The orthography (system for writing a language) of Malayalam is considered phonemic in nature. It means the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. But the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is not precisely one-to-one. The pronunciation of graphemes can depend on its position in a word (word beginning, middle or end) and its proximity to other graphemes.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.smc.org.in/phonetic-description-of-malayalam-consonants/