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7 Genre and Society The Literary Culture of Premodern Kerala Rich Freeman This essay rethinks aspects of the literary culture of premodern Kerala through anthropological reflection on the social and pragmatic contexts in which those genres of textual practices we today call Malayalam literature were apparently produced. I characterize my project in this way because the Kerala materials I survey have led me to reconsider some of the basic assumptions of existing literary histories. Therefore, by way of introduction, I sketch a quick inventory of some problems that Kerala literature raises and the theoretical concerns that inform my reasoning. The writings that concern me here were produced in what is now the modern linguistic state of Kerala from roughly the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries c.e. While this body of work is treated in the literary histories as “Malayalam literature,” it is in fact not at all clear that composers of these works saw themselves as contributing to a primarily written corpus of canonical works, nor that they regarded the language varieties and hybrids in which they composed as aspiring toward a regionally standardized and uniform language medium. Until the gradually stabilizing emergence of the term “Mala437 I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for their generosity in funding this project, and to the contributors to this volume who provided various levels of valuable input and advice—especially to Sheldon Pollock. In addition, I acknowledge my individual debt to the American Philosophical Society for a research grant in the summer of 1997 that allowed me to spend several months in Kerala working on this project. In Kerala, I am most grateful to Rajan Gurukkal, Director of the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam , for his help and hospitality during those months; and to D. Vinayachandran, M.R. Raghava Variyar, and numerous other colleagues at the university, including its library staff. Finally , C.J. Mannumood generously provided me with a number of hard-to-find texts in Kottayam , and A.S. Menon gave timely assistance with an important source after my return to the United States. yalam” over the last few centuries, there was in fact no distinctive name for the local language; it was just bha3a, “speech,” in its many varieties. While models for high literature (kavya) were certainly available from Sanskrit , and some genres of vernacular textual production apparently aspired to these, others clearly did not. Yet many of these latter genres, more reliant on local Dravidian language and meter, seem just as evidently literary in their crafting of artfully formalized language registers as their Sanskritic counterparts . What they apparently lacked were the metatreatises of grammars and poetics that made some Sanskritized genres the special objects of secondary , learned discourse. The rootedness of these Dravidian works in the wider and more popular institutions of Kerala society, however, gave them perhaps as much force in advancing their own aesthetic and social values as the more self-consciously Sanskritic productions had in advancing theirs. We thus encounter, on the one hand, marked disjunctions in the aesthetics, form, language, and cultural outlook that defined certain extremes of literary activity in this society; on the other hand, we find that these very differences triggered experiments in mediation and synthesis that generated, through time, an array of intervening linguistic and poetic forms. This seems to me to require an analytic perspective in which the assumed unity of an established literary corpus, “Malayalam literature,” is rendered problematic, along with the essentialized model of language that underwrites it. Rather than assuming the unity of this literature at the outset, I therefore propose instead to proceed through differently constituted and socially positioned genres of textual practice, charting their trajectories and interactions through the different contexts and evaluative forums that I hold to comprise literary culture. The forums of literary culture (or cultures) in Kerala were mainly performative , and while my preference for talking of textual practices (rather than just texts) is theoretically motivated,1 there are also substantive grounds for enjoining this approach in the Kerala setting. It would, in fact, misrepresent the historical facts of the production and self-representation of Kerala ’s textual cultures to confine them to the modern West’s ideology of the text as an inscriptional object designed for silently individual consumption. Most of the “texts” (the actual artifacts) that constitute the region’s “literature ” (the artifactual assemblage) seem not to have been primarily intended as objects for contemplation through private reading, but...

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