Kerala Brahmins in Transition: A Study of a Namputiri Family.

• Author: Freeman, Rich
• Position: Book Review

Kerala Brahmins in Transition: A Study of a Namputiri Family. By MARJATTA PARPOLA. Studia Orientalia, vol. 91. Helsinki: FINNISH ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 2000. Pp. 436, figs.

Marjatta Parpola's ethnography of Kerala's Namputiri Brahmans grows out of her stay and long association with a particular family of Namputiris, as she accompanied her husband, the eminent Indologist, Asko Parpola, on his own field and textual investigations into the community's preservation of their Vedic liturgies and rites. Spanning the period of the early 1980s into the mid-'90s, this field experience provided an excellent opportunity for anthropological research into this important and understudied community in a contemporary, ethnographic context. As Kerala's only traditionally indigenous Brahman community, the Namputiris historically dominated the religious, intellectual, and literary landscape of Kerala, and the overturning of their social prominence and authority marked a significant stage in the region's modern transformation. We are thus fortunate that Parpola has availed herself of her opportunities in collecting considerable detail on the domestic life of a particularly orthodox, priestly family of Namputiris, and it is in the record of this detail that the value of this work lies for those interested in the lives of such communities.

Despite being a revision of the author's dissertation in anthropology, the work seems heavily informed by the Indological context of her husband's and other scholars' researches, centered on documenting the ability of this family and a few others to perform some relict Vedic sacrifices (e.g., Frits J. Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar [Univ. of California Press, 1983]). Perhaps owing to this research environment, and the peculiar profile of the families involved, Parpola's purchase on the modern lives of her subjects is sought primarily through a deeply Indological construal of their past. As she says, this study is concerned with "the general purpose of examining whether Vedic Brahmanism still thrives in Kerala and how the Namputiris have coped with the initially outward pressure for change, and with the special purpose of studying what the Namputiri relationship to some ancient Kerala customs or rules is nowadays.... My orientation is thus toward seeking for cultural persistence from the past" (pp. 5-6). While it is clear that "Vedic Brahmanism" (as opposed to the retention of certain Vedic rites under later...