The Poet Who Asked a Parrot to Tell It

The poet who asked a parrot to tell it

There was a time in Kerala when the great stories were kept in Sanskrit, and Sanskrit was not something everybody was taught. The stories existed. They were simply on the other side of a door, and most people had not been given the key.

Thunchath Ezhuthachan had the key. He could have kept it.

Instead he did something that sounds small and was not. He wrote the Ramayana out again in Malayalam, the language people actually spoke to each other in, at home, about ordinary things. And he did it in a form so plain that anyone could follow it: verses meant to be sung, not studied.

Then he did the strange part.

He did not tell the story himself. He begins by turning to a parrot, kili, and asking her to sing it. The whole of the Adhyatma Ramayanam is a bird's telling. Page after page of it, and the poet is not speaking; he is listening, like everybody else.

People have argued for four hundred years about why. Some say a bird's voice is sweet and carries. Some say a man of his time could not stand up and recite scripture in his own person, and a parrot could say anything. Some say he simply liked it.

He did not explain, and we should not pretend he did. But look at what the choice does. A parrot has no learning and no rank. A parrot repeats what it has heard. If the Ramayana can come out of a parrot's mouth, then it can come out of anyone's, and that is the argument the poem makes without ever making it aloud.