PAMA

Remembering a Journalist

Jijo John Puthezhathu (54)

Jijo John Puthezhathu of Malayala Manorama, a senior journalist, died yesterday, 8 September 2026, around six in the morning, at the age of 54, probably by a massive heart attack. The news came as a shock.

I remember Jijo particularly for his affection for the people who lived before us — the ancestors buried beneath the coconut groves of Pattanam.

It must have been many years ago that he first came to Pattanam and almost stayed with the excavation team for a whole day. He had so many questions. He returned for a few more visits, and after a gap of nearly ten years, I was told that he had again visited the site and was planning to come and see me at the PAMA Centre in Aluva.

Long ago, when I was probably around 54, he wrote one or two full-page stories on Pattanam in the Sunday Supplement of Malayala Manorama. If memory serves, the title of one was Pattanathil Bhootham. He was fascinated particularly by Pattanam’s transoceanic connections and by the second-century CE Muziris papyrus, that extraordinary document relating to a commercial transaction between Muziris and Alexandria.

He wanted to understand the papyrus better. When I told him that it had already been studied by several scholars, including my friend and distinguished scholar Federico Romanis, he asked for his contacts and writings. I sent him the relevant papers. He also wanted a photograph of Romanis.

That became almost a little story in itself. Romanis, who had been a shy and deeply affectionate visiting professor to teach classical Greek that mentions Muziris at great length at KCHR for nearly two months and had visited Pattanam several times, apparently told Jijo that he too was helpless about providing a photograph!

But there is another memory that perhaps explains why the word affection comes to mind whenever I think of Jijo.

One afternoon he came to visit me at Pattanam. My room had one chair, a table and a bed on the floor. I naturally asked him to take the chair while I sat on the floor with my back against the wall.

He was embarrassed — almost painfully shocked — that a 54-year-old teacher and Director of the excavations was sleeping on the floor.

Jijo could not simply leave it at that.

He went out, spoke to members of the team and somehow found a solution. Next door to the house used for the Pattanam team’s accommodation and for storing artefacts. There were inexpensive beds made by a neighbouring carpenter, using coconut wood.

He made sure that I got one.

That small gesture remains with me. It was not merely concern for comfort. It was Jijo’s way of caring.

He was also endlessly curious about his own island, Gothuruthu. He would often ask me:

“What could Gothuruthu have been like in the Pattanam times, when Muziris was something like a Shanghai, New York or London of the twenty-first century?”

It was not an easy question to answer.

Perhaps I should have answered him differently.

Perhaps we could have imagined it together.

Just a little downstream from the legendary island of Pattanam, there could have been another island — dreamy, green and river-bound — called Gothuruthu.

The Western Ghats would have appeared on the eastern horizon, and beyond the waterways would have been the Neithal coast and the Arabian Sea. Canoes and larger vessels would come and go with the tides. People speaking different languages would arrive, carrying gold, w**e and stories. In exchange for pepper, honey, forest goods such as ivory, tortoise shells, medicinal plants, intaglios, pearls, beads, textiles, metals, arrack, toddy and wide variety of mulled w**es, beautiful adornments etc made by the artists and medical professionals of the Sangam Age (300 BC and 300 AD)

And at the entrance to the island there might have been a simple wooden welcome board:

WELCOME TO GOTHURUTHU ISLAND OR THE HAVEN OF
THE VIRTUE OF MEASUREMENT

Perhaps that was the secret of the island.

Not too much. Not too little. Again balancing with Sramana priorities of AUPP - എളിമ, ഉള്ളിലെ നേരു, പ്രപഞ്ച വാൽസല്യവു, വകതിരിവു

The best arrack of the Periyar country could be exchanged here with mulled w**e prepared by travellers from faraway lands. Twelve varieties of Mediterranean w**e might sit beside the local drink, arrack and toddy, each appreciated for what it was.

Nobody needed to declare one superior to the other.

The virtue was in measurement.

In knowing when enough was enough.

In the evening, musicians might gather near the water. Travellers from the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the eastern shores of India and the islands beyond Sri Lanka, beyond South Malay Peninsula to South China could sit together with people of the Periyar country. Food, cuisines from nearby forty cultures would pass from hand to hand. Stories would travel faster than merchandise.

Perhaps Jijo would have loved such an island.

