CHRISTOPHE VIELLE
UCLouvain christophe.vielle@uclouvain.be
THE VERNACULARISATION OF THE PURĀṆA-ITIHĀSA TRADITION: THE KIḶIPPĀṬṬŬS OF KERALA
When, between1790 and 1805, the Discalced Carmelite Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo (i.e. the Austro-Croatian Filip Vezdin, 1748-1806) used and quoted more than once in his Indological works an unidentified (by Ludo Rocher) “Sambhavam [saṃbhavaṃ inMalayalam script] seu Puranam [purāṇaṃ]”, “in lingua Samscrdamico-malabarica”, which he ascribed to “Vedavyásen Hesychasta”, or, more recently, when Vettam Mani (1921-1987, Kottayam) in his Purāṇic Encyclopaedia (1975, translated from the Malayalam) refers several times to an atypical “Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa” (in 99 chapters) or to the “Skanda Purāṇa, Asura Kāṇḍa”, in all these cases it is the vernacular (Malayalam) kiḷippāṭṭŭ versions of the Mahābhārata, Rāmayaṇa and Brahmāṇḍa- or Skanda-purāṇas, which turn out to be the sources used by these two scholars. The characteristics of these local versions, composed in Kerala in the 16th-18 th centuries, and of the kiḷippāṭṭŭ “parrot-song” (kiḷi-p-pāṭṭŭ) genre itself as a means of transposing purāṇa-itihāsa literature into Dravidian poetry, will be here highlighted, along with the fact that the Sanskrit Brahmāṇḍa- and Skanda-purāṇa models on which these kiḷippāṭṭŭs are based are themselves peculiar works of medieval period specific to southern India or Kerala, different from the works we usually know by these titles.