Abstract
This volume is a tribute to Professor M.G.S. Narayanan, Kerala’s leading historian and, as the title of the book suggests, an ‘irreverent’ scholar, one who bows down to the authority of historical sources alone. It is therefore heartening that two volumes encompassing M.G.S.’s seminal work in the last six decades and its influence on Kerala studies have been published recently: the above volume and an edited English translation of his 1972 PhD dissertation—Perumāḷs of Kerala (2013, Cosmobooks).
The volume opens with a preface by Kesavan Veluthat, one of M.G.S.’s senior students, in which he sketches Kerala’s historiography prior to M.G.S. and elaborates on the ways in which his work has changed its face. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts: the first deals with ‘Kerala History and Culture’ while the second, termed ‘Epigraphy, Connected History and Conceptual Frameworks’, brings together various papers on South Asian historiography outside of Kerala. The first part has six papers: Christophe Vielle traces the literary history of the Paraśurāma narrative and how Kerala came to be associated with the territory he raised out of the ocean; K.N Ganesh attempts to understand the southern Veṇaṭŭ region as a ‘nāṭu’ in order to create a possible model for the formation of medieval ‘svarūpams’; Manu V. Devadevan studies transformations in the nature of property relations during the decline of the Cera state; Heike Moser (Oberlin) reflects on the innovation of Kerala’s Sanskrit theatre, Kūṭiyāṭṭam, by the modern enactment of Jaṭāyuvadham; Donald R. Davis, Jr, examines the apologetic aspect of satire, focusing on a performance text from the Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition—the Puruṣārthakkūttŭ; and Rich Freeman reconstructs the intricate network of the Āṟāṭṭupuḻa Pūram festival, exposing the ritual interrelations, mythologies and hierarchies of the participating deities.
The second part has nine papers: Krishna Mohan Shrimali deconstructs monolithic categories in the study of Indian history to reveal their inherent simplification; Daud Ali provides an overview of the intriguing image of the scribe in early medieval Sanskrit sources; Bhairabi Prasad Sahu offers an account of the political development in medieval Orissa, giving special attention to the region’s autochthonous inheritance; Upinder Singh calls for a reinvestigation of the history of caste in ancient and medieval times, viewing caste as a process rather than a static institution; Elizabeth Lambourn presents a biography of two Dravidian loan words found in documents from the Cairo Geniza; Noboru Karashima discusses the historical implications of political compacts made by local Tamil chiefs of former hill-tribe origin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; Y. Subbarayalu looks into a 1531 copperplate inscription from Tiruvannamalai, demonstrating the political importance of the supra-local ‘periyanāṭṭavar’ assembly; Venkata Raghotam considers the role of historical memory in Krishnadevaraya’s campaign against the Gajapati rulers from Orissa; finally, Nayanjot Lahiri paints a portrait of Delhi’s century as a capital since 1911.
Devadevan’s article on changes in land relations during the decline of the Cera state calls for particular comment. One of M.G.S.’s most important contributions to Kerala historiography is his description of the ninth-to-twelfth century Cera state, the last pan-regional polity to have existed in pre-modern Kerala. Former descriptions varied from repudiation of its sheer existence to its designation as an ‘empire’. With an ardent investigation of epigraphical and literary sources, M.G.S. has clarified many issues. Devadevan’s article follows the same spirit, shedding light on the way this state came to an end, to be replaced not by another centralised polity but by chiefdoms, localities and estates. Devadevan shows that if most inscriptions up to the early tenth century document the donation of large pieces of land to temples, later inscriptions cease to mention this practice and often refer to ‘kīḻīṭŭ’, a subordinate tenure which does not involve the actual transfer of ownership but the gaining of various fiscal rights. Simultaneously, we witness the rising role of private individuals and powerful landed families with respect to temple affairs and the development of hereditary tenancy of temple land.
Lambourn’s paper on the Dravidian loan words ‘tālam’ (dish, salver) and ‘fātiya’ (box, chest) in Judeo-Arabic and Yemeni-Arabic documents from the Cairo Geniza also merits special attention. These words were formerly left untranslated by Geniza scholars. Lambourn cooperated with Malayalam- and Tulu-speaking colleagues to solve the puzzle of their provenance. She follows the words’ various occurrences in the communication of medieval merchants from the Mediterranean, telling a fascinating tale about the making of Indian Ocean cultures. This is a fine example of cross-discipline cooperation, leading not only to important linguistic discoveries but also to our better understanding of the ways in which words, objects and human beings travelled and shared spaces in pre-modernity.
The volume includes many other good papers. Yet, while collective studies of pre-modern Kerala (like the first part) are extremely rare and important, the organising principle of the second part seems somewhat loose. This allows the editors to include various contributions from scholars who were influenced by M.G.S.’s work but at the same time, hinders the volume from telling a larger story than the sum of its articles. Nevertheless, it is a much-welcome addition to the bookshelf of Kerala studies.
In a pointed footnote towards the end of his own article, Davis laments the gap ‘between scholarship on Kūṭiyāṭṭam in Kerala versus scholarship from outside India’, with many non-Malayali scholars suffering from ‘an almost total lack of relevant language skills to deal with the contents, as opposed to the contexts, of Kūṭiyāṭṭam’. Davis’s own translations from the Puruṣārthakkūttŭ are amongst the finest I have read from old Malayalam. He has managed to render into fluent English some of the lively, lewd and often ironic Cākyār sense of humour. In a similar fashion, this entire volume is an important step on the way to narrowing the above-mentioned gap, found not only in Kūṭiyāṭṭam studies. Irreverent History thus stands as a worthy testimonial to a most worthy scholar.