Pathaayappura
I asked ChatGPT whether it knew anything about Kerala’s pathaayappura പത്തായപ്പുര. It responded with some nonsensical hallucinations about a community of “ten houses,” literally translating pathayappura as pathu “ten” and pura “house.” But when I directed it to the actual meaning of the word in Malayalam, namely, “storehouse,” it seemed to regain its confidence and responded with the correct description and details. The pathaayappura was an ancient method for storage in Kerala. It was an elevated, covered, enclosed space in which agricultural produce (primarily) was stored safely, away from mold and pests. It was also used to store valuables in rich households.
My personal knowledge of the pathaayappura arose in three separate family contexts: maternal, paternal, and spousal. My mother’s ancestors on her father’s side were physicians who once ran an ayurvedic clinic in present-day Kottayam. The family later converted the clinic into a house, closing off all the functional spaces that were once used for storage, including the pathaayappura. The pathaayappura was a large structure in the center of the house; it formed the seed around which the wings of the house were built. I am told that the structure is also called an ara അറ when it is inside the house and pathaayappura when it is outside. Anyway, this particular structure was a raised room within the house, large enough to seat one or two people, and made entirely of wood, with a small door that opened into an equally small corridor. I was told it was used to store grains and dried herbs. I believe it was also used in relatively modern times to store other types of produce, bananas mainly. Its essential function was as a storage space. I remember it as a dusty structure, a bit plain perhaps, but exuding a feeling of timeless, rich, ancient history.
My father’s ancestors on his mother’s side were royals belonging to the House of Mavelikkara. Before Tippu Sultan’s assault of northern Kerala, they had been rulers of the land around Beypore, near present-day Kozhikode. They sought refuge with the Travancore royal family who gave them land in Mavelikkara, where they have been settled ever since.¹ Before the Communist land reforms in Kerala, they had been rich too, and one of the pathaayappura in one of their ancestral properties housed a shrine and my great-grandmother’s jewels. When the ancestral property was torn down in pieces during relatively modern times, my aunts moved the pathaayappura to their new house where it was made visible to the world, including to me. Made of darkly varnished teak, it was an exquisite structure, with sculpted details and designs that spoke of immeasurable wealth. Although it was almost the same size as the pathayappura in my mother’s ancestral house, its door was much larger. My aunts used it as a prayer room and my grandmother told me stories of the days in the past when her mother used to open it on festive occasions to retrieve the family’s jewels.
My husband’s family lived in a small house on a large lot abutting enormous paddy fields. A few feet from the main structure was a detached airy thatched shed, a quarter of which was taken up by a box that stood on stubby legs. I was told that the box was commissioned by my husband’s grandmother more than half a century earlier. Decades of monsoons had not made any dent in the wood. It came up to my hips and was perhaps six to eight feet in length and three to four feet wide. It was a pathaayam, a box once used to store paddy but now used to store a variety of garden tools, and the airy thatched shed was the pathaayappura.
The one common strain through these three different types of pathaayappura was its utilitarian aspect as a storage space. It stored what could not be immediately used: grains, dried herbs, jewels, tools. Believe it or not, such a structure was in use in ancient Egypt around 2400 BCE and was called almost exactly the same: 𓉐𓏺𓃀𓂝𓎛𓏏 pere-bedehe, “house of surplus.”² The term occurs in a papyrus found in the pyramid of pharaoh Djedkare Izezi of the Old Kingdom. The papyrus is currently housed in the Egyptian Museum.³ The word refers to the storage space in the manor of Kakai, presumably a noble of those times.
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bedehe was used in ancient Egyptian from around 2414 BCE to 526 BCE to mean “surplus.”⁴ During this long period, the central sound that was once “d,” represented by the arm hieroglyph, evolved into a stop that became “ka” or “a” in Malayalam. Thus, by around 526 BCE, bedehe for “surplus” would have been pronounced as bekeh or similar. Had ancient Egyptian and old Malayalam evolved together, bedehe would have evolved in Malayalam too into bekeh and the original pronunciation would have been lost. But pathaayam was retained in Malayalam although it changed slightly to lose is original meaning of “surplus” and came to refer to the space used to store the surplus. On the other hand, baaki in Malayalam, which is close to bekeh, means “surplus.” baaki also means “remnant.” Based on the presence of the sound “b” instead of “p,” this latter meaning likely derived from Arabic baaqi “lasting.”⁵ The two words may have merged based on the similarities in sound and meaning.
Thus Malayalam has pathaayam derived from the ancient pronunciation of Egyptian bedehe dating to around 2400 BCE and also baaki derived from the more recent pronunciation of bekehe dating to around 526 BCE. That both have been retained suggests a discontinuity in contact between Malayalam and Egyptian. It also indicates the influence of the intervening Arab trade in Kerala. This journey into Kerala’s history through the study of words and language is indeed fascinating. Who knew that sounds could tell us so much about those who once uttered them?
Notes
[1]. Sasidhara Varma, 2018, Mavelikkara Kottarathinte Charithram Varma [in Malayalam], Self-published.
[2] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/60560. Prefixes and suffixes exchanged places between Malayalam and ancient Egyptian so that pere-bedehe would be bedehe-pere in old Malayalam. The “b” changed to “p” and the rope hieroglyph, which was a fricative sound, transliterated for convenience here as “h” became “ya” in Malayalam. The arm hieroglyph was once pronounced as “d” in some words, which evolved into “tha” in this example.
[3] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/text/U2CXI4WKORDAHGQZUCKK22XWTU/sentences?page=1#sentence-1
[4] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/55060.
[5] https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?page=749. Arabic could also have derived from ancient Egyptian.
