Introduction

1

The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed manifold transformations in the religious life of the Malabar Christians from South India. Up to that time, the functioning of the ecclesiastical structures of the local Christian community—known as ‘Saint Thomas Christians’ and claiming Syriac identity—depended highly on bishops consecrated and sent to the Malabar Coast by the Catholicos Patriarch of the Church of the East, from Iraq. As Heleen Murre-van den Berg emphasizes, since the end of the fifteenth century “after almost two centuries of near isolation, the Church of the East in Mesopotamia was reconnected to the wider world; its clergy started to travel and influences from outside began to impact upon its internal development” (Murre-van den Berg 2015, 23). In this context, the contacts between the Church of the East and the Indian Church from the Malabar Coast “were resumed in the late fifteenth century, testifying to the important fact that, in this period, the Church of the East was being reintegrated into a global network of political and ecclesiastical contacts” (ibid.). Since 1553, when the ‘Uniate’ counterpart of the Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, was created, both the East Syriac and the Chaldean Patriarchs sent metropolitan bishops to Malabar and contended for their own jurisdiction over the South Indian Christian community. According to the same scholar, in the context of renewed contacts and communication between the Indian Church and the East Syriac Christians from Iraq, the creation of the Chaldean Catholic Church in the Middle East “seems to have been stimulated as much by the ‘pull-factor’ of a Roman Catholic presence in India as by the ‘push-factor’ of the incumbent [East Syriac] patriarch’s misconduct” (Murre-van den Berg 2015, 47). In 1552, the abbot of the Rabban Hormizd Monastery (near Alqosh, in Iraq), John Sulaqa, revolted against the existing Patriarch, Simeon bar Mama, and went to Rome, where he made a Catholic profession of faith and was re-ordained and appointed Catholicos Patriarch by the pope in the spring of 1553 (on this matter, see Murre-van den Berg 2015, 44–54; Beltrami 1933).

2

In competition with the East-Syriac and Chaldean bishops coming from Iraq to India, the Portuguese, present in Malabar since the end of the fifteenth century, attempted to control the religious life of the Malabar Christians by cutting off their connection with the Syriac Iraqi prelates and by imposing on them Tridentine Catholicism. A process of ‘Latinization,’ carried through by the Catholic missionaries active in the area during the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, had two main objectives. The first one was to achieve Catholic Orthodoxy in terms of doctrine, rites, and jurisdiction by uprooting the Syriac identity of the Malabar Christians and purging their Syriac books from what the Catholic missionaries considered “Nestorian” heresy (in this sense, the Syriac language was often regarded by the European missionaries as a vehicle for heresy). The second objective was to suppress many of the social and cultural customs and practices which the Malabar Christians adopted as a result of their interaction with and integration into the local society of Malabar. Examples include the observance of the rules on purity and untouchability, the practice of charms, magic, and divination, the participation in the festivals of their non-Christian neighbors, and the adoption of the dress, appearance and habits of the Nayars by the Malabar Christians (an overview of these customs are listed in the Ninth Action of Acts of the Synod of Diamper entitled “On the Reformation of Manners;” see Da Cunha Rivara 1862, 488-519).

3

These two tendencies are mirrored in the decrees of the Synod of Diamper (1599), a turning point in the history of the Malabar Christians, which also placed this Christian community under the direct authority of the Latin archbishop of Goa. Yet, the Syriac rites and language in the liturgy as well as many of the local social customs were part of the identity of Malabar Christians, and the missionary strategies used by the Catholic clergy among them needed to be refined. In order to make their missionary enterprise efficient, the missionaries (especially the Jesuits) felt the need to negotiate the borders between social and religious customs and practice, and to redefine them in the light of the local multicultural and multireligious society of Malabar (see Županov 1996). They also adjusted the Catholic dogma, theological discourse and European erudition to the East Syriac tradition of liturgy and theology. This East Syriac tradition formed a rich corpus of literature that reached the Malabar Coast through the repeated contacts of the Malabar Christians with the Middle East (see Perczel 2018, 2015). As shown by Ines Županov, it is through their interaction with the Malabar Christians that the Jesuits elaborated for the first time their missionary strategy of “separating the social from the religious” and of developing “a permissive and flexible attitude towards the diversity of the pre-Christian social customs” (Županov 2005, 287–88), a strategy conventionally known in secondary literature as the principle of accommodatio (see Županov 2005). The importance of the Jesuit mission and of the practice of accommodatio among Malabar Christians has been substantiated and analyzed by Antony Mecherry in his work Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros SJ in Malabar (16^th–17^th Centuries) (see Mecherry 2019). Mecherry analyzes the practice of accommodatio promoted by Francisco Ros, the first European Archbishop of the Malabar Christians, among the South Indian Christians, and stresses that the Jesuit prelate was as important for the practice of accommodatio in the Early Modern Catholic missions in Asia as other prominent missionaries, such as Alessandro Valignano in Japan, Matteo Ricci in China, or Roberto de Nobili in Tamil Nadu (Mecherry 2019, 431). In Mecherry’s words:

4

Given the dilemma faced by the missionaries, namely an underlying conflict between the faith that they wanted to import to India and the local culture that resisted such imports, Malabar turned out to be the primary testing ground of the Jesuit accommodation. […] The Jesuit praxis of accommodation was a “a way-out” approach promoted by Francisco Ros and Roberto de Nobili in their attempt to respond to the local resistance of the people of Malabar. In this process, Ros appeared as a Chaldean in terms of his imitation and appropriation of the traditions of the Malabar Church and Nobili appeared as a high-caste sage in terms of his imitation and appropriation of the customs and symbols of the Brahmins of Madurai. While Ros […] tried to perpetuate the Syriac language and the Indo-Oriental format of the Malabar Church, Nobili presented the Catholic religion before his potential converts as a universal faith that was compatible with their cultural symbolism. (2019, XXXI)

5

As an expression of this complex missionary context, during the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, the Syriac literary heritage of the Malabar Christians shifted from a standard East Syriac (“Nestorian”) canon of texts to a Catholic post-Tridentine literary production in Syriac, a fusion of Western (Latin) and Middle Eastern (Syriac) sources and elements (see Perczel 2009). While, with one exception,¹ Syriac manuscript evidence from Malabar does not date earlier than the sixteenth century, in the sixteenth century, when substantial Syriac manuscript evidence from Malabar is available, Syriac emerges as the liturgical language of this Christian community, being endowed with prestige as the sacred language of the learned priestly elite (see Perczel 2018, 193–95). The Syriac literary output conducted in Malabar under the agency of the Catholic missionaries during the second half of the sixteenth and first decades of the seventeenth centuries is an important witness to the literary networks of the community of the Malabar Christians at that time. It encompasses various literary genres, such as sermons and homilies, liturgical poetry, theological treatises, commentaries, translations, and original creations (Perczel 2009, 295–317). Source analysis of such texts allows one to explore various aspects of the ecclesiastical and confessional identity of the Malabar Christians as well as the cross-cultural encounters between them and the Catholic missionaries.

6

Besides announcing the discovery and emphasizing the importance of several such Syriac Indian compositions from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Malabar, pioneering studies by István Perczel have shown how the cosmopolitanism of the Arabian Sea facilitated the circulation of Syriac texts from the Middle East to the Malabar Coast. In Malabar, through the agency of the Jesuit missionaries, the Syriac Middle Eastern culture met the theological erudition of the Latin West, leading to the creation of this new original Catholic culture in Syriac based on European, Middle Eastern and local sources from Malabar (Perczel 2015, 2009). Perczel also showed how this newly created literature in Syriac, stimulated mainly by the Jesuit missionaries and their Indian disciples, was intended as a means of accommodatio in the context of a controversy about the Chaldean rite analogous to controversies about other rites in Asia, and is thus of crucial importance for understanding early modern Catholicism and the history of Catholic missions in a global perspective (Perczel 2018, 2014).

