Translator's Note

Maṇipravāḷam is the story of the metamorphic birth of Malayāḷam and its coming of age. Sometime around the 11th C, Keraḷabhāṣā, as the vernacular of Kerala was then known, started to squirm out from under the literary rock of Tamiḻ, its old, powerful, politically dominant neighbour. Borrowing heavily from Sanskrit in poetic motivations, forms, and vocabulary and using a hybrid Grantha/Vaṭṭeḻuttu script, this novel offshoot, this ‘gem-gathering’ language set its sights high: it sought as connoisseurs sahṛdaya, those aesthetes ‘possessed of heart’.

If one is not disheartened by learned, voluble, conflicting papers on the subject, nor weighed down by the whole skull-throbbing gravity, if one just leans at the language, then: to look at Maṇipravāḷam is to look at a newborn, slightly awkward, slightly bald, untoothed but grinning, clad in silks and gems from his mother and aunts, endearing, growing, glowing.

As songs meant to be sung, these follow rāgam, the distinct melodic movement of notes in a scale, and tāḷam, the rhythmic metre or pulse of the melody. These were the first things I lost in translation, all right. However archaic or ornate, courtly or coy, I trusted the original words of these love songs over my modern conceits and brought them over. A funny thing happened. In English, their fluid architecture fell apart. The felicitous dovetailing phrasing was gone. It was like dismantling the lattice of delicate articulation and discovering the raw pulsing heart underneath. Emotion became punctuation. Their erotic lexicon was revealed.

The rasam or essential flavour here is śṛṅgāram, erotic sentiment. The bhāvam or mood is rati, sexual pleasure. The five floral arrows of kāma, Lord of Eros, torment the lover. The nāyikā or heroine is the king and the nāyakaṉ or hero, his Lord Śrī Padmanābhaṉ—Viṣṇu. Then again, the king was no stranger to mortal love himself, with four wives and an unknown number of lovers.

Kanya Kanchana

In the Classroom