Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c5.s2.t4.11

c5.s2.t4.11

The application of the Ārya-eḻuttu to the vernacular Malayāḷam was the work of a low-caste man who goes under the name of Tuñjatta Eḻuttacchan, a native of Tṛkkaṇḍiyūr in the present district of Malabar. He lived in the seventeenth century, but his real name is forgotten; Tuñjatta being his ‘house’ or family-name, and Eḻuttacchan (=schoolmaster) indicating his caste. It is probable that there was a scanty vernacular literature before his time⁴, but it is entirely owing to him that the Malayāḷam literature is of the extent it is. He translated the Sanskrit Bhāgavata, and several similar mythologico-religious poems, leaving, however, a large infusion of Sanskrit, and writing his composition in the Ārya character. His translations are often erroneous, and beyond adopting the Vaṭṭeḻuttu signs for ṟ, ḻ and ḷ, (റ, ഴ and ള) he did nothing whatever to systematize the orthography which till lately was most defective⁵, or to supply signs for letters (*e. g.* ṵ) which are wanting in most of the other Dravidian languages. The Sanskrit literature was, after this, no longer a secret, and there was perhaps no part of S. India where it was more studied by people of many castes during the eighteenth century.