From Verb Conjugation To Pickled Mangoes

There is one feature that makes Malayalam truly stand out among Indian languages: its Verb Conjugation depends ONLY on the tense. There is no dependency whatever on the gender, number, person or whatever of either the subject or the object of the verbs. There are some irregularities in the way the tense affects the verbs but the subject and object never come into the picture. For example, 'poyi' is the past tense for the root verb 'po' (go). This form is unaffected whether it is I, we, you, he, she, it or they who has 'done the going'. Transitive verbs show no dependence on the object either.

Malayalam is said to be a youngish language (dating back to only around 14th century) and has borrowed heavily from Tamil and Sanskrit (and perhaps Kannada) primarily and also plenty of vocabulary from English and a host of other Indian and foreign languages, all this mixing has a given a certain richness and also an under-construction feel to the language. In such a scenario, the above speciality of verb conjugation seems particularly intriguing since none of the primary source languages has anything like it.

A theory I heard attributes this speciality of malayalam to Chinese influence - Chinese apparently has such an 'insensitive' verb conjugation. Prima facie this explanation sounds far-fetched. For languages to have been influenced so fundamentally, there ought to be intimate interaction between peoples. There do not seem to have been any serious Chinese trading posts or 'factories' in Kerala - although their ships did reach south India and even Africa regularly in medieval times - let alone colonization; no hint can be seen in the Malayali physiognomy that could indicate the admixture of Chinese blood - on the other hand, at least scattered Arab and European ancestry shows at least on a few Malayali faces

But there is also some hard evidence of very strong Chinese influence and perhaps even presence in Kerala. Silk, porcelain, frying pans, (a type of) fishing nets, etc..are still referred to as 'Chinese' in Kerala. The word 'samprani' in Malayalam and also Tamil seems to have been an adjective applied to more than one thing of Chinese/East Asian origin, from incense sticks to a special class of sailing vessels (India might have copied the common ritual of burning incense sticks from China). 'samprani' is also an insult in both these languages, a racist slur perhaps! The 'chempavu' strain of rice, a traditional favorite with Keralites is almost certainly the 'champa', first bred in China or probably, Vietnam. And the temple (and residential) architecture of Kerala has almost as much of a Chinese flavor as the 'rest of Indian' (resemblance between Nepal and Kerala temples could be due a shared Chinese influence)....

Yet, the folk memory of Kerala has not preserved much on the visitors from the far east. I vaguely know of only one story - a visiting Chinese merchant leaves a set of sealed 'bharanis' (porcelain jars) for safe-keeping with a poor Kerala family and they turn out to be filled with gold coins (up to this point, the story line is 'universal') and oddly enough one of those jars (it had a slight manufacturing defect and was called the 'kodan bharani') later turns out to impart a uniquely delicious flavor to pickled mangoes (!) stored in it!

Note Added On April 27th 2005:
I know very little about languages such as Tulu, Kodava and Sanketi which are spoken by smallish numbers of people in Karnataka and in particular, whether verb conjugation in these languages is as 'insensitive' as in Malayalam. Tulu especially is said to have some affinity with Malayalam and there is a dialect called Byari spoken by Muslims of Coastal Karnataka which is said to be a mix of Malayalam and Tulu. So, the above claim about Malayalam being 'unique' in its verb conjugation may not quite stand up to facts.

I still think the intensity and importance of the 'Chinese connection' with Kerala and Southern India in general is often not adequately appreciated and THAT has been the main theme of this post.