7

Within the same theoretical framework, in the following paragraphs I would like to focus on a special case of textual accommodatio² that reveals this missionary strategy among the Malabar Christians as an enterprise shared by Catholic missionaries (most likely the Jesuits) and arguably their Indian Syriacist disciples. The central point of my analysis is the entanglement between two literary genres in Syriac from the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries—namely (1) prose sermons and (2) newly discovered liturgical poetry—since occasionally Syriac sermons (translated from Latin or composed on the spot by Catholic missionaries) were reused or replicated in liturgical poetry. As I will try to show, the study of these two groups of texts together is an important witness to the amalgamation of the East Syriac heritage of Malabar Christians and Indian Catholicism as promoted by Western Catholic missionaries. Such texts also illustrate the chains of transmission of knowledge from the Jesuit teachers to their Indian pupils.

Syriac Catholic Paideia and the Collections of Syriac Catholic Sermons from Malabar

8

Most of the Syriac texts that I will discuss henceforth belong to the Syriacist circles of Francisco Ros, a polyglot Jesuit missionary to India who, in 1587, became Professor of Syriac language at the Jesuit Seminary of Vaipicotta in Chennamangalam. Ros was entrusted with the ‘correction’ of the Syriac books from Malabar following the synod of Diamper. Later on, he became the first European Bishop of the Malabar Christians (1601–1624) and was the patron and defender of Roberto de Nobili, the most controversial accommodationist missionary in the Indian rites controversy, from Tamil Nādu (on Francisco Ros, see Mecherry 2019; Ferolli 1939, 1:291–360; Thekkedath 1988, 2:75–79). Under the supervision of Ros, a considerable number of Syriac compositions (both translations/adaptations from Latin and original creations) were created in Malabar in the late sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth centuries (see Perczel 2018, 214–25). Before assessing the importance and value of several Syriac compositions coming from him and his Syriacist circles (which are the object of the present study), it is necessary to make some preliminary remarks on what the Syriac heritage of the Malabar Christians looked like before the Jesuits started to teach Syriac in their seminary at Vaipicotta in the 1580s. This provides a general context on the emergence of these Syro-Catholic texts from Malabar and allows one to link them to the previous Syriac textual tradition of the South Indian Christian community.

9

As far as one can rely on the preserved and clearly dated evidence, the Syriac manuscript material from Malabar up to the 1560s generally consists of standard East Syriac literature, mostly liturgical material. Indicative in this sense are, for instance, the Syriac manuscripts from Malabar (either locally copied or brought from the Middle East to South India) preserved in the Vatican Library and discussed by Van der Ploeg in his book (1983, 184–203). Most of them are standard East Syriac liturgical and biblical books belonging to the various Syriac prelates from Iraq, consecrated and sent by their Patriarchs to the Malabar Coast for the local Christian community (ibid.). Such works continued to be copied and eventually adapted by diligent local scribes fond of their Syriac Church and culture. It is possible that many of the East Syriac books condemned by the Synod of Diamper had belonged only to a very learned ecclesiastical elite directly related to the circle of Mar Abraham (?–1597), the last Chaldean Metropolitan of the Malabar Christians before the Synod of Diamper (Perczel 2013, for the list of condemned books, see Da Cunha Rivara 1862, 328-337). Yet, the continuous copying of several such condemned works by the Malayalee Syriacist scribes, throughout the centuries, is an indicator that at least some of these titles had been circulating and continued to circulate among the Malabar Christians before and after Diamper (Perczel 2013).

10

In competition and complementary to this, in the second half of the sixteenth century a new Syriac Catholic culture started to develop in Malabar comprising both translations/adaptations from Latin and original creations meant to contend with East Syriac sources of authority. The earliest dated Syro-Catholic compositions to be used in the Catholic mission among the Malabar Christians are from the year 1567.³ It is possible that these Catholic texts were produced in response to the fact that by the early 1560s Mar Joseph, the Chaldean Metropolitan of Malabar and the brother of the first Chaldean Patriarch, John Sulaqa, refused to ordain to priesthood Malayalee pupils trained by the Franciscans in their seminary at Cochin on account of their ignorance of the Syriac rites and language (Thekkedath 1988, 2:44). To the year 1567 one can link such works as a collection of testimonia from the Greek and Latin Church Fathers on the primacy of Saint Peter over the whole Church and an untitled sermon on the Elevation of the Cross which belongs to a larger corpus of sermons for various feast-days and commemorations of saints.⁴ I have referred elsewhere to this collection as “the Malabar Sermonary” (Mustaţă 2020). The core of the collection of sermons (including the sermon on the Elevation of the Cross) seems to be based on a Latin/Western model, and there is need for further philological work in order to identify its source(s). The Indian Syriacist scribes either copied the sermons in independent collections with a life of their own, or inserted some of the sermons in miscellanies.

11

After the Synod of Diamper, other sermons were added to the collection and the Malayali scribes continued to copy and adapt these texts until the nineteenth century.⁵ Many of the later additions to the collection are examples of Syriac textual accommodatio and must have been composed within the Syriacist circles of Francisco Ros. Such is, for instance, a sermon on Saint Thomas the Apostle, an original composition based on both Latin and Spanish sources from Europe and Syriac Middle Eastern sources (see Mustaţă 2019) that I will further refer to and which must have been composed sometime in the first decades of the seventeenth century, after 1601. The augmented collection of sermons comprising initial adaptations from European source(s) (done around the year 1567) and enriched further with original creations addressing the audience of the Malabar Christians might have been used for teaching purposes, perhaps for the instruction of future priests in the seminary. This is suggested by the fact that after 1653 (when the Malabar Christians revolted against the Portuguese and the Jesuit Archbishops) the West Syriac branch of Syriac Christians from Malabar reedited and reused this sermonary and even composed sermons according to the prescriptions of the European medieval artes praedicandi (manuals for writing model sermons) in order to polemicize with their Syro-Catholic rivals. This practice of writing sermons in Syriac while observing the rules of European medieval artes praedicandi was already embedded in the compositions belonging to the Malabar Sermonary (see Mustaţă 2020).

12

Together with a variety of other literary and theological texts, the sermonary seems to have constituted the basis of Syriac institution in Malabar at the turn of seventeenth century. Most of this literary output arguably reflects the activity of Francisco Ros and can be understood as an expression of textual accommodatio (Perczel 2018, 214–25). Among other items, this corpus of Syriac literature comprises original theological treatises on various topics, compilations on canon-law, Syriac-Garshuni Malayalam explanations on the books of the Bible, translations from Latin of biblical or Patristic works (such as a translation of the Revelation of John on the basis of the Vulgate and a translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ “Mystical Theology” from the Latin version by Ambrogio Traversari), and commentaries on various biblical works by Western authors such as Denis the Carthusian (see Perczel 2009, 2008); all these works need further study. While there is need for substantial research in order to establish the precise date and authorship of these texts, they still provide the general picture of a Syriac paideia in Malabar against which the texts referred to further on can be better understood.

13

Almost a century later, a similar Catholic literary movement in Syriac took place in the Middle East after the establishment of the Capuchin mission in Aleppo in 1667. In this context of Catholic consolidation, many Catholic literary and theological works were compiled, composed, and translated into Syriac through the literary activity of learned men such as Joseph II Ṣliba, the Patriarch of the Chaldeans (1696–1714) (see Murre-van den Berg 2015, 60–68). The Syriac Catholic material from the Middle East was usually compiled or translated from Latin into Syriac through the intermediary of already existing Arabic translations (2015, 245–52). Compared to this, the distinctive textual peculiarity of the Syriac Catholic texts from Malabar seems to be precisely the fact that they lack such an Arabic intermediary; thus, from a glocal perspective, they enrich our understanding of the variety of Catholic missions among different groups of Syriac Christians in different parts of the world, in the early modern times.

