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Abstract This article concerns a representation of a temple festival in Tiruniḻalmāla , a major literary work in early Malayalam. The work in question focuses on a high-order Brahmanic temple of Āṟanmuḷa in the moment of a grave ritual and operational crisis. It emphasizes the restorative role of rather lowly rites of exorcism and purification including elements of dance, song, and drama. The article pays close attention to the structure of its textual matter and the literary strategies deployed by its author in meeting the performative exigencies of the genre. The festival itself seems today to have been long forgotten in the place of its origin. The article attempts to understand the socioreligious functions of the festival by exploring the inner logic of its literary representation, drawing parallels to other cultural institutions of medieval Kerala and showing how its afterlife in folk possession dance rituals contributed to the transmission of a text that gave the festival its literary form.
Galewicz et al. (Tue,) studied this question.