Festivals of (the God of) Love (kāmotsava) in ancient India, their links with the larger spring festivals (vasantotsava), and the survival of the latter in modern Holi (holākā), are subjects that have already been discussed at length by scholars. In Kerala, popular forms of kāmotsava still survive, especially through the pūrotsavas (“Pooram”) conducted in several places in northern Kerala. In an earlier study (presented at the 40th Sanskrit Traditions Symposium of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in May 2024, and now in course of publication in the IJHS), I focused on particular aspects of the festival and worship of Kāma as depicted in the Viṭanidrā-bhāṇa and Lakṣmīdāsa’s Śuka-saṃdeśa, two works composed in central Kerala in the first half of the 14th century. In this case, the sexually marked aspects of the Festival of Love were intimately linked to the highly educated and eroticised local urban courtesan culture, which must itself be anthropologically appreciated in the light of the special interconnections developed in premodern Kerala between the Nampūtiri brahmin elite and the matrilineal Nāyar ruling caste. In this paper, the historical survey is extended to the 13th-15th centuries Maṇipravāḷam literature and to later Sanskrit and Malayalam bhāṇa and saṃdeśakāvya accounts. In his Malayalam-English dictionary issued in 1872, Herman Gundert still defines pūraṃ, pūravēla and pūrakkaḷi as “the Saturnalia of Malabar”, alluding to the survival, up to that time, of licentious aspects of this Festival of Love, which are no longer attested in present-day Poorams.
Vielle et al. (Wed,) studied this question.