Abstract
The article deals with the imagery of the Nayar (Nair) warrior caste group in two famous 16th century Venetian travelogues. These accounts were written by the merchants Cesare Federici (traveled in the Middle East and Asia in 1563–1581) and Gasparo Balbi (traveled in 1576–1588). Their descriptive particularities are compared with the ones of some Portuguese accounts of South Asia. Federici and Babli both linked their Nayar accounts to Cochin (Kochi), an ancient city, which thrived of maritime commerce. For the merchants, the Nayars seemed analogous to the European nobility, these recklessly brave noble warriors were always loyal to their king, despised death, walked barefoot, used sword and rondache in combat and had “common women”. Federici told about his personal communication with one of them. Balbi’s Nayar account is distinguished by his particular attention to the hypergamic relations between the Nayar women and Brahmin men. Balbi tried to observe the complex Hindu society of the South through the lens of the European trifunctional model. Although these Venetian authors proved to be partly dependent on the Portuguese descriptive pattern of India, their accounts contained some unique details of everyday life of 16thcentury Kerala.
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