New Evidence on the Sixteenth-Century East Syriac Missions in the Malabar Coast: The Muttuchira Inscription (1581 CE) in Context

Abstract

The present study deals with an inscription on a granite stele in the township of Muttuchira, Kottayam District, Kerala, India. The inscription was written in Malayalam, in the ancient Dravidian vaṭṭeḻuttu script, in 1581. It commemorates the erection of a series of open-air crosses, as well as the placement of a Persian Cross, called the Bleeding Cross. The first cross was erected in 1528 and the last one in 1581. The inscription was first published in 1930 and, ever since, several concurrent interpretations thereof have been proposed. However, all the previous transcriptions and interpretations were based on a poorly executed estampage, which gave rise to a series of misunderstandings. This study is based on a new, clearly readable estampage and gives a transcription in vaṭṭeḻuttu Unicode fonts and in Modern Malayalam characters as well as a Modern Malayalam and an English translation, together with a detailed historical interpretation permitted by new material collected in Kerala in the last two and a half decades. The new deciphering of the inscription sheds light on the role of Muttuchira, one of the main centres of the anti-Portuguese and anti-Latin resistance of the local Christians in the sixteenth century, on the origin of the open-air crosses defining the landscape of Central Kerala, and on the vicissitudes of Christian epigraphy in Kerala.