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A A chance conversation with a distant relative led me to Palayil, the name my parents were given Tharavad. The latter is the name given to a house built around women. Ours had stood, in a way, since about the 17th century. My grandmother, Palayil Sreedevi, was the last woman in my line to be one. It was in the southern Indian village of Tholanur.
My grandmother belonged to the Nair caste, a matrilineal caste that originated in Kerala. Historically, they were military nobles who served royal kings. For centuries, Nair boys left home at the age of 12 for military training before being sent to serve the royal family of Travancore. When the men return, they often sleep in outhouses – satellites to the Tharavad about women.
I have spent several years researching societies around the world where women build their own systems, communities and organizations, for my book Herlands: Lessons from Societies Where. Women Make Rules. The title nods to Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland’s feminist novel, thinking about a society dominated by women, although my interest was in the specific communities that women created for themselves. I expected my journey to end with Palayil, and it did, but not the way I thought. Palayil had been overthrown more than ten years ago, when the matrilineal system of grandmothers was brought up in a haphazard environment, broken by rules written by many men.
When I went to look for it in 2024, I walked through acres of paddy fields and only found a basement house, a snake temple, an ancient gate and neighbors who remembered it. The Tharavad in its glory it exists now only in memory. But its grammar – the rooms, the streets, the bodies built to hold it – survives in others like them across Kerala.
This is more important than my family history. Today, 23 June, International Women in Engineering This day celebrates the contributions of women in shaping and building the world around us. The Tharavad it raises an additional question: what happens when buildings are built around women’s lives in the first place? Although the buildings were built by male craftsmen, they were designed to suit women’s needs, tone and authority. Looking back at them reminds us that the built environment is neutral; It reveals what their needs, experiences, and lives are worth in order to make design decisions.
The house was a here is the catwhich translates as “four corners”: a rectangular structure of jackfruit and teak wood, opening to a central roofless courtyard called a nadumuttamwith four blocks named as the destination. These were not the only houses where there were women. They were buildings built around the female body: its cycle, work, sorrow, desire and noise.
These buildings were designed and built by male carpenters but were briefly installed by women. There is a survivor Tharavad 20 minutes from Tholanur, called Kandath. It is now maintained as a home by its caretaker, Sudevan Bhagwaldas, who told me stories about ginger tea before leading me to purathalams. These are raised, curved platforms designed to provide a comfortable, circular view of the square. The men gathered one, the women another.
“This is designed,” Mr. Bhagwaldas told me, “so that, curiously, no words spoken by women can be heard by men and vice versa – even if you shout.” Buildings don’t just protect women’s bodies – they protect their conversations.
The kitchen was in the northeast. Architect Benny Kuriakose, who has restored several tharavadshe told me that this was because Kerala’s monsoons blow from the southwest, so the hot air from the kitchen would be blown out of the house. The women’s bedrooms, on the west side, were not heated by the heat from the kitchen. Among the rooms were smaller rooms: one for giving birth, the other for bathing. A bathing girl can relax in this room. It is possible that his mother gave birth to him in another house.
In a Tharavad The rooms were on the design plan of Kuriakose’s house as part of the Muziris Heritage Project. The basement floor was labeled: “A hall with rooms for mothers-to-be and pregnant women.” I’ve been thinking about that corridor a lot. While researching Herlands, I came across many examples of women creating systems of care, inheritance and mutual support. Which struck me Tharavad it was that those values were not based not only in social rules but also in actual structures.
In many parts of South Asia, the “temporary house” has become a tool of deportation. The Hindu practice of indeed they see women who bathe as unclean. But some of my relatives insist that Palayil told a different story. There, he remembers the time room as a rest room. A menstruating woman was cared for by other women in the house. He was not allowed to do housework. He was not dirty. He was not fired. His body was expected, welcomed, given its own room.
I only have one picture of my great-grandmother and she is very beautiful on film. In Tholanur, the neighbors remembered her beauty, though they told me that even her mother, Palayil Kalyani, won. He grabbed the keys to the main gate and to the jewelry room. His name was on Palayil’s works. His blessing was necessary before any business, marriage or naming.
Before the First World War, Kalyani planned to replace the dry coconut leaf roof with clay tiles, modernizing the roof. This was the home of all women related to Kalyani: widows, single women, relatives, childless, new mothers. The structures protected them all. Kalyani insisted that Palayil’s daughters should always stay in a safe house. That insistence – that we were protected, financially isolated, not in need of rescuing – was drilled into me by my grandmother and mother, who heard it from them.
A number of Nair communities practiced a form of union called sambadhanamfrom Sanskrit Likewise, equal, and bandam, a partnership, a sexual and free partnership between a man and a woman that can be terminated at the request of either party. A woman did not move into her husband’s house. They came to him, and he could be asked to leave.
A system like that needed a united house. Outside the building ran a circular path holiday on the porch, lit at night by brass lamps. I’ve been told it was designed in some way as a clever tourist trick. This practice ended in the 1800s. But architecture remembers the possibilities.
Another thing he remembered was the line: the women’s line. “The birth of a daughter was more valuable than a son because of the role a woman plays in childbearing,” Lekha NB, a Kerala Gender scholar told me. “This ensured the continuity of Tharavad heritage.” A girl arrived by ringing the bells. His body was due to construction.
I don’t want to please the system I come from but I don’t live in it. The architecture was generous, but still optional. Tharavadas were caste structures. While Nair women, mostly literate, do the readings in the yard, lower caste women work in the fields outside, often under substandard conditions. My father’s family is of the lower class; his sisters would not be accepted inside Palayil. A home for women’s bodies, yes, but not all women.
This system ended in the early 20th century, with laws that abolished female inheritance and created sambadhanam illegal. Palayil Kalyani built a house for her daughters. The walls fell. But the lesson remained: keep the shelter, keep your freedom, keep the key.
Herlands by Megha Mohan published by Penguin. To support the Guardian, buy your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.
