society and hold them up for critique against the projected religious values.^15 The
roles of Epic kings, soldiery, and Brahmans, for instance, are filled out by Kerala
chieftains, Na ̄yar-caste militia, and Nampu ̄ tiris, with all of their contemporary
circumstances and foibles archly displayed. Nambya ̄r wrote at the time when
early modern states (most notably Travancore) were developing and crushing the
old local orders, and historians can clearly read in his satire the problematic shifts
in the agrarian and mercantile order of medieval Kerala that would eventuate in
colonialism and modernity. This mode of critique was played out in the language
itself, both in overt criticisms of high Sanskritic style, which he states held no
charm for the common populace, and in deliberate sporting with different lin-
guistic registers, including hyper-Sanskritic stretches that were clearly playful
(Gan.e ̄s ́ 1996). While modern Kerala literature is most noted for its focus on social
problems and reform, it is interesting to consider Nambya ̄r as the harbinger of
this trend, sitting on the cusp of the late medieval and early modern periods. In
Nambya ̄r’s case, though, this observation and criticism of his surrounding
society was wrought entirely in the mode of “traditional” Hindu mythology, in
frames derived from, but equally subversive of, the high pretensions of Sanskrit.
I conclude my overview in this way with Nambya ̄r, since he is usually con-
sidered the last stellar Kerala writer of the premodern period. With the penetra-
tion of colonial powers (to which Nambya ̄r already alludes in several places), the
entire context of Kerala literature undergoes a series of progressive shifts into
modernity. Perhaps the most massively reorienting is the epistemic shift from a
frame which assumes that the context of literature is continuous with the insti-
tutions of Kerala’s Hinduism, to one in which the possibilities of a secular, mate-
rially transformative, and revolutionary social vision were opened up, with
literature as its sounding board. Yet from another perspective, one could, I think,
read the earlier articulation of literature, even in its pervasively Hindu mode, as
registering within it all of the tensions of its social and regional context, as these
were reconfigured through the forces of history.
In summation, we have seen how the “Hinduism” of Kerala can be traced
through a series of literary reworkings in linguistic, poetic, and semantic form
and content. From its early origins as part of an autonomously Dravidian reli-
gion of the immanent powers of nature and human society, worshipped through
the charismatic force of local chiefs, the ancestral dead, and spirit possessed
oracles, it developed a bhakti idiom of devotion that accommodated the north
Indian gods of Sanskritic Brahmanism and its priestly class of literati to the
martial and productive forces of the land. The sociocultural differences were pri-
marily mediated through the temple and its various performative arts, and the
articulation of these with popular shrines through religious festivals and
the folk-forms. These parallel religious worlds, coinciding with the schism in
caste blocs and ritual norms of purity, were equally registered by the split in
early Malayalam between two distinctive genres of poetic and thematic form –
Man.iprava ̄l.am and Pa ̄t.t.u. I have suggested, however, that the religious environ-
ment of tantrism, entangled with the sexual politics of intercaste relations and
the material concerns of sorcery, worked towards synthesis from above, while
the literature of hinduism in malayalam 177