The Story of Panampazhinji
This article was originally written by Anjali Rajagopalan and received additional contributions from Geetha Rajagopalan and Ramesh Kumar. As regards the sources of the contained information, (legends and myths included!), we owe them to all the senior family members - particularly Lakshmikumari, N.Krishnan Nair, Sathiakumari, Lalitha Menon and the late Gopakumar.
This account is based on what we could gather from the memories of our dear mothers, aunts and uncles who are still with us. Unfortunately we have not been able to lay our hands on any old birth or marriage certificates, old newspaper clips, etc. that could have made this story more credible. The only public document that carries the names of our ancestors is a property partition deed signed in the year 1904, but this has only added to our confusion regarding the name of the chief protagonist of this story (see below). If we had made an attempt to find out these things a few decades ago when we were children, we could, no doubt, have gained more first hand information from our grand uncles and aunts who are no more with us. It is a pity that none of us ever bothered to find out from them in detail about their ancestors and how life was for them when they were young. Due to the scarcity of documentation and the steady passage of our older generations and their memories, there may be inaccuracies in this account. But we should be happy that we could trace back our history to as far back as the first half of the nineteenth century - about 170 years or roughly six generations ago.
The story thus goes back to 1850s.
1. Lakshmi or Parvathi (1850 - ?)
Lakshmi and Parvathi were twins probably born around 1850. It seems they lost their mother early and were brought up by an old uncle. According to hearsay, their childhood was tough and they were made to do all the household chores in their uncle’s house. Despite this, they grew up to become, we believe, attractive teenagers by the 1860’s. Those were times when Brahmins used to be invited by the King during the Murajapam festival to do the 56 days chanting of Vedas. One such Brahmin was our ancestor Sri Padmanabha Iyer who hailed from somewhere in Tamil Nadu. It’s likely that he saw young Lakshmi sweeping the courtyard in front of her house - presumably in the year 1863. Or was it Parvathi?
We are sorry for this confusion. It may seem a simple thing to know the name of one’s great grandmother, but actually it isn’t. It may be a law of nature that people don’t think about their ancestors as much as we would like our great grandchildren to think about us. Don’t be surprised that six generations down the line, nobody will be thinking about us and perhaps nobody wouldn’t even care what our names might have been. Well, perhaps that may not happen with future generations - because of the internet. Because of Facebook, our descendents a few centuries down the line may be able to tell exactly what we ate for breakfast today. But our ancestors sadly didn’t have this privilege. Hence the fact is that - we don’t know who it was - whether Lakshmi or Parvathi - who married Mr Padmanabha Iyer from Tamil Nadu. A land partition deed signed in 1904 and kept in the State Archives Office suggests that it was Parvathi. Our current senior generation, however, thinks that her name was Lakshmi. That’s just as far as we can get. But for convenience, let’s take it that it was Lakshmi.
It would seem, therefore, that Mr Iyer, on seeing our beautiful teenaged ancestor, asked for her hand. To this, her uncle might have readily agreed - leading to the function of ‘pudava koda’ that, according to Nair custom, gave the husband ‘sambandham’ rights with the lady in the house. Nothing much is known about the other twin.
The ancestry of the twins, we know nothing of except for an unverified rumour that they could be descendents of one of the Ettuveettil Pillamar, the powerful nobles who were executed for revolt against the kingdom of Travancore and whose families were banished by Raja Marthanda Varma in the early 1700’s. The family of one of the Pillamar (according to some sources, it might have been Kazhakkoottath Pillai), to escape persecution, had fled roughly thirty kilometres to the east of Trivandrum to somewhere near the present Neyyar Dam and from there, their descendents managed to migrate, over the next century, closer to the capital and purchase the area of land in Jagathi where the Panampazhinji tharavadu was built.
By the time Lakshmi was married to Padmanabha Iyer, the land in Jagathy where the present family house stands was probably already in their possession. It is not clear who purchased this land - whether it was the twins’ parents, any of their ancestors or Mr. Iyer himself after marrying Lakshmi. The odd official document that we could lay our hands on relates to the portions of land that was passed on to the siblings of Rugmini, but there is no information on how that land came to be in the possession of Rugmini or her ancestors. There is this hearsay that the land was once a defunct crematorium and was therefore purchased by one of the twins’ ancestors for a very low price. Whatever that may be, the property in Jagathi finally ended up in possession of Lakshmi and Iyer.
