Mūlabhadra (മൂലഭദ്ര) aka Mūlabhadri ( :ml:മൂലഭദ്രി) was a secret method of communication employed by the royal spies of the erstwhile

Travancore Kingdom The Kingdom of Travancore ( /ˈtrævənkɔːr/), also known as the Kingdom of Thiruvithamkoor, was an Indian kingdom from c. 1729 until 1949. It was ruled by the Travancore Royal Family from Padmanabhapuram, and later Thiruvananthapuram. At ...

during the medieval period. The scheme was also colloquially referred to as Mūlapatra. It was essentially a cryptographic scheme involving a partial transposition of the letters of the

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was des ...

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

. The scheme had been extensively used by King Marthanda Varma (1706–1758) of

and his spies both for oral and written communication of messages. It was a fixed one-time unchangeable code in as much as it did not employ any key in its implementation in contrast to modern methods of substitution ciphers involving the utilisation of a key for generating a system of codes. ''Mūlabhadra'' is the only such scheme known to have been used in governance in this part of India during this period.The only known speaker of the language currently is K. N. Mohan, Ettumanoor, Kottayam district, Kerala.

The scheme

The following tables give the transposition scheme used in the ''Mulabhadra'' code.

Vowels

Consonants

Chillus

Mnemonic

The users had developed a

mnemonic A mnemonic ( ) device, or memory device, is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory for better understanding. Mnemonics make use of elaborative encoding, retrieval cues, and imag ...

to learn and remember this language. The mnemonic was very similar to

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

slokas Shloka or śloka ( sa, श्लोक , from the root , Macdonell, Arthur A., ''A Sanskrit Grammar for Students'', Appendix II, p. 232 (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 1927). in a broader sense, according to Monier-Williams's dictionary, is ...

. അകോഖഗോഘങശ്ചൈവ ചടോഞണതപോമനഃ യശോരഷോലസശ്ചൈവ

Examples

References

{{reflist History of cryptography Military communications Kingdom of Travancore