Nair - Historical Customs and Traditions

Historical Customs and Traditions

The Nairs practised various customs and traditions in the past and which are not found in the present-day community. Many of these were complex systems.

Pullapilly has suggested that the Nairs may share a common heritage with the Ezhava caste. This theory is based on similarities between numerous of the customs adopted by the two groups, particularly with regard to marking various significant life stages such as childbirth and death, as well as their matrilineal practices and martial history. The theory is that only a common parentage can explain some of these issues.

Read more about this topic:  Nair

Famous quotes containing the words historical, customs and/or traditions:

    Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
    William Golding (b. 1911)

    Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.
    —W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)

    And all the great traditions of the Past
    They saw reflected in the coming time.

    And thus forever with reverted look
    The mystic volume of the world they read,
    Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
    Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)