Kattunayakan poet Bindhu Irulam on winning Kerala Folklore Academy’s Yuvaprathibha award

For Wayanad-based teacher, singer and poet Bindhu Irulam, who belongs to the Kattunayakan tribal community, poetry was woven into daily life right from childhood. He developed an affinity for the spoken word by listening to his parents tell stories and sing under the moonlit sky after dinner. He also fondly remembers his uncle, who played his songs on a local wind instrument.

As she grew older, Bindhu became more aware of lost practices in her culture, and took on the task of documenting her community’s collective memory in Kattunayakan, a blend of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu but without a script. It is these efforts that recently earned him the Kerala Folklore Academy’s Yuvaprathibha award.

“I was against accepting the award at first,” laughs Bindhu. “We are sorry that our art was ignored for a long time. When the award committee reached out to me, I rejected the award. But then I thought why should I deny it? I am glad that our art is being recognized. This is an opportunity for us, from not being able to perform to proudly taking our place in the public sphere.”

Bindhu’s poems capture her identity as Kattunayakan and celebrate the harmonious relationship between humans and nature. “It hasn’t been long since we lived in civilization. We live close to nature. We consider it our god. We collected from nature and lived off it.”

The poem he wrote a few years ago Nanna Thod (My Stream) earned Bindhu the Special Jury Award from the Malayalam Sahitya Pravarthaka Sangham. He also wrote the lyrics of the song ‘Kulirikku neeraatti delile’. Pada (2022) was launched as the first song in this language in Malayalam cinema.

Origin Story

Bindhu Irulam | Photo Credit: SPECIAL EDITING

Bindhu’s meeting with literature VIII. It started when he and his friend wrote a play in their own language for a competition in class and this play won the best play award. A few years later it was performed at the Keralotsavam youth festival and won the first prize.

The poet is also considered a talented singer who specializes in Kattunayakan songs, which he learned as part of rituals in his community. These include art forms such as Bathatta, which surrounds the harvest, and Thotti, a ritualistic art form associated with girls’ first menstruation. “I collect songs based on these rituals and perform them in schools.”

During the pandemic, Bindhu started compiling songs and writing poems in Kattunayakan. “I thought about what would happen if more people read about our art forms, our culture, and our oral history. I wanted the outside world to know more about it.”

“Initially, I was hesitant to speak our language. There were times when I was told to speak Malayalam instead of our language. That’s why I never sang or spoke in our language,” says Bindhu, who recorded her poems and posted them on social media. Seeing this, tribal poet and activist Sukumaran Chaligatha reached out to him to contribute to the compilation of tribal poetry in the state.

“I write when I feel like writing. I used to see poetry in everything. I write about the past, our art, our pain. I write that we were once a group of people who lived a certain life. But we no longer have our own diet. We used to collect meat, honey, roots, etc. from the forest. We don’t do it anymore. We rarely hunted animals and ate the leftovers from tigers and leopards.”

Bindhu adds: “As time progressed, our rights became compromised. And when these rights were taken away, our community’s way of life began to disappear.”