Being Iyer…

16^th September,2012

For a person who is a south Indian Keralite Iyer by birth, its quite difficult to connect back to your native land ,when you have been born and brought up in North for 25 years, unaware of all the complexities what my parents might have faced, my dad migrated from Palakkad,Kerela in the year 1971 to Kanpur, and got married in 1979 to Mrs.N.V.Thailambal,(that’s my mom,of course)… and then finally,settled in Ghaziabad in 1979, Our landlady taught mom how to cook, gave her a hindi-cized name…Geeta Raman, and also happened to be her hindi teacher.

Days passed,actually got transformed and there was a certain metamorphosis from being and Iyer to a North Indian, I was born in 1987, so… I am a north Indian in that sense…!! But since childhood, there was always a feeling of a certain longevity, an eagerness to learn more about my roots, although some of the traditional Iyer customs irritated me, still I managed to pull through well.

I became irritated at the family functions where all the “Taathas, and paatis and maamas and maamis” used to gather and we had the similar set of questions repeated again and again in every gathering…

“Onakku poonal potaacho??”  “Poonal is the sacred thread which Brahmins are supposed to wear and they are also required to do a “Sandhyamantaram” or “Sandhyavandanam” every morning and evening after wearing it. I would name it as “Poonalising” ceremony..!!so finally it happened on one fine day in 2004, and I could proudly say that now I had all the qualifications of being an Iyer. Apart from the fact that I didn’t knew how to read or write Malayalam or Tamil, Interestingly, every Palakkad Iyer is well versed in Tamil and Malayalam, being located in Kerela only geographically, there is an interesting history how Iyers acquired a major portion in Palakkad and several other parts of Kerela, and gradually their Tamil got mixed with Malayalam, and so it gave birth to a new sub-dialect of Tamil, Iyer Bhashai or Iyer Tamil or Palakkad Tamil, being basic tamil with a lot of Malayalam influence.(for which I am still mocked at by some.. :D ).

When I was unaware of all this history, I was in a constant dilemma telling people about my native place, whether I should tell them Kerela, or Ghaziabad....

To be continued...