Perhaps Gothuruthu, in his imagination, was already something like this.

I had been wanting to tell him that, if he came again, I would imagine Gothuruthu as a satellite settlement of Muziris — perhaps something like Singapore or Dubai today, but without their skyscrapers. An island between the Western Ghats and the Neithal coast, welcoming people from many cultures. A place where travellers could meet, eat, drink, make merry and care for the wellbeing of the body. They were great practitioners of balancing AUPP

Perhaps, in that distant world, Gothuruthu could indeed have been a haven on earth.

Jijo never stopped asking questions about such connections between the landscape of his own time and the landscape buried beneath it. That was perhaps his special relationship with Pattanam and Gothuruthu.

He was a journalist, but his curiosity often took him beyond the immediate news. He wanted to know what lay underneath — beneath the coconut groves, beneath the islands, beneath the stories handed down to us through the archaeological research at Pattanam.

That is why I feel that Jijo belonged, in his own gentle way, to the continuing conversation about the people and places of the ancient Periyar landscape.

Perhaps the Pattanam of our ancestors and the Gothuruthu of Jijo’s imagination were never really separate islands.

Perhaps they were several ways of looking at the same river — one through archaeology, another through written records in Tamil, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, the other through memory and imagination.

Thank you, dear Jijo, for keeping alive that rare cosmic affection for Gothuruthu and the Neithal landscape — and for those people who lived here between 300 BCE and 300 CE.

Perhaps, had you come to PAMA in Aluva as you had planned, we would have continued our unfinished conversation about that dreamy island.

Instead, I can only offer these memories.

And perhaps there is no better farewell than the words of Kaniyan Kundranar in Purananuru 192, written nearly two thousand years ago.

പുറനാനൂറ് 192

മരണത്തില്‍ എന്താണ് പുതുമയായുള്ളത്?

എല്ലാ പട്ടണങ്ങളും എല്ലാവരുടെയും പട്ടണങ്ങളാണ് .

എല്ലാവരും നമ്മുടെ രക്തബന്ധുക്കളും

തോൽവിയോ സമുന്നതിയോ ആരെങ്കിലും നമുക്ക് അയച്ചുതരുന്നവയല്ല

കഷ്ട-ക്ലേശങ്ങൾ ഉണ്ടാവുന്നതും ഇല്ലാതാവുന്നതും അങ്ങനെ തന്നെ

മരണത്തില്‍ എന്താണ് പുതുമയായുള്ളത്?

ജീവിതം എത്രമേൽ രുചികരമെങ്കിലും അതിൽ മാത്രം നമുക്ക് മുഴുകുവാനാകുമോ ?.

കൊടും ദുരന്തങ്ങൾ വന്നാലും ഇനി ജീവിതം വേണ്ടാന്ന് കരുതുകയും ആവതില്ല.

മുന്നേ നടന്നവർ പറഞ്ഞ് നമുക്കറിയാം – ഓരോ ജീവനും ഇല്ലായ്മകളും കഷ്ടതകളും പേറുന്ന പെരിയ പുഴയിൽ പ്പെട്ട ചെങ്ങാടം പോലെ
ഇടക്കത് പാറകളില്‍ തട്ടും. മിന്നല്‍പ്പിണരുകള്‍ക്കിടയിലെ ഇരുണ്ട കാർമേഘപ്പാളികളുടെ തണുത്തുറഞ്ഞ മഴത്തുള്ളികൾ അതില്‍ പതിക്കും
എന്നാലും അത് മുന്നോട്ടു തന്നെ നീങ്ങും .

അതുകൊണ്ടാവും, അതുകൊണ്ടാവും, വലിയവരെ കണ്ട് നാം മതിമറക്കാറില്ല.
എളിയവരെ നിസാരമായി കരുതാറുമില്ല.

Pandit Ramesh Narayanan’s recitation — “What Is New in Death!” — a vision song of PAMA and the Sangam Age ancestors of ancient Kerala, can be heard from the link below.

PJ A Sramana in the making
09/09/2026
(The author was the director of Pattanam Excavations from 2006 to 2022.)

PS, AUPP may be translated as the art and science of balancing എളിമ, ഉള്ളിലെ നേരു, പ്രപഞ്ച വാൽസല്യവും വകതിരിവും

Who is Malayali?

