From 'Kaa' to 'Ka'

- "Uncle, Can you make a 'kaavu' for me - a strong wooden bar with two big baskets hanging from its ends?"

- "Sure, my boy! But why?"

- "My parents are old and can barely see; and they have never been on a pilgrimage. I will get them to sit in those baskets - please make them nice and roomy - and carry them to the holy places!"
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Thus begins the tragic story of young Sravana that I remember Pop reading out to a five-year-old me from a National Book Trust volume - I still have the book. Here is an illustration:

In my long-gone childhood in Kerala, such 'kaavu's were ubiquitous - they were especially favoured by door-to-door fish vendors. But as I distinctly remember, I didn't know the word before I heard this story.

Over the years, one discovered that 'kaavu' is only a natural Malayali and Dravidian way to say the root word 'kaa' - as a parallel, 'Raja' (king), a loan word from Sanskrit becomes 'Rajavu' in Malayalam. Moreover, 'kaa' is a very remarkably versatile word - at least in Mal and Tamil, it meens (1) the root of a verb meaning 'guard' or 'protect' (in Tamil, its infinitive form is 'kaakka' (to guard)) (2) 'kaa' also means garden or park which, at least in Mal, becomes 'kaavu' (which has come to stand for the sacred groves associated with some temples) (3) it also means 'fruit', specifically a raw fruit!

Now, let me shift focus to an article: Titled 'The Script of the Indus Valley Civilization', it was written way back in 1983 in the Scientific American by Walter Fairservis(1921-1994). To date, this is one of the very few SciAm articles I have actually read.

As has been noted by many history/archeology experts, the Indust script has not yet been deciphered and represents the single biggest vexing problem facing those researching Indian history. Fairservis gives some interesting plausibility arguments for the language being written by the Mohenjodarans as belonging to the Dravidian family (even this is still a matter of debate!) and then goes thus (Readers, what Fairservis tells might well have been overthrown by subsequent studies but I am innocent of them):
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Scholars have noted in Dravidian, a number of homophones, words with the same sounds but with different meanings. For example, the word for the shoulder pole from whihch pots are suspended is kaa. It is also the word meaning guardian or protector. The homophonic principle is found in many ancient languages, including the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The key aspect is that it seeks a syllabic equivalent (say, a picture of an eye to mean "I") rather than merely being a picture of something. For example, an Egyptian ruler Nr-mr, was represented in hieroglyphs by the sign for a catfish( 'mr') and the sign for a chisel ('mr'). The representation was not meant to suggest thatt he be called the "catfish-chisel one" but rather that his name sounded like "catfish-chisel". Does this suggest a basis for deriving the Indus syllabary?..... See the following pic of a symbol from an Indus seal:

... a pictograph of a human figure carrying a shoulder pole with a pot at each end. As we have seen, the syllable for a pole with pots is a homophone of the Dravidian words meaning to guard or protect. Furthermore a common Dravidian word for man is 'aal'. The combination of these would allow for the reconstruction of the sign as a two syllable word 'kaa-aal'. In the Dravidian languages for the sake of euphony, such adjacent vowels are separated by a consonant, either a v or a y. Thus the restored wrod 'kaavaal' could be translated as one who guards or protects - a statement of personal identity suitable for entry on a private seal.
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Let me venture a guess that the 'kaavaal' or 'kaa' glyph was the root for the symbol for the short 'ka' syllable (aksharam) in most subsequent Indian scripts. I am not sure how the shortening of the vowel could have happened. And curiously, the earliest script of the lot, Brahmi, reduced it to a simple cross but subsequent scripts recovered some of the details of the original! See this pic that goes in approx reverse chronological order from top to bottom:

There is one more episode to this story. A few years back, in Allahabad, I first encountered the 'kanwaria's. Note that the pronunciation is nothing like 'can-war-yaa'; as in many northern contexts, the 'r' is pronounced as a retroflexed 'd'. And here is a bit from Wiki:

Kanwar Yatra is named after the kānvar (कांवड़), a single pole (usually made of bamboo) with two roughly equal loads fastened or dangling from opposite ends. The kānvar is carried by balancing the middle of the pole on one or both shoulders.[5] The Hindi word kānvar is derived from the Sanskrit kānvānrathi (काँवाँरथी).[5] Kānvar-carrying pilgrims, called Kānvariās, carry covered water-pots in kānvars slung across their shoulders. This practice of carrying Kavad as a part of religious pilgrimage, especially by devotees of Lord Shiva, is widely followed throughout India (see Kavadi).

Of course, the 'kavadi' mentioned at the end is a popular offering in the South to Murugan, who is very much a Saiva deity. And now, the kavadi's north Indian counterpart is in the news in a big way at the National level, due to Covid and stuff - let's not go there!

I dunno how the 'kaa' became 'kaavadi' - Dravidianically speaking, it can be analysed as kaa + vadi where 'vadi' means 'stick' but then, there don't seem to be any word up North that is both similar to 'vadi' and meaning 'stick'. Ergo, I give up!

To sign off, let me reveal what triggered this speculative trip where a lot of the locomotive power came from homophones and homonyms. This slightly arcane but quite fun pic came my way but a few days back!

And as per Edgar Allan Poe, notorious pirate Captain Kidd used the picture of a kid as his signature - a smart but as per our observations above, not at all unprecedented trick!
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An unrelated (well, not entirely!) bit:
I don't know if I am the only one seeing a certain resemblance between the soccer striker frozen in mid-volley - emblem of the recently concluded Euro - and Toulouse Lautrec's sprightly dancing girl: