There are a few problems with the lede on polyandry 1 Only a small minority of Nairs in Central Kerala practiced this The vast majority of those in the South and North didn t practiced it Central Nairs are mostly Charna Nairs who rank lower than Kiryathils of the North and Illath of South 2 Polyandry was widely practiced in Kerala and the main practitioners of it were not Nairs but lower ranking Savarna castes such as Kammalans 3 Sources about polyandry are written by a few European researchers who don t have first hand experience about this and many of them haven t even visited Kerala The last recorded instance of polyandry among Nairs date back to mid 19th century Not 1900 4 There are travelogues written by many European explorers like Duarte Barbosa and none of them mentions polyandry But every single one of them mentions about the martial traditions of Nairs I find it quite ironic that the martial history is completely ignored and POV prone issues like polyandry are given undue weight however a few Evangelical Christian editors who are super active here for the past 2 3 months will disagree with this statement 160 80 2 8