Niranam Poets
Niranam gave birth to three well-known poets called Madhava Panikkar and Sankara Panikkar and Rama Panikkar. These poets were populary known as Niranam Poets. They belong to the Kannassa family and the first two were the uncles of Rama Panikkar. They lived in between 1350 and 1450 and made valuable contribution to the Malayalam Literature. It is said that the appearance of modern Malayalam literature starts with the Niranam poets.
Before them the Malayalam poetry was a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam known as ‘Manipravala’. Their success led to the gradual replacement of the Manipravala cult of worldliness and sensual revelry by an indigenous poetics of high seriousness. Madhava Panikkar wrote a condensed Malayalam translation of Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the first ever translation of that classic into any modern Indian language. Sankara Panikkar’s important work is Bharathamala, a masterly condensation of Mahabharatham, is also the first major work of its kind in Malayalam. The greatest of the three is of course Rama Panikkar, the author of Ramayanam, Bharatham, Bhagavatham, and Sivarathri Mahatmyam. Kannassa Ramayanam and Kannassa Bharatham are the most important of Niranam works. Rama Panikkar’s ‘Ramayanam’ has an important link among Cheraman’s ‘Ramacharitam’, Ayyappilli Asan’s ‘Ramakadhappattu’ and Ezhuthachan’s ‘Adhyatma Ramayanam’. The centrality of Niranam Rama Panikkar is of vital concern to any conscientious literary historian of Malayalam. The subordination of the descriptive and the narrative elements to the controlling theme is a feature of Rama Panikkar’s poetic style. Ulloor, the Great Malayalam poet has opined that Rama Panikkar holds the same position in Malayalam Literature that Spenser does in English Literature.
