Manipravalam and Ayyappa

It has been a very long while since the last post. 'Anamika' is now an 'adult blog', having turned 18(!) in April.

The Vishnu that never was (or the Linga of Crime)

The oeuvre of late Kottayam Pushpanath, hugely prolific (1970s) author of crime novels in Malayalam, is seeing a revival of sorts. I texted Rekesh with the news and got this response:

"As a schooler, I was hooked to detective novels and at some point, started writing one. Never finished. Sis discovered the manuscript - now lost - and would pester me to complete it... Now all I remember is it was about an an underground crime city.. Literally Underground!"

I replied:
"Our Puranas talk about a flying crime city. Actually, there were three crime cities flying around in outer space and collectively called 'Tripura'. At a special moment when they were all in one line, Shiva took them out with a single well-aimed arrow ... blew them up .. and came to be known as Tripurantaka!.. Your novel would have been the Vishnu to the Purana tale's Brahma! Sad it never was!"

Note: The Brahma-Vishnu allusion explained: When Shiva manifested as the supreme Linga, Brahma flew up into the heavens to find its top and Vishnu dug deep into the Earth to find its bottom. Thus, one has lined up the Trimurtis in one single text message!
And of course, the Trimurtis had gotten together in the Tripura story as well -Brahma was Shiva's charioteer and the missile-arrow he launched was Vishnu in disguise.
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Manipravalam Metaphors
Wiki defines 'Manipravalam' as a *macaronic* language (again as per Wiki, a language that uses a mix of languages) found in some manuscripts of South India. It is a hybrid language, typically written in the Grantha script, which combines Sanskrit lexicon and Dravidian morpho-syntax. David Shulman's 'Tamil, a Biography' has some dense information on Tamil-Sanskrit Manipravalam but it is Malayalam (arguably) that had the strongest Manipravalam tradition among the 4 major Southern languages - dozens, if not hundreds, of literary works are known from the 11th to 16th centuries in Malayalam-Sanskrit Manipravalam. Let me also mention that most of these poems are erotic in nature and have resulted in the word Manipravalam itself to mean some sort of 'verbal porn'.

Note: Such 'macaronies' are not uniquely south Indian - have heard this half Persian and half Braj Ghazal by Amir Khusrau sung as a qawwali. It goes:
"Zihaal e miskeen makun taghaful
do raiye naina banaye batiya!"

My present intent is only to present in translation two Manipravala slokas. They were extracted from some short Manipravalam works compiled in a slim volume that I spotted quite recently at the usual bookstore. Curiously enough, the book had on its cover 'Impression - Sunrise' by Monet (sometime back, I mentioned here a ponderous elegy by Asan in Malayalam with Duchamps' 'Nude descending the staircase' as cover)!

1. Background: Cheriyachi is a very fetching dancing girl. A besotted admirer, who can't ever have enough of her, laments his not being in her boudoir. He has pined a whole night away - the suffering made a lot worse by the night having been a beautifully, indeed erotically, moonlit one. And just before daybreak, as the moon plunges towards the western waters and the moonlight fades, the Lover says:

"O woe! This Full Moon has been as loyal to Cheriyachi as Hanuman to Sita. And just as Hanuman, making a burning torch of his tail (it had been set alight by enemies), burnt down an entire city for Sita and then dipped his tail into the ocean to douse the flames, the goddamn Moon, having set raging fires in the hearts of Cheriyachi's legion of admirers, now sinks into the western ocean, as if to put out that firebrand of his tail!"

Note: Guess 14th century folks were quite cool about allusions to Sita and Hanuman while praising a dancing girl.
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2. Background: This is from 'Unnuneeli Sandesham'. As the protagonist approaches the Kali temple in Panayannarkkavu, at daybreak, he is filled with fear - the Goddess has a reputation of extreme ferocity and vengefulness and the temple is surrounded by a particularly impenetrable and dark jungle (at least part of it still stands and is a rather scary sight especially at twilight). He looks up at the dark and reddening sky and has this vision:

"O, Goddess, at the end of Time, your fiery scimitar shall slice right thru the necks of the 8 Elephants one by one and collecting the gushing blood in a huge bowl, you shall drink it to the last drop. The sky today is a premonition of that terrible day - that hideous bowl stained with clotted elephant blood."

(the 8 Elephants are the Diggajas who support the world at its 8 corners; at the very End, everything would go bust).
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Ayyappa, the Rider

In 2021, eminent historian and scholar Wendy Doniger published a typically detailed work 'Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares' on India's Equestrian tradition - historical as well as literary and religious. Having learned from it lots of curious and entertaining details, I wrote to her the following mail:
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Dear Professor Doniger,

With reference to your 'Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares', let me show a picture of Sasta/Ayyappa as he is shown hunting with dogs and assistants in a Kerala style mural at the Pundareekapuram Krishna temple (30 km from Kochi).

Sasta is referred to as Vajivahana (horse-rider) in a stotra (perhaps the only Hindu deity, Kalki apart, who is said to be equestrian in a Sanskrit stotra) - although he is most famously depicted as a young boy riding a tiger. The mural, said to be done in the 18th century, is crammed with details. Let me also mention here that one sees a horse - and not a tiger - atop the flag pole at the Sabarimala temple. It is always the Vahana of the deity that is featured on the flagpole of any temple.

And here is Prof. Doniger's reply:

Dear Nandakumar, thank you so much for this wonderful image, and the notes on Ayyappa. I wish I had known of these images when I published my book! but of course, learning goes on and on.

Let me gratefully salute her for those generous words of appreciation and add a couple more of Ayyappa/Sasta images from Kerala's 'Kalamezhuthu' tradition; they are taken from a book on Kalamezhuthu by M V Vishnu Nambuthiri, who has written a lot of books on Kerala's folk art and literature. The Lord is a mature warrior and is shown with a horse in one picture and with a tiger in another:

Kattilmadam revisited:

Those were two views of Kattilmadam, arguably Kerala's oldest structural temple(?). There are vague similarities to the Pidari Rathas (below) at Mahabalipuram - of course, Kattil is not monolithic like Pidari.

When compared to the shore temple at Mahab or other Pallava structural temples, Kattil is quite modest and low-key but then, that is all we seem to have in Kerala. It is located at Koottanad near Pattambi (right off the edge of a busy state highway) and is on what was an ancient trade and migration pathway that runs to the coast from TNadu via the Palghat Gap - so the Tamil influence in its making is very understandable.

I dunno if granite is readily available in the area. I am not even sure why the lower and upper parts of the building have two different colors. I have heard that this building was Jain - it might well have been because ancient Tamil Nadu was strongly influenced by Jainism. There is what seems to be a 3-faced Brahma figure above one of the doorways that doesn't say anything. The little interior has no image or anything. As to why this temple wasn't Hinduized, I have no guesses.

While it is fashionable among dabblers in history to say that anything cool from Kerala's - and India's- past as either Buddhist or Jain, what is most remarkable to me about Kattilmadam is that it still stands!

Before quitting, let me add another mural from the Pundareekapuram temple - a very cosy Siva-Parvati couple.