PAMA, Q&A Session – 5

Question from +91 85279 48575

When merchants and sailors from Arabia, Greece, Rome and other regions stayed at Pattanam between seasonal monsoon voyages, how and where might they have lived and socialised with the local communities?

PAMA Team’s Reflection

Before answering this question, we need to recognise a difficulty that applies to almost every attempt to understand the human past.

We are twenty-first-century Homo sapiens looking back at people who lived around two thousand years ago. We know what happened during those two thousand years. They did not.

A person living at Pattanam around 300 BCE–300 CE could not possibly have known what the next two thousand years would bring. Nor can we assume that the identities, institutions, political systems, religions, economic structures, technologies or cultural categories that we know today existed in anything like their present form.

Yet we unconsciously carry those intervening two thousand years with us whenever we try to imagine them.

This creates a peculiar predicament. We are trying to understand people of the past while looking at them through the fragmented and highly individualised condition of the present.

An AUPP-balanced approach therefore requires us, as far as possible, to suspend our later assumptions and allow the evidence to speak first.

This is only a thought experiment: what might the people of Pattanam have looked like if we could temporarily remove the last two thousand years from our imagination?

So, where and how might these people have lived?

The most honest answer is that archaeology cannot yet tell us exactly where every visiting sailor or merchant slept, with whom they lived, or how long they stayed.

But archaeology can establish the wider conditions in which such admixture took place.

The Pattanam evidence belongs broadly to the Sangam Age, approximately 300 BCE–300 CE. This was a period of the Mature Iron Age, when communities in the region possessed sophisticated metallurgical knowledge involving iron as well as copper, silver, gold, lead and other materials.

The archaeological evidence also points to developed craft production, maritime technology, navigation, exchange networks and forms of organised settlement, supported by agricultural and medicinal resources. The ecological landscape between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea—with its rivers, wetlands, forests and access to the sea—provided a rich setting for human interaction and economic activity, spread across what the ongoing KFRI–PAMA investigation suggests may once have been nearly 52,000 rainforest islands.

The people arriving at Pattanam were therefore not entering an empty or technologically backward landscape.

Nor were the people living at Pattanam simply passive recipients waiting for outsiders to arrive.

They were already participants in a maritime world.

The evidence suggests that Pattanam became connected with regions extending across the Indian Ocean and beyond. People, commodities, technologies and ideas moved in multiple directions.

A visiting merchant or sailor did not necessarily need a separate “foreign quarter”. They could have stayed with people involved in trade, maritime activities or craft production, in temporary accommodation, in a household, near a workshop, or close to the waterfront. Archaeology has not yet allowed us to identify such arrangements with certainty.

We should therefore resist imposing a modern hotel, hostel or ethnic-quarter model on ancient Pattanam.

What we can reasonably propose is that seasonal maritime mobility created repeated opportunities for face-to-face interaction.

What happened when people met?

Shared spaces such as workshops, production areas, waterfront facilities, habitation areas and storage spaces could have brought people together. The archaeological assemblage can sometimes reveal such interaction even when it cannot identify the individual people involved.

The most significant interactions may not have been spectacular events. Eating, working, repairing boats, making objects, exchanging goods, learning techniques, negotiating prices and sharing information could all have created sustained human relationships.

Nor should we assume that these relationships were purely commercial. There could have been cooperation, competition, friendship, affection, conflict, marriage and cultural negotiation. Archaeology can sometimes suggest such possibilities, but it cannot automatically distinguish one from another.

People who stayed for weeks, months or perhaps longer would inevitably have encountered local food, technologies, languages, environmental conditions and social practices. Local communities, in turn, would have encountered new materials, technologies, ideas and habits.

Can we glimpse something of their minds?

Here we would like to place one small food for thought on the table—not as a conclusion, but as a hypothesis worth testing.

Could the people participating in this remarkably interconnected world have possessed, or been encouraged towards, a cognitive orientation that balanced humility, inner truth, cosmic awareness and critical thinking—what we refer to as AUPP?

We certainly cannot claim that every person at Pattanam lived according to such a balance. The more interesting question is whether this balancing of priorities may have been a predominant tendency among some of the communities participating in this world.

This is only a hypothesis, and it needs to be tested repeatedly against evidence.

Some features of the archaeological record nevertheless invite us to ask the question.