The Canticles of Glorification for the Night Service and the Malabar Catholic Revision of the Ḥudrā

14

In order to unravel the entanglement between Syro-Catholic sermons from the Malabar Sermonary and pieces of Syriac liturgical poetry from Malabar on the basis of compared manuscript analysis, I will mainly show how a newly discovered group of hymns belonging to the genre of “canticle of glorification” (ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ) [Syr. tešboḥtā⁶] was composed in Malabar and how they circulated both in anthologies and liturgical manuscripts. I will also explain the relationship of these new compositions to the already existing Syriac liturgical poetry belonging to the literary heritage of the Church of the East. I will define the place of this type of poetry within the ritual: the stanzas of these new hymns from Malabar were inserted as propers in the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā under the title “anthems” (ܗܦ̈ܟܬܐ) [Syr. hpākātā] according to a pattern which already existed in the Middle East but has been little documented so far in secondary literature; the Ḥudrā and the Gazzā are two complementary collections and can be seen together as a breviary, a collection of hymns and services, for the main festivals of the liturgical year. Another question that I will try to answer is: What is the relationship of these produced locally hymns to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Syriac Catholic collections of sermons from Malabar and to the Latin hymnography of the Roman Breviary approved by the Council of Trent? I will also discuss as a working hypothesis the evidence for ascribing these poetical compositions to the authorship of the Indian Syriacist poet Alexander of the Port/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar (1588–1673), author of religious and humanistic erudite poetry and a disciple of Francisco Ros. I will bring forward three textual examples in order to reconstruct the history of these texts from ritual books back to the workshop of their skillful author(s) and show the sources and chains of Syriac knowledge in Malabar after the Synod of Diamper (1599).

15

In a pioneering study from 2014, István Perczel reported about the discovery of seven memrē by Alexander of the Port (Kadavil Chandy Kattanar) comprised in a South Indian manuscript: MS Mannanam Syriac 63 (Perczel 2014). The name of the poet does not appear in the manuscript, but the manuscript comprises, among other things, a memrā on the Eucharist, which the Indian poet sent to Pope Alexander VII in 1657. The poem on the Eucharist is also preserved under Kadavil Chandy’s name in another manuscript (MS Mannanam Syriac 99: fol. 149r–160v) (Perczel 2014, 32–34). Perczel established that out of the eight poems of similar structure and style comprised in MS Mannanam Syriac 63, seven are by Kadavil Chandy while the eighth poem is written by a medieval East Syriac poet from the thirteenth century, Gabriel Qamṣa of Mosul (2014, 42–43); the poem by Gabriel of Mosul served as the model for the poetry of Kadavil Chandy (2014, 36–40). While analyzing the content of a memrā on the Syriac language by Kadavil Chandi, Perczel showed its reliance on an untitled Catholic treatise against heresies in Syriac, which is comprised in MS Mannanam Syriac 46: fol. 123v–135r (2014, 42–43). This miscellaneous manuscript is the oldest copy of the Malabar Sermonary. In order to show the intertextuality between liturgical hymns from the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā and sermons from the Malabar Sermonary, I follow Perczel’s analysis.

16

I will begin with the case study of an eighteenth/early nineteenth century manuscript preserved in the library of the Metropolitan Palace of the Church of the East in Thrissur. MS Thrissur Syriac 62 is an interesting anthology (a pocket-book) and contains Syriac and Garshuni Malayalam material.⁷ The manuscript, which does not contain any colophon or date, can be dated to the eighteenth/early nineteenth century on paleographical grounds.⁸ It is written in a special type of Indian East Syriac script that does not seem fully developed as a local Indian variant of the East Syriac script when compared to other Syriac Indian manuscripts from the nineteenth century [on this type of script, see Briquel-Chatonnet and Desreumaux (2010)). For the sake of the present discussion, I have conventionally divided its contents into five main sections/parts:

17

1. fol. 1r–11r: A fragment from the Eucharistic celebration (according to the revised rite of Francisco Ros) and other liturgical fragments;
2. fol. 11v–33r: A short catechetical work in Garshuni Malayalam, in the form of questions and answers;
3. fol. 33v–99v: Poetical works by Kadavil Chandy Kattanar/Alexander the Indian, a Syriacist Indian poet, disciple of the Jesuits, and other pieces of poetry which resemble in style the compositions of the same poet;
4. fol. 99v–110r: A couple of anthem-like canticles which seem to be part of the ritual for various feast days.
5. fol. 110v–120v: The Litany of the Saints, the Marian Litany (translated from Latin) and other hymns and liturgical fragments.

18

The third part of the manuscript (fol. 33v–99v) that is important for the present discussion consists of poems belonging to Kadavil Chandy Kattanar (1588–1673), an Indian priest and Syriacist poet (a disciple of Francisco Ros), and other religious pieces of poetry similar in style which have been taken out of their liturgical context in an anthological manner. An important figure in the general revolt of the Malabar Christians against their Jesuit bishops and the Portuguese from 1653 (see Thekkedath 1988, 2:91–109; Pallath 2006), Kadavil Chandy Kattanar became one of the four advisors of the newly consecrated Archdeacon Thomas Pakalomattam (Thekkedath 1988, 2:92), who later joined the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch and became Mor Toma I, the metropolitan of the so-called “New Faction/New Allegiance” (in Malayalam, Puthankūru) among the Malabar Christians (1988, 2:100–102). Further on, in 1663, a part of the Malabar Christians who had previously revolted against the Portuguese and the Jesuit Archbishops returned to the fold of the Catholic Church. This happened as an outcome of the fact that Parambil Chandy, the cousin of Archdeacon Thomas, was consecrated as the first indigenous Catholic bishop of this Christian community. In this context, Kadavil Chandy Kattanar became Parambil Chandy’s Vicar General (2014, 32; Toepel 2011, 389). I. Perczel, who discovered five hymns composed by the same Kadavil Chandy, has described his poetry of as “a synthesis of Indian, East Syriac, and post-Tridentine Latin Christian elements along with humanistic erudition which the poet acquired from his Jesuit teacher” (Perczel 2014, 40). In this manuscript (MS Thrissur Syriac 62), the name of the poet is absent but I was able to identify three of his hymns on the basis of Perczel’s work; the mēmrā on the Eucharist is the only poem explicitly preserved under the poet’s name in another manuscript (MS Mannanam Syriac 99: fol. 149r–160v) (see Perczel 2014, 32–34). This section of the manuscript comprises the following items:

• 19

  fol. 33v-58r: Kadavil Chandy’s mēmrā on the Eucharist. The title and the tune anthem is missing; it begins with the first verse under the heading ālap (ܐ) of the acrostic. Incipit: (܀ ܐܵܒܵܐ ܠܲܒܪܹܗ̣ ܝܼܚܝܼܕܵܝܵܐ ܠܥܵܠܲܡ ܫܲܕܲܪ܀ ܕܓܹܢܣܵܐ ܕܐܢ̈ܫܵܐ ܕܲܒܝܼܕ ܗܘܵܐ ܢܒܲܫܩܲܪ⁹ ܐܵܦܿ ܢܹܣܥܘܿܪ܀). The scribe copied the tune anthem, which usually follows the title of the poem, only at the end of the mēmrā (on fol. 57v-58r).

