Chinnapulayan: The Dalit Teacher of Sankaracharya

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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.

Summary
Introduction and method
Tottam (song) — Pulaya version: what the text says
Close readings — key passages and short analysis
The Brahminised version — Sankaracharya enters
Major themes and argument
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:

The Brahminised version retains the encounter but changes its frame — from protest to pedagogy.
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.