For example, so far, Pattanam has not produced prominent idols or extensive weapon assemblages of the kind found at some other ancient settlements. This does not prove that religious images or weapons were absent. Absence of evidence cannot automatically be treated as evidence of absence.

Yet the pattern is intriguing.

Could it, together with Sangam literary traditions and other archaeological and scientific evidence, eventually help us test the possibility that a balancing of Sramana priorities—Anbu, Unmai, Patru and Pakutharivu—was a significant tendency among some of the communities participating in this maritime world?

Another intriguing piece of evidence is a single pottery fragment bearing the inscription “Amana” in Brahmi script, dated to around the 2nd century CE, identified among approximately 4.5 million pottery sherds recovered so far from 67 trenches by the Pattanam archaeological research team led by PJ Cherian. Most of these cultural deposits belong to the Sangam Age and occur approximately one to three metres below the present ground level.

The term Amana, with its etymological connections through Pali, Sanskrit and Tamil, invites further investigation. One isolated inscription cannot establish a cultural or philosophical orientation for an entire community. But precisely because it is so rare within such a vast assemblage, it is worth asking whether it represents one small clue to intellectual and cultural currents that deserve further examination.

Could such evidence point towards a Sramana orientation?

We do not know.

But this is precisely where AUPP should function as a question rather than an answer.

And if such a tendency can eventually be demonstrated, another question follows: was it confined to Pattanam, or might comparable evidence be identified at other ancient Asian port-sites where similar patterns of social and cultural interaction occurred?

We would need to test this repeatedly through archaeology, literature, anthropology, environmental evidence, technology, genetics and other available sources.

AUPP should not be imposed upon the evidence; it should be offered as a question to the evidence.

What can archaeology actually tell us about the human side?

A piece of pottery can tell us that something travelled.

A coin can tell us about economic connections.

A bead can tell us about technology and exchange.

Stratigraphy can tell us when these things entered a particular context.

But how did the person who carried that object think, eat, work, negotiate, make friends, disagree or adapt?

Archaeology rarely gives us a direct answer.

What it can do is establish the conditions within which such human experiences became possible.

This is why archaeology needs to be read together with genetics, environmental evidence, metallurgical studies, ancient texts, anthropology and comparative studies. Each provides a different window, and none should be allowed to speak beyond what its evidence permits.

The human remains from Pattanam add another dimension. Of the twelve human skeletal remains studied so far, eleven have yielded usable genetic information. The currently reported ancestry signals indicate connections involving South Asia, eastern Africa–West Asia and Europe. One sample did not yield the necessary genetic material. The available evidence does not yet allow us to establish the s*x or complete biography of all the individuals concerned.

These findings do not provide the complete biographies of these people. But they add another line of evidence for human mobility and interaction.

So we may never be able to identify the particular house in which a sailor from the Arabian world slept, the local family with whom a merchant from the Mediterranean ate, or the person who helped a visiting craftsman adapt to an unfamiliar landscape.

But the archaeological evidence allows us to say something important:

Pattanam was a place where people from different parts of the world could meet, stay, work, exchange and interact within a highly connected maritime environment.

And perhaps the deeper challenge is not merely to find more objects.

It is to learn how to read those objects without making the people who produced and used them carry the identities and assumptions of the last two thousand years.

Perhaps that is one of the most difficult requirements of an AUPP-balanced archaeology:

To meet the people of the past without making them carry the baggage of our present.

PAMA Team
24/08/2026

Please post your questions or comments on Muziris/Pattanam through WhatsApp: +91 90748 52914, or email [email protected].

A Discussion about the Depth of Thamizh Antiquity in the Light of New Genetic Studies

I have no idea yet whether all the new genetic studies being circulated are adequately balanced through AUPP—whether their interpretations arise from the evidence itself or whether some of them may carry the burden of preconceived narratives. That, to me, is precisely why they deserve an open and critical discussion.

Vaidehi Herbert has scolded me several times for using the Anglicised word “Tamil” instead of Thamizh. She even blames—or perhaps laments—the Keralites for being so innocent of their own myopia.

This particular memory goes back to November or December 2010, at the Oxford home where Nicole Boivin, my host, lived with Michael Petraglia and their three- or four-year-old daughter, Eva. I had been invited for tea. I had already had a dinner there with Michael as the cook; Nicole had said that it was his turn to cook and hers to wash the dishes. I was also supposed to have another dinner when Nicky was the cook.

