Manipravalam

          While the Pattu school flourished among certain sections of the society, the literature of the elite was composed in the curious mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam which is referred to as Manipravalam, mani meaning ruby (Malayalam) and pravalam meaning coral (Sanskrit). Lilathilakam, a work on grammar and rhetoric, written in the last quarter of the 14th century discusses the relationship between Manipravalam and Pattu as poetic forms. It lays special emphais on the types of words that blend harmoniously. It points out that the rules of Sanskrit prosody should be followed in Manipravalam poetry. This particular school of poetry was patronized by the upper classes, especially the Nambudiris. It is also to be remembered that the composition of this dialect also reflects the way Aryan and Dravidian cultures were moving towards a synthesis. Dramatic performances given in Koothampalams, known by the names of Koothu and Koodiyattom, often used Sanskrit and Malayalam. In Koodiyattom, the clown (vidooshaka) is allowed to use Malayalam while the hero recites slokas in Sanskrit. Tholan, a legendary court poet in the period of the Kulasekhara kings, is believed to have started this practice. The language of Kramadeepikas and Attaprakarams, which lay down the rules and regulations for these dramatic performances, is considerably influenced by the composite literary dialect of Manipravalam.

Early Manipravalam Works

          The earliest of these works in the Manipravalam school is Vaisika Tantram written in the 13th century. It is fairly typical of the works that appealed to the upper class reading public of those days. It contains about 200 quatrains in Sanskrit metres and is in the form of professional advice given to a prostitute or courtesan by her mother. These instructions are of a practical nature calculated to please the pampered tastes of a leisured class. But each quatrain is composed with care and due weight is given to the rules of rhetoric. For instance the mother tells the daughter, who is to get ready for the family vocation as a courtesan, that "old age is a sea to be crossed by means of the wealth earned during one's youth". Several quatrains of this type are quoted in Lilathilakam by way of illustration for the several rules of grammar and rhetoric. An example may be quoted here:

All breezes are not breezes. The real breeze is the one
That bathes in the nearby river, dances among the growing coconut trees,
Caresses the uniquely beautiful body of mistress Rohini
And comes in kindness to thrill me by blowing over me.

           Perhaps the most representative of these early Manipravalam works are the tales of courtesans (Achi Charitams) and the Message Poems (Sandesa Kavyas).

Early Champoos

          Unniyachi Charitam, Unnichiruthevi Charitam and Unniyadi Charitam are examples of the former type which is known by the name champoo, written in close imitation of the champoos in Sanskrit. The Padya or "verse" portion is in Sanskrit metres and the gadya or "prose" portion is mostly in Dravidian metres. Unniyachi is the heroine of Unniyachi Charitham and the poem is concerned with a Gandharva's love for her. There are plenty of passages of ornate description of either the heroine's charms or the splendour of the town or market place visited by her. The authorship is unknown. In Unnichiruthevi Charitham, it is Indra, the King of the Gods, who is smitten by a passion for the heroine and descends on the earth to visit her. In the course of the elaborate description of things seen by Indra, we get passages which throw light on the manners and morals of the upper class society of its time. Only a portion of the work is now available to us. Unniyadi Charitam, which also exists in a fragmented form, is supposed to be by Damodara Chakkiar. Against the backdrop of a complicated story involving generations of Gandharvas, there merges the story of Unniyadi, the heroine. The moon god happens to hear wonderful music wafted into the sky and sends his attendant Suvakan to find out its source. The poem contains the description of all that Suvakan sees on the earth, especially in places like Thrissur, Mahodayapuram and Kayamkulam.

