The History of Kalaripayattu: Kerala's Ancient Fighting Art

The training hall is a hole in the ground. A kalari is dug into the earth of Kerala to prescribed dimensions, roofed with palm leaves, laid out east to west, with a shrine to the guardian deities in the south-western corner, and a Nair boy of the Middle Ages walked down into one at the age of seven and trained there until someone called him to fight. The word payattu means practice, or fight. The art is simply what happens in the pit.

It is also, if you believe the brochures, the oldest martial art in the world and the mother of all the others. No historian can support either claim. What the record does show is worth more: a warrior culture in medieval Kerala with its own duels, ballads and training halls; its suppression by the British after the conquest of Malabar; and its revival by a handful of masters in the 1920s and 1930s who reopened the pits and taught in public. This article follows the art from the courts of the Zamorins to the tourist kalaris of today, and keeps the legends where they belong.

Key facts

Region

Kerala, south-western India; related traditions in Tamil Nadu

Meaning

Kalari – the training ground; payattu – practice, fight

Classical age

12th–16th centuries: Nair warriors, ankam duels, the Vadakkan Pattukal ballads

Suppression

British Malabar, from the 1790s: arms banned, kalaris closed

Revival

1920s–1930s, Kottakkal Kanaran Gurukkal, C. V. Narayanan Nair and others

Signature weapons

Otta (curved stick), urumi (flexible sword), sword and shield, spear

Warriors of the south

The Tamil poetry of the Sangam age, composed between roughly 300 BC and 300 AD, sings of the warriors of the south Indian kingdoms – the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas – with their spears, swords and bows, their duels and their heroic deaths. The Cheras ruled the coast that became Kerala, and the art's traditions look back to that world, as they do to the later Sanskrit texts on Dhanurveda, the science of arms. How much of what was practised then survived into the kalari is unknown. The word kalari comes from the Tamil for a battlefield or arena, and the mythic founders, the sage Agastya in the south and the warrior-priest Parashurama in the north, are the founders of Kerala's culture in general, not evidence of a dated system.

The documented history begins with a collapse. The Chera kingdom broke up around 1100 and Kerala became a mosaic of small principalities – the Zamorin of Calicut, the rajas of Cochin, Kolathunad and Venad, and dozens of chiefs – whose armies were the Nairs, a martial caste that sent its boys into the kalari at seven and kept them training until they were called to fight. Each village had its pit. Each pit had its gurukkal, the master, who taught fighting and treated injuries. And what came out of the pits was not only soldiers but a whole culture of the duel.

Duels to the death, and the songs about them

Between the 12th and 16th centuries kalaripayattu was the military system of Kerala, and its institutions were unusual. A dispute between chiefs could be settled by ankam, a duel fought to the death on a raised platform by champions – the chekavars, hired from families of professional fighters. The chaver, sworn warriors, took oaths of vengeance against the Zamorin at his great festival at Tirunavaya and attacked his guard knowing they would die. Both were sung about in the Vadakkan Pattukal, the northern ballads, and the ballads' heroes are still the art's exemplars: Aromal Chekavar, the duellist betrayed by his cousin, and his sister Unniyarcha, who fought off a gang with her urumi. The Portuguese, who arrived with Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498, and the Dutch and British after them, described the Nairs' agility, their swords and shields, and their habit of training in pits under the eye of a master.

The art they described had a structure it still keeps. Training moves through four stages. Meythari is the body: exercises, leg swings and animal postures. Kolthari is wood: weapons from the long staff to the short, curved otta. Ankathari is metal: dagger, sword and shield, spear, and the coiled flexible sword called the urumi, whipped rather than swung and taught last, because it is as dangerous to the user as to the opponent. Verumkai is the empty hand: locks, throws and strikes to the marma, the vital points. Alongside all of it the gurukkal taught kalari chikitsa, a system of massage, bone-setting and herbal medicine. The man who taught the village to break bones was also the man who set them.

Gunpowder, then the Company

Kalaripayattu's decline began with gunpowder and ended with the British. Firearms made the duel and the sword and shield obsolete through the 17th and 18th centuries, and when the East India Company took Malabar from Tipu Sultan in 1792 it found a countryside of armed Nairs and a revolt led by Pazhassi Raja of Kottayam, which ran, on and off, from 1793 until his death in 1805. The Company's answer was to disarm the province. Weapons were confiscated, martial training banned, the kalaris closed. Within a generation an art that had trained every Nair boy survived in a few families teaching in secret, in the ritual traditions of temple festivals and in the physical training of Kathakali dancers, whose exercises were the kalari's.

The 19th century is the art's dark age and the reason its history is so hard to write. Almost nothing was recorded, and the lineages that resumed in the 20th century could claim what they liked.

Revival

The revival was part of Indian nationalism. In the 1920s, as the independence movement looked for indigenous physical culture to set against British sport, a few surviving masters in northern Kerala reopened their kalaris and began to demonstrate in public. Kottakkal Kanaran Gurukkal was one. C. V. Narayanan Nair, whose demonstrations and articles in the 1930s gave the art its modern name in print, was another. Chirakkal T. Sreedharan Nair wrote the first manual and taught the northern style systematically. Between them they drew the line that students still argue over: the northern (vadakkan) style, with its high, flowing movements and long weapons, against the southern (thekkan) style of Travancore and Tamil Nadu, closer to the empty hand and the marma. The distinction is real. The boundary is not settled.

The Kerala Kalaripayattu Association was founded in 1958 to run competitions and gradings, and from the 1970s the art found new patrons: Indian cinema, which used it in Malayalam and Hindi films; dance and theatre, through choreographers who studied in Kerala; and foreign students and scholars, above all the American theatre researcher Phillip Zarrilli, whose two decades of training and writing produced the standard academic account. Kerala's tourism department made the kalari a visitor attraction. The myth that Bodhidharma carried the art to Shaolin and thereby fathered every Asian martial art, which has no source before the 20th century, travelled with the tourists.

Kalaripayattu today

Several hundred kalaris in Kerala, schools across India and abroad, and the beginnings of a sport: the Indian Olympic Association recognised it, and in 2021 it was included in the Khelo India Youth Games, the government's national youth competition, with events in forms and weapons. Most of its life, though, is what it was. A sunken pit. A master. A curriculum that begins with oil massage and ends with the urumi. And the ballads of Aromal Chekavar and Unniyarcha, which every student in Kerala still knows.

Where to go next

• The kalaripayattu discipline hub collects training articles, workouts and gear.
• The Chinese art the Bodhidharma legend connects it to: The History of Kung Fu.
• Another weapons-first tradition: The History of Kali, Eskrima and Arnis.
• Flexibility and body control, the meythari of the gym: Kettlebell Strength for Fighters.