The Village in the Name

Chandiroor lies in the northern reaches of Alappuzha district, in the low, water-laced country between Aroor and Cherthala where the Vembanad backwaters run close to the sea. It is coir and fishing land, a landscape of narrow lanes, canals and small workshops. The poet born there on 10 May 1946 as Kalathil Makki Divakaran took the village as his working name, and has been known ever since as Chandiroor Divakaran.

That convention matters more in Malayalam than it might appear. Kerala's writers have long attached their village to their given name — Vailoppilli, Kadammanitta, Chemmanam, Kilimanoor — and the practice is not decorative. It stakes a claim: the poet writes from somewhere in particular, and the somewhere is a small place rather than a city. For a poet whose material has been folk song, village ritual and the working life of artisans, the name is a statement of method.

A Sixty-Year Career

Divakaran began publishing in 1965, at nineteen, with Radha. A second collection, Parannupoya Inakkuyil, followed in 1966. He has been publishing continuously since, across poetry, fiction and writing for children — a working life now approaching six decades, most of it conducted outside the metropolitan literary circuits of Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode.

His central identification is as a poet and a writer of nadan pattu — the folk-song tradition of Kerala. These are the songs of rural working life: work songs, harvest songs, boat songs, ritual and festival songs, carrying the emotional and social memory of communities that produced very little written literature. A modern poet working in this register is doing two things at once: composing new verse, and keeping a form alive that industrialisation and mass media have steadily eroded. Divakaran's output belongs to a broader Kerala movement of the later twentieth century that treated folk material not as quaint survival but as a living literary resource.

Poems for the Artisan Castes

Among his most distinctive works is Viswakarmakeerthanangal, published in 2007 — devotional verse addressed to Vishwakarma, the divine artificer, and by extension to the artisan communities who take their name from him: the smiths, carpenters, goldsmiths, braziers and stone-workers whose labour built Kerala's temples, boats and houses. Writing a body of hymns for a community defined by its craft rather than its landholding is a pointed choice, and it places Divakaran within Kerala's long tradition of poets who wrote from and for socially subordinated groups.

His other significant collections include Pattini Theyyam, published in 2003, whose title draws on theyyam, the ritual performance tradition of north Kerala in which performers are possessed by deities; Vishadhaparvam in 2004; and Karnikaram in 2013. For children he has written Chakara in 1994 — named for the seasonal upwelling along the Kerala coast that brings sudden abundance of fish, an event any Alappuzha coastal child would know — and Ulsavam in 2003, on temple festivals.

Recognition

Divakaran's awards have come steadily rather than spectacularly, which is the usual pattern for a poet working in folk and devotional registers away from the literary capitals. Early recognition included the Poppal Gana Award in 1976 and the Jnanodhayam Sabha P. K. M. Vayanasala Award in 1977. The Samastha Kerala Sahithya Parishath Award followed in 1985, and the Bodhi Sahithya Puraskaram in 2003.

His most prominent honour is the Ambedkar National Award, conferred in 2011 for his overall contribution to Malayalam literature. The award's association with Dr B. R. Ambedkar is fitting for a writer whose subjects have consistently been the labouring and artisan communities rather than the literary establishment. In 2025 he received the Kavi Thilakan Pandit K. P. Karuppan Smaraka Puraskaram, named for the poet and social reformer K. P. Karuppan, who worked among Kerala's fishing communities — another award whose lineage matches his own concerns closely.

Why He Belongs on a Village Record

Chandiroor Divakaran is not a household name across India, and it would be misleading to present him as one. His importance is of a different and, for a village-heritage project, arguably more relevant kind. He represents the large class of Indian writers who never left the district they were born in, who wrote in the idiom of the people around them, and who kept regional oral traditions in circulation at a time when very little institutional support existed for doing so.

The songs and rituals he has drawn on — the theyyam, the chakara, the work-chants of the coir belt, the hymns of the artisan castes — are not abstractions to him. They belong to the twenty-odd kilometres of backwater coast around Chandiroor where he has spent his life. A poet who carries his village in his name, and spends sixty years writing its songs into print, is doing precisely the work that a record of India's villages exists to remember.