manism and within it, that tend to fragment adherence to any monolithic set of
social-literary norms. They derive their strength both from a wider and lower-
caste patronage base and literary constituency, conjoined with competitive
cleavages among Brahmanical authors who are aligned with different social
groups. As an example, during approximately the same period in the fifteenth
century when Punam Nampu ̄tiri was composing and performing his great
Ra ̄ma ̄yan.a Campu, an artfully woven pastiche of lively Dravidian “prose,” high
Man.iprava ̄l.am, and Sanskrit passages from Bhoja’s own campu ̄form of the epic,
Cerrs ́s ́e ̄ri, another Nampu ̄tiri Brahman, had composed his famous Kr.s.n.a Ga ̄tha.
This latter work is entirely in a simple Dravidian meter of song (ga ̄tha), explic-
itly commissioned by a local king of northern Kerala. Its composition in this
meter, suggests that it was intended to be sung. While Kerala scholars put it in
the Pa ̄t.t.u genre, based on its linguistic and metrical form and its subject-matter
on the life of Lord Kr.s.n.a taken from the Sanskrit Bha ̄gavata Pura ̄n.a, other fea-
tures mark it out as diverging significantly from works like those of the non-
Brahman Niran.am poets. What is firstly always noted as most remarkable in
Cerus ́s ́e ̄ri’s work, is that despite its composition in Dravidian meter and vocabu-
lary at the level of content, he has managed to formally work this material into
the poetic figures of sound and sense (alam.ka ̄ra) that were the hallmark of high
Sanskrit literature. The second feature, far more troubling to modern sensibili-
ties, is the amount of erotic sentiment (s ́r.n.ga ̄ra) that he seems to develop and
savor in this ostensibly devotional project. In this regard the feeling-tone of
certain sections is sometimes more like the classically erotic Man.iprava ̄l.am.
While modern scholars tend to either disparage these erotic themes as marring
an otherwise fine devotional piece with Brahmanically decadent values, or deny
the erotic intention altogether through interpretively subsuming it in a higher
form of devotion, I would not rule out the pervasive influence of the tantric
milieu (and erotic modes of bhakti, as well) in which sexuality was given an
explicitly positive valuation within a religious framework.
A larger point to be noted here is that after the early courtesan romances, the
important works of Malayalam, whether in the Pa ̄t.t.u or Man.iprava ̄l.am styles,
are nearly all based on adaptations of Sanskrit Epic and Puranic myths. Being
rooted as they are in performative traditions, however, they simultaneously
adapt the religious themes of those myths to the particular social context of
Kerala, while they offer the mythic models as an interpretive frame for that social
context. Moreover, since Kerala society was stratified by partly congruent dis-
tinctions of caste, class, and ethnolinguistic affiliation, these performative and
literary adaptations bear the internal structural strains of social contestation.
Bakhtinian notions of multivocality are clearly in evidence. The initial asides of
gloss, commentary, or satire within Sanskrit drama, widen into the wedge of
Dravidian “prose,” by which all kinds of local myths and context are inserted
into Puranic frames. On the Brahmanical side, Cerus ́s ́e ̄ri seizes on the form and
language of his lower-caste predecessors; on the non-Brahman front, from the
Niran.am poets onward, authors lend their local bhakti a Brahmanical veneer
with the full lexical embrace of Sanskrit.
172 rich freeman