the impetus of bhakti,exerted a persistent vernacular pressure from below. We
have seen how with time, the distance between the strata closed, as newer
mediating forms of performance, and new forums of literature, emerged under
changed historical circumstances. These were still explicitly religious in their
motivation, however, and it is not until the modern transformation that these
fundamentally Hindu ideologies and institutions – as internally conflictual as
they were – came to be finally eclipsed by the conscious emergence of social
relations in their own right as the fount of literary production.
Notes
1 While I take Pollock’s point (1998) that we must be cautious in the facile assump-
tion that vernacular literacy was fundamentally driven by a concern with propa-
gating religion in popular milieus – recognizing that literary cultures were just as
often imbricated with the political aspirations of regional elites – it seems nonethe-
less clear that the epistemes that framed these efforts were, almost inevitably, reli-
giously valorized. The challenge is to understand how the political and religious
articulated in terms of local social bases, transregional cultural forms, and their
histories of interaction.
2 The Dravidian language family comprises the four literary languages of peninsular
southern India (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu), and a score of unwrit-
ten tribal languages scattered mostly across southern and central India. These lan-
guages are historically unrelated to, and clearly predate the arrival of, Sanskrit and
its related Indo-Aryan languages in north India. The distribution of these major lan-
guages in the south further coincides with uniquely related institutions of kinship,
political and religious culture that were indigenously recognized under the term
Dra ̄vid.amany centuries before the modern Tamils co-opted the linguistic label,
Dravidian, for their contemporary political movements. On the antiquity of these
cultural interrelationships, see Trautmann (1981), Freeman (1988), and my
accompanying chapter, this volume, on the teyyamtradition of Kerala.
3 The standard, and most readily available, histories of Malayalam literature in
English are Nair (1967), George (1968), and Chaitanya (1971). Relevant work in
Malayalam is extensive, but will be cited here only where I owe a direct debt to an
author, and for text-citations. My own attempts to rethink this field in light of my
social scientific and historical interests, with fuller Malayalam citations can be
found in Freeman (1998, and forthcoming).
4 A thorough and scholarly study of religion in the Can.kam period is wanting. A
number of relevant sections in Hart (1975) and Hardy (1983) are helpful. In the
characterization that follows, I rely on these, scattered characterizations through
the literature on the Can.kam traditions, and my own study of the texts.
5 The historical nature of polity in medieval Kerala, particularly around the puta-
tively revived Ce ̄ra line of Maho ̄dayapuram, can only be sketchily reconstructed
from a relatively poor inscriptional record and little by way of reliable archeology.
While various degrees of formative centralization are argued for this period of the
ninth to eleventh centuries, historians (Gurukkal 1992, Menon 1980, Narayanan
1996) all are agreed as to the subsequent fractionated patchwork of independent
kingdoms in which all the extant literature we today call Malayalam was produced.178 rich freeman