A village that became a name

Pinarayi is a village in the Thalassery region of Kannur district, in the northern part of Kerala, and it belongs to a small class of Indian villages whose name is pronounced every time a particular person is named. Pinarayi Vijayan was born there on 24 May 1945, when the district formed part of Madras Province in British India, and in keeping with the naming custom of the Malabar coast he carried the village forward as the first half of his public identity. For most of its history the word Pinarayi referred to nothing more than a cluster of houses, paddy fields and working looms in the hinterland of Thalassery. Six decades of political life later it is heard in news bulletins across the country, and the village retains a quiet claim on a career that reached the highest elected office in the state.

The family into which he was born was poor. His father, Koran, earned a living as a toddy tapper, among the most physically demanding and least secure of the occupations open to men in the coastal villages of Malabar, and the narrow circumstances of the household shaped his son's boyhood. As a young man Vijayan worked at a handloom, weaving to earn while he continued his studies. Handloom weaving has long been woven into the working life of the Kannur region, organised through small units and cooperative societies, and the rhythm of piecework was among his earliest experiences of collective labour. That combination of rural poverty, manual work and persistence with education placed him squarely within the social world from which the communist movement in northern Kerala drew much of its early strength, and it is the part of his biography most often recalled in the district.

College years and the Emergency

Vijayan studied at Government Brennen College in Thalassery, one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Malabar, and took a bachelor's degree in economics. The college was then, as now, a centre of political argument as much as of teaching, and it was there that he entered student politics, becoming active in the Kerala Students Federation, the student body associated with the communist movement in the state. Student organising in that period revolved around fee demands, hostel conditions and the wider political questions of the day, and it served as an apprenticeship in the mechanics of meetings, membership drives and public speech that would define the rest of his working life.

He joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 1964, the year the party came into being, and in 1968 he was elected to its district committee in Kannur. His rise through the organisation was steady rather than sudden, built on branch and area work in a district where the party's structure was unusually dense. When the Emergency was proclaimed in June 1975 and civil liberties were suspended across the country, Vijayan was among the many opposition workers taken into custody; he spent roughly a year and a half in prison before the Emergency was lifted in 1977. The episode is a fixed point in accounts of his life, and it belongs to a generation of Indian politicians for whom imprisonment in those months became a formative common experience.

In the legislature

Electoral office came early. In the assembly election of 1970 he contested the Kuthuparamba seat in Kannur district and won it at the age of twenty-five, entering the Kerala Legislative Assembly as its youngest member of that term. He was returned from Kuthuparamba again in 1977 and in 1991, and in 1996 he was elected from Payyanur, also in Kannur. Across these terms he worked chiefly on the organisational side of politics, and his legislative record is that of a party manager rather than a floor orator.

His only spell in a state cabinet came after the 1996 election, when he was appointed Minister for Electricity and Cooperation in the ministry headed by E. K. Nayanar. He held the two portfolios from 1996 to 1998, a period in which the electricity department was at the centre of debate over Kerala's power supply and generation capacity. He left the ministry in 1998 to take up a full-time position in the party organisation, a move that redirected his career decisively away from administration for the better part of two decades.

Leading the state party

From 1998 to 2015 Vijayan served as secretary of the Kerala state committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the longest continuous tenure anyone has held in that post. In the structure of a cadre party, the state secretary is the pivot of the organisation: the office coordinates district committees, oversees membership and discipline, frames the state unit's political line between conferences, and negotiates seat-sharing with allied parties at election time. Seventeen years in that chair made him the central organisational figure of the Left in Kerala long before he held executive office, and much of his later political method, with its emphasis on structure, consistency and party channels, can be traced to those years.

Chief Minister, and after

Following the assembly election of 2016, in which he was elected from the Dharmadam constituency in Kannur, Vijayan was sworn in as Chief Minister of Kerala on 25 May 2016. He was returned from Dharmadam in 2021 and continued as Chief Minister, becoming the first Kerala leader since the era of E. M. S. Namboodiripad to secure a consecutive second term at the head of a state government. The result was widely noted because Kerala had, since 1980, changed its governing front at every general election to the assembly, and the pattern had come to be regarded as a fixture of the state's politics.

His decade in office coincided with a sequence of emergencies that placed unusual demands on the state administration. The floods of August 2018, the most severe in Kerala in generations, displaced very large numbers of people and required a relief and rebuilding effort across almost every district. Outbreaks of the Nipah virus, a rare and highly lethal infection, called for rapid containment work by the state health machinery, and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 drew sustained national attention to Kerala's public health system, its testing and surveillance arrangements and its network of local self-government institutions.

He was elected once more from Dharmadam in the assembly election of 2026. His term as Chief Minister ended on 18 May 2026, and he took office the same day as Leader of the Opposition in the Kerala Legislative Assembly. Taken together, his record covers more than half a century of continuous public life, from a first election in 1970 to the leadership of a state government and, subsequently, of the opposition.

For the village of Pinarayi itself, the connection is simply a fact of daily speech. The place is a working settlement in the Thalassery countryside, with its houses, fields, schools and cooperative societies, and its name has travelled far beyond the boundaries of Kannur district because of the son who took it with him. In a state where a person's village is customarily attached to their given name, few such attachments have carried as far.