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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[JULY, 1928
Gouvea, as we have seen, refers to songs about the ancestors. We think of the songs of Thomas Cana. Roz (1604) has the date 345 for the arrival of Thomas Cana. We think of the chronogram Šôvâla' (345) contained in III. 40. Doubtless, there were songs about Villiyarvattam, the king of the Christians, of whom one authority writes that the Christians elected him, a non-Christian, in A.D. 825, the first year of the Quilon or Malabar era. By adoption his kingdom passed to the king of Diamper, and from Diamper to Cochin. I remember reading that the boys of the Jesuit College of Cochin in the beginning of the seventeenth century acted with great success and enormous applause the tragedy of Villiyarvarttam. If played in Portuguese the first time, it was surely translated into Malayalam and repeated at the chief Churches. Who will discover it? Such a composition supposes that the chief traditions were collected for the occasion.
The specimens of Christian songs here presented by Mr. T. K. Joseph will reveal, I doubt not, a new world to our scholars. They will not rest satisfied with so little. Volumes could bo filled with the Christian poetry of Malabar. Let us have more of it. Too long have we been ignorant of it. It contains the history, the traditions, the legends of Christian Malabar, of its Churches and their Saints; it holds the customs, folk-lore, aspirations, triumphs, sorrows of its people.
Never was I more surprised, nor Mr. C. W. E. Cotton, the Agent of Travancore and Cochin, either, than when, driving from Ernakulam to Kottayam on January 16, 1924, we met at Kagutturutti a young man, E. I. Chandy of«Pallam, who stopped the car to show some of the specimens of the inscriptions, songs and legends which he had been collecting during the past two years. How he managed to make his living with that we wondered. I took him as my companion during the greater part of my tour to the Churches. He filled pages and pages wherever he went with more inscriptions, more songs, more legends. Everywhere he had to say he would come back and take it all down at greater leisure. If I was an enthusiast, he was not less so. What will become of all his collections? As long as they are not made accessible in English, they are lost to most of us. [The Kerala Society will examine them.-T.KJ.]
Much more remains to be done for Thomas Cana before we exhaust the theme. (1) The Malabar MSS. and printed histories may contain many valuable details not yet brought together. All the passages referring to Thomas Cana in the Malabar historians should be compared, after which we may compare them with what Portuguese, Dutch, French and English historians have written. (2) The various local versions of the privileges granted to Thomas Cana, must be translated and compared. During my tour, I was presented with such a paper by the Vicar, Fr. Michael Nilavaret of Gôturutti, in which the Yavana ships were mentioned to my exceeding surprise, and several of the Seven Churches, among them Chayal, if I recol. lect well, were attributed to Thomas Cana. At Muttam we were told of another version. Shortly after, when I had left, Fr. J. C. Panjikaran and Mr. T. K. Joseph started collecting more of these versions and in a short time they obtained more than a dozen. (3) The songs of the hereditary bards, the Calivoulam Viradians, who for a remuneration and in obedience to the behests of Chéraman Perumal, as the legend goes, sing at the house of the Syrians the privileges of Thomas Cana, must be published. (4) My translation of Du Perron's translation of 4 ollas of privileges granted to Thomas Cana99 will be published with the collaboration of Mr. T. K. Joseph. (5) Besides the Ancient Songs, Kottayam, 1910, most of which calls for translation, there are others, unpublished, on a variety of subjects, all of which, unless collected now, is bound to be lost.
(To be continued.) 09 In fact Du Perron's translation is a summary of the contents of five out of the seven copper-plates of the Quilon Tarisa Church, C. 880 A.D., with a translation of the utterly incorrect popular version of the long lost copper-plates of Thomas Cana (348 A.D.). Du Perron's translation with my coniments will be published soon in the Journal of the Kerala Society, which was founded on 26th September, 1927, with headquarters at Trivandrum, with the object of promoting research and advancing the study of the History and Archeology and Folklore, Art, Language and Literature of Malabar.-T.K.J.
