The wide canopy of the 150-year-old banyan tree is vivid and striking.
It stands on an isolated, uncultivated patch of land owned by the Mundamuka Sastha temple on the banks of the Bharathapuzha in Shoranur. The tree evokes awe-inspiring memories of the formative years of social reformer V.T. Bhattathiripad, even though the concrete platform at its base is no more in existence. Then a priest with the temple, Bhattathiripad used the shade to contemplate.
It was close to a century ago that the 18-year-old Bhattathiripad started working as a priest at the temple, stated to be over 2,000 years old.
It was sheer poverty that drove Bhattathiripad, an uneducated youth from Mezhathur in the then undivided Ponnani taluk, to reach Shoranur to take up the job. His work started early in the morning and ended by noon. He spent the afternoons under the tree.
One fine evening, he was jolted out of slumber by a 10-year-old girl in the neighbourhood who wanted to solve a Maths problem. Unable to read the text she showed, Bhattathiripad pleaded with her to make him her disciple. Then she taught him alphabets and basic Maths under the tree.
The reformer had later stated that the evenings spent under the tree had helped him think of his Namboodiri community which was caught in a ‘time warp.’
The alphabets he learned from the girl helped Bhattathiripad become one of the leading lights of social reform in the State, he says in Kanneerum Kinavum, his memoir. “We have been asking the Shoranur Municipality to set up a fitting memorial for him close to the banyan tree. It will be a great tribute to the renaissance movement of Kerala too,” says Prasad K. Shornur, social activist.
The ‘thinking space’ which influenced V.T. Bhattathiripad’s formative years is facing neglect.
