109 – Literary islands of Far South : pāṭṭu and other quixotic archipelagos of songs

October 2, 2025
2:00 pm
H02
South Asian scholarship’s new interest in song can be seen as marked by absorbing concepts from anthropology, musicology, sound and media studies. The mutual transfer of ideas opens chances to explore afresh the relationship between “literary” and “folk”. Both have long history of incorporating song as matter and form. India's far South, with its multitude of diverse lived-in song cultures, offers a uniquely rich area of study. Its emerging vernacular literary cultures grew by absorbing, adapting and transforming expressive forms developed within largely understudied song cultures of the subaltern. They themselves changed profoundly producing a variety of hybrid (trans-medial) cultural forms. One archipelago within broader patterns of literary cultures is made by pāṭṭu-songs: local stories of inequality, devotion, and transformation. Other archipelagos equally deserve closer study. The panel explores song cultures as complex cultural objects and unique knowledge systems. It relates the lived-in song traditions with forms recognized as literary across the ecologies of Southern vernacular idioms and languages of prestige. We welcome papers adopting new approaches including such concepts as sensorial and sonic epistemologies, embodied knowledge, media-archaeology while looking at the archipelagos of South Indian song cultures in ways that question basic assumptions about oral and written, centre and periphery. Papers on specific singing and literary cultures asking questions about their patterns of circulation, communities of practice, performers, audiences and patrons, as well as social practices that shaped their sensorial, discursive, historical or political bodies.

Convenors

Elena Mucciarelli
Cezary Galewicz

Presentations

Pāṭṭu and its Significance in the Ritual Practices of Kerala
Subramonia Iyer Anantha Subramonia Sarma - Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), Ecole
Pāṭṭu singing in the contemporary Ayyappan Tiyyāṭṭu of the Tiyyāṭi Nambyar and Kaḷameḻuttu pāṭṭu of the Kallaṯṯakuṟuppu communities of central Kerala
Paolo Pacciolla - University, Christ University, Bangalore, India
Performing Sonic textuality: a literary song ritual for the Goddess Kuṟatti
Mucciarelli Elena - Department of Comparative Religion, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
Kāṟaḷmān (Charlemagne) Performances as Sites of Cultural Memory in the Caviṭṭunāṭakam Musical Theater of Kerala, India
Kaimathuruthil Wilson Geetha - Asien Orient Institut, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Profane in the devotional: Bharanippāttu as a subaltern song culture and Hindutva
Harikrishna Deva Nandan - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
A Stairway into the World of Music: Transmission of Sopāna Saṅgītam from Temple to Theatre in Kerala
Gopalakrishnan Sudha - India International Centre, India International Centre, New Delhi, India
Defining a song:Perspectives in Līlātilaka
Chettiarthodi Rajendran - University of Calicut, University of Calicut(Rtd), Calicut, India
UNDERSTANDING TŌṞṞAM: THE KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION THROUGH RITUAL SONGS AMONG THE MAVILANS OF SOUTH INDIA
Balan Binesh - Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands