If S. Ramesan Nair had been less ambitious, devotional music in Malayalam would have been a little less rich. It was Ramesan’s ambition to become a lyricist – he did, a rather successful one at that – that made P.K. Kesavan Namboothiri a composer of unmatched devotional songs. Kesavan Namboothiri died at a private hospital in Thrissur at the age of 84, leaving behind some of Malayalam’s finest and most popular devotional songs.
Temples across Kerala have been playing his songs, like Vadakkumnathanu suprabhatham…, Vighneswara janma nalikeram, Ambadi thannilorunni, Mookambike…, Neelamegham… and Koodum pinikale… for the last four decades. This correspondent could remember listening to those songs, in P. Jayachandran’s voice, wafting through the air from the public address system of the temple at a village in Kozhikode district called Thiruvallur, as one got off at the bus-stop near the temple pond in the evenings and walked towards the ancestral home.
