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liteRatuRe
During the early medieval period, most literary works were written in Sanskrit. Shankarcharya,
Ramanuja, Madhavacharya and Vallabhancharya wrote many books on religious philosophy.

Many books on Medicine, astronomy, music, dramas, stories and poems were written in
Sanskrit. Some important works of this period are :- Somadeva’s Katha — Saritasagara, a
collection of stories and legends; Kalhana’s Rajtarangini, an exemplary work on history
of Kashmir; Jayadeva’s Gita Govind, a poem on the love of Krishna and Radha, Bilhana’s
Vikramankadeva Charita, the biography of Vikramditya. Regional languages often borrowed
literature from Sanskrit language. The first literary works in Malayalam of the about the
twelfth century are directly taken from Sanskrit.

develOPmenT Of regiOnal languages

Indian languages and dialects are grouped into four language families as under:

1. Indo-European : With the Aryans came, their language Sanskrit, a member of the large
Indo-European family of languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Assamese
and others evolved from Sanskrit and thus called the Indic or Indo-Aryan group.
2. Dravidian : It included four major languages - Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam
which are native to Southern India, and influenced by Sanskrit and Hindi over the years.

3. Sino-Tibetan : The Sino-Tibetan speakers might have come in through the Brahmaputra
valley in pre-historic times. Kashmiri, Manipuri and many languages of the north
eastern states and Sikkim belong to the Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Berman group.
4. Austro-Asiatic : The Austric (from the regions near Australia) group is the mother of the
Kol and Munda speeches of central and eastern India, Nicobarese of Nicobar Islands,
Santhal of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, flo of Bihar, and other tribal speeches. A Iinguistic

would happily link up India with Burma, Indo-China, Malaya and Indonesia.

malayalam liTeraTure Of Kerala

The ancient Chera dynasty of Kerala had links with the Pandya and Chola dynasties of
ancient TamilNadu. Till about the eighth century; Malayalam, the local language of Kerala,
was influenced by Tamil, the languages of tamil Nadu. After this, Brahmans, mainly from
Karanataka, migrated to Kerala in large numbers, they built temples which became centres

of Sanskrit culture. Around the ninth century, Kerala came under a new line of Chera rules
called the Perumals, who got up their capital at Mahodayapuram. ‘The Perumals promoted
Sanskrit Culture, and the influence of Sanskrit on Malayalam increased.

Malayalam script in the nineth century was based on Tamil script. An example of this script was
found in an inscription of the time from vazhappally in Kerala. Lilititakam, a fourteenth-century
work on Malayalam grammar, was written in the Manipravalla style, which show the growing
influence of Sanskrit on Malayalam. Manipravald literally means a combination of ‘gem with
loral’. Gem refers to a Dravidian language; in this case ‘Malayalam’, and to coral represents
Sanskrit. Modern Malayalam literature had its beginning around the sixteenth century.

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