A Kerala in Afghanistan

Kerala is a village in Kunar Province of Afghanistan known for the 1979 Kerala Massacre. This massacre involved the alleged killing of over one thousand unrmed civilians by Afghan soldiers and Soviet advisors. 

The incident occurred in April 1979, during the years of Soviet Afghan war. Survivors reported that Afghan troops, led by Soviet advisors

rounded up the male population of Kerala and executed them, burying the body in a field outside the village.

The massacre was a response to local resistance against Soviet backed Afghan government.

The village of Kerala is located near Asadabad, the provincial capital of Kunar. The province lie in a rugged region along Afghan Pakistan boarder. Kunar is sparsely populated, mountainous and with forests. It is in the lower Hindukush mountains cut by the Kunar river to form a forested Kunar valley.

The language spoken by the people is likely Gawar-Bati, which belongs to Dardic branch of Indo Aryan languages 

Interestingly Kerala was not the name of the State of Kerala. The revenue records of the landlords of local chieftains documented the name of the Malabar district as Thekkan Malayalam, in 1945. If there was a Thekkan Malayalam There must have been a Vadakkan Malayalam. The etymology of the word Malayalam can be interpreted as places down the hill. Or it can be interpreted as land of മല and ആലം or Hills and ocean. This name reflects different perceptions of different people who came into this land from opposite directions. People from westward  direction (over sea) perceived it as land of mountain and ocean. People who crossed the Western Ghats and came down here called it the land in the in the depth of or at valley or bottom of mountains. Either way the place name Malayalam is correct  and an exonym, a name marked by outsiders. 

Who were the insiders? There were no insiders. This land was a corridor of the earliest homosapiens in their search for food. They were hunter gatherers. Both the western and eastern coasts of Indian (another exonym) subcontinent were corridors of the never ending flow of homosapiens. Here the corridor was a habitate.  When the demographic pressure increases people move to new places adjacent to the existing habitate. Some of these earliest band had contributed two words to Malayalam language ആല് and ആലം. Both these words are archaic and they sleep in the pages of ശബ്ദതാരാവലി or Malayalam lexicon compiled by Sreekanteswaram G. Padmanabha Pilla, later updated by P. Damodaran Nair, M. A. B. L in 1983. In this lexicon on page 289 sleeps ആല് meaning ജലം. On the same page is ആലം meaning:

1. വിസ്താരം; വിശാലത Broad 

2. ജലം; കടൽ; മഴ. Water, sea, rain

These words are archaic and not in current usage. But these words remain in the place names of modern day Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In Tamil also it is an archaic word. Since the words are found in both Tamil and Malayalam and in both languages these  archaic the words have their root in an earlier language, proto Dravidian.

കൊക്കഴിക്കൊട് (Kokkazhikkode) was a Taluk in Thekkan Malayalam district, according to local chieftain's revenue records. When we split കൊക്കഴിക്കോട് we get കൊക്ക് + അഴി+ ക്കൊട് that means beak shaped + river mouth+ place. The name sheds light on the coastal formation of the land by deposition of limeshell and sediments. And almost all estuaries around Kozhikode are beak shaped.

Alaska is a U.S. state on northwest extremity of North America. On the western side of Alaska is Bering strait. Once, the sea was bridge or an isthmus connecting Eurasia to America. Now, in the place of Bering land bridge there are a chain of islands called Aleutian island. About fifteen thousand years ago Homo Sapiens in small bands from Eurasia (from eastern coasts of Siberia) must have crossed the bridge and entered American continent. Note that the bridge was not a passage but a habitate where people lived as hunter gatherers and from the Bering land bridge and later in the Holocene epoch they began to spread to mainland of Alaska. The word Alaska is derived from the Aleut word. The word "Alaska" comes from the Aleut word "alaxsxaq" (pronounced roughly ah-lock-shock), which means:

 "The mainland" or "the object toward which the action of the sea is directed." or the land facing the sea.

It was an exonym coined by the Aleut speaking people, who lived in the Bering land bridge, and later in Holocene epoch in the Aleutian islands.

The name was adopted by Russian explorers in the 18th century and later by the United States when it purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.

So, in essence, "Alaska" means the land facing the sea. The word "Ala" in

Unangam Tunuu language is sea or water.

ആല് (Alu) in Malayalam vernacular means water. ആലം (Alam) means Sea. Similarity between the words in Malayalam vernacular and Unangam Tunuu language is striking. But most linguists would initially classify this as coincidence.

Southern Coastal Migration Hypothesis suggests that early humans (between 60000 and 40000 years ago) followed coastal routes from Africa through South Arabia, Guarat, Kerala, Sri Lanka, South East Asia, eventually reaching Australia and later Americas. These groups would have hugged coastlines, living off marine resources - similar to what Unangam people later did in Aleutian islands

Genetics supports coastal corridor migration of early bands of homosapiens. Studies of mtDNA haplo groups (e.g. M, N) in South Indians show ancient lineages that are shared with East Asians and indigenous Americans, suggesting deep ancestral route.

Dravidian groups have unique Denisovan admixture, also found in aboriginal Australians and Native Americans - possibly a relic of shared early migratory path.

Linguistic Parallels - Possibility of Proto-Oceanic Vocabulary.

Although Malayalam ( Dravidian) and Unangam Tunuu ( Eskimo-Aleut) belong to completely different language families, some linguists speculate that: 

Certain proto human concepts like water, sea, mother may have stable phonetic forms passed down or re-emerged independently in different regions due to similar cognitive and environmental pressures

What a root like ( ആല ) reflects?

1. A shared ancestral term, now diffused and obscured.

2. A universal phonetic tendency to associate liquids with open vowels and l sounds: aqua (a light bluish green colour) agua ( Spanish and Portuguese word for water)

Though modern linguists cannot confirm a direct lineage, it does support the idea  of shared deep migratory routes, and possibly even proto Vocabulary carried and reshaped by early humans.

There are about more than seventy toponyms in Kerala with the root ala, alam as prefix, like Alamkode (ആലംകോട്), Alakode (ആലക്കോട്); that too within a coastline of three hundred and seventy miles.

The End