# Balachandran Chullikkad

Balachandran Chullikkad (born 30 July 1957) is an Indian poet, orator, lyricist and actor in Malayalam-language media.

## Early life

Balachandran was born in Paravur, Ernakulam, Kerala, India. He completed his graduation in English literature from the Union Christian College, Aluva (first two years) and Maharajas College, Ernakulam.

## Career

His collection of poems published includes Pathinettu Kavithakal, Amaavaasi, Ghazal, Maanasaantharam, Dracula etc. Another collection of his previously published poems, Balachandran Chullikkadinte Kavithakal (The Poems of Balachandran Chullikkad), was published in 2000. He has also published a book of his memoirs, Chidambarasmarana (2001).
He has participated in many national literary seminars organised by the Central Academy of Letters, India. He was one among the ten members of a cultural delegation of India to Sweden in 1997 invited by Nobel Academy and Swedish Writers Union. He represented Indian poetry in the international bookfair in Gothenburg, Sweden in November 1997.
Chullikkad is also an actor in Malayalam films and serials. As an actor, he is best known for G. Aravindan's Pokkuveyil (1981) in which he played a young artist who lives with his father, a radical friend and a music-loving young woman. The film is about how his world collapses when his father dies, the radical friend leaves him and her family takes the woman away to another city.
In 2018, he criticised the state education department for their incompetency in teaching Malayalam language. He urged it to remove his poems from curricula in schools, colleges and universities. Chullikkadu alleged that marks were being given in abundance for papers containing mistakes without proper evaluation, and the appointment of Malayalam teachers are not on the basis of qualifications, but caste, religion, political influence and nepotism. He said research work on Malayalam literature lack quality and that doctoral degrees were conferred on even those works which contain mistakes.

## Personal life

Chullikkad is married to Vijayalakshmi, a known Malayalam poet and they have a son named Appu.
In 2000, he took Buddhism as his religion. He says that this cannot be called a conversion from Hinduism because he was never a follower of that religion. "I have not converted because I have not been a believer though I was a Hindu. I have now embraced Buddhism, not converted to Buddhism. The problem with Hinduism is that it is a religion of social status and set-ups. Your value in Hinduism depends on the family in which you were born," he says.

### Political views

In a 2000 interview, Chullikkad revealed that he was a sympathiser of the Naxalite movement during his teenage years. He then continued as a Marxist for some years. But after the fall of the Soviet Union and "the Eastern European experience", he rethought his conviction about Marxism and reorganised his intellectual life on a different path. "I found that Marxism is outdated and irrelevant. Now I am not a Marxist, but a social and political democrat. Soviet experience proved that individual freedom without the base of socialism and socialism without sanctioning individual freedom is a failure. Communism practised all over the world is some kind of socialism without sanctioning individual freedom. Communism without approving individual freedom is social fascism", he said.

## Awards

In 1990, he refused the Sanskriti Award for the best young writer in India and declared that he would not accept any award for his literary works. In 2001, his work Balachandran Chullikkadinte Kavithakal was selected for the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry, but Chullikkad did not accept the award. In 2003, he received the National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Film Narration / Voice Over (Non Feature Film Category) for The 18 Elephants – 3 Monologues.