Sree Narayana Guru, one of the greatest revolutionary social reformers Kerala has ever produced, was born on August 20, 1856, in a humble cottage in Chempazhanthy, a village near Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, as the son of Madan Asan and Kutty Amma. Madan Asan was a farmer as well as a teacher, with proficiency in Sanskrit, Astrology and Ayurveda, and his son, the little “Nanu” grew up listening to his narrations of the stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharatha to the local residents of the village. Nanu’s uncle Krishnan Vaidyan, a reputed Ayurvedic physician and a Sanskrit scholar, taught him the basics of Tamil and Sanskrit languages. He was drawn to meditation and poetry right from his childhood years, and criticised the social discrimination against the backward classes, which was plaguing the society at that time.
He exhorted man: “The act one performs for one’s own pleasure should also be of pleasure to others.” The great seer who preached “Oneness of Humanity” propagated the ideal, “One Caste, One Religion, and One God for the Human Kind”. He called upon the unprivileged and downtrodden to “Strengthen Through Organization” and to “Emancipate Through Education.” The emancipation he envisaged was the absolute freedom from the fetters of ignorance and wrong customs that bind humanity down. In the endeavor to fulfill the exhortations of Guru, Sree Narayana College accepts into its fold all sections of society, irrespective of caste and creed, to impart egalitarian attitude and ethical high-mindedness to the privileged, and to empower the weak to come on a par with the privileged, with self respect. The vision of Sree Narayana College is embodied in the noble ideals of Sree Narayana Guru.
