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Happy Onam to all!
This is a good time to remember the Onappattu that will be reverberating around Kerala now - the song that kindles memories of how things used to be when Maaveli was King, before he was unjustly sent to the Netherworld through trickery.
This is a good time to remember the Onappattu that will be reverberating around Kerala now - the song that kindles memories of how things used to be when Maaveli was King, before he was unjustly sent to the Netherworld through trickery.
“When Maaveli was ruling the land, all humans were equal”. Then the rest of the stanza: “They lived happily and there was no danger to anyone.”“There were no worries and no diseases. Evil people were nowhere to be seen."
"There were none around other than people of goodness. There were no lies, and no cheating and no false promises. There were no false measures or crooked weights and no other falsities either.”
Notice that the song says nothing about Maaveli himself, neither his physical powers nor his generosity or other personal qualities. The song only talks about the kind of society that flourished when he was around.The fulcrum of the song, therefore, is about social relations.
Equal dignity of all individuals. Fairness, justice and lack of lies and cheating when people deal with each other. There couldn’t be a better articulation of the ideal society.
Remember that during much of the recent centuries, Kerala was no haven of equality or fairness or justice. It was, as Vivekananda called it, a “madhouse” - of caste supremacy, extreme inequality and prejudice. But the song kept the flame alive.
And so did the Maaveli story. Ideas, as they say, have consequences. So the next time anyone wonders why Kerala is what it is, one could say: may be Onam had a lot to do with it!The Maaveli story with its distinctive sympathies, is not a one-off.
Some of the folk dance performances of Kerala, like Theyyattam, are built around the stories of those who were punished with death for infringing caste rules.These performances deified those who were thus killed and kept them alive.
Onam in that sense is also a yearly performance that revolts against forgetting, and sets up the right ideals for a society to strive towards.Onam comes around every year because Malayalis haven’t reached those ideals yet. But they’re on the way. Come hell - or high water!
