Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan (Malayalam: [t̪uɲdʒɐt̪ːə̆ ɾaːmaːnudʒɐn eɻut̪ːɐtːʃʰɐn] ⓘ, Tuñcattŭ Rāmānujan Eḻuttacchan) (fl.

[2] He was one of the pioneers of a major shift in Kerala's literary culture (the domesticated religious textuality associated with the Bhakti movement).

[4] He was born in a place called Thunchaththu in present-day Tirur in the Malappuram district of northern Kerala, in a traditional Hindu family.

[3] Ezhuthachan's ideas have been variously linked by scholars either with philosopher Ramananda, who found the Ramanandi sect, or Ramanuja, the single most influential thinker of devotional Hinduism.

[6] For centuries before Ezhuthachan, Kerala people had been producing literary texts in Malayalam and in the Grantha script.

[3] It can be said that Ezhuthachan brought the then unknown Sanskrit-Puranic literature to the level of common understanding (domesticated religious textuality).

[1] The name Ezhuthachan, meaning Father of Letters, was a generic title for any village schoolteacher in premodern Kerala.

[6] After his early education he is believed to have travelled in the other parts of India (outside Kerala) and learned Sanskrit and some other Dravidian languages.

[15] It is believed that Ezhuthachan on his way back from Tamil Nadu had a stopover at Chittur (in Palakkad) and in due course settled down at Thekke Gramam near Anikkode with his disciples.

[10] A verse chanted by the ascetics of the mathom during their daily prayers makes a reference to the following line of masters.

[5][1][3] Sri Mahabharatam omits all episodes not strictly relevant to the story of the Pandavas and is generally considered as a work of greater literary merit than the Ramayanam.

[5] I would not at all rule out a level of critique of the prevailing religious order of [Kerala] society, though only implicit and certainly not overtly pitched in caste or class terms, in Eluttacchan's sectarian teachings.

[3] The Bhakti movement was a collective opposition to Brahmanical excesses and the moral and political decadence of the then-Kerala society.

[3] The shift of literary production in Kerala to a largely Sanskritic, puranic religiosity is attributed this movement.

[27] P. Shungunny Menon ascribes the authorship of the medieval work Keralolpathi, which describes the Parashurama legend and the departure of the final Cheraman Perumal king to Mecca, to Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan.

[3] It depicts Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, as an ideal figure (both as man and god-incarnate, the Bhakti interpretation).

The text spread with phenomenal popularity throughout Kerala middle-caste homes as a material for domestic devotional recitation.

It tells us something about the place of this multiform narrative, the Ramayana, in constituting the core of a literary tradition; about the enduring historical importance of the moment when a subaltern social formation achieved the literacy that in the South Asian world conditioned the culturally significant type of textuality we may call literature; and about literature as requiring, in the eyes of many readers and listeners, a particular linguistic register, in this case, the highly Sanskritized.According to critic K. Ayyappa Panicker, those who see Adhyatma Ramayanam merely as a devotional work "belittle" Ezhuthachan.

[33] E. P. Bhaskara Guptan, a writer and independent researcher of local history from Kadampazhipuram; supports Kurup's conclusion.

William Logan, officer of the Madras Civil Service under the English India Company Government, expresses a similar opinion in his Malabar Manual and states that Thunchaththu Ezuthachan was "a man of Sudra (Nayar) caste".

[39][43] In addition to the common title Panicker, the members of Kaniyar from the South Travancore and Malabar region were known as Aasaan, Ezhuthu Aasans, or Ezhuthachans (Father of Letters),[43] by virtue of their traditional avocational function as village school masters to non-Brahmin pupils.