- Lived:
- 20 August 1856, Chempazhanthy village near Thiruvananthapuram → the riverbanks, hilltops and back roads of Kerala; died 20 September 1928 at his ashram of Sivagiri, Varkala
- Field:
- philosophy (Advaita Vedānta), Malayalam and Sanskrit poetry, and the quietest and most consequential religious revolution in modern Indian history
- The Big Idea:
- He took Advaita — the doctrine that all being is one Self — off the bookshelf and enforced it. If all is one, caste is not merely cruel; it is a factual error. So he consecrated temples nobody had authorized, opened them to everybody, and gave Kerala a one-line constitution: one caste, one religion, one God for man.
- In their words:
- "Oru jāti, oru matam, oru daivam manuṣyanŭ" — "One caste, one religion, one God for man."
- If you remember one thing:
- A man forbidden to enter temples lifted a stone out of a river and called it Shiva; when the priests objected, he said he had installed an Ezhava Shiva — and within fifty years the state that had measured human pollution in feet threw open its temple doors to everyone.