The locally Dravidian impulses of the theater finally break out, in the seven-
teenth century, colonizing the Sanskrit frames themselves with local motifs and
language, in the birth of the Malayalam temple-theater form, Kathakal.i (Zarrilli
2000). Actors need no longer be part of the interior temple-servant castes, but
are prominently drawn from the martial castes and bring their themes and
narratives in with them. Formerly “demonic” roles may come to overshadow
those of the gods (as in the Ra ̄van.avijayam); the goddess Ka ̄l.i, arrayed as a spirit-
possessed hellion from village festivals, leaps from the stage to cavort through
the audience; and Narasim.ha enacts the disembowelment of his demonic adver-
sary with simulated bloody entrails, recalling the stunts of the Malayans from
their gibbets in the Tirunil
̄
alma ̄la. While still Sanskritic by the standard of village
religious festivals, Kathakal.i was the genius of locally competing courts, and
their martial retainers, yet it brought to the Malayalam language the performa-
tive patina of a classical temple-art, still partly sequestered as a high ritual form
from the bulk of the “polluting” castes.
The Ferment of Popular Religiosity
In the world outside the temple, in the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century interim
between Cerus ́s ́e ̄ri and the birth of Kathakal.i, the tradition ofS ́u ̄dradevotional-
ism found in the Niran.am poets is taken up by Tuñcattu El
̄
uttacchan, often con-
sidered the father of Malayalam, proper (Achyuta Menon 1940). While using
an array of local Dravidian meters, always in simple couplets, his language effec-
tively effaces any lexical distinction between Man.iprava ̄l.am and Pa ̄t.t.u styles,
wedding them in a medium that seems distinctively modern. His principal work,
theAdhya ̄tma-Ra ̄ma ̄yan.am, is taken not from the classical archetype of Va ̄lmı ̄ki,
but from the fourteenth-century work of popular devotion of the same name.
Like its namesake, El
̄
uttacchan’s work follows the later bhakti interpretation
of Ra ̄ma as fully empowered godhead incarnate in this world, and teaches the
simplistic path of repeating his sacred name as fulfilling all earthly desires and
leading to liberation.
While we have no firm historical evidence for the individual, Tuñcattu
El
̄
uttacchan (his personal name itself being in dispute), we can surmise some-
thing of the social import of his work and the new movement he typifies. He was
either the founder or star pupil of a religious institution that housed both
Brahman and S ́u ̄ dra literary-religious notables under the patronage of a local
chieftain in north-central Kerala. The historical details remain shadowy, but
stories report that he was the offspring of a Brahman–S ́u ̄ dra union. El
̄
uttacchan
itself is a title (literally “father of letters”), used in recent centuries for school-
masters, generally of higher S ́u ̄ dra caste, who imparted basic literacy to the
“clean” castes in village settings.
That such literacy became widespread is testified to by the enormous number
of manuscripts of the Adhya ̄tma Ra ̄ma ̄yan.am, the largest by far for any premod-
the literature of hinduism in malayalam 173