• 20

  fol. 58r-69v: Kadavil Chandy’s mēmrā on the Syriac language. Title and incipit: (ܫܝܼܪ̈ܬܵܐ ܕܥܲܠ ܩܘܼܠܵܣ ܠܹܫܵܢܵܐ ܣܘܼܪܝܝܵܐ ܒܿܩܲܠ ܣܓܖܝܼܢܲܢ¹⁰ ܒܲܪܟܝܼܢܲܢ. ܠܚܲܕ ܟܝܵܢܵܐ ܡܥܠܝܐ܀ ܡܲܘܕܹܝܢܲܢ. ܒܲܫܡܹܗ ܡܬܘܿܡܵܝܵܐ܀ ܕܲܐܒܵܐ ܘܲܒܼܪܵܐ. ܘܪܘܼܚܵܐ ܕܩܘܼܕܫܐ.).

• 21

  fol. 69v-71r: Canticle of glorification in praise of St. Mary. Title and incipit: (ܬܫܒܘܿܚܬܵܐ ܕܡܲܪܬܿܝ ܡܲܪܝܲܡ¹¹ ܒܿܪܝܼܟܼ ܚܢܵܢܵܐ ܕܲܒܼܛܲܝܒܘܼܬܹܗ̣ ܦܲܪܢܹܣ ܚܲܝܝ̈ܢ ܒܲܢܒܝܼܘܼܬܼܵܐ܀).

• 22

  fol. 71r-72r: Intercession before the altar. Title and incipit: (ܒܥܘܬܐ ܖܩܖܡ ܡܖܒܚܐ¹² ܐܲܒܵܐ ܕܩܘܼܫܬܐ ܗܐ ܒܪܵܟ ܕܹܒܚܵܐ ܕܲܡܪܥܹܐ ܠܵܟܼ܀).

• 23

  fol. 72v-74r: Untitled hymn about the Crucifixion of Christ. In the first part of the hymn the Greek Trìs hágion hymn is meant to be repeated after some of the stanzas, while after other stanzas the words of Christ “My people, what have I done to thee?” are to be repeated. Incipit: (ܥܲܡܝ ܡܵܢܵܐ ܥܹܒܼܕܲܬܼ¹³ ܠܵܟܼ܆ ܥܢܝܼܢܝ ܒܿܡܲܢ ܐܲܟܼܪܝܼܬܵܟܼ܀ ܕܡ̣ܢ ܐܲܪܥܵܐ ܕܡܹܨܪܹܝܢ: ܐܲܦܿܩܹܬܼ ܠܲܓܦܹܬܵܟ܀).

• 24

  fol. 74r-76v: Untitled hymn on the Cross. Incipit: (ܨܠܝܼܒܵܐ ܡܗܲܝܡܲܢ ܒܹܝܬܼ ܟܠ ܐܝܼܠܲܢ܀ ܫܲܒܲܚ ܠܹܫܵܢܝ ܐܲܓܘܼܢ ܬܲܟܬܘܼܫ܀).

• 25

  fol. 76v-82r: Another untitled hymn on the wood of the Cross. Incipit: (ܒܩܠܐ ܣܓܖܝܢܢ¹⁴ ܒܲܪܟܝܼܢܲܢ. ܠܨܠܝܼܒܼ܀ ܒܵܪܟܝܼܢܲܢ ܒܲܪܟܝܵܢܲܢ܀ ܘܣܲܓܕܝܢܲܢ. ܢܝܼܫܹܗ ܕܣܓܕܝܼܢܲܢ܀ ܘܲܠܡܲܟܝܵܢܲܢ. ܐܲܟܝܼ ܘܲܗܘܵܐ ܡܙܲܟܝܵܢܲܢ܀ ܘܲܥܢܵܢ. ܒܿܦܘܼܪܩܵܢܲܢ ܘܙܲܒܼܢܲܢ܀܀ ܟܲܕ ܗܵܪܹܓ ܐܢܵܐ ܒܐܪܙܹܗ̣ ܪܵܡܵܐ܀ ܘܲܡܥܲܠܝܘܼܬܹܗ̣ ܕܠܵܐ ܡܹܬܼܦܲܚܡܵܐ܀).

• 26

  fol. 82r-89v: Kadavil Chandy’s mēmrā on the Arabic language. The title is missing. The poem is only fragmentarily preserved (it ends after the section yūd of the acrostic). Untitled incipit: (ܣܲܓܕܝܼܢܲܢ ܠܲܐܒܵܐ ܡܬܘܿܡܵܝܵܐ܀ ܘܡܲܘܕܹܝܢܲܢ ܒܲܒܼܪܹܗ ܝܼܚܝܼܕܵܝܵܐ܀ ܘܲܡܫܲܒܚܝܼܢܲܢ ܠܪܘܼܚܵܐ ܕܩܘܼܕܫܵܐ ܫܲܘܝܵܐ܀ ܐܝܟ ܬܲܘܕܝܼܬܼ ܕܗܿܘܢܵܐ ܕܕܘܼܟܣܝܵܐ܀ܐ¹⁵܀ ܐܲܒܵܐ ܘܲܒܪܵܐ ܘܪܘܼܚܵܐ ܚܲܝܵܐ܀ ܚܲܕ ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ ܕܠܵܐ ܫܘܼܪܝܵܐ܀).

• 27

  fol. 89v-91v: Canticle of glorification in praise of St. Mary. Title and incipit: (ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ ܖܡܖܝܡ¹⁶ ܫܠܵܡܵܐ ܥܲܡܹܟܼܝ ܡܲܠܝܲܬ݀ ܛܲܝܒܘܼ ܡܵܪܢ ܥܲܡܹܟܼܝ܀ ܪ̈ܚܡܹܐ ܐܹܬܼܢܣܹܟܼܘ ܥܲܠ ܣܹܦܘܵܬܹܟܼܝ ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ ܒܲܪܟܹܟܼܝ܀).

• 28

  fol. 91v-93v: Another canticle in praise of St. Mary. Title and incipit: (܀ܐܚܪܢܐ ܖܡܖܝܡ܀¹⁷ ܒܿܥܹܐܕܵܐ ܕܝܵܘܡܲܢ ܢܹܓܕܘܿܠ ܟܠܝܼܠܵܐ ܕܲܙܡܝܼܪܵܬܼܵܐ ܠܐܝܼܩܲܪ ܡܲܪܝܲܡ܀). Every verse of the poem ends with the word: (ܡܪܝܡ).

• 29

  fol. 93v-96r: Canticle of glorification in praise of the saints. Title and incipit: (܀ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ ܖܩܖܝܫܐ܀܀¹⁸ ܫܘܼܒܚܵܐ ܠܛܵܒܵܐ ܕܟܲܪܝܼ ܙܲܒܼܢܵܐ ܕܥܲܩܬܼ ܥܲܠܡܵܐ ܠܲܓܼܒܵܘܗܝ ܟܹܐܢܹܐ܀).

• 30

  fol. 96r-97v: Canticle of glorification in praise of St. Thomas. Title and incipit: (܀ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ ܖܡܖܝ ܬܐܘܡܐ܀¹⁹ ܬܵܘ ܒܢܲܝ ܗܹܢܕܘܿ. ܒܿܢܲܝ ܬܲܪܒܝܼܬܼܵܐ ܕܲܫܠܝܼܚ ܬܐܘܿܡܵܐ܀ ܢܘܼܗܪܹܗ ܕܥܲܠܡܵܐ ܪܲܥܝܵܐ ܕܥܹܕܬܵܐ ܓܙܐ ܪ̈ܒܵܐ܀).

• 31

  fol. 97v-99v: Canticle of glorification in praise of the holy martyrs. Untitled incipit: (ܬܵܘ ܡܵܝܘܿܬܹܐ ܢܙܲܝܲܚ ܕܘܼܟܼܿܪܢ ܣܲܗܕܹܐ ܒܿܪܝܼܟܹܐ܀ ܡܡܲܪܝܵܢܹܐ ܕܝܼܫܘܿܥ ܡܪܗܘܿܢ).

