The honorific Guru, when used without a specific subject, refers to just one person in Kerala: Sri Narayanan or Narayana Guru. The reason is that he stands foremost as a spiritual guru and reformer among the sons of the soil who pioneered a modern society in Kerala. No other spiritual personality, woman or man, has equalled him as a humane, progressive thinker and radical, charismatic moderniser.
When he was born in 1856, the process of social change in Kerala had already been triggered through colonial influences Portuguese, Dutch and British that exposed sections of society to science and contemporary knowledge. Guru’s call for change, made from this fertile ground, was rooted in Kerala’s soil, empowered by a spiritual message that is as radical today—in fact, especially today—as it was then and accompanied by bold interventions against decadent belief systems, social and spiritual. Ayyankali, the legendary leader who led the untouchables of Kerala on a revolutionary quest for equality and dignity, was his contemporary. At the turn of the 20th century, they created a seismic change in feudal, obscurantist Kerala in their separate ways that set off a process of social transformation and decisively changed Kerala’s social character.