Toxic Beads Dipped in Sweet Honey!

What you hold in your hands is the eleventh instalment of an inquiry that began with a single, almost accidental observation: that the English language, in its flat and unyielding simplicity, behaves differently from the languages that dominate this subcontinent. Where English says “you” and “he” and “she” without hierarchy or tremor, the languages of India—and of much of Asia—speak in vertical shafts of power. A single word can elevate a man to divinity or reduce him to a thing. A glance, a tone, a suffix can shift personality from gold to filth in the transcendental software that runs beneath every human interaction.

Most people never notice this software. They live inside it, breathe through it, suffer or triumph by its invisible rules, and call the resulting sensations “culture,” “tradition,” “dharma,” or simply “the way things are.” Only when one steps outside—into the flat terrain of English—does the machinery become visible. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.

This book continues that seeing. It examines, among other things, the extraordinary architecture of verbal divinity constructed by the Namboodiris of Malabar, Cochin, and Travancore: a multi-tiered hierarchy of Brahminical ranks, each layer fortified by precise recitation rights, ritual permissions, and the absolute necessity of maintaining verbal supremacy over those below. 

The Shodasha Kriyakas—sixteen prenatal and early-life samskāras—are revealed here not as mere religious custom but as an ancient, painstakingly engineered firewall: a supernatural operating system designed to shield the high-born child from the downward-pulling, value-draining codes that radiate constantly from every lower social tier.

Yet the firewall is imperfect. The child must still grow up inside the same feudal linguistic atmosphere that the rituals were meant to protect against. Daily life—every word spoken by a servant, every glance from a field labourer, every casual “nee” or “eda” uttered without fear—reintroduces the very negativity the mantras sought to neutralise. The tragedy is not that the system failed; it is that no ritual, however powerful, can permanently insulate a human being from the language environment in which he or she must live.

The English administration, when it arrived in Malabar, did not understand these codes. It could not have. Yet by imposing written law, English-medium education, property rights without caste veto, and above all the flat linguistic field of English itself, it quietly dismantled much of the old verbal architecture. Namboodiri women, once confined behind palm-leaf umbrellas and ghosha, found themselves—gradually, unevenly—released into a social space where “you” no longer automatically carried a vertical vector. For some, this was liberation. For others, it felt like exile from divinity.

Today, the descendants of those who once stood at the pinnacle of Indic verbal hierarchies often claim the Vedas, the samskāras, the very idea of “Hinduism” as the common heritage of every caste and community in the subcontinent. They do so with sincerity, and sometimes with pride. But sincerity does not make history accurate. The rituals described in these pages were never intended for those below the Ottullavar line. They were never meant to be universal. They were precision tools forged for a specific social and linguistic predicament—one that lower communities, by definition, did not share.

This volume does not celebrate or condemn. It simply records what was, and tries to explain why it was necessary in the linguistic universe that produced it. Whether the reader finds the explanation illuminating or disturbing is of no concern to the writer. The concern is only that the explanation be attempted, again and again, until the machinery beneath the surface becomes visible to more than a handful of observers.

The English language made such visibility possible for me. Whether it will ever make it possible for the majority who still live inside the old codes remains an open question.