My other hosts were Chris Gosden and Mark Pollard. I really do not have the words to describe how affectionate they were towards this Thamizhan.

On the day I went there for tea—or perhaps beer—Nicky had not yet arrived. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to share with Michael some of my doubts about whether the Western Ghats could have been one of the world’s oldest human habitats.

I had hardly any material evidence. What I had was mostly the experience of trekking and participating in a couple of wildlife surveys in different parts of the Western Ghats, together with the almost magical impact of being in the Kurinji region—the ecological and cultural landscape that produced what I consider one of the most sophisticated Thamizh civilisations.

I also remembered that Sardar K. M. Panikkar had, somewhat speculatively, suggested that in some remote prehistoric past there may have been migratory movements from Sri Lanka towards southern India, or something to that effect, pointing to connections between South Indian and Sri Lankan populations.

So I asked Michael about the possibility of prehistoric settlement on the western side of the Western Ghats. My argument was partly based on the extraordinary geography of the region—the rainforests, rivers and what later KFRI researchers, led by Dr T. V. Sajeev, counted as 51,858 rainforest islands.

I also wondered whether the familiar “push and pull” theory of migration really worked here. If a community had entered this narrow strip between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats at some point in its long prehistory, what exactly would have pushed it out—or pulled it elsewhere? Could this have been a place where people simply remained, contentedly adapted, and developed over very long periods?

And could Muziris, with its global connectivity, have been the flowering of the region’s deep Thamizh past?

Michael smiled and said, in effect, “Cherian, there should be material evidence.”

Then he told me about his journey to the house of Dr P. Rajendran, probably one of the earliest archaeologists from modern Kerala—and, in my deliberately provocative description, one of those who somehow got trapped in the Malludom, innocent of the depth of their own past.

Michael described what seemed to have been an almost unforgettable and rather sad moment for him: seeing a lump of laterite that had been presented as a “laterite baby”, supposedly belonging to a prehistoric period from the Idukki district.

I know Dr P. Rajendran a little more closely, and I would put it differently. To me, he was a sensitive archaeological mind whose possibilities were constrained by the extraordinary apathy of Kerala Thamizhans towards their own deep past.

Michael’s smile and his simple insistence—“there should be material evidence”—stayed with me.

In 2022–23, PAMA obtained permission from the Archaeological Survey of India to undertake archaeological exploration in the Idukki district without a terminal date. The permission was granted during the tenure of Dr Alok Tripathi, then Additional Director General of the ASI, and the necessary orders were issued. It came in the wider context of the difficulties PAMA faced in obtaining continued permission for its proposed excavations at Pattanam.

We were nevertheless able to undertake one phase of exploration in Nedumkunnam Panchayat of Idukki district with an all-India team, despite what seemed at times to be almost insurmountable difficulties arising from the Kerala mindset towards its ancestral legacy. The District Collector, as allegedly, under pressure from all political parties, subsequently banned the exploration.

Perhaps the time has come to return to the question—not with a predetermined conclusion, but with AUPP balance.

Could the Western Ghats and the narrow ecological world between the mountains and the Arabian Sea preserve archaeological evidence of a much deeper human history than we presently recognise?

And, more specifically, what can archaeology contribute to the new questions being raised by population genetics?

This is not an argument for replacing archaeology with genetics, or genetics with archaeology. It is an invitation to bring archaeology, genetics, geology, ecology, palaeoanthropology, linguistics and the historical traditions of the region into the same conversation.

I would therefore like to ask a simple question:

Would the Union and State Governments consider extending the necessary facilities and support for PAMA to undertake a systematic five-year archaeological exploration programme in Idukki District?

The proposed field study could be undertaken under the leadership or guidance of two great scholars and friends of PAMA, Dr Ravi Korisettar and Dr Dorian Fuller, together with Dr Michael Petraglia, who may perhaps even remember where the “laterite baby” was encountered.

I would also welcome the participation of PAMA Friends—including our friends in the media—not as advocates for a conclusion, but as witnesses to and participants in an open archaeological enquiry.

The purpose should be very simple:

not to prove an ancient Thamizh homeland, but to find out what the evidence actually says about the people who lived in the Upper Periyar basin, which may have acted as a resource pool for the legendary port at its delta, and about how the landscapes between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea became part of the extraordinary human story of the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.

