatheera

Tharavad? House name? What is that?

Over the past few days, I've seen variants of a post on the impermanence of a 'permanent address'. Through the analogy of an address, the posts talk about the futility of trying to hold on to certainties in a changing world. I agree. But I also believe that - at least for us in India - the liberalisation of the last 30 years has accelerated that change and permanently altered the status quo. Over the last couple of years, I completed an exercise that many families in Kerala undertake at some point -- creating a family tree and history. Sifting through anecdotes, dimly or often mis-remembered by older relatives, and scouring available sources for credible facts and figures to validate often apocryphal claims, I put together a timeline for my parent's families going back several generations. It was a bit of a vanity trip, of course. Like many families in our situation, our family trees feature chieftains, royals, vagabonds, layabouts, achievers, and a large number of peop

Kerala Kalamandalam — Day with the Masters tour

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T hirty kilometres north of Thrissur in the southern Indian state of Kerala, close to the Nila river (also known as Bharathapuzha), is the small town of Cheruthuruthy (also known as Vallathol Nagar). This is the home of Kerala Kalamandalam, an art and culture deemed university dedicated to preserving and furthering the traditional art forms of Kerala. Started in 1930 by poet Vallathol Narayana Menon and his associates, Kalamandalam offers training in a range of performing arts such as Kathakali, Mohiniyattam, Thullal, Kutiyattam, Carnatic Music, Mridangam, and Kerala percussion instruments like Chenda, Maddalam, Timila, and Mizhavu. A residential institution that democratised the performing arts by opening admissions to students from all walks of life, Kalamandalam offers a Day with the Masters guided tour in which visitors are taken to the various classes being held in the campus. Over a three-hour walk around the large campus, you get to sit in on a wide range of classes from differe

Tripping in Thrissur

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Temples, a church, a dance and performing arts university, a wedding, an ammama, appams, and quiet flows the Nila. The Swaraj Round, located at the centre of Thrissur town in central Kerala in southern India, is said to be among the largest traffic roundabouts in the world. About two kilometres in circumference, it encircles 65 acres of the Thekkinkadu maidan. Within the maidan, the Vadakkunnathan temple sprawls serenely over nine acres of well tended lawns and walkways within four imposing gopurams facing the north, south, east, and west. Vadakkunnathan temple, together with the Thiruvambady Sri Krishna temple on Shornur Road less than a kilometer to the north and the Paramekkavu Bhagavathi temple to the east just across the Swaraj Round, are the three principal temples that participate in the annual Thrissur Pooram, one of India’s largest and most colourful temple festivals. A short walk from the Swaraj Round, in the middle of busy streets and lanes, the white walls and towers of th

Stop the bridal gold rush

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The excessively gold-bedecked Kerala bride is a well-known cliché. Jewellery shops promote it, social media memes satirize it, reformers condemn it, and many families strain their finances to achieve it. It is absurd that in a progressive state like Kerala, most families feel compelled to perpetuate this gross gender discrimination. A middle class family aims at accumulating 100 sovereigns (800 grams) of gold for a daughter’s marriage. At current gold prices and making charges, that’s a whopping Rs 40 lakhs a family has to budget for just gold jewellery. Call it what you will — dowry, security, keeping up appearances, or whatever — this is the penalty parents take on themselves for having a girl child. And it is so unnecessary. Kerala is in many ways a gender equal opportunity society and women role models abound across the socio-economic spectrum. Why then does society condone this gold handicap for girls? Often it is because parents and family want to find “suitable” grooms. This con

Our sapramanja kattil story

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  Documenting the learning from assembling the “sapramanja kattil”, a traditional Kerala cot.  One of the things my wife inherited from her family home in Kerala was a traditional four-poster cot. Built like a tank, the cot is an impressive creation weighing a massive 115 kilos and is 7.5 feet long, 3.5 feet wide, and a little over 1.5 feet high. There are intricately carved head and foot boards, four-foot long posts at the corners, and thick carved legs. The posts, head and foot boards, and legs are painted in traditional orange and black vegetable dye colours. The sleeping plank is an assembly of six separate sections joined by mortise and tenon joints and held together by wooden dowels. The cot is thought to be over 100 years old and is a fine example of traditional Kerala carpentry. As far as I can tell, it is called a  sapramanja kattil  in Malayalam.  Manja  means yellow and  kattil  means cot. I'm not sure what  sapramanja  means so if you know, do tell. The colourful sapram

Stories from the pandemic - John vakil

 My wife and I travelled to Kerala in Sept 2020 during the Covid pandemic. We’d taken a ‘short stay’ pass that the Kerala government allows if you have work that cannot be deferred. Most people we met in Kerala agreed the government was doing a good job managing the pandemic. From tackling the humanitarian crisis of migrant workers to identifying infected cases, isolating them and tracing their contacts to ensuring food and medicine supply for quarantined people, the state is thought to have done well. What helps is that the populace is diligent about wearing masks, maintaining social distance and washing hands – a result of high levels of education and the slight paranoia common in Kerala on health matters. Of course things are not perfect. There are complaints about lapses in the process, lack of supplies, and petty corruption but that is inevitable in any large endeavour. But this story is about our neighbour in Kerala. Let’s call him John. John vakil (so called because he is an adv