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While each of the items belonging to this section of the manuscript would deserve a close examination in relation to their actual liturgical context and function, the aim of the present article is to critically assess only the literary genre of the three pieces comprised between fol. 89v–91v, 96r–97v, 97v–99v. The reason for doing so is that they belong to the same liturgical place in the ritual, namely at the beginning of the night service (ܠܠܝܐ) [Syr. lēlyā] for feast days and commemorations of saints (ܥܐ̈ܕܐ ܘܕܘܟܪ̈ܢܐ) [Syr. ‘ē’dē u-dukrānē], most of them with fixed date, in the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā (a sort of East Syriac Breviary comprising propers for the services for the temporal and sanctoral sections of the liturgical year). As I have already indicated, occasionally such pieces of poetry present a structural intertextual correspondence with the corpus of Syriac Catholic sermons referred to above as “the Malabar Sermonary” and, therefore, they are an important witness to the various redactions of Syriac texts in Malabar during the times surrounding the Synod of Diamper. Due to the interconnectedness between various literary genres of Syriac compositions, they also invite to an incursion into the intellectual history of the time.

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Whereas a systematic study on the history and development of the East Syriac Ḥudrā and Gazzā in itself is a desideratum, the same is true about the structure, development, and use of their Malabar Catholic revision, which was prescribed by the Synod of Diamper. Decrees 14 and 15 from the fourteenth chapter of the Third Action of the synod provide a list of “Nestorian” saints whose services are to be purged from this type of liturgical books, as well as a list of doctrinal “mistakes” to be corrected (see Da Cunha Rivara 1862, 337-339). Up to the second half of the nineteenth century such ritual books of the Catholic revision circulated in Malabar only in manuscript form.²⁰

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According to Juan Mateos who studied the services for the night (ܠܠܝܐ) [Syr. lēlyā] and morning (ܨܦܪܐ) [Syr. ṣaprā] in the Chaldean tradition from Iraq, the difference between the manuscripts of the Ḥudrā and those of the Gazzā is that “Gazzā contains only compositions belonging to the night vigil; such pieces are not to be found in the Ḥudrā; the two books are therefore complementary to each other” (Mateos 1956, 11). The same scholar asserts that

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Ḥudrā is the book which contains the oldest services for all days of the ecclesiastical year. Later compositions have been reunited in another volume, namely the Gazzā. The content of the Gazzā is exclusively dedicated to the night vigil. Actually, this vigil is the last one to have been organized among the liturgical hours. Being an anthology, Gazzā shows notable variations with respect to contents from one volume to another. Basically, in each monastery, the poet monks could add new pieces of poetry according to their own will. (1956, 12)

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Be this as it may, the liturgical manuscripts containing the Malabar Catholic revision of these two collections usually form a single corpus combining both parts in a single codex, and the manuscripts do not display a clear division between Ḥudrā and Gazzā. Occasionally, the scribes would group the temporal section (services for Sundays) in a volume and the sanctoral section (commemorations of saints and feast days with fixed date) in another one, but even this is inconsistent, since feast days such as the Ascension of Christ and the Pentecost (which belong to the temporal section of the liturgical year) usually end up in the sanctoral part. Therefore, whenever I refer to the “Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā” in what follows, it is only a convention in order designate manuscripts combining both the Ḥudrā and Gazzā; I prefer to use the term Ḥudrā over Gazzā, as I have not encountered the term Gazzā in any manuscript containing this Catholic revision of the ritual from Malabar. Also, for comparison I have used three other manuscripts for the analogous East Syriac ritual from the Middle East, namely MS Thrissur Syriac 27 (on this manuscript, see Othottil 2011, 71–84) and MSS Vatican Syriac 86 and 87. MSS Thrissur Syriac 27 and Vatican Syriac 86 bear the title Ḥudrā, while MS Vatican Syriac 87 begins directly with the services without a generic title (on the two Ḥudrā MSS from the Vatican Library, see Assemani and Assemani 1758, 476–82; Van der Ploeg 1983, 196–97).

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In order to determine the liturgical place of the canticles of glorification,²¹ I looked into the services of various feast days and commemorations of saints from several South Indian liturgical manuscripts (ranging from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries) and from a few sixteenth-century manuscripts of the Ḥudrā from the Middle East. I noticed that the beginning of the service of the night (ܠܠܝܐ) [Syr. lēlyā] was a (liturgical) place of relative freedom in the ritual, where unsystematically various pieces of liturgical poetry could be inserted as propers (=distinctive elements for every feast day); most of the hymns inserted in this place of the ritual are abridged versions of the mēmrē (metrical homilies) composed in dodecasyllabic meter (4+4+4) by Narsai of Nisibis (fifth to sixth centuries), but the name of the poet is always omitted from the manuscripts. In the East Syriac tradition, Narsai is considered to be the most important East Syriac poet from Late Antiquity after Ephrem the Syrian and a champion of Nestorian theology. As the founder of the School of Nisibis and due to his dependence on the theology of the ‘Three Greek Doctors’—Diodore of Tarsus (d. 390), Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428) and Nestorius (d. 450)—Narsai “ultimately became the most foundational theologian articulating a dyophysite Christology in Syriac” (Butts 2020, 4) (on the most recent scholarly contribution to Narsai, see Butts 2020).

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These abridged poems of Narsai have been inserted in manuscripts of the Ḥudrā under the title “anthems”(ܗܦ̈ܟܬܐ) [Syr. hpākātā];²² however, this type of poetry is missing from the printed editions of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā (i.e., Bedjan 1886–1887; Darmo 1960–1962). It is also missing from the Chaldean revision of the Gazzā done in the Middle East at the end of the seventeenth century by the Chaldean Patriarch Joseph II of Amid.²³ While in some East Syriac manuscripts of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā this type of poetry is missing,²⁴ it is to be found three manuscripts of the Ḥudrā from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Middle East. It is present in MS Thrissur Syriac 27, a Ḥudrā manuscript copied in Alkaye in Urmi (Iran) in 1598 A.D. (the manuscript is described in Othottil 2011, 71–84) and in MSS Vatican Syriac 86 and 87.²⁵ The two Ḥudrā manuscripts from the Vatican Library are particularly important for the Indian context as they might have belonged to Mar Joseph Sulaqa (see Van der Ploeg 1983, 196–97). As mentioned above, Mar Joseph was the brother of the first Chaldean Patriarch in the Middle East, Yohannan Sulaqa. In the 1550s and 1560s Mar Joseph was active in Malabar, where he was sent as Metropolitan Bishop of India by his Patriarch, ‘Abdišo‘ of Gazarta (on Mar Joseph, see Beltrami 1933, 35–59; Thekkedath 1988, 2:40–47).

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Alongside with the poetry of Narsai, in the same liturgical context, new “canticles of glorification” were composed and introduced as propers in the services belonging to the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā, under the same title “anthems” (ܗܦܟ̈ܬܐ) [Syr. hpākātā]. Like the poetry of Narsai, such poems usually precede the session (ܡܘܬܒܐ) [Syr. mawtbā] of the service of the night and are meant to be read or chanted²⁶ as insertions at Psalm 82: 1 (“God stood in the assembly of angels”) in the beginning of the twelfth (ܗܘܠܠܐ) hulālā²⁷, during the reading of the Psalter within the night service (for their place in the ritual, see, for instance, Bedjan 1886–1887, 1-3:3:278). All newly added poems use the dodecasyllabic metre of Narsai, but like late medieval Syriac poetry they also use rhyme (on the peculiarities of late medieval Syriac poetry, see Brock 2018, also Pritula 2015, 72–116, with an emphasis on the Wardā collection; on the continuity and changes between medieval and early modern Syriac poetry in the Middle East, see Murre-van den Berg 2015, 156–83). The rhyme pattern suggests that some of the newly created poems are divided into couplets, while others might be divided into quatrains; the division of some of the canticles into quatrains is suggested by the fact that in the ritual, a canticle is occasionally divided into shorter “anthems” resembling stanzas of four verses each. The scribes introduced each such stanza/anthem with the word (ܐܚܪܬܐ) [(’)ḥrētā] “another-one.” The rhyme pattern is either aaaa or aabb, but there are also instances when isolated verses do not present any rhyme. However, some of the newly composed canticles do not appear divided into quatrains even in liturgical context; this is, for instance, the case for the canticle for the feast day of the Transfiguration of Christ discussed below. Also, unlike their Middle Eastern peers, the Indian scribes do not always mark verses or hemistichs in Syriac poetry with two oblique dots (܆) and little crosses (܀). Since the use of punctuation in manuscripts seems to rather reflect the choice of the scribe, punctuation does not always help to understand the structure of these canticles.