Perhaps Michael was right.

There should be material evidence.

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പ്രതികരിച്ച എല്ലാവർക്കും നന്ദി. നിങ്ങളുടെ പ്രതികരണങ്ങൾ ഞങ്ങൾ വളരെ വിലമതിക്കുന്നു. എന്നാൽ നിങ്ങളുടെ AUPP സന്തുലനത്തിൽ പാകപ്പെടുത്തിയ ചിന്തകളും അറിയാൻ ഞങ്ങൾ ആഗ്രഹിക്കുന്നു.

ഒരു ചെറിയ ചിന്താപരീക്ഷണം നടത്താമോ? നിങ്ങൾ Gen Z ആണെന്ന് കരുതി, Asianet Science Talk വീഡിയോ ആ കാഴ്ചപ്പാടിൽ നിന്ന് വീണ്ടും കേൾക്കുക. കേട്ടുകഴിഞ്ഞാൽ എന്താണ് ചോദിക്കാൻ തോന്നുക? എന്തെല്ലാം ചിന്തകളോ ചോദ്യങ്ങളോ മനസ്സിൽ വരും?

അത്തരം നിഷ്കളങ്കമായ, അറിയാനുള്ള ആകാംക്ഷയിൽ നിന്നുള്ള ചോദ്യങ്ങളും അഭിപ്രായങ്ങളും ഞങ്ങൾക്ക് അയയ്ക്കുക. നിങ്ങളുടെ അടുത്തുള്ള ബന്ധുക്കൾ, സഹപ്രവർത്തകർ, വിവിധ തലമുറകളിലുള്ള സുഹൃത്തുക്കൾ എന്നിവരിൽ ചിലരെയും വീഡിയോ കേൾക്കാനും പ്രതികരിക്കാനും ക്ഷണിക്കാം. പ്രത്യേകിച്ച്, ശരിക്കും കൗതുകമുള്ള ചില Gen Z-ക്കാരും ഉണ്ടാകുന്നത് നല്ലതാണ് (ഏകദേശം 30 വയസ്സിൽ താഴെയുള്ളവർ).

വിശ്വസനീയമായ തെളിവുകളുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിൽ, നാം ഇപ്പോൾ കുറച്ചെങ്കിലും മനസ്സിലാക്കിത്തുടങ്ങിയിരിക്കുന്നു എന്ന് കരുതുന്ന ആ പഴയകാലത്തെക്കുറിച്ച് അവർക്ക് ചോദ്യങ്ങൾ ചോദിക്കാം. ഇവിടെ പ്രത്യേകിച്ച് ഒരു അജണ്ടയുമില്ല—ഏതെങ്കിലും പാർട്ടിയിൽ ചേരാനോ, തമാശ പറയാനോ, സ്വത്ത് വിൽക്കാനോ, ഇനി ജീവിതകാലം മുഴുവൻ പട്ടണത്ത് വന്ന് കിട്ടാനിടയുള്ള സ്ഥലം വാങ്ങി താമസിക്കാനോ ഒന്നുമല്ല! 😊

പട്ടണത്ത് ജീവിക്കുകയും സ്നേഹിക്കുകയും ജോലി ചെയ്യുകയും മരിക്കുകയും ചെയ്ത മനുഷ്യരെ—അവരുടെ ഓർമ്മയെയും, പട്ടണത്തിൽ ഇന്നും അവശേഷിക്കുന്ന അവരുടെ അടയാളങ്ങളെയും—മനസ്സിലാക്കാനും ഒരുപക്ഷേ അതിനെ സംരക്ഷിക്കാനും ഉള്ള ഒരു ചെറിയ ശ്രമം മാത്രമാണിത്.

അതിൽ കൂടുതൽ സങ്കീർണ്ണമായ ഒന്നുമില്ല. ആരിലും AUPP അടിച്ചേൽപ്പിക്കാനുമില്ല.

സ്വന്തം ജീവിതത്തിലും തലച്ചോറിലും നാം കൊണ്ടുനടക്കുന്ന എളിമ, ഉള്ളിലെ നേര്, പ്രപഞ്ച ബോധം / വാത്സല്യം, വകതിരിവ് എന്നിവയുടെ സന്തുലനം കഴിയുന്നത്ര ഉറപ്പാക്കി, സ്വാഭാവികമായി ഉയരുന്ന ചോദ്യങ്ങളും ചിന്തകളും ഞങ്ങൾക്ക് അയച്ചുതരുക.

