Trade,markets and urbanism: Perceptions of literature from medieval Kerala

Among the problems that await serious study in the history of Kerala is the one related to trade, markets and urbanisation. This may sound somewhat surprising for two reasons. For one thing, the economy of Kerala in pre-modern times depended heavily on trade. Second, there is an abundance of material for such studies. Evidence of what has been called Roman trade in the Greco-Roman Classical accounts, statements in early Tamil literature, head-loads of Roman coins in excavated sites, and surface finds and hoards as well as fragments of Roman pottery enable the historian to study Mediterranean trade in the early historical period with confidence. The scenario is equally encouraging in relation to the early medieval period: the inscriptions granting trade privileges to Syrian Christians, Jews and Arab Muslims, documents related to what have been called ‘trade guilds’ and continuing traditions of these communities with a West Asian origin have not been exploited by the historian to the full. Coming to the period of what could be described as the ‘medieval period’ of the history of Kerala, too, we have enough evidence in the archaeology and epigraphy of the period from the time of the disintegration of the Cera kingdom of Mahodayapuram in the twelfth century. Literature of this period in both Sanskrit and Maṇipravāḷam (a mixture of Malayalam and Sanskrit) gives a picture of flourishing trade, the presence of markets and the process of urbanism. The present article is a report of an attempt to read the literary texts from this period with a view to looking at the trade, markets and urbanisation in medieval Kerala. Evidence from other sources such as archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics too will be used to illumine the arguments; but the focus will be on literature with a view to understanding the perspective that these texts had on trade, markets and urbanism.

The corpus of literature that I seek to look at for this purpose are basically texts in Maṇipravāḷam. It includes three campūkāvyas, ¹ two sandeśakāvyas, ² a sargabandha in five parts, ³ a collection of verses supposed to embody lessons given by a veteran courtesan to her daughter in their hereditary craft (vaiśikatantra), ⁴ a poem describing a city ⁵ and several shorter kāvyas and stand-alone verses (cāṭu or muktaka) brought together in one volume by modern scholars, ⁶ apart from several verses quoted as illustration in a text book of grammar, prosody and poetics called Līlātilakam. There are two sandeśakāvyas in Sanskrit which share all the characteristics of these poems: the Kokilasandeśa of Uddaṇḍa and the Śukasandeśa of Lakṣmīdāsa.

All these are generally centred on courtesans, a phenomenon characteristic of the urban life-world. Earlier scholars writing about these texts looked upon them as constituting a movement in the history of Malayalam literature—what they called the Maṇipravalam Movement. ⁷ Since their concern was largely with fixing the identity and date of the authors of these texts, they did not go to questions of economic and social history there; not to speak of their failure to appreciate the unmistakable presence of trade and urbanism in these poems. In fact, when a historian wrote a commentary on one of these texts, he remarked that ‘even though there is no place for the description of a marketplace in a sandeśakāvya, it has historical importance as [as it provides] a picture of the age. Nothing will happen if the text is read leaving out these passages’ (my emphasis). ⁸

One thing that stands out clear and unmistakable about these texts is the heavily Sanskritic kāvya stamp they bear. The genres are mainly campū and sandeśa, with one single work that can be described as a sargabandha. There are several smaller kāvyas, cāṭus and muktakas. The narrative style, too, is comparable. Nāṭakas as such are absent; but the bulk of the muktakas and cāṭus brought together in the Vaiśikatantram and Padyaratnam as well as several of the illustrations given in Līlātilakam are from the stage manuals for the performance of Sanskrit nāṭakas in the kūṭiyāṭṭam mode known as āṭṭaprakārams. The metres used are invariably Sanskrit metres such as Sragdharā, Śārdūlavikrīḍita, and smaller ones like Vasantatilakā, Anuṣṭubha and Āryā. Interestingly, the sandeśakāvyas use Mandākrāntā, the metre that Kālidāsa has used in his Meghasandeśa, as if the use of any other metre would make it less than a sandeśakāvya! Dravidian metres, which are used in the Malayalam pāṭṭu that had become a popular genre by then, are scrupulously avoided in the verses, although the ‘prose’ (gadya) in the campūs is highly rhythm-bound, where the rhythm of some Dravidian metres could be identified.

