Can a Malayali be the Chronicler of Kolkata? This rare honour belongs to P Thankappan Nair, originally from Kalady, the birthplace of Adi Sankara. Nair came to Kolkata as a young man seeking a livelihood and stayed for nearly seven decades, allowing the city to seep into his bones. Over time, he emerged as perhaps the most meticulous and affectionate chronicler of Kolkata’s layered past through his extensive writings on the history of the capital of West Bengal. Nair, who passed away at 91 in 2024, was also known as a “barefoot historian” because he had no formal academic credentials.

If anyone deserves to be called the contemporary chronicler or the barefoot historian of Thiruvananthapuram, it would undoubtedly be the veteran journalist and author, Malayinkeezhu Gopalakrishnan. The Kerala government’s decision to confer on him the coveted Swadesabhimani-Kesari Award of 2025, the state’s highest award for lifetime achievement in the field of media, is thus timely and richly deserved.

Gopalakrishnan’s iconic weekly column, Nagarappazhama, published in the Mathrubhumi newspaper, which spans Thiruvananthapuram’s past, has crossed a quarter-century. It could arguably be the longest-running weekly column based on the history of a single city in Malayalam, if not in any other language. Nagarappazhama has narrated hundreds of unknown or forgotten stories about Thiruvananthapuram’s history, politics, culture, and development; Gopalakrishnan wrote not just about the extraordinary people who shaped the city's life but also about the ordinary folks who fell through the cracks of official historiography. True to his journalistic instincts, Gopalakrishnan does not treat history as a museum piece but connects it to or contrasts it with the present, often using memory to critique contemporary life. Nagarappazhama has traversed through the sepia-tinged tales of the city’s various landmarks: palaces, colleges, churches, hospitals, mosques, temples, and other buildings, its iconic streets, markets and ponds. It revisited the city's major political agitations of the past and the floods and epidemics; it chronicled visits by celebrities such as Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Tagore, Nehru, Martin Luther King, and many others. No wonder that Mathrubhumi retained Gopalakrishnan’s popular column even after he retired as News Editor from the newspaper in 2008, after nearly four decades of distinguished........

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