---
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title: "Chinnapulayan: The Dalit Teacher of Sankaracharya"
permalink: /amaa/chinnapulayan-the-dalit-teacher-of-sankaracharya/
categories: [A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel, Publications]
description: "A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel's study of the Pulaya Tottam of Pottan Teyyam and its Brahminised Sankaracharya variant, examining how the two versions frame caste, ritual memory, and argument."
created: 2025-11-27
---

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***Chinnapulayan: The Dalit Teacher of Sankaracharya*** is a paper (essay) by A. M. Abraham Ayrookuzhiel that reproduces and closely interprets the Pulaya ritual song (the *Tottam* of Pottan Teyyam) alongside a Brahminised variant that inserts Sankaracharya into the encounter. The essay treats the *Tottam* as both ritual memory and argumentative text, documenting how the Pulaya version advances a material, experience-based critique of caste through images drawn from labour, food, wounds and shared dwelling. By placing this against the later Brahminised retelling — where a doctrinal Advaitic exchange replaces the original social confrontation — Ayrookuzhiel shows how the force of a Dalit protest poem can be preserved in form yet redirected in meaning. All quotations and page references below are taken directly from the source document.

## Contents
- [Summary](#summary)
- [Introduction and method](#introduction-and-method)
- [Tottam (song) — Pulaya version: what the text says](#tottam-song--pulaya-version-what-the-text-says)
- [Close readings — key passages and short analysis](#close-readings--key-passages-and-short-analysis)
  - [Shared life and the rhetorical move](#shared-life-and-the-rhetorical-move)
  - [Boat imagery and solidarity](#boat-imagery-and-solidarity)
  - [Human dwelling as body and vulnerability](#human-dwelling-as-body-and-vulnerability)
- [The Brahminised version — Sankaracharya enters](#the-brahminised-version--sankaracharya-enters)
- [Major themes and argument](#major-themes-and-argument)
- [Publication](#publication)

## Summary

A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel presents the *Pottan Teyyam* (also called the *Tottam of Pottan Teyyam*) as a Pulaya ritual-poem that functions rhetorically as a sustained repudiation of caste-based exclusion. The essay reproduces the Pulaya version of the *Tottam*, offers a line-by-line reading of its argumentative moves, and then contrasts this with a Brahminised reworking in which Sankaracharya is the antagonist. The Pulaya song builds its critique from common life — food, labour, wounds, trees, boats — to insist on shared humanity; the Brahminised narrative reframes the episode as a spiritual teaching about non-duality, thereby neutralising the poem's direct social critique. All quotations and page references below are taken from the source document.

## Introduction and method

Ayrookuzhiel situates the Pulaya *Tottam* within north Malabar ritual life and frames the essay as three tasks: (1) reproduce the Pulaya version of the song in full; (2) explain its historical circumstances and changes; (3) give a short account of how the song has been used in modern Dalit movements. The author emphasises fidelity to the text and treats the song as both ritual performance and argument.

## Tottam (song) — Pulaya version: what the text says

The Pulaya *Tottam* as printed in the essay opens with prose introduction lines that announce the coming of Pottan and set the ritual context (pp. 91–92). The *Varavil* (praise poem) follows, addressing prosperity and the well-being of the community (pp. 92–93). The core argumentative passage — where Chinnapulayan replies to the Chovar (taskmaster/landlord) — is printed and discussed on pages 94–96; these lines form the poem's moral centre. 

## Close readings — key passages and short analysis

### Shared life and the rhetorical move

The Pulaya speaker answers the command to "give way" with a sustained practical and moral argument. He points to shared bodily experience and shared labour as the grounds against caste quarrel:

> "When you are wounded blood comes out / When we are wounded blood comes out".

He then insists on identical daily facts — food and tools — to undercut ritual othering:

> "The rice you cook, and the rice we cook / Is the same".

These lines use minimal metaphysics and maximal empirical commonplaces (food, blood, knives) to transform a ritual confrontation into an ethical demand for equal treatment. The poem thereby makes a pragmatic case: caste distinctions lack any material or bodily basis.

### Boat imagery and solidarity

A short passage uses the image of boats crossing from one bank to another to make a solidarity claim:

> "When a boat comes from the other bank to this bank / Another boat goes from here to the other bank. / Isn't it in the same boat you go / Isn't it in the same boat we go".

This pragmatic image — shared passage, shared journey — converts ritual difference into a shared trajectory and thus undermines the logic of exclusion. The appeal is not metaphysical; it is a rhetorical insistence on social fact.

### Human dwelling as body and vulnerability

Another sustained set of verses compares communal houses and their fragility to the human body. The *Tottam* describes a small chala (dwelling) with specific construction details and then asks rhetorically who will inhabit it when it collapses — a metaphor for social precarity that links caste marginality to structural vulnerability (pp. 96–98). The poem's catalogue of construction elements (rafters, coconut-leaf roofing, fifty-one nails) indexes care and skilled labour carried out by the community, implicitly rebutting assumptions of worthlessness.

## The Brahminised version — Sankaracharya enters

Ayrookuzhiel prints a Brahminised retelling in which the Chovar (or comparable figure) is replaced by Sankaracharya and the encounter is reframed as a doctrinal exchange. In this version Sankaracharya reproves the outcaste and advances an Advaitic teaching. The Brahminised poem converts the original's material critique into a spiritual lesson: caste becomes a matter of spiritual ignorance rather than a site of social and economic injustice. The text records Sankara's rebuke and then the Chandala's lengthy philosophical reply; the dialogue culminates in Sankara's realisation and praise.

Two observations follow from the printed exchange:
1. The Brahminised version retains the encounter but changes its frame — from protest to pedagogy.  
2. The effect of this reframing is to absorb the poem's social force into a non-dual theological idiom that neutralises its immediate ethical challenge to caste practice.

## Major themes and argument

- **Material commonality as ethical ground.** The Pulaya song repeatedly uses shared, ordinary facts (blood, rice, knives, boats, trees) as proof against caste-based exclusion. This move is empirical and rhetorical rather than metaphysical.
- **Ritual memory vs. appropriation.** The essay shows how dominant traditions absorb folk protest by retelling it in their own metaphysical language (Sankaracharya's insertion). The appropriation preserves the story but alters its force.
- **Poetry as argument.** The *Tottam* functions simultaneously as ritual performance and argumentative speech — it enacts community identity while arguing for equality. Ayrookuzhiel treats the poem as evidence of Dalit normative language.  
- **Continuities with modern Dalit literatures.** The author links the *Tottam*'s rhetoric to later Dalit poets and political movements that reclaim folk memory as resources for identity and protest.

## Publication
The paper titled *Chinnapulayan: The Dalit Teacher of Sankaracharya* was first presented by A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel at an academic seminar. A revised portion of the study was later published in 1996 in the volume *Emerging Dalit Identity*, edited by Walter Fernandes and brought out by the Indian Social Institute (ISI), Delhi.

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