A Boy from the Kannur Coast

The village of Azhikode, where the Valapattanam river meets the Arabian Sea in Kannur district, gave Kerala one of its most formidable minds — and it gave him his name. Born on 12 May 1926 as Koloth Thattarath Sukumaran, he became known to every Malayali simply as Sukumar Azhikode, the village fixed permanently to the man. He was the fourth of six children of Vidwan Panankavil Damodaran, a teacher and Sanskrit scholar, and Madhaviyamma. A household where classical learning was ordinary conversation shaped a child who would spend six decades arguing, in print and from the platform, about what Indian thought actually meant.

His schooling began at Azhikode South Elementary School and continued at Rajas High School in Chirakkal, where he cleared his intermediate examination in 1941. What followed was a restless, self-directed education rather than a straight line. He spent a year studying Ayurveda at the Arya Vaidya Patasala in Kottakkal, then took a commerce degree at St Aloysius College in Mangalore in 1943. For a short period he worked as a clerk at the Kannur branch of a bank — an unlikely start for a man who would later be described as the conscience of Malayalam letters.

The Long Apprenticeship of a Teacher

Teaching drew him back. He trained at the Government College of Teacher Education in Kozhikode and in 1948 joined Rajas High School, Chirakkal, as a teacher — returning to the institution that had schooled him. While teaching full time he took master's degrees in Sanskrit and Malayalam through distance study, and completed a bachelor's degree in education in 1952. Over the following decades he taught at St Joseph's College, Devagiri, and at St Aloysius College, Mangalore, and served as principal of the SNM Training College at Moothakunnam.

His formal scholarship culminated late and deliberately. In 1981 he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Western influence in Malayalam literary criticism — a subject that sat exactly at the fault line he had been probing all his life, between inherited Indian thought and imported critical frameworks. At the University of Calicut he became the founder-head and professor of the department of Malayalam, and later served as pro vice-chancellor and acting vice-chancellor. Generations of teachers and writers passed through his classes.

Tatvamasi and the Work of a Critic

Azhikode wrote across criticism, philosophy and social commentary, but one book stands above the rest. Tatvamasi, published in 1984, is a long, ambitious treatise on Indian philosophy built around the Vedas and the Upanishads, written not for specialists but for the ordinary Malayali reader. It was an act of translation in the deepest sense — carrying classical metaphysics into modern prose without diluting it. The book was extraordinarily well received, collecting a dozen awards, and it later generated a companion volume gathering four of the lectures he delivered on its themes.

His other major works include Malayala Sahityavimarsanam, a survey of Malayalam literary criticism, Aasante Seetakavyam, Ramananum Malayalakavitayum and Mahatmavinte Margam. Taken together they established him as the leading Malayalam critic of the generation that followed Joseph Mundassery, M. P. Paul and Kuttikrishna Marar. He was awarded the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for literary criticism in 1984, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985, the Vayalar Award in 1989, the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram — Kerala's highest literary honour — in 2004, and the Vallathol Award in 2007.

The Voice on the Public Platform

For most Malayalis, however, Azhikode was heard before he was read. He was among the greatest orators Kerala has produced, and for decades no major public occasion in the state felt complete without him. His speeches ranged freely across the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia, and he used the stage the way other intellectuals use the essay — to think aloud, at length, in front of thousands. His addresses on the demolition of the Babri Masjid were widely reported and remembered.

He was not a comfortable public figure. He quarrelled openly with writers, politicians and institutions, and he took positions that cost him allies. He stood once for the Lok Sabha, the only occasion on which he entered electoral politics, and was unsuccessful. Politics of the party kind was never his medium; the lecture hall and the newspaper column were.

A Refusal, and What Remains

In 2007 the Government of India named him for the Padma Shri. He turned it down, arguing that grading citizens into tiers of civilian honour was itself a form of discrimination. The refusal was characteristic — a man who had spent his life insisting that equality was not a slogan but a discipline, declining an honour on exactly that ground.

He never married, and lived his final years at Eravimangalam near Thrissur. Admitted to hospital in December 2011 with bone cancer, he died on 24 January 2012 at the age of eighty-five. Kerala responded as it does to the loss of a public conscience: the state acquired his property in 2013 and turned it into a memorial and museum housing his books and belongings, and a separate memorial was raised at Payyambalam Beach in Kannur, within reach of the coastline he was named for. An annual literary award now carries his name. For a village boy who took his address as his identity, it is a fitting arrangement — Azhikode the place and Azhikode the man have become difficult to separate.