WORK IN PROGRESS We hope to add content progressively, so please bear with us for the moment.

What is Manipravala?

Maṇipravāḷa (“pearls/gems and corals”) is, broadly speaking, a technical term used to describe a language or dialect that combines Sanskrit with a vernacular language, often (but not only) a Southern one. More specifically, it is used to refer to languages or dialects explicitly identified by its speakers or in its literary corpus as falling under this general rubric in South India, e.g., Śrīvaiṣṇava Tamil Maṇipravāḷa, (Malayalam) Maṇipravāḷa, Kannada-Maṇipravāḷa, and Telugu-Maṇipravāḷa.

This website focuses on the Tamil Manipravalas, especially the widespread Śrīvaiṣṇava variant, but hopes to progressively integrate other forms of it (e.g., Jain Tamil Manipravala). For the Śrīvaiṣṇavas were not the first to use such a hybrid language in the Tamil land, as its usage is attested already in the 8th century, with the earliest extant text using it being the Pārataveṇpā by a Peruntēvaṉār. The Jains also adopted it, and composed hagiographic texts as late as the 14th-15th centuries.

What is Śrīvaiṣṇava Manipravala? And why?

However, the Śrīvaiṣṇavas adopted it with great enthusiasm since roughly the beginning of the second millennium. Since they considered both the Sanskrit Vedas and the Tamil Vedas (i.e., the Nālāyira Divyaprabandham), they gave equal importance to both Sanskrit and Tamil (depending on the individual teacher/writer, of course). And one way they showed their dual loyalty was by opting to write in a mixture of Tamil and Sanskrit. While Tamil provided the sentence structure and (usually) the word endings, Sanskrit lent its rich vocabulary, with the proportions of words from each language varying according to the author, genre, nature of the text, and so forth.

It has been suggested that Manipravala was used to make theological contents accessible to the lay audience who might not be well-versed in Sanskrit. And the opposite has also been suggested: while giving the general meanings related to Śrīvaiṣṇavism accessible to anyone who is interested in the audience, the more subtle and easily misunderstood meanings were given in Sanskrit so as to preserve them for the common people. It has also been theorized that words of theological importance were not tampered with and kept as such in order to preserve their exact meanings. Or that a prevalence of Sanskrit theological vocabulary (especially the compound words) helped keep the works short and crisp. Whatever the reason, Manipravala thrived in the hands of the Ācāryas up to our day.

Why this website?

The idea behind this website is to provide anyone interested in Manipravala a means to know more about it, learn to read and use Grantha, use word-searchable texts for their research, and also get fonts, material, and suggestions to get started. For, while there are many resources for learning and reading Grantha works online, some websites are not easy to use (like archive.org which is notoriously difficult to search, since the titles are not properly spelled), some have Tamil contents that Google does not show while using English, and many of them are simply scattered and hard to find.

Contributors

This is a dream project for us, and we will be happy to welcome anyone sharing this dream, should they wish to contribute in any way (by providing e-texts, book references with or without links to their PDFs, etc.). Please contact us if you wish to do so.