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Upon a systematic search through Syriac liturgical manuscripts from several South Indian libraries, to which I have added the evidence of an Indian manuscript preserved in Paris, I have collected twenty one canticles of glorifications for the service of the night from the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā. Around half of the canticles are abridged versions of Narsai’s poetry showing continuity with the East Syriac liturgical tradition from the Middle East. Other canticles present in both the Iraqi and South Indian manuscripts might be pieces of poetry composed by medieval East Syriac poets, and the identification of their author(s) requires further study. A third group of canticles are newly created Syro-Catholic poems composed in the meter used by Narsai in India. Occasionally, such newly created pieces of Syro-Catholic poetry were meant to replace the existing pieces belonging to Narsai. The majority of the manuscripts testifying to this tradition are nineteenth-century copies (which is not exceptional if one considers the general situation of the Syriac manuscripts preserved in Malabar). Since most of these manuscripts do not contain a colophon, it is difficult to determine their precise date. Among the manuscripts that can be safely dated and help one trace the origin of these Syro-Catholic poems to the decades following the Synod of Diamper, one should mention MS Paris Syriac BnF 25, the prayer book of Parambil Chandy, the first indigenous Catholic bishop of the Malabar Christians after the general revolt in 1653. The manuscript, which is a Kaškūl (i.e., to be used for the ferial section of the liturgical year), also contains some services for feast days and commemorations of saints (i.e., belonging to the temporal and sanctoral sections of the liturgical year) copied as an appendix to the ferial section (this manuscript has been discussed in detail by Van der Ploeg 1983, 231–44; more recently, it was revisited by Perczel 2016, 50–52, 264–65). Among the manuscripts preserved in India, one of the most comprehensive collections of the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā is MS Mannanam Syriac 99 dated to the year 1734 AD (on this manuscript, see Perczel 2014, 32; Thelly 2004, 261–62, 267). The canticles of glorification survive in collections of varying length depending on the aim of the scribe. In most cases, they are copied in manuscripts of the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā (combining both the temporal and the sanctoral sections of the liturgical year), but services for a few feast days might have been added as a small appendix to other liturgical books such as the Kaškūl or to the “Book of the Week Before and After” (Ktābā da-qdām wa-d-bātar) containing the standard services of the days of the week, corresponding to the šḥimō in the West-Syriac tradition.

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In South Indian manuscripts, these poems sometimes appear in non-liturgical context, in anthologies, bearing the title “canticle of glorification” (ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ) [Syr. tešboḥtā]; in such cases, the text of the poems runs continuously and there is no stanzaic division (such is the case of MS Thrissur Syriac 62 discussed above). In most of the manuscripts (which are liturgical manuscripts), the canticles are inserted under the title “anthems” (ܗܦܟ̈ܬܐ) [Syr. hpākātā], as propers, in the beginning of the service of the night (ܠܠܝܐ) [Syr. lēlyā] for various feast-days; such series of anthems are usually organized in units of four verses. Occasionally, even the canticles based on Narsai’s mēmrē (i.e., those inherited from the East Syriac liturgical tradition) do not appear in their liturgical context but are rather isolated, usually in the end of a liturgical manuscript, preceding the colophon. When in the second half of the nineteenth century, Blessed Elias Kuriakose Chavara reorganized the liturgical material from the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā for his breviary, he sometimes suppressed some of the verses of the canticles or reorganized their verses into units (anthems) of uneven length.²⁸

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The following list comprises an inventory of the canticles of glorifications for the night service from the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā, ordered according to their incipit. Since the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā displays a hybridization between the Roman Catholic and the East Syriac liturgical calendars, I have chosen to list the feast days in the order in which they appear in MS Mannanam Syriac 99. The manuscript is one of the most complete collections of this type and was copied in 1734 A.D.:

