Sri Narayana Guru

A child was born in a humble cottage in Chempazhanthi near Trivandrum in August 1856 A.D. No one knew it marked the dawn of the most remarkable epoch in the social evolution of Kerala.  This child was to blossom forth as the great sage Sri Narayana, the most revolutionary social reformer Kerala has produced.

Sri Narayana Guru was born to a middle class Ezhava family. Numerically Ezhavas or Thiyyas are the largest non-caste Hindu community in Kerala. His parents, ‘Madan Asan’ and ‘Kutty Amma’ endearingly called him ‘Nanu’.  At the age of five, he began his education in the neighbouring school in the old “Gurukula” model.

After his elementary education in this school, he became the disciple of a great Sanskrit scholar ‘Raman Pillai Asan’ of Puthuppally in Central Travancore.  Under his master’s tutelage, he became well versed in Sanskrit classics.  For some time he too functioned as an ‘Asan’, a teacher of infant pupils. Thus he came to be known as ‘Nanu Asan’.

Nanu, even from his boyhood had an ascetic bent of mind.  When he was on the threshold of his youth, he had to undergo the ceremonial marriage due to parental pressure.  But he never led a married life.  Sree Narayana’s mind was always agitated by a spiritual urge that induced him along with a fellow-spiritualist renowned as ‘Chattampi Swami’, to become the disciple of a man named Ayyavu, the then Superintendent of the British Residency in Trivandrum from whom he learned Yoga.  At the age of twenty-three he left his family, renounced the pleasures of his world and wandered about as an “avadhutha” or mendicant, keeping his body and soul together by the alms he received from all sorts of people.  Soon he went into seclusion and immersed himself in meditation, absolutely isolating himself from contact with the human world.  The caves of “Maruthwamala” and “Aruvippuram” hills in South Travancore were his abode during this period.

As more people sought him out for healing or advice, he and his disciples felt the need of a regular temple for worshipping Shiva. At a beautiful spot in a river near Aruvippuram, he had his followers build a small canopy of coconut leaves and mango leaves over an altar on a rock jutting out in the water.

In those days, the foundation and consecration of a Hindu temple was the exclusive monopoly of the Brahmins. Sree Narayana’s first revolutionary act was the challenge thrown against this monopoly, by him consecrating temples. The first in this line was the temple dedicated to Shiva in Aruvippuram in 1888 A.D. To have proper appreciation of the magnitude of Sree Narayana’s achievements, it is necessary to understand the background of the social conditions in which he was born and brought up.  Kerala, reputed for its natural beauty and richness of life, was alas, the cursed land of caste tyranny at that time; to such an extent that it was really a “lunatic asylum” as Swami Vivekananda branded it. The non-caste Hindus, the “Avarnas” were groaning under the terrible weight of social, economic, religious and political oppression imposed upon them by caste Hindus or “Savarnas”. Not only temples of God but also temples of learning were also shut against them by twin weapons of untouchability and inapproachability.  They had to toil hard for their caste-Hindu masters with hardly any reward.  They had to suffer a multitude of disabilities that broke the very backbone of their life.

The people of the Ezhava community were the first to be awakened by the teachings of Sree Narayana and to be inspired into a spirit of mass militancy to eradicate their social disabilities. His action was the Keralite equivalent of overturning the tables of the moneychangers, or refusing to give up a seat on the bus. From the beginning of time, so far as anyone knew, only Brahmins had ever installed an idol. "Yet when Swami performed the sacred rite it appeared so natural for him to pick up a small rock and install it."

Caste did not crumble immediately, however. Sree Narayana Guru, along with many other reformers, spent their lives confrontation for more rights for the various castes--more representation in government jobs, increased educational opportunity, the right to enter and worship at all temples. But all the mundane struggle for civil rights went on in an atmosphere of spirituality; more than the simple assertion of power by a group too large to be ignored, it was also the statement of a moral ideal, a view of hum an dignity against the oppressions both of feudalism and of faith. "One caste, one religion, one God for man," was Sree Narayana Guru's rallying cry.

Sree Narayana founded two famous Ashrams, one at Varkala and the other at Alwaye, with educational institutions attached to them. These Ashrams remain the centers of purity and universal fraternity, the ideals, which the Guru greatly appreciated and nourished.  Sree Narayana did not attempt to find a new religion, but he propounded a great creed, the creed of “Universal Goodness”.  Thanks to Sree Narayana, the Ezhavas came to have their own temples on the model of caste-Hindu temples that denied them admission, and in their temples they could worship the deities until then monopolized by caste Hindus. 

Within a few years Sree Narayana established a multitude of temples all over Kerala.  The temples at Vakkom, Kulathur and Kovalam in south Travancore area, at Cherai, Koorkancherry and Peringottukara in Cochin area, and Tellicherry, Cannanore and Calicut in the Malabar area of Kerala State and Mangalore in Karnataka state are some of the most celebrated among these temples. It is significant that the history of founding of Temples by Sree Narayana was a process of evolution through which he slowly prepared the minds of the masses in the progressive realization of more and more revolutionary ideas the great Guru Sree Narayana attained Samadhi on September 20, 1928.  Thus physically Guru disappeared, but spiritually he lives forever in the minds of mankind.