Before I explore Kerala’s ancient creationary legend in an attempt to understand the land’s earliest history, it may be worthwhile to take a step back and look critically in general at the relevance of such folktales as credible historical sources. Almost all great nations of antiquity narrated their biographies using a peculiar mix of mythology and history. While the ancient Greeks peopled the earth and heavens with their numerous gods and demigods, the ancient Egyptians claimed to have been ruled by their gods who descended to earth for this purpose. The people of Kerala were no different — according to their unique historical legend, a divine avatar in human form lifted their land out of the ocean and peopled it according to his laws.
This legend claims that once upon a time long ago, Parasurama, the sixth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, flung his battle axe from Gokarna and it fell at Kanyakumari, whereupon the sea receded between these two points, lifting up the land to the present extent of the Malabar coast. He then divided the reclaimed land into administrative divisions and invited people from various nations to live there. He built temples to goddess Durga along the coast and to Shasta along the mountains, sprinkled gold all over to enrich the earth and promulgated laws for the citizens.
Before this fantastic tale can be rejected outright, it may be well to analyze it in some depth, for, like many other historical folktales, it could rest on a kernel of literal truth preserving historical memories passed down over the centuries in the oral tradition of antiquity. Yet, because this kernel of truth is buried deep in layers of unintentional misinterpretations, intentional tampering for dramatic effect or worse, ethnocentric ends, and poetic licenses in the forms of a sacred base and supernatural agencies, it is virtually impossible to parse fact from fiction. Thus, folklore tends to be dismissed as bad history. For example, in the context of interpreting Indian history based solely on the Puranic tales of the middle-ages, Michael Witzel speaks of the dangers of naively relying on such texts composed as a product of a lively bardic tradition millennia after the fact.
Peering at folklore with the looking glass of modern times is akin to studying religion through the lens of atheism. Folktales, legends, and myths are neither fiction nor art; they were not invented for amusement alone; they are not imaginative fantasy to explain primitive beliefs about nature; neither are they mere superstitions, or the result of stupidity. “[E]very single item of folklore, every folktale, every tradition, every custom and superstition, has its origin in some definite fact in the history of man; but . . . the definite fact is not always traceable . . . it sometimes goes so far back as to defy recognition.” Indeed, because legends render events of the past significant to communities that tell the tale in their own present, they can constitute “excellent primary sources” for their own history as long as they can be corroborated by other evidence according to Richard Dorson, such as “testimony from archaeology, ethnology, history, geography, linguistics, [and] physical anthropology.”
Folk history is an oxymoron only on a superficial level. Folklore seems absurd when taken out of context because of its fragmentary nature; yet, at their roots, folk history and academic history are stories of the past, and set in true context, the former becomes as valuable as the latter. It is undeniable that folklore contains within it memories of early polity, faith, custom, rite, and thought from the most ancient times, for tradition does not attach itself to any particular historical personage or event without cause. Historical details embedded in folktales and legends may not tell us of any one single personage or locality with specificity but may relate in general to the people before personages and localities became historic. In a general sense, folktales speak more to a cultural past than a political one. As cultures transform and civilizations progressively develop around the folklore, it preserves those ancient customs, rites, and beliefs, clothing its heroes of the past with the more familiar trappings of the present. Before it becomes a written story, it lives long in the oral tradition, passing from mouth to mouth and generation to generation, because people love to tell stories of their revered ancestors even though the tales may have lost their oldest and most impressive significance.
However, because historic events that transformed into folktales and tradition relate principally to the remotest period in antiquity, they are eventually masked by successive layers of misinterpretation. Although they come down to current generations with incredible fidelity, the later misinterpretations render it difficult to parse out true historical facts. Indeed, because folklore tends to involve the narrator and the listener as tacit participants in the shaping of the story, the historical facts it narrates are colored by the present context of the participants, for, as George Gomme put it, “different cultures shape different histories.”
In many instances, folktales in the oral tradition were transformed into the written word at some point, and in that process, they changed in meaning as well. In one example, many British folktales were transcribed during medieval times by non-native Christian monks, who changed the stories to fit their moral precepts, imbuing them with an aversion to native culture, no doubt to influence readers to accept Christianity instead. In other instances, the natural evolution of language altered the meanings of words, rendering the folktale nonsensical. As I wrote in Thara, the translator’s misrepresentations of Egyptian qnn, khai, and khalb-n into kann, kayy, and kalpana in the Malayalam version of Keralolpatthi rendered the words odd in the context of the folktale. In yet other instances, the relatively modern translator who penned it to paper applied perfectly good logic to incomplete facts.
The Parasurama legend as penned by the anonymous author of Keralolpatthi is unlike a simple fantasy; neither is it irrational superstition. Although at first blush it seems to fit a typical Brahmanized Puranic lore characteristic of the sort of text Witzel warns against in its symbolic motifs that seem fantastical, it is not so in its details, which contain particularized events, persons, and timelines that speak to concrete history. For example, as I wrote in Syrian Merchants, it chronicles the actual history of a viceroy from a distant land who settles Phoenician sailors along the coast to export to his homeland the wonderful natural treasures of the Sahyadri; tying these facts to archeological evidence, I showed that the tale is one of the symbiotic maritime partnership between Egyptians and Phoenicians in early to late 1800 BCE.
In the next few articles, I will dissect Kerala’s creationary legend Keralolpatthi and, through corroboration with archeological evidence from Egypt, I will show the history that it likely relates, devoid of any fantastical elements and supernatural agencies.
Bibliography:
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Keralolpatthi: The Origin of Malabar. 1868. [In Malayalam]. Mangalore: Pfleiderer & Riehm.
Kugle, Scott and Roxani Eleni Margariti. 2017. “Narrating Community: the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ and Accounts of Origin in Kerala and around the Indian Ocean.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 60, no. 4: 337–380.
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