Of Native Flavours and Tunes

A delectably peculiar combination of nearly every vegetable one can find in the local market, indulgently permitted to simmer in luscious dollops of coconut paste, curd and varied seasonings, the Avial, as a casual conversation with the Malayali next door would reveal, is an ineluctable component of traditional Kerala cuisine. A vegetarian dish cooked mostly with carrot, yam, potato, beans and raw plantain that is best consumed with rice, its very name colloquially refers to a mixture of anything and everything.

There are various versions of the origin story of the Avial. One narration has it that the Maharaja of Travancore had a custom of performing the Murajapam (an elaborate puja) every year which involved the participation of a large number of Vedic scholars who were overwhelmingly Brahmins. One year it so happened that there weren’t enough vegetables with which to prepare the meal on the last day of the Murajapam, merely remnants of various vegetables left over from the preceding days’ cooking. The desperate cook, as a last resort, cut up the leftovers into long, thin fragments and prepared the ‘Avial’. The king liked the dish so much that he presented the cook with a gold bracelet and ordered that it be served every year henceforth.

The Avial gives an important lesson in food consumption and wastage. A sustainable dish for the environmentally conscious, it uses local produce that take naturally to the soil and require minimal amounts of water and pesticides for their cultivation. The vegetables that go into it are typically those that don’t reduce into an unappealing mushy consistency when cooked. This goes a long way in contributing to the palatability of the dish in terms of its visual appeal and texture which renders it more appetizing to those who sit down to consume it. The act of consuming a food item transcends the mere end of meeting a basic need. It is a complex, sensory process that impinges on one’s receptors, defining and determining one’s experience with the dish, the act of eating it and the satiety derived out of it. The homely curry epitomizes the practice of thrifty cooking, effectively utilizing remnants (on account of its flexible recipe) to put together a fulfilling dish without compromising on the nutritive value while at the same time minimizing wastage of edible material. Well, now you know what to do about that halved carrot lying around in the bottom tray of your refrigerator.

True to the story, the Avial has withstood the assault of time on memory to become a symbol of authentic Malayali cuisine. Every Onam (the Harvest Festival of Kerala), upon fragrant banana leaves laid out to hold the profusion of vegetable curries typical of the festival, a spacious part of the green is reserved for the essential Avial to be accommodated in generous quantities. Step into a local restaurant and ask for a vegetarian thali, one is assured a serving of this eminent curry. The seasoned wedding attendee will tell you that a traditional wedding luncheon without the Avial is not traditional at all! So popular is the indigenous concoction, that there is even a band named after it.

The eponymous Avial, a five-piece Malayalam alternative rock band, purposively handpicked their band name to capture the crux of their musical creativity, a fusion of traditional Malayalam folk songs set to the charged vibes of the electric guitar and the metallic throb of the drums, all the while retaining the authentic lyrical complexity and tone of the classics. Malayalam folk poetry and music, as immortal raconteurs that tell of rural myths and legends, the pristine ways and beliefs of the land and stories that describe life in the past, echo the haunting rhythm of the life of the sons and daughters of the soil, the farmers and peasants of a culture woven out of the intimate connection of men and women with the fruit-bearing earth, the agrarian lifestyle, and has today emerged as a site of active political engagement with the labouring class. Avial picks up these raw affective braids of music, retaining the pathos of the original narration, the words spun into notes that resonate with the very thoughts, feelings, experiences and encounters that gave birth to them and reverently conjoins them with Rock to create an impactful, charismatic fusion that stays true to its roots.

Through its music, the band amplifies, literally and figuratively, the cries of those of yore who worked the land tirelessly, often adapting these potent narratives to contemporary contexts to convey pressing social concerns. An example is the song titled ‘Aadu Pambe’ (inadequately translated as the ‘Snake Dance’) that relates how humans have drifted apart from Mother Nature and exploited her generosity to feed our own selfish, insatiable appetites.

A distinguishing feature of its lyrical work is that it is transposed straight from the rustic, unsanitised and pristine. The songs are sung in the raw, unrefined Malayalam of the folk as spoken by the agriculturalists, retaining the original tone, words and lapses in grammar particular to each dialect, coarse to the ear but that which best preserves the authenticity and the profundity of the emotions it envelops.

Growing up as students of an elite school in Cochin, we were compelled to communicate in English while on campus and an inadvertent lapse into Malayalam was certain to invite reproach from teachers and peers. While the rather imperialist norm in one sense served to polish our communicative skills in English and prepare us for the global rat-race that lay ahead, its latent function, as Merton would put it, was the internalization of a sense of disdain toward our own mother tongue. This manifested itself in the form of an insidious hierarchy that posited knowledge of spoken English as superior to that of Malayalam, resulting in the exclusion of students who were more comfortable conversing in the latter and less fluent in the former, marginalization of a knowledge form, and perhaps more adverse, a veritable feeling of shame at a facet so intrinsic to our identity as Keralites and Malayalis.

At a time when the very ecology of formative education discourages affinity with one’s mother tongue, the band attempts to carve out a niche and win recognition, not for Malayalam music and the particular genre of the band alone, but for Malayalam folk culture and the language itself with its associated dialects. Avial’s outside-the-mainstream venture is an attempt to reclaim an authentic, rooted identity in today’s world where the global and the western takes precedence over the regional. A preponderance of its fans are adolescents and young adults within the state who are often seen mimicking the power-packed performances of the band at youth cultural fests, tearing at their Gibsons while mouthing a rustic form of Malayalam. The magnetism of the mundu-clad (dhoti) lead singer’s vocals and the high-voltage atmosphere the instrumentalists create with their talent have attracted a massive state-wide following. Its videos posted with translations of the lyrics in English on YouTube and other information-sharing platforms have gathered numerous non-Malayali fans in different parts of the country as well, thus popularizing the Malayalam alternative rock scene well beyond Kerala.

Although Avial is one of many of its kind, its relatively wider reach and unique style allows the band to hold significant sway over a young demographic which has, in a way, re-ignited their connect to the mother tongue and revived a sense of pride in the language and in being Malayali. Through its art, it plays a significant role in preserving dying dialects and folk knowledge, which in the form of tales and legends veritably make up, bequeath and carry forth the culture and intangible heritage of the land.

What stands out for me personally about Avial’s art is its ability to draw me into the story that each song narrates, the conviction with which it is sung and the emotion encapsulated in every note. At some point you absorb the music and shape the notes into images in your head only to realize that it is but a recreation of the past; that an exhausted, bare-bodied farmer with a thorthu (a thin towel) tied around his head had once hummed the same tunes to himself while ploughing the land in the sweltering heat; a reaper working in the field with a sleeping child under the shade of a nearby tree had sung those lulling words in the hope that the infant would be comforted if it should startle out of its sweet slumber; a narration of small sacrifices, that nourished the land and sustained the life and culture of a people; put simply,

Art that hits home.

Written by-

Elizabeth Mathew, TYBA 2018