from other works (and of them from this), as well as repeated references to
an audience and to the context of a Ra ̄ma festival (Ra ̄ma ̄vata ̄ra-utsavam)
(Ven.kit.t.ara ̄ma S ́armma ̄ 1967: 104–5), all point to the performance of this and
other such works being staged in temple festivals of the higher castes. Another
thematically different set ofcampuscomes from the sixteenth-century author,
Nı ̄lakan.t.ha, who composed three of them, each on the mythology and greatness
of a different temple under the patronage of a different king.^14 Being specifically
temple-based, these works give an unusual glimpse into the social circles, rites,
and patronage base characterizing Kerala’s late medieval temples.
A similar shift, though not so marked, comes out of the sande ̄s ́a,or “messen-
ger poem” genre, in imitation of Ka ̄l.ida ̄sa’s great Sanskrit work, the Meghadu ̄ta.
While the bulk of these works in Kerala were in Sanskrit, two well-known ones
in Man.iprava ̄l.am verse seem to chart a similar thematic shift towards religious
themes. The late fourteenth-century Un.n.unı ̄lisande ̄s ́am sends its narrating
messenger over the length of southern Kerala in search of the beautiful damsel
Un.n.unı ̄li, describing a number of courtesans, their physical charms and their
associated residential and temple locales (I. Kuññan Pil.l.a, 1985 [1954]). The
Ko ̄kasande ̄s ́amof the next century, however, fails to even name the heroine of its
quest, and is given over far more to the description of temples and praise stanzas
of their associated gods (Go ̄pikkut.t.an 1996). In contrast to these two messen-
ger poems in Man.iprava ̄l.am, there were scores of them also written in Sanskrit
proper, down to the modern era. Their thematics are usually built around liter-
ary romances, as with Ka ̄l.ida ̄sa’s original, but transposed to the courts, temples
and residential palaces of Kerala.
This calls our attention to the fact that throughout the shifts from
Man.iprava ̄l.am and the various early Pa ̄t.t.u works into Malayalam proper (gen-
erally reckoned from the era of El
̄
uttacchan), and indeed into modernity, San-
skrit literary production continued a parallel life among the Brahmans and royal
courts of Kerala. This influence fed into Malayalam in the form of commentaries
and digests, particularly on ritual and its ancillary disciplines like astrology,
iconology, and architecture, as well as in guides to the complex social rituals of
Kerala’s Nampu ̄tiri Brahmans. Digests on the tantric rituals of temple worship,
for instance, span the fifteenth-century Put.ayu ̄r Bha ̄s.a, down to the eighteenth-
century Kul
̄
ikka ̄t.t.u Paccathat was eventually printed and is in common use today.
This technical ritual literature found its didactic, nonritual counterpart in the
popular stream of Dravidian song-literature inaugurated by El
̄
uttacchan. Thus
in addition to the recasting of Sanskrit Epic and Puranic literature discussed
earlier, there were a number of highly popular homiletic works that come down
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, into modern print editions. Often
these were cast in the simple folk-meters like the pa ̄nathat was named after and
used in lower-caste festivals of non-Brahmanical worship. One of the most
popular of these, the Jña ̄na Pa ̄na, by one Pu ̄nta ̄nam Nampu ̄ tiri, fuses simplified
Vedantic philosophy with the bhakti approach into a kind of synthetic Hin-
duism-for-the-masses, imparting basic notions of karma, gnosis, and liberation
(Go ̄pikkut.t.an 1989). Legend claims that Pu ̄nta ̄nam himself was not learned in
Sanskrit, and that he came from a lower division of Brahmans not entitled to
the literature of hinduism in malayalam 175