address to the audience, and these developed their own genres ranging from prose
retellings (gadyam) in a lexically Sanskritic but grammatically local form of Kerala
language, to special compositions (prabandhams) that mixed Man.iprava ̄l.am-style
verses with prose (a form known as campu). The prose, gadyamcompositions, were
apparently recited by the Nambya ̄r caste of temple drummers, while the campu
works were performed by the somewhat higher-caste actors of the Ca ̄kya ̄r caste.
While this interspersing of verse and prose in the campu ̄(to use the Sanskrit
spelling) emerged at a pan-Indic level in Sanskrit with Bhoja, in the eleventh
century, its popularity in south India, and its special adaptation in Kerala, seems
closely related to the context of performance and its social moorings there. In
the first place, much of the so-called “prose” of the campuswas in fact in local
Dravidian meters. Since these did not qualify as “verse” (padyam) under Sanskrit
poetic typologies, they had to be smuggled in, as it were, under the label of
“prose” (gadyam) between the metrically Sanskrit verses of Man.iprava ̄l.am, to
form the matrix of the Malayalam campu. These Dravidian “prose” sections seem
to be functionally adapted not only to the main description and story line of the
Puranic myths, but also to weave in commentary, and especially, social obser-
vations and satire, often with the force of recontextualizing the myths in the
social setting of contemporary Kerala culture.
This points up several crucial features of the performance traditions of Kerala
in relation to Malayalam literature. First, it was such traditions that we think of
as the “performing arts” which mediated much of the Sanskrit religious tradition
into Kerala culture. It was actors in the temple-theater who seem first to have
developed special elaborating sub-genres, as ancillaries to the main performance.
With time, these appear to have become more popular, increasingly independent,
and eventually to have left the interior of the temple-theater to circulate in the
wider society. In this context, we should also keep in mind that while “theater”
tends to suggest the primary function of secular entertainment in the modern
West, both the Sanskrit theatrical performances and their subsequent transfor-
mations were fundamentally religious rituals in Kerala (Jones 1984).
Relatedly, we have to realize that much of what our print-culture thinks
of, and therefore receives, interprets, and reconstructs after our book-form as
comprising “Malayalam literature,” often comprises only the text-artifacts, the
mnemonic props of performative genres. Though the campuemerges in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the dominant genre of “literature,” the degree
of borrowing and transposing of whole chunks of composition between works
and authors, coupled with frequent direct address to and descriptions of
audiences, leaves little doubt that these works were performed in some partly-
improvisational, public forum. This public was almost certainly gathered on cal-
endrically ritual occasions, in the context of temple festivals. The Dravidian form
of the poetic “prose,” coupled with the satiric elements, often with Brahmans
and their institutions themselves as the target, suggests that the audience
constituency was wider and less exclusive than that of the Sanskritic theater.
This indicates the final, socially significant trajectories of performative context
that become more pronounced, finding their way increasingly into literary
inscription with time. I refer here to contestatory social forces, both outside Brah-
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