The Mother Of All Myths

Kalaripayat, India’s most evolved martial art, has a rich and colourful history.

- John Mathew

But the first attempt at a comprehensive documentation of its training regime was made only in 1963, when Chirakkal T. Sreedharan Nair, who taught at the YMCA College of Physical Education, Madras, put in black and white the oral tradition that was the basis of the secret art of fighting. Not many kalari practitioners were impressed.

For centuries, kalaripayat exponents had trained in dugouts without any textbook. The gurukkal, or the master, was the textbook, and students learned from him. The two aspects of kalari—vaythari or the oral commands, and meythari, the physical action calibrated by the former—were open to all students, but the chosen few were allowed access to the distilled wisdom the guru accumulated over the years. The oral tradition, to an extent, continues in kalaripayat even today. At the end of the evening practice, the inquisitive sit with the guru to clear their doubts and have debates.

On one such evening at the C.V.N. Kalari in Kaduthuruthy (currently E.P.V. Kalari) Kerala, I posed a question to the legendary E.P. Vasudevan Gurukkal, whom the BBC featured in its 1984 docu series The Way of the Warrior. I asked him: Was kalaripayat the mother of all martial arts?