From: Anya Bernstein
Subject: Fieldnotes on the go
   Date: August 8, 2005 1:22:04 PM CET
     To: Undisclosed recipients


For about two weeks, I stayed at the gorgeous house of Professor Nayar, a retired professor of linguistics, who gave me Malayalam classes.
Professor belongs to the Kerala's indigenous Nayar caste, which is a high caste, one step below Brahmins. The Nayars used to be matrilineal and live in extended families. At the same time, in the highest Kerala Brahmin caste, only the eldest son was allowed to marry. Others were allowed to have relations with Nayars, who kept the children and gained prestige. The real father of the child was thus the uncle. This matrilineal system persisted well into the twentieth century before being replaced by nuclear families.
Professor is also a chair of every imaginable committee from advising the government on neologisms and spelling reforms in Malayalam to being
the foremost authority in traditional performing arts. He has a Linguistics PhD from Oxford and was ecstatic that I knew what retroflex consonants were (hooray for my Linguistics BS!). I was also the first foreigner who demanded the conjugation and declension tables from the get-go. "I don't usually do it for beginners, because most people would run away if I did," he confessed.