In due course Lakshmi had four daughters. Nothing is known further about Padmanabha Iyer who, it might be presumed, went back to Tamil Nadu. In those days, the custom of ‘sambandham’ was the norm in the Nair community. This meant that the woman remained in her tharavadu - where she would engage in a ‘sambandham’ with a husband who would be visiting her, it would seem, only for the purpose of procreation. The children would belong to the matrilineal tharavadu with the husband having very little control over the children he fathered. The control over the children was claimed by the mother’s eldest brother - the ‘karanavar’, a formidable figure those days, often an autocrat who was partial to his own children and discriminated against his nephews and nieces in the joint family. Fortunately, Lakshmi did not have a Karanavar to deal with - as she had no brother. It is believed that Padmanabha Iyer whose relationship with Lakshmi was a ‘Nair sambandham’ had another wife waiting for him back in Tamil Nadu where a patriarchal system of family was the norm. It is likely that he might have produced several generations of our distant cousins in some unknown location in Tamil Nadu.
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Lakshmi had four daughters and presumably no sons. These four daughters, in order, were Rugmini, Parvathi, Gauri & Karthiyayani. Our branch was descended from Rugmini but the descendants of the other daughters are also rightfully Panampazhinji. Parvathi or Kochakkan married someone who is only remembered as some Chittappan and had two daughters, Sumukhi and Meenakshi. Sumukhi left home early with her husband and nothing is known about her or her family.
Kochakkan’s second daughter - Meenakshi, known to the current seniors as Meenakshikunjamma was Sathyabhama's age. They lived near Panampazhinji and their house was called Keezhathil. Meenakshikunjamma passed away in the late 1960s.
Gauri had a daughter Jaanamma who married the nephew of Unni Nair (Rugmini's husband). His name was also Unni Nair and they went to live in Manjilavil house in Chavakkad near Thrissur.
There is an extraordinary anecdote involving Jaanamma and Sathyabhama and for this reason alone, if not for any other, she would merit an important place in the family lore. A wandering soothsayer once visited Sathyabhama (Rugmini’s daughter) in the year 1939, who was then living in Sathyaniketan in Thampanoor (the house built by her husband Dr Kumaran Nair) and prophesied that someone would die in her house in the near future. Sathyabhama, not overly superstitious. was nevertheless nervous and worried thinking who it might be, should the soothsayer’s words come true. A few days later a taxi arrived at the gate and a woman accompanied by her nephew was carried into the Veranda. She was Janamma and had come from Chavakkad to visit Sathyabhama. By the time they reached the house, she had collapsed and become unconscious. She was taken inside and Sathyabhama tried to give her a spoonful of milk. Very soon it seems she breathed her last. The soothsayer’s uncanny prophecy thus became real.
Karthiyayaniamma, better known as Karthiakkan, married Sri Ananthan Pillai, who was a professor of Sanskrit in the University College, TVM. They had two sons and three daughters - of which Bhanumathiamma was the Head Mistress of the Cotton Hill Girls High school, Trivandrum.
2 Rugmini (1868 - 1943)
Rugmini was the eldest daughter of Lakshmi and this is her story. 
Unni Nair [c. 1856 -1916] belonged to Manjilavil House in Engandiyur near Guruvayoor. He was one of the early graduates of Kerala having done his B.A from Madras University. He came to Trivandrum in 1880 and was working in the Trivandrum Public Library. He married a woman from Trivandrum in c.1881 who was referred to as Attukal ammachi by Rugmini’s descendents. They had one daughter Kamakshi but soon they parted ways. Unni Nair returned to Engandiyur with his daughter Kamakshi. He eventually came back to Trivandrum in 1884 to continue his job in the Library.
