complexes of lush eroticism and graphic violence that motivated these carried
forward into the Sanskritization of Tamil literature. Known as the “Tamil
Bhakti” movement that commenced in the sixth century ce, this literature rep-
resented the mapping of mythological themes from the Sanskrit Pura ̄n.as into
the indigenous literary forms. As a socioreligious movement, this was coincident
with the revival of Tamil kingdoms in new state forms, institutionally centered
on the emergence of structural temples, as cultural centers built on and linking
together the village structure of these kingdoms’ agrarian economies. The orig-
inally local deities of these temples were Sanskritized into either the Vais.n.ava or
S ́aiva Puranic pantheons, and celebrated in new liturgical song-literatures by
poet-saints who revealed the gods’ presence through divine visions and inspira-
tion, and who became the subject of their own hagiographies as the saints of
Tamil Vais.n.avism, the A ̄l
̄
va ̄rs, and those of S ́aivism, the Na ̄yan
̄ma ̄rs (Narayanan
1994, Peterson 1991). While the earlier genre distinctions between love and
war poetry merged in the new bhakti works, the earlier aesthetic and emotional
energies of the Tamil ethos adapted readily to the new religious themes (Cutler
1987). The martial impetus was transferred to the battles of gods with their
demonic adversaries (or sometimes with each other), as well as to violence of the
god against the devotee, of devotees against sectarian rivals, and of devotees
against themselves or their loved ones in acts of self-mutilation and sacrifice
(Hudson 1989). Similarly, erotic longings were displaced from human relations
to those of longing and devotion between devotee and deity. In many of these
saints’ poetic utterances, we find clear resonance with the earlier ecstatic
mediums, where the longing for bodily and psychic union suggests possession
(Yocum 1982). The link between Tamil sovereigns and the deities who repre-
sented them likewise remained powerful, though it now accommodated a
Brahmanical complement that was specialized in religious pursuits which
emerged as a distinctive institutional domain: on the one hand, there was
patronage of an essentially Indo-Aryan Vedic ritual cult, and on the other, an
increasing Brahmanization of the hybrid temple culture whose roots were in
Dravidian ancestral shrines (Hart and Heifetz 1999).
Kerala participated in this new bhakti paradigm to a certain extent, but unlike
the earlier Can.kam tradition, we have only a smattering of Tamil literary sources
attributed to Kerala chiefs or kings, and only a dozen or so temple sites in the
region that seemed to participate in what became a predominantly eastern Tamil
complex. Linguistically, Tamil had shifted from the language of Can.kam com-
position into Middle Tamil, and around this time, from the early ninth century,
the first Kerala inscriptions attest the divergence of local language into a dis-
tinctively regional dialect that anticipates the later emergence of Malayalam
(Sekhar, 1953; Ayyar, 1983 [1936]). While there was certainly no “Hundred
Years’ War” between the Co ̄l
̄
as and Ce ̄ras that an earlier generation of historians
invented to account for the political-cultural break between the regions, there
can be no doubt that Kerala’s cultural divergence from Tamil developments was
marked by repeated warring across the Ghats, and that the tenth-century rise of
162 rich freeman