The Namboothiri household into which Narayana Bhattathiri was born in 1560 stood at an illam called Melpathur, in the small settlement of Kurumbathur, within what is now Athavanad panchayat in the Tirur region of Malappuram district. The neighbourhood is also remembered by the name Chandanakkavu, and the family compound lay only a short walk from the slow brown water of the Bharathappuzha, the river that shaped almost every scholarly life in that stretch of medieval Kerala. It is worth saying plainly that the village sometimes attached to him in modern lists, Karimbam in Kannur, does not match the older Kerala sources: every substantial account, including local temple tradition and the Sanskrit records of his family, places his birth in the Tirur countryside of Malappuram, not in north Malabar.

The Malappuram of the sixteenth century was unusually dense with learning. Within a few hours' walk of Melpathur lay Thrikkandiyur, Thirunavaya with its great periodic assembly on the riverbank, and the villages of a scholarly network later described as the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. Bhattathiri grew up inside that network rather than at its edge, and it is the reason his name still appears on lists of Kerala mathematicians, although, as explained below, that label sits awkwardly on him.

A childhood among grammarians and logicians

His father, Mathrudattan Bhattathiri, was himself a respected teacher, particularly of Mimamsa, the demanding discipline of Vedic interpretation. A boy in such a house did not have to travel far for instruction, and the tradition records that Narayana was pushed early and hard. He is said to have read the Rig Veda with a teacher named Madhava, taken up logic and dialectic under a Damodara, and studied Sanskrit grammar with Achyuta Pisharati of Thrikkandiyur. That last relationship mattered most. Achyuta Pisharati was a working astronomer as well as a grammarian, and through him Bhattathiri became a junior member of the scholarly lineage that descended from Madhava of Sangamagrama. Bhattathiri later married into the Pisharati family and settled at Thrikkandiyur, a few kilometres from his birth village, so his adult life was spent almost entirely inside the same handful of parishes.

By his teens he had a reputation as a prodigy. What survives of his own writing suggests the reputation was earned: he wrote fast, in tightly controlled metre, and he clearly enjoyed technical difficulty for its own sake.

The hundred days at Guruvayur

The episode that made him a household name in Kerala is preserved as tradition rather than documented history, and it deserves to be told as such. According to the story handed down in Malabar, Bhattathiri's teacher fell gravely ill with a paralysing rheumatic disease, and the young student, using a yogic transfer, took the affliction upon himself. Disabled and in pain, he travelled to the Krishna temple at Guruvayur and settled there. The tradition adds that he asked the Malayalam poet Thunchath Ezhuthachan for guidance on what to compose, and received the cryptic reply that he should begin with the fish, understood as an instruction to start from the Matsya incarnation and work through the god's descents.

Whatever the truth of the illness, the literary result is entirely real. Over about a hundred days he composed one canto a day, producing the Narayaniyam: 1,036 verses arranged in a hundred sections, a compressed and intensely personal retelling of the Bhagavata Purana addressed directly to the deity at Guruvayur. The date of completion can be recovered because Bhattathiri, characteristically, encoded it. The closing words of the last verse, ayurarogyasaukhyam, meaning long life, health and happiness, also function as a number in the katapayadi system, a Kerala convention in which consonants stand for digits so that a meaningful word doubles as a date. Read that way the phrase yields 1,712,210, the count of days elapsed in the current era, which corresponds to late November 1587, when the poet was about twenty-seven. A few scholars prefer a date a fortnight later. That single flourish is the clearest surviving trace of his mathematical training: he was not a discoverer of theorems, but he thought in numbers as easily as in metre.

Grammar, philosophy and a long working life

Devotional fame has tended to overshadow the work Bhattathiri himself probably regarded as his most serious. The Prakriya-sarvasva, written for King Devanarayana of Ambalappuzha around 1616, is a full reorganisation of Panini's grammar into roughly twenty topic-based sections, rebuilding the classical system so that a student meets the rules in the order needed to form words rather than in Panini's compressed original sequence. It is an act of engineering as much as scholarship, and it remained in use in Kerala's Sanskrit schools for centuries.

Around this he produced a long shelf of other writing: campu poems mixing verse and prose, hymns, panegyrics for local rulers including the Cochin ruler Vira Kerala Varma, a poem composed under the constraint of avoiding nasal sounds, verse handbooks on Sanskrit verbal roots, and a Mimamsa manual traditionally attributed to him. He appears to have taught steadily for decades. His death is variously placed in 1646 or as late as 1666; the later date would give him a life of about a hundred and six years, which Kerala tradition accepts without embarrassment but which cannot be confirmed.

How he should be described

Calling Bhattathiri a mathematician is not wrong so much as misleading. He belonged to the Kerala mathematical milieu, learned from one of its astronomers, and used its number-encoding techniques with obvious pleasure, but no original mathematical or astronomical treatise by him survives. His lasting achievements are literary and grammatical. He is best understood as a Sanskrit poet and grammarian who happened to be trained by mathematicians.

What the village keeps

Four centuries later the Narayaniyam is still recited every day at Guruvayur, and its hundredth canto is sung by people who could not name its author's village. In Malappuram the memory is more local: the Melpathur name attaches to auditoriums, institutions and a literary trust, and pilgrims still visit the Thrikkandiyur temple where he lived after his marriage. For a small riverside settlement of Namboothiri houses, it is an unusually durable legacy, and it began with a boy who was taught grammar, logic and the Veda within walking distance of his own doorstep.