Balachandran Chullikkadu Biography: India’s renowned Malayalam poet Balachandran Chullikkadu hails from Kerala. He was born in Paravur on July 30, 1957. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Maharajas College in Ernakulam. His published poetry collections include “Pathinettu kavithakal”, “Amaavaasi”, “Ghazal”, “Maanasaantharam”, and “Dracula”, among others. Balachandran Chullikkadinte Kavithakal (The Complete Poems of Balachandran Chullikkad) was published by DC Books, Kottayam, Kerala, India, in 2000.
Balachandran Chullikkadu Biography
Early years
Born in Paravur, Ernakulam, Kerala, India, Balachandran. He graduated from Union Christian College, Aluva (first two years) and Maharajas College, Ernakulam, with a bachelor’s degree in English literature.
Balachandran Chullikkadu Career
His published poetry collection includes Pathinettu Kavithakal, Amaavaasi, Ghazal, Maanasantharam, Dracula, and others. Balachandran Chullikkadinte Kavithakal (The Poems of Balachandran Chullikkad), a compendium of his previously published poems, was published in 2000. He has also published Chidambarasmarana (2001), a collection of his memoirs.
India’s Central Academy of Letters has organised a number of national literary seminars in which he has participated. In 1997, he was one of ten members of an Indian cultural delegation invited to Sweden by the Nobel Academy and the Swedish Writers Union. In November 1997, he represented Indian poetry at the international book fair in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Chullikkad also acts in Malayalam films and television series. In the 1981 film Pokkuveyil directed by G. Aravindan, he portrayed a young artist who resides with his father, a radical friend, and a music-loving young woman. The film depicts how his world crumbles after the death of his father, the departure of his radical companion, and the removal of his girlfriend by her family to another city.
In 2018, he criticised the state education department’s incompetence in Malayalam language instruction. He requested that his compositions be removed from school, college, and university curricula. Chullikkadu alleged that excessive marks were awarded for papers containing errors without proper evaluation, and that Malayalam teachers are appointed not on the basis of their qualifications, but on the basis of caste, religion, political influence, and nepotism. He stated that research on Malayalam literature is of poor quality and that doctoral degrees are awarded even for flawed works.
Balachandran Chullikkadu Personal Life
Chullikkad is married to the renowned Malayalam poet Vijayalakshmi, and they have a son named Appu.
He adopted Buddhism as his religion in 2000. He claims that this cannot be considered a conversion from Hinduism because he was never a Hindu. “I have not converted because, despite being Hindu, I have never been a devotee. I have adopted Buddhism rather than converted to Buddhism. Problematically, Hinduism is a religion of social status and hierarchies. “In Hinduism, your worth is determined by the family into which you were born,” he explains.
Political opinions
In an interview conducted in 2000, Chullikkadu revealed that, as a teenager, he sympathised with the Naxalite movement. He remained a Marxist for several years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and “the Eastern European experience,” he reconsidered his Marxist beliefs and redirected his intellectual life in a different direction. “I considered Marxism to be obsolete and irrelevant. Now I am a social and political democrat, not a Marxist. The Soviet experience demonstrated that both individual freedom and socialism without the sanction of individual freedom fail. Communism practised globally is a form of collectivism that does not permit individual liberty. “Communism without respect for individual liberty is social fascism,” he stated.
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Balachandran Chullikkadu Awards
In 1990, he refused the Sanskriti Award for the best young writer in India and declared that he would not receive any literary awards. Balachandran Chullikkadinte Kavithakal was chosen for the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 2001, but Chullikkadu did not acknowledge the award. The 18 Elephants – 3 Monologues won the 2003 National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Film Narration / Voice Over (Non-Feature Film Category).
