Being a top official in
the government and an orthodox Brahmin himself, he predicated his works
upon a lofty ideal of eternal India of Sanskrit culture and provided the
best fusion of the Aryan and Dravidian cultures.
Ulloor S Parameswara Iyer
The prolific Ullur was a scholar-poet. Though his position as one of the Great Trio is often questioned, his overall contribution to Malayalam literature is beyond dispute. He is known for his versatility, his lyricism, his innovative techniques of prosody, and of course, his productivity. Ullur's five-volume history of Malayalam Liteature is still the best work on pre-twentieth century Sanskrit, Tamil and Malayalam. Though many critics eventually sought to attack Ullur as a member of the ruling class, the service he rendered to modern Malayalam literature through such works as Umakeralam, Karnabhushanam, Bhakthi Deepika, Kiranavali ensured his position among the Great Trio. His most memorable poem is "Prema Sangitam" a beautiful, ornate, pre-Raphaelite lyric about the aesthetics of love.
The author of the epic on Kerala, Umakeralam, Ullur was the most classical of the three poets. In mid-career, he abandoned some of his classicism and joined the new movement which was being popularized by Asan and Vallathol. As a first step, he adopted Dravidian meter and enriched it with his impeccable technical skill. His main contribution was to develop a sense of pride about the Indian identity of Malayalam-speakers. Being a top official in the government and an orthodox Brahmin himself, he predicated his works upon a lofty ideal of eternal India of Sanskrit culture and provided the best fusion of the Aryan and Dravidian cultures.
Ullur's zeal for asserting cultural identity is most evident in Chithrasala (The Art Gallery) in which the poet takes the American writer Katharine Mayo for a demonstrative tour of the eternal India. In her Mother India, Mayo had attacked Indian culture and made many cynical, myopic remarks on Indian womanhood. Ullur took it upon himself to set the record straight by revealing to the American writer the gallery of portraits of men and women of the Indian tradition, describing their greatness, showing how the women often emerged nobler and wiser than their consorts. Late Romantics The Late-Romantics were not merely a group of decadent aesthetes creating art for art's sake. Extreme idealists and dreamers, they seemed to be obsessed with death and the awareness of transience and the futility of life.
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Last Updated: December 11, 1998