Alone at Thappalli house one afternoon, I found myself opening old chests and rifling through dusty drawers. I was hunting for a family heirloom. It was not, though, the usual kind of trinket or ornament that is typically passed down in Malayali clans – but a precious, long-lost book.
Thappalli is the family home of my ancestors, one of the principal residences of the Vayakkara Padannakkott Tharavad of Kannur, Kerala. As a child growing up in faraway Mumbai, I had not been able to visit it as frequently as I would have liked, and as an adult I tried to make up by spending as much time as I could in the ancient house. This bright summer day in 2000 was no different. The book I was searching for happened to be a dictionary. It was the pivot of a family legend, one I had grown up hearing all about from my father.
The story was, by all accounts, a tragedy. Its protagonist was the family patriarch Kunhikkannan Nambiar, the grandfather I had never met. A teacher, scholar and bibliophile, he had passed away in 1967, almost a decade before I was born.
This is what I had heard: A gifted linguist, Kunhikkannan Nambiar had dedicated several years of his life to the arduous task of writing and compiling an English-English-Malayalam dictionary. Historically, only one work of its kind had appeared in the Malayalam language before– the English-English-Malayalam dictionary of T. Ramalingam Pillai, which preceded Kunhikkannan Nambiar’s dictionary by a mere five years, and which went on to acquire classic status and sell more than a million copies. By any estimate, if this new dictionary had appeared at its rightful time in the early sixties, it would have become a cornerstone of the lexicographical history of Malayalam. Except it never happened.
Most of those I spoke to in the family were of the opinion that Kunhikkannan Nambiar’s attempt was cruelly thwarted by death, perhaps a mere handful of entries away from completion. Some said that it was completed, alright, but the author had passed away before he could see it through to publication. This I found a little difficult to believe. Surely, the hard part would have been the writing and perfecting of such a work, not the mundane details around getting it into print? This was a vital addition to the treasury of a language, after all, not some whimsical story or novel. Surely, someone would have wrapped it up and dispatched it to a publisher?
The subsequent fate of the manuscript was a mystery, lost in vague conjectures and contradictory memories. By the time Kunhikkannan Nambiar passed away, most of his children –six boys and six girls had moved away from Thappalli and were busy establishing their lives elsewhere. All had, at some point, witnessed the creation of this monumental labour of love, and vividly remembered the endless hours he devoted to the task. Yet no one could claim to have actually seen the finished work. Or even fragments of it. For many years afterward, the story of its writing remained firmly in the realm of legend and apocrypha. No real pages had ever turned up to lend that improbable tale the credibility of hard evidence.
Until, suddenly, I was holding it in my hands, on that hot April afternoon.
The sheaf of yellowing pages was unbound, but carefully numbered. It emerged in fragments– from forgotten trunks, unused cupboards, creaky almirahs and various bookshelves. Once I had recovered from the surreal event of my finding it, –it was so unreal that I only have a dreamy sense of that moment, more than any vivid memory – I arranged the pages by number. Next, I checked the manuscript carefully. Voluminous, handwritten, it appeared to be physically intact. Breathing in the nostalgic smell of the sheer passage of time, I made my way to the last page, eager to check the final entry.
The dictionary, it turned out, was as whole and complete as anyone could wish for. The last page bore this inscription: Finished on 17th May, 1963. I did a quick mental calculation: it was completed a full four years before its author’s death. Indeed, most of the entries bore additions and enhancements in a slightly different ink, interposed between the lines in smaller letters. It suggested he had had ample time to polish it, to go over all the entries and make the necessary modifications that brought the work up to perfection.
What had happened then? What could have prevented him from fulfilling a cherished dream, from taking the last, logical steps of the journey? Could it be that he had been unsuccessful in his first attempts at publication, and had lost heart thereafter?
If only we knew.
Many family elders helped me with their reminiscences, and yet the image I have of my grandfather is sketchy. It is obvious from his work, though, that behind it lay a brilliant and masterly mind. Everything I have heard of him confirms him as an exemplary human being– as gentle as he was wise, as elegant as he was modest.
