Prior to the nineteenth century, the Christian contribution to Malayalam letters was slight. Malabar had lived first under the influence of Old Tamil, and thereafter, from roughly the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, under the dominance of Sanskrit, which for the greater part of that period defined literary legitimacy. A small number of Christian songs survive from these centuries, transmitted orally across generations and committed to writing only in the nineteenth century.
What altered this situation was a decision undertaken for religious rather than literary purposes. European missionaries, obliged by the practical necessities of evangelisation to make themselves understood, began to treat the vernacular speech of Kerala as a medium fit for serious writing. The subsequent translation of the Bible into Malayalam demonstrated that the language of the common people was capable of transmitting philosophical and theological argument at full weight. Clergy of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (MOSC) were closely associated with this task, and in the process acquired editorial and literary skills which the Church soon turned to its own institutional ends. Printing, publishing and journalism entered Kerala by precisely the same route, as instruments of evangelisation in the first instance; the Malankara Orthodox community took up all three with an enthusiasm that rapidly outran that of its original teachers, and its members are properly regarded as the effective founders of modern journalism in the Malayalam language.
Malayala Manorama
The decisive institution in this history was Malayala Manorama, established in 1889 as a limited company by Kandathil Varghese Mappilai (MOSC; 1857–1904), who came from a traditional Orthodox family. The Church's involvement was not merely sentimental: Metropolitan Pulikkottil Joseph Mar Dionysius II (MOSC) held a quarter share in the company and made over his own episcopal residence to house its first printing press. The paper appeared initially as a weekly from 1890, and was converted into a daily in 1929, with ownership passing gradually into the hands of the Kandathil family.
Manorama distinguished itself from the other Malayalam periodicals of its day by publishing the work of leading Hindu poets and writers alongside essays contributed by educated young men who otherwise possessed no outlet for their writing, and by actively seeking out fresh literary talent rather than waiting passively for it. Kandathil Varghese Mappilai convened regular gatherings of poets and writers, and launched Bhashaposhini, which remains the most prestigious literary journal published in Malayalam. The effect within the Malankara Orthodox community was the emergence, for the first time in organised form, of a reading public, and behind it a writing public.
Under the direction of K. C. Mammen Mappilai (MOSC), the founder's nephew, the newspaper grew rapidly and became, in the decades that followed, as much a political instrument as a literary one, deeply implicated in nearly every popular movement and agitation that Travancore experienced. This involvement was not without cost. In the course of its protracted conflict with the autocratic Diwan C. P. Rama Swami Iyer, the Government of Travancore ordered the suspension of the paper's publication in 1938, and Manorama did not resume printing until India achieved independence in August 1947, nine years later.
The newspaper survived this period of enforced silence, and has since gone on to considerably greater prominence. Today, Malayala Manorama is, by a very wide margin, the largest newspaper in Kerala, published from approximately nineteen centres, including editions produced in Dubai and Bahrain for the diaspora, with a circulation of approximately 1.8 million copies and an estimated daily readership in the region of 18 million persons. The Manorama group has also established a well-regarded training institute for journalists, offering instruction in both English and Malayalam.
The novel, and what followed
It was Christian writers who first introduced the Malayali reading public to the novel, principally by translating the classics of European fiction. Kandathil Varghese Mappilai (MOSC) and Kalloor Oommen Philipose (MOSC) each undertook a translation of a work of Shakespeare. In the course of the twentieth century, a substantial line of Malankara Orthodox writers shaped Malayalam prose and drama in decisive ways: among them may be named P. K. Kocheeppan Tharakan (MOSC), O. M. Cherian (MOSC), K. M. Varghese (MOSC), Puthencavu Mathen Tharakan (MOSC), and his son K. M. Tharakan (MOSC).
The most singular figure among this company was C. J. Thomas (MOSC; 1918–1960). Ordained a reader, the koruyo, while still a child, he received the customary training intended to prepare him for the priesthood. During his years at university, however, he joined the Communist movement instead, and directed a formidably trained critical intelligence against the political and literary orthodoxies of his generation. He remains, arguably, the sharpest instance of a pattern that recurs throughout the Church's modern history: an institution that had set out to educate men for service at the altar discovered in the process that it had also educated them to argue, in public, in Malayalam, and with a printing press standing behind them.