Sexual versus devotional (Festival of) Love in 13th-14th century Kerala
(2024) International Journal of Hindu Studies — Vol. 30 (2026)
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- Abstract
- The present study at first concentrates on peculiar sexual aspects of the Kāma festival and worship as described in a bhāṇa (the Viṭanidrābhāṇa) and a saṃdeśakāvya (Lakṣmīdāsa’s Śukasaṃdeśa), both composed in central Kerala sometime in the first half of the 14th century. These two works, like a few other Sanskrit and Maṇipravāḷam ones of the 13th-15th c. Kerala, are intimately linked to the local highly-educated and -eroticised urban courtesan culture, which itself has to be appreciated anthropologically in the light of the close interconnections developed between the Nampūtiri brahmin elite and the Nāyar ruling caste, which one, as it is well known, was matrilineal and characterized, for women, by sexual freedom and polyandry. However, these “sexual” aspects of the kāmotsava here underlined are, contrastively, not found in the picture of the same festival given in a nāṭaka (the Pradyumnābhyudaya) penned around 1300 AD by a pious (Padmanābha-devotee) South Kerala king, supporter of moral dharma, for whom Kāma has to be seen first as the one incarnated into Kṛṣṇa’s son Pradyumna. In the same way, the Jaiminīyasaṃhitā of the Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa, probably composed under the same king, explicitly condemns the adharmic visit to courtesans through a retelling of the pativratopākhyāna. Moreover, on the subject of love, a sharp contrast can be highlighted between the erotic Śukasaṃdeśa (extending vipralambha- to saṃbhoga-rasa) and, on the other hand, the Haṃsasaṃdeśa composed, some time before (in the beginning of the 14th c.), by the saṃnyāsin and bhakta Pūrṇasarasvatī, who anticipates Gauda Vaiṣṇavism by transforming śṛṅgāra into premabhakti as the main sentiment in that kind of message (/messenger) poem (the “loved one”, asked to be reached by the separated she-devotee, being here Kṛṣṇa). The latter exposes also moral concerns about love and women in his allegorical nāṭaka Kamalinīrājahaṃsa, and in the Vidyullatā commentary on Kālidāsa’s Meghasaṃdeśa. Ultimately, it is as if two very different conceptions of Love itself — one sophisticatedly sexual, the other purely devotional — had clashed within Kerala high society and reflected in the literature attached to one or another royal court of that time.
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Vielle, C. (2024). Sexual versus devotional (Festival of) Love in 13th-14th century Kerala. International Journal of Hindu Studies, 30. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/267275 (Original work published 2026)