When Sanskrit and Malayalam came together: Manipravalam resists the exorcism of influence

When a Tamil speaker exclaims “Sabaash!” to celebrate an act worthy of applause, she is reaching back through a very specific chain of history. The word, a contraction of the Persian shād bāsh – “be happy” – has a long history.

It travelled through the administrative courts of the Nawabs of Arcot, through the performative flourish of Parsi theatre troupes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, through registers of power, pleasure and public life, before settling in the Tamil heart. Today, it simply belongs.

These are “loanwords”, as though they are temporary guests, items borrowed with the intention of return. But language does not work like a library. Once a word is spoken with feeling, it enters the architecture of thought, replete with meaning and emotion.

In the last five centuries, the world has undergone a biological, botanical and linguistic shuffling so total that the idea of a “purely native” identity has become a historical fiction. The chili in sambar came from the Americas, carried by Portuguese ships and colonial appetites. The tomato, now indispensable to Indian kitchens, arrived the same way. The violin, so central to Carnatic music that it now feels inseparable from it, is a European import that learned, patiently and brilliantly, to speak in Indian tonalities.

Everyday lives are made of a layered hybridity so deep that it feels ancient, even when it is not. Rather than narratives about “invasion”, this is the outcome of a steady osmosis.

Weight of the load

To be a modern speaker of a language like Malayalam is to carry a load that is ancient and expansive. Malayalam was formed at the meeting point of two distinct lineages: the ancient, earthy, civilisational Tamil base and the high, cerebral Sanskrit canopy. One lends texture, tactility and proximity to land, origin stories and labour. The other provides abstraction, metaphysics and a vocabulary for the infinite.

Historically, this produced manipravalam, a literary aesthetic, which literally means “ruby and coral”. The metaphor is precise. Coral is organic, porous, grown slowly from countless living organisms while ruby is crystalline, hard, refractive, prized for its ability to catch and bend light. As an aesthetic philosophy, manipravalam recognises that lived reality could not be held in a single register. It shows the co-existence of two cultural registers.

The local tongue provided structure and intimacy while Sanskrit provided reach and resonance. To write in manipravalam was to admit that the world arrived at your doorstep from several directions at once. It was to accept that identity could be layered without being distorted. One could speak to the village and the cosmos in the same breath.

Commoner’s counterpoint

In Maharashtra, the abhang, meaning “unbroken”, performed a similar miracle, but from below. The Bhakti saints refused to accept that spiritual complexity must remain locked inside Sanskrit, guarded by priestly keys. They dragged metaphysics out into the street and forced it to sing in the rhythms of everyday life.

The abhang, a radical act of linguistic democracy, places the highest philosophical questions about the soul, devotion and surrender in the mouths of potters, tailors, farmers and wandering singers. Its metaphors come from work: the turning wheel, the stitching hand, the furrowed field.

Here, the “load” of daily life is no obstacle to transcendence but the vector. The abhang insists that the divine breathes through labour. By refusing to exorcise the language of the street, the Bhakti tradition made itself indestructible. It is alive and pulsating, resisting being sealed within institutions because it lives in song, repetition and memory.

Price of purity

Today, there is a rising global temptation towards purification. In an era of anxiety about borders, belonging, score-settling and loss, many reach backward in search of an imagined Golden Age, scrubbed clean of influence. Language, art and culture are subjected to audits of authenticity.

What does not “belong” is marked for removal.

But purification is a polite word for attenuation. When we attempt to exorcise influence, we uncover a thinner self. To remove the “load” of history is to sever the nerves that connect us to the wider human story.

When language is purified, words but also registers of experience are purged. It is a loss of the language of law and trade, of migration and negotiation, of encounter and adaptation. A culture that amputates its influences becomes brittle rather than authentic.

Orchestral identity

There is another way to see ourselves: as a counterpoint.

In music, counterpoint is the art of holding independent melodic lines together in harmonic conversation. Each voice retains its identity. None dominates. Meaning emerges from a relationship rather than uniformity.

The Tamil root provides melody – the grammar of survival, intimacy and place. The Sanskrit or Persian load provides harmony – the reach toward historical encounters that are embedded in our human experience. When these voices work in counterpoint, the result is depth.

A language capable of carrying multiple civilisations is strengthened by range, rather than being weakened. It can whisper and proclaim. It can pray and bargain. It can mourn and celebrate. Such a language is an orchestra.

Manipravalam of the soul

To live today is to embrace manipravalam. Our food, music, thought and emotion arrive from layered pasts. We are walking archives of past migrations and histories. The attempt to strip this away in an elusive search of purity misses the point of how cultures survive.

Continuity is adaptation with memory, rather than a linear sameness. Let us therefore resist the exorcism of influence and reject the fear that hybridity weakens us.

The load of history is no burden but a ballast which keeps us upright in turbulent times. It allows us to absorb shock, to translate across worlds, to remain intelligible to others without losing ourselves.

The manipravalam of our existence is alive, breathing, accumulating meaning. To honour it is to ensure that culture remains a living conversation rather than an erasure or attenuation.

Nirupama Menon Rao is a former foreign secretary. She has served as India’s ambassador to the US and also to China.