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Mulabhadra
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<p>Mūlabhadra (മൂലഭദ്ര) aka Mūlabhadri (ml:മൂലഭദ്രി) was a secret method of communication employed by the royal spies of the erstwhile <a href="/facts/Travancore_Kingdom/7RRoKgwf">Travancore Kingdom</a> 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 <a href="/facts/Malayalam/YLuvDWd3">Malayalam</a> <a href="/facts/Alphabet/vqfRpS3E">alphabet</a>. The scheme had been extensively used by <a href="/facts/Marthanda_Varma/uxcqIGPe">King Marthanda Varma</a> (1706–1758) of <a href="/facts/Travancore_Kingdom/7RRoKgwf">Travancore Kingdom</a> 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. </p>