Kunchan Nambiar - Literary Career

Literary Career

The chief contribution of Kunchan Nambiar is the popularization of a performing art known as Tullal. The word literally means "dance", but under this name Nambiar devised a new style of verse narration with a little background music and dance-like swinging movement to wean the people away from the Chakyar Kuttu, which was the art form popular till then.

He used pure Malayalam as opposed to the stylized and Sanskritized Malayalam language of Chakyar Kuttu. He also adopted many elements from Padayani and Kolam Tullal and certain other local folk arts. It is reasonable to assume that he was himself a Tullal performer and writer. The first hand knowledge of the various talas and ragas (and even the practices of drummers) is a pre-requisite for the writing of a Tullal. Each Tullal composition consists of a local Puranic tale retold in simple rhythmic verse, fit for loud recitation before an local audience.

There are three kinds of Tullal distinguished on the basis of the performer's costume and the style of rendering, viz., Ottan, Sitankan and Parayan. Dravidian metres are used throughout although there is a quatrain in a Sanskrit metre. Kunchan Nambiar also developed new metres (for example; Vaytari metres) based on the vocal notation for various talas. The language is predominantly Malayalam with a large admixture of colloquial and dialectal forms. Kunchan Nambiar is often considered as the master of Malayalam satirist poetry. Humour is invariably the dominant mood in his works: other bhavas are brought in for variety and to suit the situation.

One of the oft-quoted lines from his poems are; "Nokkeda nammude margei kidakkunna markada niyangu mari kida saddha!" (in Nambiar's retelling of the ancient Indian epic Mahabharatha, Prince Bhima of the Pandavas tells half-brother monkey god Hanuman to move from his way, by saying "Go lie elsewhere, you obstinate monkey!").