Maṇipravāḷam’s total dependence on the kāvya tradition does not just begin or end with these external features or the prescriptive aspects of prosody, poetics or rhetoric—it goes beyond both form and theory. A reading of the texts shows that these texts are permeated through and through with the urban sensibility that kāvyas in Sanskrit express. The failure to appreciate this has obscured the central features of Maṇipravāḷam poetry, namely, its urban life-world, the definitive influence of Kāmasūtra on the one side and the literary theories in Sanskrit starting with the Nāṭyśāstra on the other, and other matters of detail. This putative urban world of Maṇipravāḷam was inhabited by the gaṇikās (‘public women’) and their ceṭis (‘servant-maids’), the nagarakas (‘men-about-town’), the viṭas (‘libertines’), the lampaṭas (the ‘profligate’) and so on, apart from the celestial apsarās, gandharvas, cāraṇas, siddhas, yakṣas, kiṁnaras, vidyādharas, et al., who frequent these kāvyas on various missions, a feature that has been demonstrated as characteristic of Sanskrit kāvya poetry. ⁹

This imaginaire can be seen as having its basis in a real urban experience that Kerala went through in the medieval period. There is strong reason to believe that trade and urbanisation had reached a relatively high level in Kerala. The texts describe towns very elaborately. Thus, the Uṇṇiyaccīcaritam has a lengthy passage on the town of Tirumarutūr. ¹⁰ In describing Tirumarutūr, the poet says that it is superior in all respects to not only towns like Aḷakā, Laṁkā, Bhogavatī, Amarāvatī (which may have existed only in the poet’s imagination), but also Kollam, Koṭuṅṅallūr, Vaḷḷuvanagarappaḷḷi, Kuṇavāy, Maṁgalapuram and Dōrasamudram (of which he may have had first-hand knowledge). Similarly, the Uṇṇiyāṭīcaritam’s description of the town of Śrīparvatam, with its busy marketplace, concludes with the statement that it was equal to Kōḻikkoṭu, Kollam, Vayaṉāṭu, Mutukōṭṭūr, Kuḷamūkku and Māṭāvi, ¹¹ each of which was a prosperous trading centre in medieval Kerala. The Uṇṇunīlīsandeśam describes Kollam as putting even the town of Indra to shame: In the port there are ships, big and small, coming from far and near, crossing the ocean like the fame of the ruler of Vēṇāṭu. In short, there is no place equal to it in the 14 worlds. ¹² The market of Kariyanāṭṭukāvu is described as unequalled even by Kōḻikkōṭu and Kollam, although the goddess of prosperity along with all people gathered there withdraw from there by the evening, and not a child will be seen there after that! ¹³

To be sure, this growth in trade was not a sudden development. It is well known that a brisk exchange had been going on between Kerala on the one side and the westerly world on the other. Although historians have raised the question as to how far this can be described as the instituted process of trade; ¹⁴ the importance of the contacts that this had opened out cannot be denied. Even after the decline of the Roman Empire and the drying out of what has been called ‘Roman trade’, the westerly contacts of Kerala continued with the Jews, the Syrian Christians and Muslims coming as merchants from West Asia. Documents such as the Syrian Christian Copper Plates (AD 849), the Jewish Copper Plates (AD 1000) and the Vīrarāghava Copper Plates (AD 1225), ¹⁵ on which considerable literature is available, present unimpeachable evidence of the brisk trade going on in the port towns such as Kollam and Kodungallur. It was a continuation of this that we see in the subsequent centuries, with a greater participation of the Arab and Chinese players in the process.

Another factor in this continuity and even expansion of trade in this period was the diversification of agriculture. Much of the wetland in Kerala had been utilised for rice cultivation by the time of the Cēra kingdom of Mahōdayapuram (AD 800–1124). Dry land, known as paṟampu or purayiṭam, which later came to be known as ‘garden land’, was gradually being exploited, particularly for purposes of cultivating what are known as ‘commercial crops’ such as coconut, areca nut, pepper, betel leaves, etc. Raghava Varier and Rajan Gurukkal have described this as the ‘paṟampu–purayiṭam system of economy’. ¹⁶ Inscriptions from the twelfth century onwards point to the increased use of such dry land. ¹⁷ A verse in Śukasandeśa, a Sanskrit kāvya from Kerala in this period, describes Kerala as ‘rich in coconut and areca palms on which climb pepper and betel vines’. ¹⁸ Accounts of trade contained in the writings of Arab, Jewish, Chinese and European travellers mention precisely these as the items that were traded in from the port towns of Kerala. Apart from this development of the production of tradable surplus, there was also a growing demand for these products in the international market. West Asian trade continued in the hands of Jewish, Syrian Christian and Muslim traders. Chinese trade opened up on a large scale by the twelfth–thirteenth centuries. European travellers also visited the coast of Kerala, trade being one of their primary interests. ¹⁹ This growth in trade brought in its train the rise of urban centres and urbanism.

