Ramayan and Onam

Interesting Read.

A different view on Ramayan and the Source of Oman celebrations .
An excerpt

The only Malayalam picture that T and I watched together, just after we got married, had the Malayalam superstar ‘Mohan Lal’ as it’s hero. Just after the movie, I had heard T passing a comment, ‘Ayyyeeee, he looks like a monkey’. Thirty years later, during the Onam musings, it occurred to me that what she said had profound significance of how Hanuman (Bali or Sugreeva) came to be monkeys. ‘Hanu’ in Sanskrit, I believe, means a deformed face, one that juts out. The Malayalees (Nairs as well as those Nairs who converted to became Kuruvilas or Mathappans) have since time immemorial followed the custom of intermarriage and marrying their first cousins. The inbreeding led to several deformities that one can see even today in Kerala, that of monkey like jutting jaws, thick lips, hair lip, body patches with thick matting of hair, all of which when described, let us say to a descendant of Ram (like Laoo Prasad Yadav), who repeats it again and again over centuries in his inimitable style adding his own spice, may make a Malayalee Hanuman (Bali or Sugreev) like what T saw in Mohan Lal.  Mahabali could well have been a Malayalee !!!