Malabar, Muslims and Many Legends: Reading Keralōlpatti

This talk examines the Keralōlpatti corpus—the origin-legend traditions of Kerala and South Kanara—to explore how premodern Brahmanical historiography negotiated questions of sovereignty, religious difference, and community formation. Attending to the semantic ambiguities of terms such as bauddha, palli, mārga, śuddhi, and pramāṇa, the talk traces how the narrative deploys “Bauddhas” as a capacious rhetorical category that collapses Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, and other non-Vedic communities into a single heterodox other.

Focusing on the śāstra-vivāda between the Śāstris and the Bauddhas, the talk reconstructs the polemical worlds within which Muslims participated in premodern Kerala—not merely as metaphorical or marginal trade figures, but as actors within a shared courtly and intellectual culture. It further examines how the Keralōlpatti distinguishes between the heterodox Bāṇa Perumāḷ, who departs for “Makka,” and the orthodox Cēramān Perumāḷ, who ascends to svarga, and how this distinction is contested, inverted, or reimagined in parallel origin-legends circulating in Arabic and Tamil literature.

By situating these narratives within wider South Indian traditions of Saiva, Jain, Buddhist, and early Islamic disputation, the talk foregrounds the spatial and political sites through which polemics unfolded in pre-modern and early-modern Kerala. In doing so, it argues that kingship and sovereignty in the region were imagined less as fixed institutions than as contingent relationships shaped through debate, ritual, and the management of religious difference. Ultimately, the talk shows how Islam and Muslims were not external anomalies but integral presences within the narrative, theological, and political imaginations of the Keralōlpatti corpus.

About theSpeaker

Afeef Ahmed is a PhD student at the department of South Asian studies at Harvard University, USA.

Date:

19/12/25 Friday

4.00 PM - 5.00 PM