- Lived:
- traditionally c. 1495–1575; born at Tṛkkaṇṭiyūr (Trikkantiyur, near Tirur) in Malabar, on the Nila river; by tradition he died far south at Chittur near Palakkad, where his Gurumadham still stands
- Field:
- poetry and language-making — the kiḷippāṭṭu ("parrot-song") epics that made him the acknowledged father of modern Malayalam, and the fixing of the alphabet Kerala writes to this day
- The Big Idea:
- He took the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata out of Sanskrit and into a Malayalam a farmer could follow without losing the philosophy — and the language, and its script, crystallized around his books.
- In their words:
- "Little green she-parrot, who came singing the name of Śrī Rāma — come, sing me Rāma's story, and do not tire." (the opening address of the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇam Kiḷippāṭṭu; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- Kerala's founding author may be remembered not by his name but by his job title — "Ezhuthachan" means something like "father of letters," the village schoolmaster — and five hundred years later, every Malayali child's first written letters are still traced at his ground, in a tray of rice.