Shelley, Nair and Lawrence

An occasional reader with little time to peruse this further, but with some imagination would assume that this title is about a firm of lawyers (into which an Indian lawyer strayed or some such thing) for lawyers are wont to naming their companies thus, in what I would term a singularly unimaginative fashion. But this short article is not about a lawyer’s firm, but about two people and their relation to the Nair’s of Malabar.

The Malabar community, Nair’s in particular has been a subject of great curiosity from Roman times and a number of legends have been attributed to them in traveler’s tales. Many of them are far fetched and meant for the only purpose of evoking extreme reactions. Books have been written about them, notably by Fawcett and Forbes. Their customs and traditions until the turn of the century, especially the matrilineal and matriarchal lineage was the object of much study by the travelers, for it was a rare place where women were sometimes considered more important in the family system though mainly from an inheritance point of view. This particular (matrilineal) aspect has been the subject of a huge book by anthropologist Kathleen Gough, which I am incidentally in the process of perusing.

Nayar (or Nair) society was reputed in those days to be harmonious and productive, without property disputes and sexual jealousies, enlightened and spiritually favored (Indian renaissance – Pg 89 Almeida and Gilpin). Of course this did raise a lot of questions about polyandry and free love amongst a group of people in Europe. Cameo’s Lusiad’s even tried to portray how idyllic the life style in Calicut was compared to the cheap and gaudy lifestyle of the Portuguese and the Dutch in Cochin. Forbes wrote about the stillness of nature in Malabar and the softness of life, providing a soothing effect without the using of drugs like Opium (!!). Forbe’s account of the encounter with the bathing lady and the Nair temple and his flight are fascinating for a reader. He called the people handsome, fair and the women well made, sometimes tall but very graceful (in his 1813 version he changes this graceful to ‘masculine’). In short he equated the place to the mythical ‘garden of Eden’ till the next version of 1813.

James Henry Lawrence (a.k.a Chevalier Lawrence – Knight of Malta) living in Jamaica was fascinated by the original (privately circulated) Forbes account and many others. After studying the Nair race, he wrote an essay ‘Nair marriage traditions’ in 1793 and then a romantic novel originally in German as ‘Das Paradies der Liebe’ later reprinted as Das Reich der Nairen. According to him, Nair customs were based on the Freedom of nature. In the book, a British ‘Nairess’ known as the Countess Camilla is brought up in Malabar and goes back to London topropogate her ideas.

The novel was read by Friedrich Schiller the famous German writer (a friend of Goethe) who recommended to Lawrence that he publish it. Lawrence himself translated the book into English as ‘The Empire of the Nair’s’ (Rights of women – An utopian romance) in 1811. Alas, the book is not easily available today except for some parts here & there (Unless you want to spend a fortune and buy Modern British Utopias, 1700–1850 edited by Gregory Clayes). Lawrence in his longish and apparently ‘dull’ work entreated Europe to advocate the customs of Nair’s when it came to marriage.

It got some recognition after the famous but unconventional (from a lifestyle point of view) writer and romantic poet Percy Shelley read it. He wrote to Lawrence stating himself a complete convert to Lawrence’s ideas and advocating the abolition of marriage, calling marriage as licensed prostitution. Shelley then referred to these ideas in his Queen Mab (others roundly condemned him for bringing Nair domestic governance to Europe)

Unfortunately a lot of things happened between 1792 when Lawrence first wrote the book and 1811 when he published it. The relations between the Malabar Zamorin’s, the Mysore rulers and the English changed. Political factors came into play and the English saw a chance of subjugating the weakened Malabar Nair’s. Malabar had by then been annexed by the EIC and the British crown. Nair men were soon seen as threatening to the British interests (after various revolts by the Zamorin’s relatives and the Pazhassi raja). The writing about Nair’s soon changed their tone and the once touted customs soon changed to uncultured and barbaric, adulterous and demeaning (Buchanan accounts). Lawrence’s book was no longer the ‘in thing’…

Even the published Forbes version about travels to Malabar (1813) played down the original glowing comments and took a more cautious tone.

Strangely Lawrence and Shelley never visited India though Lawrence had a number of contacts with East India Company personnel. Schiller (read his play The Indian Exiles) too was intrigued by the Nair’s and was probably influenced by Lawrence’s writings about Malabar. German writer Cristoph Wieland and Richard Carlile often quoted these customs. Mary Shelly was however not enchanted with the book and parodied it in ‘Frankenstein’. At times, Lawrence was even called Nair Lawrence (W St Clair – Godwins and Shelleys pg 471)

Shelley’s interesting letter to Lawrence about the book and his opinion about Nair’s can be read here. At that time Shelly was married to Harriet Westbrook and feeling miserable about the ‘jail’ institution of marriage. Later he married Mary Godwin only for legal reasons (SL Gladden – Shelley’s textual seductions Pg 127)

Dr Prof Robin Jeffrey (An Aussie academic and keen follower of Nayar society & Kerala) in his essay on the Legacies of Matrliny states thus – Why is Kerala different from the rest of India? It is a question asked for over 30 years. He states the answer right at the beginning of his essay - The place of women in their society is, he believes, the key to the puzzle of the “Kerala model”. In his lovely essay he covers the path taken by the Nair matrilineal society in Kerala till it was finally abolished in 1976. He summarizes - Matriliny did not make women rulers of their families, but it did allow some of them a remarkable latitude unknown elsewhere in India.

References
Indian Renaissance - Hermione De Almeida, George H. Gilpin
Lion Magazine 1828 – Pages 653-672
Shelley pic from Shelley resource pages