Chavara, a coastal village in Kollam district of Kerala, sits on a narrow strip of land between the Arabian Sea and the Ashtamudi backwaters. It was here, on 27 May 1931, that Ottaplakkal Neelakandan Velu Kurup was born — a poet known to all of Kerala simply by his initials, O. N. V.. Over six decades he produced a body of work that runs from committed political verse to some of the most widely sung film lyrics in the Malayalam language, and he became only the fifth Malayalam writer to receive the Jnanpith Award.

Chavara and early loss

O. N. V.'s father died when he was a small child, and the family's circumstances were straitened. He grew up in the coastal landscape that would return again and again in his poetry — the sea, the backwater, the coconut palms, the particular light of that stretch of Kerala coast.

He took a bachelor's degree in economics from S. N. College in Kollam, and then a master's in Malayalam literature from the University of Travancore, now the University of Kerala. His university years coincided with the height of the progressive and Left literary movement in Kerala, and he became active in the All India Students Federation. That political formation — a straightforward socialist commitment to the working poor — never left his writing, though its expression grew more subtle over time.

The teaching life

O. N. V. spent his working career as a teacher of Malayalam literature. He lectured at Maharaja's College in Ernakulam, University College in Thiruvananthapuram, the Arts and Science College at Kozhikode and Brennen College at Thalassery, and served as Head of the Malayalam Department at the Government Women's College in Thiruvananthapuram. He retired in 1986 and afterwards held a visiting professorship at Calicut University.

The teaching mattered. Generations of Malayalam students encountered the canon through him, and his own criticism and scholarship formed part of the apparatus through which modern Malayalam literature understood itself.

The poetry

O. N. V.'s early work is squarely in the progressive tradition — verse about labour, hunger, inequality and struggle, written with the directness that movement demanded. His first major collection, Daahikkunna Panapathram, appeared in 1956. Over the following decades his range widened considerably, moving into lyric intimacy, myth, memory and, notably early, ecological grief.

Agni Shalabhangal (1971)
Aksharam (1974), which brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award
Uppu (1980)
Bhoomikku Oru Charamageetham (1984) — an elegy for the earth, one of the earliest sustained works of environmental lament in Indian poetry
Ujjayini (1994), drawing on the world of Kalidasa
Swayamvaram (1995)

What holds the range together is a distinctive musicality. O. N. V. wrote lines that ask to be spoken aloud, and his command of Malayalam rhythm is the quality most often cited by other poets.

A thousand songs

That same musicality made him one of the most important lyricists in the history of Malayalam cinema. He began writing for films with Kalam Marunnu in 1956 and went on to write in the region of a thousand songs across more than two hundred films, alongside songs for plays and for standalone albums.

His film work is not a lesser branch of his output, and Kerala has never treated it as one. He worked with the major Malayalam composers over five decades, and songs he wrote are known by heart across the state by people who have never opened a poetry collection. He received the National Film Award for Best Lyrics in 1989 and won the Kerala State Film Award for lyrics well over a dozen times.

Honours

O. N. V. received the principal recognitions available to an Indian writer:

Jnanpith Award for 2007, India's highest literary honour
Padma Shri, 1998
Padma Vibhushan, 2011
Sahitya Akademi Award, 1975
Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for poetry, 1971
Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, Kerala's highest literary award
Vayalar Award and Odakkuzhal Award

He served terms on national and state cultural bodies, and in his later years his readings drew audiences that had far more in common with a concert crowd than with a literary gathering. He continued to write and to appear publicly almost until the end of his life, and remained a frequent, unhurried presence on Malayalam television and radio, reciting his own work in a voice that several generations of listeners could recognise instantly.

He died on 13 February 2016 at a hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, aged eighty-four. His death was marked by an official state funeral and by the kind of public mourning that Kerala reserves for very few figures.

O. N. V.'s standing rests on an unusual double achievement. He was a serious poet judged by the strictest literary standards, awarded the Jnanpith for a body of work of genuine formal accomplishment. He was simultaneously a mass artist whose lines were on the radio, in cinema halls and at weddings across the state. In most literary cultures those two audiences are separate and mutually suspicious. In Kerala, for six decades, O. N. V. held them together, and the village of Chavara on the Kollam coast remained the ground from which the imagery of that work was drawn.