The PIVF Journal: Essays on Kerala’s Literature, Music, Temple Arts, History and Ideas

The PIVF Journal

Journal

Read beyond the festival. Essays, ideas, traditions and stories that continue the conversation throughout the year.

Heritage5 min read

Peruvanam: The Village That Keeps Time on Drums

A quiet village near Cherpu in Thrissur, an ancient Shiva temple, a pooram older than most of Kerala's famous festivals — and a rhythm that has passed from hand to hand for centuries. This is the story of Peruvanam, and why PIVF calls it home.

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Heritage5 min read

Thrissur Pooram and the Roots Beneath It: A Journey from Vadakkumnathan to Peruvanam

Thrissur Pooram is the festival all of Kerala talks about. But behind the elephants, the parasols and the fireworks is a quieter story — of tiger dancers, ritual fire, village temples and a drumming tradition that began a few kilometres south, in Peruvanam.

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Kerala8 min read

How Kerala Chose What It Valued

Land reform, literacy and public health turned one of India's poorest regions into its most human-developed. It reads less like economics and more like a portrait of a society deciding what mattered.

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Literature7 min read

The Epic That Refuses to Absolve You

The Mahabharata hands nobody a clean conscience — not the victors, not the gods, not the reader. Why an ancient poem still feels like the most honest book about power we have.

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Literature6 min read

The Sentence Said Out Loud

The writer whose Kerala backwaters became world literature never let her fury soften into decoration. On fiction, dissent, and the cost of saying it anyway.

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Dance6 min read

Where Tradition Ends and Invention Begins

A conversation about the frictions — and the unexpected agreements — between classical grammar and contemporary movement on the Indian stage.

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Dance5 min read

The Hand as a Language Older Than Script

A close study of mudra across ritual, sculpture and stage — and how a single gesture can hold an entire cosmology.

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Heritage5 min read

An Art Form Made to Be Erased

Coloured powder poured by hand into a deity, sung to life, then wiped away before dawn. Kerala's most impermanent art and the families who keep it breathing.

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Dance6 min read

Four Centuries of a Dance Rewriting Itself

From temple courtyards to Mughal courts to the concert stage — a map for anyone tracing how classical traditions survive by changing.

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