MUZIRIS MILKY WAY
By its nature, it is distant and hazy. By far the farthest and equally the nearest in terms of lustre, is that prince who became a monk, Ilango Adigal.
He renounced his right to the throne of Muziris, donning a Jain saint’s robe and become the earliest chronicler of the region through his magnum opus, Silappatikaram. Foreign chroniclers, famous and anoynymous followed. India’s pre-eminent poet, Valmiki, lived and worked far up north but Muziris, Murachipattanam, as he called it was very on his mental map. So too Vyasa, who wrote the best part of India’s scriptures and that master of romance Kalidasa.
One interior of Muziris , Kodungallur Kunjikkuttan Thampuran, is a poet who surprised himself. He could use poetry for correspondence and conservation. He had a prodigious memory. This surprised others; what surprised himself was that he could complete the translation of Vyasa’s Mahabharata into Malayalam in 2 years which was about 2 years less than he had originally granted himself. In perfect reverence to Kunjikkuttan Thampuran, a museum has been set up in Kodungallur.
As you go round Muziris, you will run into an old house in Kodungallur where was born a man who worked for freedom all his life and resisted the scourge of obscurantism at every step. After his education in Aligarh, he would have ended up a member of the Indian Civil Service but Abdurahiman Sahib’s vision and imagination flew far beyond its confines. He swung into the national movement and turned it from a weekend elite exertion to full time people’s passion in this part of the country.
