In 2023 Kozhikode became the first Indian city designated a UNESCO City of Literature. The designation is modern and the paperwork is modern, but the habit it rewards is not. For roughly six hundred years this city has run an annual competition in which scholars argue in front of a ruler and the best of them are given a title and a purse of money. It is called the Revathi Pattathanam, it happens at the Tali temple, and it is still held.
What it actually is
Traditionally seven days, under the patronage of the Zamorin, at the Tali Mahadeva temple in the centre of the city. Scholars — in Sanskrit learning, in Vedanta, in grammar and logic — presented and disputed, and the assembly conferred on the successful ones the title Bhatta, along with a panakkizhi, a purse. In the medieval period it drew scholars from well beyond Kerala and was among the more prominent events of its kind in south India.
The mechanism is worth noticing because it is unusual. This was not patronage in the ordinary sense of a court poet on a salary. It was competitive, it was annual, it was public, and the reward was partly reputational — a title you carried afterwards — and partly cash. A state was buying intellectual prestige on an open market, once a year, in a temple courtyard.
Why it was started, according to the Zamorin’s own chronicle
Here the story turns, and it is to the credit of the local record that it does. The Calicut Grandhavari — the Calicut chronicles — records that before he was Zamorin, while still the Naduvazhi of Eranad, the ruler seized the Tali Shiva temple and forcibly removed its sixty Saivite Brahmin trustees, and that some of those who resisted were executed.
The tradition is that the Revathi Pattathanam was instituted in the fourteenth century as a prayaschitta — an expiation — for Brahmanahatya, the killing of Brahmins. In other words the most celebrated scholarly institution in medieval Malabar was founded as penance for a massacre at the temple that hosts it.
We are printing that rather than the softer version because the source is not hostile. The Grandhavari is the dynasty’s own chronicle. When a court record preserves an unflattering origin for one of its own institutions, that is generally the strongest sort of evidence there is, and it is the opposite of the tidied-up account that usually reaches visitors.
The Tali temple
The temple itself sits in the middle of the modern city and is a working Shiva temple, its complex of shrines, mandapams and tank rebuilt and extended over centuries. It is the Zamorin’s temple in the direct sense: the seat of the dynasty’s ritual authority in the city it moved to from inland Eranad, and the physical anchor of the whole arrangement above.
- It falls on the asterism Revathi in the Malayalam month of Thulam, which lands in October or November. The date moves.
- It is a scholarly and ritual event at a working temple, not a performance staged for visitors.
- Temple entry rules and dress codes apply, and they are not the same for everyone.
- The Kerala Literature Festival, on the beach in late January, is the city’s other literary gathering — free, enormous and entirely secular. The two are six centuries and a world apart.
The line from there to here
It would be too neat to draw a straight line from a fourteenth-century Sanskrit disputation to a modern festival where novelists sit on a beach. The languages are different, the audience is different, and the Pattathanam was restricted in ways the festival is not. What survives is narrower and more interesting than a line: a settled municipal assumption that arguing in public about texts is a normal thing for this city to spend money on. Six hundred years is long enough for that to stop being a policy and become a habit.