Sandesa Kavyas

          It is natural that Manipravalam looked to Sanskrit for models of literary works. The Sandesa Kavyas are an important poetic genre in Sanskrit, and on the model of Kalidasa's Meghadoot and Lakhsmidasa's Sukasandesa, a number of message poems came to be written first in Manipravalam and later in pure Malayalam. The best of these sandesas is perhaps Unnuneelisandesam written in the 14th century. Unnuneeli is the heroine, and she and her lover live in Kaduthuruthi. One night as they as asleep, a fairy (Yakshi) carries him away and goes south. He wakes up by the time they reach Thiruvananthapuram and frees himself from the hold of the fairy. He visits Sri Padmanabha Temple and meeting Aditya Varma, a junior prince of Kollam there, engages him as a messenger to carry his news to his beloved in Kaduthuruthi. In part one, as usual, the poet describes the route to Kaduthuruthi, for the benefit of the messenger as well as the readers. In part two the actual message is described and entrusted to the messenger. The poem is a treasure house of information relating to the conditions of life in Kerala in the fourteenth century. In addition, it contains several quatrains of unexceptionable beauty, both in its thought and in its verbal felicity. In two hundred and forty stanzas, with breath-taking eroticism and exquisite imagery, this message poem reaches the high watermark of early Manipravalam poetry. It combines extreme sophistication and complexity in its poetic craft with remarkable naturalness and authenticity in its theme and thought.

The Niranam Poets

          While the Manipravala poetry flourished as a diversion from the mainstream, the tradition set up by Cheeraman of Ramacharitam and the more enlightened among the anonymous folk poets was resumed and replenished by three writers commonly referred to as Niranam poets. The Bhakti school was thus revived, and in the place of the excessive sensuality and eroticism of the Manipravala poets, the seriousness of the poetic vocation was reasserted by them. It is believed that they all belonged to the same Kannassa family and that Madhava Panikkar and Sankara Panikkar were the unless of Rama Panikkar, the youngest of the three. They lived between 1350 and 450 A.D. and made valuable contribution to the Pattu school. Madhava Panikkar wrote a condensed Malayalam translation of Bhagavad Gita, aperhaps the first ever translation of that classic into any modern Indian language. Sankara Panikkars's main work is Bharatamala, a masterly condensation of Mahabharatam, is also the first major work of its kind in Malayalam. The greatest of the three is of course Rama Panikkar, the author of Ramayanam, Bhartam, Bhagavatam and Sivarathri Mahatmyam. Kannassa Ramayanam and Kannassa Bharatam are the most important of these Niranam works. Rama Panikkar's Ramayanam is an important link between Cheeraman's Ramacharitam, Ayyappilli Asan's Ramakathappattu and Ezhuthachan's Adhytma Ramayanam. They bear eloquent testimony to the continuing popularity of the Ramayana story in Kerala. Together they constitute the strong bulwark of the Bhakti movement which enabled the Malayalis to withstand and resist the onslaught of foreign cultures. The Dravidianization of Aryan mythology and philosophy was their joint achievement, coming in the wake of the heroic effort of Sankaracharya, who wrote only in Sanskrit. The central native tradition of Malayalam poetry has its most significant watershed in the works of the Niranam poets. Their success led to the gradual replacement of the Manipravala cult of worldliness and sensual revelry by an indigenous poetics of high seriousness. One step forward from the Niranam poets will take us to Cherusseri and his Krishnagatha; two steps together will land us in the company of Kerala's greatest poet Thunchathu Ezhuthachan. The centrality of Niranam Rama Panikkar is of vital concern to any conscientious literary historian of Malayalam. The subordination of the descriptive and the narrative elements to the controlling theme is a feature of Rama Panikkar's poetic style. The killing of Thataka in the Balakanda of Kannassa Ramayanam is disposed of in one verse which helps to preserve the dramatic tension of the action.

Came she like a gigantic blue cloud,
shouting with frightening fury,
Wearing garlands of blood-dripping intestines
bearing her crescent-white tusks,
But the leader of mankind woke up to anger
and smashing her magic witchcraft
With arrows shot, saluted the rishi
and killer her at his command.

          Lakshman's furious threat to Tara when Sugriva failed to expedite the quest for Sita is another eloquent example:

Tara, your husband does not consider
what is good and what is bad without delay.
He had said, with the approach of summer
he would search for Devi without fail.
We waited so long upon that word
and then he has forgotten all that
Blind and stupid with drunkenness,
knowing neither day or night.

          Ulloor has said that Rama Panikkar holds the same position in Malayalam literature that Spenser does in English literature. His command over complex rhythms, his attention to sensuous, concrete details, his power of phrasing and perfect control over mythological material seem to lend support to this view.