In another passage, corpses severed of their heads, wander around as if
looking for something they’ve lost (i.e., their heads!), then tiring of the search,
sportively join in a ta ̄n.d.avadance around the field of battle (20.10). Still another
stanza weaves a fantastic trope: as the blood from the rent bodies of demons, the
Va ̄nara monkey allies of Ra ̄ma, and their various fallen mounts gushes out on
the battlefield, it comingles into a river; the rows of faces floating in that river
are its lotus flowers; the combatants’ crushed teeth (or pearls) are the river’s
sands; the soldiers’ floating trunks are alligators; their viscera are the water-
plants; their swishing banners are crocodiles; their parasols are lotus leaves; and
the maddened elephants are the river’s boulders (23.4).
While the bulk of the separate events and characters in the Ra ̄macaritam
closely correspond to the Sanskrit Ra ̄ma ̄yan.a,its narrative restructuring, poetic
form, and much of the imagery clearly suggest a different ethos and aesthetic that
has recast the work in a classically Dravidian mold of martial devotion. When we
pair this with the Tirunil
̄
alma ̄lawe get a clear sense that the bhakti of early Kerala
had a rather different tenor from what the Christian missionaries and modern
apologists have rather selectively emphasized in presenting south Indian devo-
tionalism for cosmopolitan consumption.^7 In many ways the myths and ethos of
contemporary, and especially lower-caste, folk-forms fit very comfortably with
these earlier images of immanent, violent powers, and this suggests a continuity
of religious perspective that sits athwart the divide of caste and class-status.
The Early Sanskrit Genre ofMan.iprava ̄l.am
Linguistically and poetically, such relative continuities are evident in Kerala lit-
erature in those genres that, like the two texts we have just reviewed, conformed
to canons recognizably affiliated with Tamil literary models. The first and
only premodern linguistic text treating Kerala’s language, the fourteenth-
century Lı ̄la ̄tilakam,^8 labels this first style of literary production Pa ̄t.t.u. Meaning
literally just “song,” this suggests its close association with those local per-
formative modes we might later style “folk.” At this time, however, Pa ̄t.t.u
stood as a literary genre contrasted with its highly Sanskritized counterpart,
Man.iprava ̄l.am. The name of this latter literary medium literally meant “pearls
and coral” after the image of this language as stringing together the different
gems of local language forms with those of Sanskrit. Lexically, metrically, and
phonologically (through adaptation of the Sanskrit syllabary from the grantha
script), this Man.iprava ̄l.am style sought to reshape the local “Tamil” of Kerala
on the model of high Sanskrit literature. In fact, the Lı ̄la ̄tilakamopens by declar-
ing that anything that can be done in the highest Sanskrit literature (ka ̄vya), can
be literarily accomplished in Man.iprava ̄l.am. But what these accomplishments
actually are, in the thematics of the poetry, testifies to the social life of Kerala’s
literati in a way that becomes an embarrassment to future generations.
It seems relatively clear that the principal authors in the early phase of
Man.iprava ̄l.am were those most intimately acquainted with Sanskrit, namely,
166 rich freeman