Miyān Tānsen#Miyan
A figure from the books
#Miyan
Miyān Tānsen · c. 1493 – 1589
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
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.
“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.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“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.”
From the book
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