Both of these thematic divisions of social life were emotionally explored through
imaging moods and feelings in a semiotic coding keyed to the flora and fauna of
a conventional set of landscapes (tin.ai) distinctive to Tamil
̄
akam (Ramanujan
1967; see pp. 146–7 above).
Most interestingly, in the larger Indian context, this Can.kam literature seems
essentially secular and worldly in terms of its subjective concerns and artistic
purpose. Objectively, however, there is considerable reportage of the indigenous
forms of religious life in Kerala and the greater Tamil country before the major
impact of Sanskritic Puranic culture. While this is not the place for an extended
treatment of Can.kam religion, I will hazard to sketch some of its prominent
features, as the substratum of later religious-literary developments in Kerala.^4
First, religion was not centered on a sacerdotal, priestly class, like the
Brahmans, but rather gave prominence to the ritual functions of kings and
chiefs on the one hand, and to relatively lower status spirit-possessed oracles and
mediums, on the other. The sacred, rather than tending towards the transcen-
dence of Brahmanical Hindu schemes, was thus experienced in the form of
immanent powers: immanent to the life of society in the persons of its political
leaders, and immanent in the natural powers of life and death, through the
oracles. The two formed a related circuit in that kings, as heads of warrior soci-
eties, presided over an economy of death that was viewed positively as the fertile
basis for social prosperity, while the oracles trafficked in the powers of the result-
ing heroic dead who were promoted to the status of gods, and whose shrines
formed the sites of spirit-possessed worship by the kings. Battle was a form of
sacrificial religion, striving to appropriate the life-force (uyir) of others, while
sacrificial religion was a substitute battle, a celebration of past blood-letting, and
the promise and foretaste to ancestral deities of battles to come. This assimila-
tion was lexicalized in the word kal.am, which meant at once the threshing floor
for gathering one’s agricultural yield, the field of battle, and the sacred space for
sacrifice. In the rites of worship, political authorities orchestrated the death-rites
of blood sacrifice, while the bodies of mediums became the vehicles for divinized
spirits of the ancestral dead who danced, offered oracular pronouncements, and
expressed their desires and pleasures.
While this complex of spirit-possessed dancing and blood-sacrifice is viewed in
modern times as “folk” religion, for many centuries this was the “classical” reli-
gion of high civilization in south India. It has persisted among the rural domi-
nants at a level of formalized worship in this region that is reminiscent of the royal
legacy, harboring an alternate sacred order that persists under the later edifice of
Sanskritic Hinduism. It is important to keep this in mind because despite the
prominence given to Brahmanically Sanskritic models in south India, Brahmans
remained a thinly distributed elite atop indigenously organized warrior societies
throughout this region, until the latter were dismantled under European colo-
nialism. This was especially so in Kerala, where even the kinship system of the
dominant warrior castes was shaped by the exigencies of perpetual warfare.
While the organization of Can.kam literature around the thematic bifurcation
into love and war genres was primarily secular, the powerful emotional
the literature of hinduism in malayalam 161