Apart from mentioning the names of these towns and making comparisons among them, the texts contain detailed descriptions of marketplaces in individual towns. True, many of these descriptions are stereotypical; but it can hardly be denied that the stereotype itself is based on the reality of a marketplace in a town. Thus we have elaborate accounts of the marketplace of Tirumarutūr in Uṇṇiyaccīcaritam, ²⁰ of Kaṇṭiyūr in Uṇṇiyāṭīcaritam, ²¹ of Āyāṉārciṟa in Uṇṇiccirutēvīcaritam, ²² and of various towns in Uṇṇunīlīsandeśam. ²³ In the descriptions of these marketplaces are accounts of the various articles which were bought and sold in these markets. They included local products as well as items which were imported from places far afield such as China and Arabia. Nearly every text, describing a market, speaks about the quarrels among the vendors gathered there, the acrid tongue of the fishwives, the unintelligible speech of people from far-off places and so on. ²⁴ The price of an Arabian horse is mentioned in one place. ²⁵ Ships from China as well as the Coromandel Coast are described in the Uṇṇunīlīsandeśam as docking in the port of Kollam. ²⁶ Texts abound in metaphors of ships. Thus, a ship approaching the port is used as metaphor to describe a woman going to a man. ²⁷ The heroine’s prudence is likened to a ship steered properly. ²⁸ Similarly, the circumlocution of a woman is compared to a ship in the ocean. ²⁹

Incidentally, remains of Chinese and Arabic pottery dating from this period (thirteenth–sixteenth centuries) have been discovered in huge quantities from Kollam and other coastal towns of Kerala. ³⁰ This has to be read with descriptions of these towns by Arab and Chinese travellers in this period. So also, the texts give detailed accounts of the varieties of coins transacted in these marketplaces. It is interesting that, apart from local issues such as kāśu, kaḻañcu, kāṇam, accu, āṉayaccu, etc., even foreign coins such as tiramam (for dirham) and aśaravi (for ashrafi) find a place in the lists. ³¹ On the whole, therefore, there is reason to believe that there was brisk trade and a concomitant urban atmosphere in many centres in Kerala in this period. The towns and marketplaces in the Maṇipravāḷam texts are not just matters of imagination, although the image of the urban, as carried in the kāvya literature in Sanskrit, may have heavily influenced the authors.

Urbanism was not just about the existence of trade and marketplaces. Although it is argued that marketplaces constituted the ‘core’ of the urban space structure, ³² there were other parts of the town which were no less of ‘cores’, depending upon the point of reference from which one is looking at it. ³³ The Maṇipravāḷam texts describe other aspects of the towns as well, such as the ‘royal’ palaces, the temples, other residential mansions, the roads, gardens, tanks and so on in relation to the towns, the references being too many to be quoted. Towns were also places where the nagarakas (men-about-town) lived. The description of one of the paramours of Uṇṇiyaccī is as if it is copied from the Nagarakavṛtta in the Kāmasūtra: ‘wearing sandals, smearing his body with musk and vermilion, exuding fragrance of sandalwood and aloe…’ ³⁴ Similar descriptions are available in Uṇṇiyāṭīcaritam, ³⁵ Candrotsavam, ³⁶ etc. So also, there is the presence of other kinds of profligate libertines that the Kāmasūtra speaks about, although they do not play any central role in the texts. ³⁷

We have descriptions of the courtesans which answer, to the last detail, to what the Sanskrit kāvyas see in them. There is, however, a major difference. While the gaṇikā is generally the female counterpart of the nagaraka in Sanskrit literature, ³⁸ they are the central figures in Maṇipravāḷam. This is no contradiction; but it is important that the nagaraka hero’s presence is much less visible than that of the gaṇikā heroine who is ubiquitous in the texts. This may be explained against the peculiar social reality in Kerala. Most non-Brāhmaṇa upper castes were matrilineal and women had a much stronger presence in Kerala. Marriage as an institution was not very deeply entrenched, with sambandham or a somewhat loose liaison being the accepted practice. It was not just that the Nampūtiri Brāhmaṇas courted such alliances—members of other castes too entered into such alliances from one’s own caste or from other, upper castes. Women in such a situation had a greater presence than men. Thus it may be said, even at the expense of using an oxymoron, that the nagarakas or man-about-town hero had only an absent presence in Maṇipravāḷam.

It may sound tautological to say that the over-all urban sensibility which these poems exude and the presence of the men-about-town in them are evidence of the high degree urbanism that had been achieved in Kerala in the period of these texts. Even the beautiful vignettes of the countryside that we have in these poems can be shown as the perspective of the townsmen, much in the same way as the town is perceived by young hermits in the Abhijñānaśākuntalam. The point of the centrality of urban characters such as the nagaraka and gaṇikā in these poems needs reiteration for two reasons. For one, these texts have not been read from this point of view at all. Such historical writing as is available on them looks at them as products of the landed class of Nampūtiris. This is not the case. Second, our way of reading the texts may hopefully introduce a methodological shift, what I should call a literary (re)turn in historical writing.