JOIN USA contrasting story of Brahmin migration
While “Palakkad Iyers” had to face the vicissitudes of history until their absorption in modern times into mainstream Kerala society, adaptation of the “Tamil Iyengar” families from Srirangam—“invited” to the erstwhile princely State of Mysore when the Wodeyars consolidated their kingdom — with the local community was smoother, said Dr Lakshman Singh, Bharathiyar University’s former head of sociology department, who presented his findings on the communities at the sociological session of the WCTC.
In his paper on “Plight of the Palakkad Iyers” in the migration’s aftermath, Singh said they were originally a group of Brahmins mainly from Kumbakonam in the heart of Cauvery delta.
They (the “Iyers”) in good numbers migrated possibly from the early part of the 18th century to Palakkad in Kerala and set up “agraharams” there under encouragement by the local “Nair chieftains,” Dr Singh said.
The Nair chieftains had a reason to welcome them to Palakkad, as the dominant land-owning “Namboodhri Brahmins” there refused to “cooperate in the coronation of Nair chieftains on the ascendant then,” Dr Singh said.
The immigrant Brahmins from Thanjavur district set up over 75 “agraharams” (traditional residential area) in and around Palakkad though the “Namboodris” resented their entry and their mode of temple worship.
Shedding their age-old Brahmin self-image, the “Palakkad Iyers” took to all kinds of works; such as domestic servants, cooks in “Namboodri illams” and even entering into marital relations with Nair women “to sustain their prolonged stay,” he said.
“These migrant Brahmins thus readjusted to the new situation and yet took care of their kith and kin in the agraharams of Palakkad,” Dr Singh who studied the sociological history of 120 families of “Palakkad Iyers” over three generations, highlighted.
Of those families surveyed in his field research, Dr Singh found that 36 of them had produced an IAS officer each. One of them was the inimitable former chief election commissioner TN Seshan’s family, he noted.
The Wodeyar Kings of Mysore ,too, facing “resistance to their coronation” from the local Brahmins at one time, encouraged a group of “Tamil Brahmins” from the Vaishnavite bastion of Srirangam, to migrate to Mysore.
AIADMK leader and former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa traces her ancestry to one such migrant “Iyengar” family, he said. Nonetheless, the “Mysore Iyengars” did not face the same level of hostility as the “Palakkad Iyers,” as the political transition of the erstwhile princely state of Mysore to British control and then into independent India was relatively smooth, Dr Singh added.