page_title: Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan
section_title: Adhyatma Ramayanam
hierarchical_section_title: Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan / Adhyatma Ramayanam
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan,the father of the Malayalam language
context_page_description: Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan was a Malayalam devotional poet, translator and linguist from Kerala, south India. He has been called the "Father of Modern Malayalam", or, alternatively, the "Father of Malayalam Literature", or the "Primal Poet in Malayalam". He was one of pioneers of a major shift in Kerala literary production. The number and circulation of his texts far outdo that of any other poet of premodern Kerala.
  Ezhuthachan was born in the Thunchaththu home near present-day Ponnani, northern Kerala, in a traditional Hindu family of the Sudra caste. Little is known with certainty about his life. His success even in his own lifetime seems to have been great. Later he or his followers shifted to a village near Palakkad, further east into the Kerala, and established a hermitage and a Brahmin residence there. This institution probably housed both Brahmin and Sudra literary students. The school eventually pioneered the "Ezhuthachan movement", associated with the concept of popular Bhakti, in Kerala.
context_section_description: Adhyatma Ramayanam, written in the parrot-song style, is Ezhuthachan's principle work. It is not an adaptation from the original Valmiki Ramayana, but a translation of the Adhyatma Ramayana, a Sanskrit text connected with the Ramanandi sect. The poem is composed in nearly-modern Malayalam. It depicts Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, as an ideal figure (both as man and god-incarnate, the Bhakri interpretation). 
  
  The text spread with phenomenal popularity throughout Kerala middle-caste homes as a material for domestic devotional recitation. Throughout the Malayalam month of Karkkidakam, Adhyatma Ramayanam is still recited—as a devotional practice—in the middle-caste homes of Kerala.
  But it is worth listening when the later tradition assigns a primal role to Eluttacchan. It tells us something about the
  place of this multiform narrative, the Ramayana, in constituting the core of a literary tradition; about the enduring historical importance of the moment when a subaltern social formation achieved the literacy that in the South Asian world conditioned the culturally significant type of textuality we may call literature; and about literature as requiring, in the eyes of many readers and listeners, a particular linguistic register, in this case, the highly Sanskritized.
  — Sheldon Pollock, Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003)
  According to critic K. Ayyappa Panicker, those who see Adhyatma Ramayanam merely as a devotional work "belittle" Ezhuthachan.
caption: A modern depiction of Ezhuthachan
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