ABSTRACT
When P. Govinda Pillai [Pi. G;vindappilla], a retired seniorofficial in the Travancore Government, published his History of the Malayalam Language or Malayalabhasacaritram in 1881, it was the first book of its kind in the language. Subsequent literary historians, even as they criticise the large number of errors that punctuate Govinda Pillai’s text, also make it a point to pay tribute to his audacity and industry: fashioning a history for one’s language was no mean task at a time when records and information were neither available nor even easily identifiable.1 Govinda Pillai was well aware of the perils that haunted his project. He undertook it, not with much self-confidence, but in response to a pressing cultural need to which better scholars had shown no sign of responding.2 In the ‘Introduction’ to the first edition of his book, in an inordinately
long first sentence that ran on for twenty-five lines, Govinda Pillai described his three main objectives. Firstly, he wished to persuade his contemporary public that they were wrong in estimating Malayalam as a language of negligible importance (nissaram); although the early years of the language’s development were marred by innumerable difficulties (anavaratavighnannal), it had acquired, of late, a cultivated status. Secondly, he wished to assist in standardising variations in usage, many of which arose from the public’s ignorance of the changes undergone by the language while acquiring its present form. Thirdly, Govinda Pillai wished to pay homage to a lineage of poets who had countered several obstacles (pratyuhavyuhannal) in the path of the language’s development in years past, to retrieve old poems from the ocean of oblivion, and through all these efforts to enrich his mother tongue.3