It is rumoured that Unni Nair, then twenty-eight, first saw Rugmini on one of his evening walks through Kochar Road while he was working in the Public Library. Rugmini, who was only sixteen, was (judged from her later appearance attested to by her granddaughters and a lone studio photo) a beautiful teenager, fair in complexion and with curly hair. She had a lively personality and could talk on a variety of subjects. The marriage took place some time in 1884 itself. A few weeks after marriage, he decided to take his new bride to his tharavadu. They travelled in a vallam (boat) that sailed along the waterways of Kerala and reached his village in three days. On the way Unni Nair briefed his bride about his family and house. He warned her that he was very poor and that his house was but a tiny little hut. Rugmini being an intelligent and composed young woman, had no problems with this. Having landed at Engandiyur, Unni Nair led her into a small thatched house, no bigger than a hut and suddenly disappeared. After a while, she heard noises outside and the chatter of female voices. A group was approaching They were girls carrying lighted lamps and trays on which there were flowers and a fresh set of pudava and jewellery. She was made to change into the new pudava and the jewellery and then escorted for a few hundred feet, to a palatial mansion that turned out to be the real Manjilavil tharavadu. There she saw her husband wearing expensive kasavumundu and seated like a king on a thookkumanjam (swing bed). She was made to sit next to him to complete the ritual of welcoming her into the tharavadu. In this way, Rugmini came to know that her husband was not a pauper but a wealthy aristocrat of Engandiyur.
Rugmini and Unni Nair had 9 children. Krishnan the first born was a brilliant child but he passed away when he was just 15. The rest in order are
R. Madhavi Amma (c.1888 - 1968)
P.N. Neelakanta Pillai (Kuttappan) (1891 - 1972)
P.N. Padmanabha Pillai (Appu) (c.1893 -1971)
P.N. Narayana Pillai (Raghavan) (1897 - 1942)
U. Karunakaran Nair (1902 - 1969)
U. Sivaraman Nair (1904 - 1982)
R. Sathyabhama (Saththi) (1906-1960)
U. Chandu Nair (1908 - 1985)
The change in the intials from Karunakaran Nair downwards (from P.N to U) is thought to reflect the change in the family system that happened in Kerala around the middle of the last century - from marumakkathayam (matriarchal joint family system) to the nuclear family system. The initials P.N. is believed to indicate Panampazhinji Narayana PIllai - that we presume was the name of the family karanavar (Lakshmi’s uncle?).
Unni Nair was around 60 when he developed incessant hiccups and he had a premonition that his days were numbered. He wanted to return to Engandiyur. There was no car, bus, or train service in those days (?1916) Ammachi and her eldest son Neelakanta Pillai. accompanied him in his last trip back by bullock cart to Chaakka and from there by boat via Chaakkathodu, Kadinamkulam kayal, Ashtamudi kayal, Kayamkulam kayal, Vembanad kayal, Aroorkutty and all the way to Engandiyur. The journey took 5 exhausting days and it seems Unni Nair never regained his health. He died in c.1916 at the age of sixty and Rugmini Ammachi returned to Trivandrum with her son.
Thereafter it must be assumed that Rugmini Ammachi spent the next twenty-two years of her life in Trivandrum - probably with her son Narayana Pillai. Rugmini Amma passed away in 1943 at the age of 74. The death of her son Narayana PIllai at the age of 45 from complications of rheumatic valvular heart disease in 1942 - an year before her death - was obviously a great blow for her and this probably hastened her own demise.
Rugmini “Ammachi” is still fondly remembered by her surviving grandchildren as a beautiful grandma who has influenced them - then, in their teens - as a role model. Her grand-daughters Sathiakumari and Lakshmikumari knew her while they were living in their uncle Narayana Pillai's house in Sasthamangalam circa 1931 - 33. They remember her as a slim figure dressed only in a mundu and a ‘thorthu’ in place of a blouse or ‘rowkka’. According to her grandson Krishnan Nair, son of Narayana PIllai in whose house she spent her last few years, she was a very ‘jolly’ person, but who could be quite firm and assertive when the situation demanded. Extremely loving and soft-spoken, she used to gift her grandchildren sweets and small items of jewellery. She would pick flowers from the garden and teach them how to make garlands of them. She used to make Sathiakumari read Ramayanam for her while seated reclining on a pillar in the veranda of the house.
And the saga of Panampazhinji continues….
