![]() I personally believe the latter.” Only parts of the Mappila Ramayanam are available to us, having been collected by Karassery. ![]() “It could be that Hassankutty was a real wandering bard or a poet or that he was simply a character used in this version as a narrator. “We don’t have any evidence for it,” he says. On the other hand, writer and academic Dr MN Karassery, who first recorded the text of the Mappila Ramayanam, believes that Hassankutty didn’t actually exist. It could even have been composed earlier, with Hassankutty being the last of its transmitters. Nicknamed Piranthan Hassankutty (Crazy Hassan), he set his version of the Ramayana in the form and metre of the Mappilapattu (Mappila folk songs). Perhaps it began with a labourer who wandered around doing odd jobs in Kerala’s Malabar region over a 100 years ago. Like with most oral compositions, the actual story of its creation is lost to us. It’s not easy to pin down the origins of the Mappila Ramayanam.
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