Manu S. Pillai’s SAGA: How a documentary is unearthing Kerala’s hidden histories

After five books, historian Manu S. Pillai found himself in need of something writers rarely permit themselves: a pause.

His last book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries (2024), was critically acclaimed and commercially successful. But working on it had been exhausting. Instead of immediately turning to another one, Pillai decided to take a break.

For a decade, his working life had largely involved sitting at a desk with a laptop—writing, researching and immersing himself in books and archives. Now, he wanted to be out in the world, encountering history beyond the books.

Meanwhile, the Archival and Research Project (ARPO), a not-for-profit initiative aimed at fostering interest in Kerala’s history, culture and heritage, was working on an unconventional documentary series that moved away from the familiar voices and subjects of historical storytelling. “Works on heritage tend to follow a format that does not feature interesting characters. Often, it is the same people who appear and discuss the subject. And they are almost always older people. We wished to change that,” says Sruthin Lal, co-founder of ARPO.

Pillai also felt there was a gap in the visual space occupied by history. YouTube was awash with history-related material, but much of it was basic, low-quality or questionable. There was room, he felt, for something more thoughtful: a series with stronger aesthetics, careful visuals, visits to historical sites and conversations with people who knew their subjects. Soon, the idea of a 12-episode series, SAGA, began to take shape.

For a while, the historian stopped writing and became the medium through which others could speak.

In 1834, C.M. Whish, an East India Company civil servant who had worked in Malabar, published On the Hindú Quadrature of the Circle, drawing European scholarly attention to the mathematics of the Kerala school and its pioneering mathematician, Sangamagrama Madhava, who lived around 1350–1425, more than two centuries before Newton, Gregory and Leibniz. Yet much of Madhava’s mathematical legacy remains obscure.

Litty Chacko, who teaches at St Joseph’s College, Irinjalakuda, in Thrissur district, is among those working to reclaim this legacy. In SAGA, Chacko told Manu about a lost portion of Lagnaprakarana, an astronomical treatise attributed to Madhava.

In 2018, while preparing a UGC course, Chacko sought manuscripts to show her students and approached antique dealers. One dealer in Irinjalakuda gave her a few dirt-covered, crumbling palm-leaf manuscripts. As she cleaned them, she found that the first leaf carried an astonishing line: “This is the seventh chapter of the Lagnaprakarana.”

Chacko broke down in tears. She had found the first six chapters in Thripunithura, near Kochi, around eight years earlier. The new discovery revealed a substantial missing portion of the manuscript.

“After the SAGA episode featuring Chacko came out, I received emails from institutions, including IITs, asking if I could help them get a copy. I told them: Let her put out her findings and publish it. She has earned that right, and we need to value her work,” says Pillai.

The same passion became a yardstick for choosing other speakers. One episode featured Sasidhara Sarma and Sreejith Sarma, practitioners of Theeyattu, an ancient ritualistic dance-drama. Only a handful of practitioners still perform the tradition in its entirety. After the episode aired, the practitioners began receiving invitations from outside Kerala and got new stages and awards for their efforts to preserve the art.

The series ranged from underexplored tribal cultural knowledge and art to overlooked royal histories of Kochi and Travancore. It explored Kochi’s progressive impulses and communist influence, the history of “Ammachis”—Nair women who were consorts of Travancore’s rulers but excluded from the royal family—and the distinctive Muslim culture of Malabar.

Interestingly, SAGA also ended up revealing Kerala’s syncretic cultural character without setting out to prove it. Rajeev Pallikonam, a culture activist and historian from the Hindu community, spoke about the history of Christians in central Kerala, while Thoufeeq Zakriya, a Muslim historian with expertise in Kerala’s Jewish history and Jewish calligraphy, spoke about the state’s Jewish heritage.

As Pillai explains, this was not a deliberate attempt to manufacture a narrative of syncretism. It emerged naturally from Kerala’s culture, where such intermingling has long been the norm.

He points to Chacko, a Christian woman entering Brahmin households to research the work of a Brahmin mathematician. “The people at these manas now call her ‘Oppol’,” he says, referring to the traditional way of addressing a sister in upper caste Hindu families.

Pillai believes there is a Kerala model of how social relations can be managed and communal harmony maintained.

“There are other ways of taking diverse communities forward. So that is a legitimate and valuable asset of Kerala. But that doesn’t mean Kerala has ticked all the boxes. Kerala still has its own problems,” he says. Those problems also found expression in the series. Manikuttan Paniyan, the first and only MBA graduate from the marginalised Paniya community, spoke about Kerala’s failure to provide adequate educational opportunities to its tribal communities. Bindu Irulam, a poet and cultural activist from the marginalised Kattunayakan community, made a case for protecting marginalised cultures and heritage: “Kerala is beyond Malayalam.”

The creators of SAGA say the passion of its speakers has ignited wider conversations about heritage and culture. People have come forward, for instance, to support Manikuttan Paniyan’s dream of building a school for tribal children.

For Sruthin and Manu, that has been the biggest return from SAGA, which continues its journey.