നിഷ്കളങ്കമായ ആ ചോദ്യങ്ങൾ ചിലപ്പോൾ PAMA Team തയ്യാറാക്കിയ ഉത്തരങ്ങളേക്കാൾ കൂടുതൽ കാര്യങ്ങൾ നമ്മെ പഠിപ്പിച്ചേക്കാം.

അല്ലെങ്കിൽ ഏറ്റവും ചെലവുകുറഞ്ഞ യാത്രാമാർഗം കണ്ടെത്തി PAMA-യിൽ എത്തിക്കോളൂ. നിങ്ങളെയും നിങ്ങളുടെ സംഘത്തെയും പാട്ടണത്തേക്ക് കൂടുതൽ അർത്ഥവത്തായ ഒരു യാത്രയ്ക്ക് ഞങ്ങൾ കൊണ്ടുപോകാം. ഇത്തരം തീർഥാടനങ്ങളുടെ പ്രതീകാത്മകതയുടെ മൂല്യം മനസ്സിലാക്കുന്നവർക്ക് സ്വാഗതം. 😊🙏🏿

Textual messages അയയ്ക്കുന്നതായിരിക്കും കൂടുതൽ സൗകര്യം.

WhatsApp: +91 90748 52914 / +91 9847449495
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.pama.org.in

PAMA TEAM

21/08/2026
RTKN Centre, Periyar Gardens, GCDA Road, Aluva – 683108

If you have watched, commented on, or considered responding to the Asianet “Science Talk” video, “Who is a Malayali?”, and would like to learn more, ask questions, or continue the conversation, you are warmly invited to visit PAMA’s Romila Thappar–K. N. Panikkar Centre in Aluva and Bappukudu in Pattanam. Come, visit, explore, and engage with us.
Facilities for a short stay of a couple of days are also available—particularly for those who see themselves as pilgrims on a journey to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors from Sangam Age Kerala (c. 300 BCE–300 CE). Come, pause, explore, and connect with the balance of AUPP and the priorities of the Sramana tradition, as well as the deep histories, landscapes, and lives that shaped this land.

For more information, please visit pama.org.in, email us at [email protected], or contact us via WhatsApp/Phone: +91 90748 52914.

PAMA - Bridging the Past, Present and Future. BRIDGING THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE with Anbu (Humility), Unmai (Inside truth), Patru (Affection), and Pakutharivu (Critical thinking) These four qualities are discerned as the predominant Sangam age ethos. They reflect in the written sources and material remains of Pattanam archaeological site (3...

Who is Malayali?

PAMA, Q&A Session – 4

Question 3 from +1(905)-924-4803

“Around 300 BCE, is it really possible to believe that Romans and Jews travelled by ship through the Mediterranean Sea, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and eventually reached Kodungallur/Muziris? It is very difficult to believe that this could have happened.”

PAMA Team’s Reflection

Thank you for raising this question. It gives us an opportunity to clarify something important: we should not begin the story of Pattanam/Muziris by imagining that Romans or Jews simply sailed from the Mediterranean to ancient Kerala around 300 BCE.

That is not what the evidence suggests.

First, 300 BCE does not mean the beginning of Roman maritime activity in the Indian Ocean. The Roman Empire and the Roman maritime presence that we associate with the Mediterranean–Indian Ocean trade belong to a later historical context. When we refer to Pattanam during the Sangam Age, approximately 300 BCE–300 CE, we are describing a long period of transformation rather than a single event.

From the perspective of Pattanam, around 300 BCE we should instead imagine something much more interesting.

The ancient Kerala coast was becoming increasingly connected to a maritime world that was already interconnected.

This means that movement did not necessarily begin with people coming from the Mediterranean towards India. People, goods, technologies and ideas could move in both directions. Communities along the Indian coast could themselves travel towards the north, west and east, joining networks that already extended far beyond the subcontinent.