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1. The Nativity of Christ (ܒܝܬ ܝܠܕܗ ܕܡܪܢ ܕܒܒܣܪ): inc.: (ܒܚܘܒܐ ܘܪ̈ܚܡܐ ܨܒ̣ܐ ܒܪܘܝܐ ܕܢܚܐ ܠܟܠܐ).
2. Commemoration of St. Steven (ܕܘܟܪܢܐ ܕܡܪܝ ܐܣܛܦܢܘܣ ܣܗܕܐ): inc.: (ܡܠܟܐ ܕܪܘܡܐ ܕܙܟܐ ܒܩܝܣܐ ܠܒܝܫܐ ܘܡܘܬܐ).
3. The Circumcision of Christ (ܓܙܘܪܬܗ ܕܡܪܢ): inc.: (ܬܘ ܒܢܝ̈ ܒܣܪܐ ܗܪܘܓܘ ܒܡܠܬܐ ܕܗܘ̣ܐ ܒܣܪܐ).
4. The Epiphany of Christ (ܕܢܚܗ ܕܡܪܢ): inc.: (ܨܠܡܐ ܡܠܝܠܐ ܨܒ̣ܐ ܒܪܘܝܐ ܕܢܬܩܢ ܠܐܕܡ).
5. The Ascension of Christ (ܣܘܠܩܗ ܕܡܪܢ ܕܠܫܡܝ̈ܐ): inc.: (ܒܫܝܛܘܬ ܡܕܪܢ ܬܗܪܬܿ ܣܓܝ ܕܟܡܐ ܝܪ̣ܒ).
6. The Pentecost (ܦܢܛܩܘܣܛܐ): inc.: (ܓܙܐ ܕܪܘܚܐ ܦܬ̣ܚ ܒܪܘܝܐ ܩܕܡ ܡܝܘ̈ܬܐ).
7. Corpus Christi (ܥܐܕܐ ܕܐܪ̈ܙܐ ܩܕ̈ܝܫܐ): inc.: (ܬܘ ܡܝܘ̈ܬܐ ܟ̇ܢܫ̣ ܡܢܢܐ ܠܚܡ ܬܕܡܘܪܬܐ).
8. Commemoration of the Virgin Mary (ܕܘܟܪܢ ܛܘܒܢܝܬܐ ܡܪܝܡ ܝܠܕܬ ܐܠܗܐ ܟܠܡܢ ܕܗܘ̣): inc.: (ܫܠܡܐ ܥܡܟܝ ܡܠܝܬ ܛܝܒܘ. ܡܪܢ ܥܡܟܝ).
9. One of the Apostles (ܚܕ ܦܪܨܘܦܐ ܕܫܠܝ̈ܚܐ): inc.: (ܒܒܢܝܢ ܡܓܕܠܐ ܡܪܝܐ ܒܠܒܠ ܠܫܢ ܐܢܫܝ̈ܢ).
10. One of the Evangelists (ܚܕ ܦܪܨܘܦܐ ܕܐܘܢܓܠܝ̈ܣܛܐ ܩܕ̈ܝܫܐ): inc.: (ܬܪܥܣܪ ܐܢ̈ܫܐ ܓܒܝܬܿ ܡ̣ܢ ܛܘܗܡܐ ܦܓܪܢܝܐ).
11. One of the Martyrs (ܚܕ ܦܪܨܘܦܐ ܕܣܗܕ̈ܐ): inc.: (ܬܘ ܡܝܘ̈ܬܐ ܢܙܝܼܚ ܕܘܟܪܢ ܕܣܗܕ̈ܐ ܒܪ̈ܝܟܐ).
12. The Bishops Confessors [of the faith] (ܐܦܣܩܘ̈ܦܐ ܡܘܕ̈ܝܢܐ): inc.: (ܐܘ ܐܬܠܝܛܐ ܕܐܚ̣ܕ ܕܪܐ ܥܡ ܠܐ ܓܫܝ̈ܡܐ).
13. Commemoration of the Virgin Holy-Women (ܬܫܡܫܬܐ ܕܒܬܘ̈ܠܬܐ ܩܕܝ̈ܫܬܐ): inc.: (ܐܝܘ ܒܬܘܠܬܐ ܟܡܐ ܪܒ ܕܪܓܟܝ ܠܡܠܬܐ ܐܕܪܟܬܝ).
14. Commemoration of the Holy Women (ܕܢܫ̈ܐ ܩܕܝ̈ܫܬܐ): inc.: (ܩܘܒܠ ܐܦ̈ܐ ܘܫܘܦܪܐ ܕܦܓܪ̈ܐ ܚܒܠܐ ܗܘ̣ ܠܓܡܪ).
15. The Birth of St. John the Baptist: (ܝܠܕܗ ܕܡܪܝ ܝܘܚܢܢ ܡܥܡܕܢܐ): inc.: (ܐܘ ܝܘܚܢܢ ܕܡܫ̇ܡܫ ܗܘ̣ܐ ܒܩܘܕܫܐ ܕܠܒܪ).
16. Commemoration of St. Peter and Paul (ܕܘܟܪܢܐ ܕܦܛܪܘܣ ܘܦܘܠܘܣ): inc.: (ܒܕܡܘܬ ܐܪܝܐ ܢܗ̣ܡ ܗܘ̣ܐ ܢܐܪܘܨ ܕܢܪܗܒ ܐܢܘܢ).
17. St. Thomas the Apostle (ܛܘܒܢܐ ܡܪܝ ܬܐܘܡܐ ܫܠܝܚܐ ܛܒܝܒܐ ܘܡܚܝܢܐ ܕܟܠܗ̇ ܗܢܕܘ): inc.: (ܬܘ ܒܢܝ̈ ܗܢܕܘ ܒܢܝ̈ ܬܪܒܝܬܐ ܕܫܠܝܚ ܬܐܘܡܐ).
18. The Transfiguration of Christ (ܓܠܝܢܗ ܕܡܪܢ): inc.: (ܟܠ ܕܒܥ̇ܝܬܘܢ ܠܝܫܘܥ ܛܘܒܟܘܢ ܐܪܝܡܘ ܗܘ̈ܢܐ).
19. Elevation of the Holy Cross (ܥܐܕܐ ܕܨܠܝܒܐ ܣܓܝܕܐ): inc.: (ܬܘ ܒܢܝ̈ ܥܕܬܐ ܟܢܫܢ ܚܕܝܐ ܠܝܘܡܢ ܩܪܝܐ).
20. The Feast of St. Michael (ܥܐܕܐ ܕܛܘܒܢܐ ܡܪܝ ܡܝܟܐܝܠ ܪܫ ܡܠܐ̈ܟܐ): inc.: (ܠܟ ܡܫܝܚܐ ܨܡܚܗ ܕܐܒܐ ܚܝܠ ܠܒܘ̈ܢ).
21. Commemoration of the departed (ܕܘܟܪܢܐ ܕܥܢܝ̈ܕܐ): inc.: (ܒܫܘܦܪܐ ܦܐܝܐ ܕܨܠܡ ܐܢܫ̈ܐ ܨܒܝܬ ܕܐܬܒܩܐ).

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The list does not strictly follow the liturgical calendar, because the canticles for the Marian festivals, one of the Apostles, one of the Evangelists, one of the Martyrs, the Bishops Confessors [of the faith], the Virgin Holy Women, and Holy Women (not Virgins) rather belong to the category of commune sanctorum, that is to say, they are used whenever a commemoration of a saint from such a category is celebrated.

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From the items listed above, the following canticles are abridged versions of Narsai’s mēmrē: the canticle for the Nativity of Christ (see Macomber 1973, no. 4; Eshai Shimon 1970, 1-2:1:77–98), the one for the commemoration of St. Steven (see Mingana 1905, 1-2:1:90–100), the one for the Epiphany (see Macomber 1973, no. 6; Eshai Shimon 1970, 1-2:1:134–157), the one for the Ascension of Christ (see Macomber 1973, no. 45; Eshai Shimon 1970, 1-2:1:546–563), the one for Pentecost (see Mingana 1905, 1-2:2:72–84), the one for the commemoration of the departed (see Macomber 1973, no. 18; Eshai Shimon 1970, 1-2:1:743–766), and the one for the commemoration of the Evangelists;²⁹ they are attested by both manuscripts from the Middle East and the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā. The canticles for the feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist and for the commemoration of St. Peter and Paul also belong to the hymnography of the Church of the East, but I could not identify their author. Sr. Othottil, who edited and translated the service of the commemoration of the Saints Peter and Paul, attributes it to Narsai (Othottil 2014, 296).³⁰ However, if Narsai is truly the author of a sogitā “On Nero and the Workers and Peter” (see Mingana 1905, 1-2:2:391–396), then the author of the canticle of glorification for the night service for the commemoration of St. Peter and Paul must be a different one. This is suggested, for instance, by the fact that the canticle of glorification spells Nero’s name as (ܢܐܪܘܨ) [Nē’roṣ] , while the sogitā provides the spelling (ܢܹܐܪܘܿܢ) [Nē’ron]. There is need for further study in order to establish with accuracy which of the remaining hymns from the list are original creations from Malabar; such a study should also take into account the hybrid structure of the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā at the crossroads between the liturgical tradition of the Church of the East and the Roman Catholic tradition of the Roman Breviary. Some feast days mentioned in the list, such as Corpus Christi, are of distinct Roman Catholic origin, without any parallel in the East Syriac tradition. The Catholic liturgical revision from Malabar also predates and is distinct from the Chaldean revision of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā, which was done in the Middle East by the Chaldean Catholicos Patriarch Joseph II of Amid (see Murre-van den Berg 2015, 148–52, 341) at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century; this Chaldean revision was the main source for Paul Bedjan’s Breviarium Chaldaicum.

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While the preservation of the canticles based on Narsai’s mēmrē in the beginning of the service of the night witnesses to the continuity between the Malabar liturgical tradition and that of the Church of the East, sometimes it seems that the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā contains newly created hymns meant to replace East Syriac compositions. One such example seems to be the canticle for the Marian feasts fashioned according to the pattern of Ave Maria (no. 8 in the list above). This canticle is preserved in both liturgical manuscripts and in MS Thrissur Syriac 62: fol. 89v–91v (the anthology containing poetry by Kadavil Chandy Kattanar, which I described above). The canticle seems to have been composed in order to replace a canticle for the commemoration of the Holy Virgin, which in the Church of the East was celebrated on the Friday preceding the feast of the Epiphany of Christ. The East Syriac canticle begins with the words: (ܐܡܐ ܗܝ ܡܪܝܡ ܕܐܕܡ ܕܬܪܝܢ ܘܠܘ ܕܐܝܬܘܬܐ) [emā-(h)i maryam d-ādām da-trēn u-law d-(’)itutā] “Mary is the Mother of the Second Adam and not of the Essence”; I was not able to identify the author of this canticle, but the canticle might be an excerpt from another mēmrā by Narsai. Although generally the printed version of the Ḥudrā published by Mar Thoma Darmo does not contain the canticles of glorification for the service of the night, in this peculiar case the edition preserves the first four verses of this canticle in the service (Darmo 1960–1962, 1:1:603). This phenomenon deserves further study and I will not focus on it here. Yet, a comparable tendency is to be noted in the evolution of ritual books throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Middle East. As Heleen Murre-van den Berg notices: “The relatively minor changes in the liturgy [in the Middle East] were much less important than the many new additions that were made, in both traditional and Catholic circles, by way of the hymns. It is in this field that the most important innovations took place, developing new or re-using older genres and in a continuous stream of new poetry that kept the liturgy of the time up to date” (Murre-van den Berg 2015, 182).

