CHAPTER 8
The Literature of Hinduism
in Malayalam
Rich Freeman
The development of written literatures in India’s regional languages raises fas-
cinating issues of social history and cultural identity for every region where this
occurred, at whatever period in the subcontinent’s history (Pollock forthcom-
ing). For most of the major regional cultures in India, such literary projects were
simultaneously caught up with religious ones, for literature and learning were
cast in languages and institutions that claimed an ultimately sacerdotal and
even divine authority. Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit, though developing in Indo-
Aryan speech communities of northern India, rapidly lost their moorings in any
local tongue and spread to establish transregional literary cultures primarily in
association with Brahmanical Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. These purely
learned languages had reached every corner of the subcontinent before the
Christian era, prior to the rise of any regional language into written form. For
at least the next millennium, until the coming of Islamic polities to many parts
of medieval India these religiously sanctioned literary cultures set the frame-
work within which regional literatures had to contend in establishing and main-
taining their identities. With the notable exception of Tamil, at the extreme
south of India, every major regional literature thus crafted the preponderance
of its founding texts as religious works.^1 Even Tamil, the earliest of the regional
literary languages, which began through bardic literature of a principally
secular nature, was thoroughly transformed through popular Hindu devotion-
alism, before any other regional literatures of the subcontinent had even
appeared (Cutler 1987, Narayanan 1994, Peterson 1991).
The Malayalam literature from the region of Kerala, along India’s southwest
coast, affords an especially revealing perspective on the intersection of regional
identity, local social relations, and the religious institutions of Hinduism in south
India. This is because the Kerala tradition emerged out of an earlier Tamil cul-
tural matrix, to develop its own transformations of Sanskrit and indigenous
genres, in a complex renegotiation of literary, religious and cultural identity