The evidence from Pattanam suggests that one important route towards the Arabian regions may have developed through the ancient Gujarat coast. Maritime movement did not always require vessels to cross the open ocean directly. Coastal navigation—sometimes described as “hugging the coast”—allowed sailors to remain relatively close to land, using familiar coastal points and intermediate ports.

In this way, communities from the Malabar Coast could have reached the ancient Gujarat region and interacted with the sailors and merchants associated with ports such as Barygaza, before continuing towards the Arabian regions.

The archaeological evidence at Pattanam is particularly interesting in this regard. Fragments of vessels and containers associated with Arabian regions—including turquoise, torpedo-shaped and ovoid jars, some of which are dated to around or before the third century BCE—suggest that connections with the western Indian Ocean were already developing before the major appearance of Mediterranean material at the site.

This changes the question completely.

Instead of asking:

“How could Romans have travelled all the way from Rome to Muziris around 300 BCE?”

we might ask:

“How did the people of the Kerala coast gradually enter and participate in maritime networks that were already connecting India with the Arabian regions and beyond?”

That is a much more historically plausible question.

The major transformation around 100 BCE

At Pattanam, another important change becomes visible around 100 BCE.

For the first time, we begin to find evidence pointing more clearly towards connections with the Red Sea region. These connections appear to have subsequently expanded towards ancient Egypt, the Greek world and, later, the wider Mediterranean and Roman maritime networks.

In other words, the archaeological sequence does not require us to imagine a single dramatic voyage:

Rome → Gibraltar → Red Sea → Muziris.

Instead, it suggests the gradual joining and expansion of already existing maritime networks.

Different communities could participate at different points. Ships could change hands. Cargoes could move through intermediate ports. Sailors with different geographical knowledge could carry goods and people from one maritime zone to another.

This is how long-distance exchange works.

Muziris and the wider Indian Ocean

There is another point that deserves attention.

The ancient Indian Ocean was not a collection of isolated maritime regions separated by political boundaries. There was no modern system of fences, passports or territorial lines controlling the movement of people and goods across the sea.

The communities of the Indian coast were therefore not merely interacting with a single “Western world”.

They were participating in a much larger transoceanic network.

During its peak phase, the evidence associated with Pattanam/Muziris points towards connections extending from the Red Sea and eastern African regions through Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal and towards Southeast Asia and southern China.

Classical writers such as Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy and the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Strabo’s writings etc provide valuable literary evidence for the importance of Muziris within this wider maritime world. Archaeological evidence from the eastern coast of India and sites extending towards Southeast Asia and the South China Sea adds another dimension to this picture.

The connection with Hepu in present-day southern China is particularly significant because Hepu is associated with the early maritime routes that later became part of what we might call the maritime Silk Road.

This raises a remarkable possibility.

During its peak, Pattanam/Muziris may have stood within one of the longest continuously connected maritime corridors of the ancient world—perhaps extending from the western & Eastern Indian Oceans to the South China Sea.

We should, however, distinguish between what the evidence demonstrates and what it allows us to hypothesise. It would be premature to claim that Pattanam definitively controlled or “presided over” the entire route. What we can say is that the evidence places Pattanam/Muziris within an extraordinarily extensive maritime network.

The period roughly between 100 BCE and 200 CE appears particularly important in this regard.

So, who was moving?

This brings us back to the larger question: Who is Malayali?

Perhaps the most important correction is that we should not imagine the ancient people of this coast merely as passive recipients of people and things arriving from the West.

They were also travellers, navigators, producers, traders and participants in a maritime world that connected many regions.

The movement was not simply:

West → India.

It was:

India ↔ Arabia ↔ Red Sea ↔ Mediterranean

and simultaneously:

India ↔ Bay of Bengal ↔ Southeast Asia ↔ South China.

The sea did not function as a wall separating communities. It functioned as a medium connecting them.

Pattanam therefore gives us another opportunity to reconsider the mental image of our own past.

The people who lived on this coast around 300 BCE were not waiting for the Romans, Jews or any other “foreigners” to introduce them to the wider world.

They were already entering that world.

And perhaps the deeper question is not:

“How did the Romans reach Muziris?”

but:

“How did the people of Muziris become participants in a maritime world that was already reaching in many directions?”

That is where the archaeological evidence becomes truly exciting.

PAMA Team
19/08/2026

Please post your questions or comments on the Muziris/ Pattanam in WhatsApp number- +91 90748 52914. Or email [email protected]