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In order to highlight the religious entanglements of the Syriac Christians from Malabar and their Syriac culture as a synthesis of various Eastern and Western Christian elements, in the following paragraphs I will present three textual examples which illustrate the textual traditions involved in the composition of new canticles of glorification from Malabar. The chosen hymns show the relationship between such pieces of religious poetry, the Roman Breviary, and the Malabar Sermonary. On the basis of the collected evidence, I will also attempt to formulate a hypothesis on their authorship. The focus of the analysis, however, will be on the intertextuality between the sermons from the Malabar Sermonary and newly created hymns. I have chosen for discussion the canticles of glorification for three feast days: the Transfiguration of Christ, the commemoration of Saint Thomas the Apostle, and the feast of Corpus Christi, which is a distinctly Roman Catholic feast day. The first two examples show how undated Syriac Catholic sermons from Malabar have been used by the hymnographer as sources for the composition of liturgical poems. The last example discusses the evidence available for claiming the authorship of Kadavil Chandy Kattanar over this type of poetry as an open question. For this purpose, I am providing semi-diplomatic editions of texts on the basis of one manuscript³¹.

The Roman Breviary, the Malabar Sermonary, and the Canticles of Glorification: The hymns for the Transfiguration of Christ and for the Commemoration of St. Thomas the Apostle

The Canticles of Glorification and the Poetry of Kadavil Chandy Kattanar

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As shown so far in this paper, the composition of the canticles of glorifications for the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā is quite complicated; the author(s) used both the Roman Breviary and Syriac Catholic sermons belonging to the Malabar Sermonary as sources for newly created hymns. Yet, MS Thrissur Syriac 62, with which I began this inquiry, contains a part consisting of religious poetry taken out from its liturgical context in an anthological manner and mixed with poems written by the Indian priest and Syriacist poet Kadavil Chandy Kattanar, a disciple of Francisco Ros. In the following paragraphs I will discuss on which grounds one can ascribe to Kadavil Chandy the authorship of the newly composed canticles of glorification. First, I will compare the canticle for the feast day of Corpus Christi (which is a distinctly Roman Catholic feast day) with other works on the Eucharist from the same literary context: a sermon on Qurbana from the Malabar Sermonary and Kadavil Chandy’s mēmrā on the Eucharist. It is important to note that this canticle of glorification does not have any parallel/model in the hymnography for the same feast day in the Roman Breviary.

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Another reason why I have chosen to discuss this canticle is that the service for the feast day of Corpus Christi from the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā seems to be older and is different from the service for the same feast day as it appears in the Chaldean recension of the Ḥudrā and Gazzā. The Chaldean recension was done in the Middle East later (in the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century), by the Chaldean Patriarchs Joseph I and Joseph II (see Murre-van den Berg 2015, 149–50). For comparison, I have used the service for the feast day of Corpus Christi from the Chaldean recension, as it is contained in a late eighteenth-century (?) manuscript,⁷⁸ MS Thrissur Syriac 13: fol. 61v–69r (on this manuscript, see Mar Aprem 2011, 14, the Chaldean service is basically the same as the one provided by Bedjan 1886–1887, 1-3:3:102–111 (ܩܒ - ܩܝܐ)). The services for the same feast day in Malabar and the Middle East are different; even the title of the feast day is different in the two traditions: the Chaldean manuscript reads “Order for the Holy Feast of the Adoration of the Body of Our Lord” (ܛܲܟܼܣܵܐ ܒܥܹܐܕܵܐ ܩܲܕܝܼܫܵܐ ܕܐܝܼܩܵܪ ܦܲܓܪܹܗ ܕܡܵܪܢ) [ṭaksā b-‘ē’dā qadišā d-(’)iqār pagrē(h) d-māran] (fol. 61v), while in the Malabar ritual books this service always bears the title “Service Which [is] for the Feast of the Holy Sacraments/Mysteries” (ܬܸܫܡܫܬܵܐ ܕܒܼܥܸܐܕܐ ܕܐܪ̈ܙܐ ܩܕܝܼ̈ܫܐ) [tešmeštā da-b-‘ē’dā d-(’)rāzē qadišē](for the present reference, MS Mannanam Syriac 59: fol. 85v). I regard the canticle of glorification discussed here as another piece of poetry belonging to the local development of Syriac Catholic literature in Malabar.

Conclusions

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This study of entangled literary genres is an important witness to the amalgamation of the East Syriac heritage of the Malabar Christians in contact with the Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, in the second half of the sixteenth and first decades of the seventeenth centuries. Due to their literary interconnectedness, the texts under scrutiny allow one to carefully examine the complicated textual layers and transmission networks of the Syriac heritage of the Malabar Christians in the times of the Synod of Diamper; they also illustrate the attempt of the missionaries to create an unitary ideology encompassing both the cult and the preaching, as part of a new Syriac Catholic paideia in Malabar. The case studies presented here display an interesting instance of religious entanglement: the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā presents both continuity and innovation compared to the tradition of the Church of the East in Iraq. At the textual micro-level of the poetry presented here, this entanglement is expressed through a synthesis which incorporates the poetry of Narsai, the Roman Breviary and Syriac Catholic sermons produced locally in Malabar by the Catholic missionaries.

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The study of the canticles of glorification is in itself important, as it helps to recover a corpus of Syriac poetry from early modern Malabar which otherwise would be lost. It raises new research questions regarding the so far unexplored but fascinating Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā, such as the need to reconsider the ratio between translations from Latin into Syriac and original compositions which were at interplay in this liturgical enterprise. The intertwined relationship between sermons and pieces of liturgical poetry provides important dating criteria: many of the sermons used as the main source for the canticles of glorification survive in nineteenth-century manuscript copies, and this type of poetry can be used as a terminus ante quem for dating back the sermons to the times surrounding the Synod of Diamper (when the Malabar Catholic revision of the Ḥudrā was made). Source analysis of this material studied together also offers an interesting incursion into the intellectual history of Syriac writing in Malabar in the seventeenth century, leading one from the workshop of one (or more) skillful poet(s) and the sources of his (or their) Syriac education to the liturgy. The entanglement between sermons and the hymns testify to the mediation of European knowledge from the Catholic missionaries to their Indian pupils. While the sermons are based on European theological and humanistic erudition of the sixteenth century, the canticles of glorification often seem to rely on similar information only through the mediation of the corpus of sermons.

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From a cross-cultural perspective, the Malabar Sermonary represents the adaptation of a European literary genre into Syriac; the canticles of glorification in their turn are an example of adapting and conveying Catholic doctrine by making use of a literary genre specific to the Syriac culture of the Middle East, and as such it is in itself an example of textual accommodatio. If the author of at least some of these poems is Kadavil Chandy Kattanar, this example shows that the Jesuits involved the local people in this process of Syriac literary production and translation as a means of accommodatio.