Kyat and Khaiat, two examples of contemporary kazakh baksis

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Aspects of the Festival of Love in premodern Kerala according to the Viṭanidrābhāṇa, the Śukasaṃdeśa and the Pradyumnābhyudaya

Festivals of (the God of) Love (kāmotsava) in ancient India, their connections with larger spring festivals (vasantotsava), and the survivals of the latter in modern Holi (holākā), are topics which 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 of Northern Kerala (in Payyannur region, Kannur district). The present paper concentrates on certain aspects of Kāma festival and worship related to the courtesan milieu, as described in a bhāṇa (the Viṭanidrābhāṇa, that I am in course of critically editing) and a saṃdeśakāvya (the Śukasaṃdeśa) both composed in central Kerala sometime in the first half of the 14th century, aspects reflecting most probably local real practices which, contrastively, are not found in the picture of the Festival given in a noble nāṭaka (the Pradyumnābhyudaya) penned by a pious South Kerala king at the very end of the 13th century. The Festival of Love in Sanskrit and Maṇipravāḷam courtly literature of the 13th-15th c. Kerala has to be seen as representing a form of Kāma worship specifically related to the highly-educated and -eroticized urban courtesan culture of this time