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Chavittunatakam (Malayalam, ‘the stamping drama’) is a performance genre associated with the Latin Catholic community of coastal Kerala. It combines theatricality, declaimed singing, percussion, and spectacular costume with the vigorous footwork that gives it its Malayalam name. The linguistic, kinetic, rhythmic, and musical elements of chavittunatakam draw on Southern Indic expressive culture. Its subject matter, however, comprises hagiographic, conversion, and crusading narratives developed during medieval European Christianity, most conspicuously ‘the matter of Charlemagne’ which includes the exploits of the emperor Charlemagne’s nephew Roland. These features suggest the genre’s formation through several scales of transcultural encounters and longue durée interactions between different groups of Europeans and locals on the Malabar Coast since the advent of the Portuguese, commencing with Vasco da Gama’s disembarkation here in 1498. Commonly acknowledged within Kerala today as a local ‘epic’ form with European influences, chavittunatakam possesses low cultural capital compared to other performance genres such as kathakali, kalaripattayu, theyyam, and margamkali. Its practitioners struggle to capture spaces and resources for their art, despite the brisk entrepreneurship in heritage economy that characterises postcolonial India. Questions about visibility, patronage, marginalisation, and marketisation join the complexities of studying chavittunatakam’s performative, literary historical, linguistic, and philological dimensions. The challenges posed by those complexities have hindered systematic examination of chavittunatakam. Based on my ongoing study of creolisation as a historical process in coastal India, and on recent fieldwork in Kerala, I analyse chavittunatakam as a creolised performance genre to present some methodological responses to these challenges.

* Photo : Karalsman Charitham (‘The Deeds of Charlemagne’), 28th December 2024, Gothuruth, Kerala. Photo credit: Gothuruth Sports and Arts Club

Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. Her research spans creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology, and the relationship between literary texts, performative cultural expression, and memory work. Professor Kabir is the author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2002), Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (2013). During 2013-18, she directed the ERC Advanced Grant-funded project ‘Modern Moves’, which explored the global popularity of African-heritage social dance; her monograph-in-progress, Alegropolitics, draws on that research. She is Fellow of the British Academy, has been awarded India’s Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize, and is on the editorial team of the new Cambridge University Press journal, Public Humanities. Her new research project is on Portuguese and Dutch interactions in fortified coastal enclaves from Brazil to Japan.