The family takes descent from one of the 7 Hindu Brahmin families converted from Hinduism to Christianity by St Thomas the Apostle, after his arrival in Cranganore on the Muziris coast, in AD 52 – in what is the state of Kerala of today. In later centuries these areas would comes under the rule of the Princes of Cochin. The surnames of some of those converted Brahmin families included Pakalomattam, Kalliankel, Kalli, and Sankarapuri.
Centuries later some of the descendant families migrated to Kuruvilangad. In the absence of written evidence, and being reliant on the hand down of information via the oral tradition, the closest approximation of the period of this migration is sometime in the 4th century AD. Much of this history was known to my late father, T M Sebastian – Sebastian Mathai Thalanany, and I am reliant on my memory of what I gathered from him in time -honoured fashion of the oral narration of the family history.
Among the families that arose from these diaspora was one called the Karimattam family. In the 18th century, a member of this family named Aviraham, (Abraham), migrated east towards the foothills of the Western Ghats. He occupied land that was in the domain of the Thampuran of Poonjar, an appointed agent of the Maharaja of Travancore.
It was a dense tropical forest area with a wide variety of flora and fauna. The wild beasts included deer, elephants, wild buffalo, leopards, and tigers. Venomous snakes included kraits and vipers and cobras. In addition were scorpions, centipedes, black millipedes and large red millipedes. Clear streams and rivers flowed through the land which joined the River Meenachil. These contained an abundance of fresh water fish.
Aviraham Karimattam settled close to the banks of the river Meenachil, somewhere around 6 miles further east from what is the town of Pala today. He cultivated the land with the help of local labour force and he built a homestead. The plot of land where the the homestead was built was at that time called Melampara. The site where the foundation was laid had an “anjali” tree growing there, and creeping up around its trunk was a large leafed jungle vine called a “thaal” plant. His eldest son Joseph Karimattam, (Kochu Ipe Karimattam), developed the homestead further after his father’s death, and towards the end of the 19th century it became the family “tharavadu” (ancestral dwelling or abode). The family came to be known in the locality as the one whose homestead was where the “thaal” and “anjali” stood. The combination of these two words became the term to describe the new homestead and the family that lived at the site where a “thaal” vine was known to be growing up and around the “anjali” tree – “thaal” and “anjali” joined up became “thaallumanjili”. In course of time the family name altered to reflect this new description, and due to phonetic changes over time, that branch of the Karimattam family obtained the present day name Thalanany.
Aviraham Karimattam’s other sons established family branches who also changed their surname from Karimattam to new ones that reflected the sites they lived in – and thus we have Kandam, Uzhakkal, Kallupurakakkom, Thalanany, and the remnant branch of the family that retained the surname Karimattam.
Around the same time that Joseph Thalanany had settled in Melampara, two other families settled not too far from the Thalanany homestead. One was the Karuparambil family, and the other was the Chunkapura family.
There is only limited information on the subsequent history of the other branches of the Karimattam family. It is known that a priest was ordained from the Kallupurakakkom family, Rev Fr Sebastian Kallupurakakkom, who was sent to Mesopotamia, and returned to the Meenachil area at some stage in the early 20th century. It is also known that at some stage in the late 19th century / early 20th century, a member of the Uzhakkal family was adopted as as an heir to the Chettukulam family. A descendant of that family was Mr Mathai Chettukulam who lived in the 20th century.
The Thalananys, the Karuparambils, and the Chunkapuras were the 3 first Syrian Catholic families to settle in Melampara, as it was then known. They were planters and opened up the land for cultivation, growing a wide variety of crops which included coconut, coffee, tapioca, rice, cassava, and spices like black pepper, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon. This planting and cultivation expanded over the decades. While this was profitable and good for the human inhabitants, it sowed the seeds for destruction of the local wildlife, and in a span of decades these became locally extinct.