It is one of the unexplainable oddities of our family history that none of his descendents gave a second thought to the consummate work of his mind, let alone saw it through to publication. Perhaps, it seems to me, the image of the devoted father and grandfather, the affectionate figure of memory, overshadowed that of the industrious scholar. When a person is entirely luminous for himself, who looks too closely at his erudition, his intellect? These aspects were fondly passed over, perhaps, aided well by his natural modesty. And so it was that the dictionary, the fruit of Kunhikkannan Nambiar’s scholarship, was seen as a relic belonging in the private life of the family, as against the collective heritage of the language itself, and of a fervently language-loving people. Given the idiosyncratic methods and outrageous ways of our clan, however, it rather makes sense.
Enough years have passed since then to have indeed made this book a relic. Published in its rightful time, Kunhikkannan Nambiar’s dictionary – concise, insightful and engaging, as these pages reveal– would have been an invaluable gift to Malayalam speakers trying to master English, a language they are perpetually in thrall of. Today, however, when traditional reference publishing has been nearly decimated by its electronic equivalents, in this age of dictionary apps with built-in thesauri and instantaneous translation into multiple languages, it is clear that this romantic, old-world volume has no place in the world it was originally meant for.
Which does not, of course, diminish its historical importance, its indisputable stature as an authentic testimonial of the time, place and milieu it sprang from. Today, the dictionary is immeasurably relevant as a remarkable document characterising the social, cultural and intellectual life of native Malayalam speakers in the first half of the twentieth century. Needless to add, it is a priceless contribution to the field of linguistic studies as well. So it is with immense pride and satisfaction that I release it to the public domain.
It is beyond the scope of this note, however, to comment on the lexicographical attributes of Kunhikkannan Nambiar’s dictionary. Speculating about how it might have been placed in the constellation of bilingual dictionaries of the time, or studying the technicalities of its organisational principles, seems superfluous at this point. Let future generations delve deeper into those aspects, debate intelligently on its merits.
Going through these pages again, sixteen years after my finding it and fifty-three years after its completion, I am still deeply awed by the magnitude of its achievement. I wish I could find some notebook or journal Kunhikkannan Nambiar kept at the time of its writing, but none exists. The manuscript itself, though, bears many insignia of those years, of the weight of passing time, the drip-by-drip accumulation of words and meaning. There are, at places, little shopping lists tucked into the leaves. Often, ink blotches made by those ancient fountain pens. An accidental thumb print or two.
I imagine him sitting by the window on the first floor of Thappalli house, or ensconced in his study, surrounded by the lush countryside of North Malabar. The wind smells like salt. On quiet nights you can hear the roar of the sea, only a few paces from where he is.
Thinking about his momentous task, of constructing an entire dictionary of a language, he probably draws inspiration from the fact that this has always been a soil rich in lexicographical expeditions. It was less than ten miles away, in Illikunnu, that Herman Gundert wrote his historic Malayalam-English Dictionary, first published in 1872. Tobias Zacharias, likewise, wrote his English-Malayalam Dictionary of 1907 in Thalassery, a mere stone’s throw from where Kunhikkannan Nambiar labours away in solitude.
He is, however, removed from these worthy predecessors by the gulf of more than half a century. All available evidence suggests that he worked, for however long it took him, in a philological and intellectual vacuum. Sheer vision sustained him, one supposes, and perhaps an indefatigable love of the language.
This image moves me afresh each time I think of it. To be the inheritor of such legacy is an honour. This project, the digitisation of Kunhikkannan Nambiar’s dictionary and its printing, -albeit in a small scale-, has already bestowed rich gifts on me. Like most people, I am often in search of role models, of exceptional people who can illustrate to me qualities like tenacity of purpose, fortitude in the face of life’s vagaries, –all increasingly elusive virtues– and for once, I am grateful that I can turn to the lineage of my own blood for inspiration. I do not think a greater gift can be given or received across generations.
This is a humble offering of thanks.
Abhilash Vijaykumar Nambiar
Mumbai
May 2016
