GURUVAYUR: On Pattambi Road in Kunnamkulam, there stands an old gateway building that many now pass without a second glance.
Rising against the blue sky, the structure once witnessed one of the town’s most fascinating chapters in history. Beneath it was a wide entrance through which people, bullock carts, and later lorries and jeeps, moved in and out of the municipal meat market where fish, goat meat, pork, and chicken were sold.
While the ground below bustled with the sounds and smells of trade, another extraordinary world existed upstairs — a world of sound, steel, science, and gunpowder. That was where Erathu Pushkaran’s famous ‘Prakash Guns and Radios’ operated.
The workshop functioned day and night and became one of the most unusual landmarks in Kunnamkulam’s cultural memory. It was a place where deadly firearms and music-playing radios coexisted under the same roof. Both were manufactured and repaired there, the crack of a rifle and the melody of a song belonging to the same workspace.
In those days, owning a radio was considered a matter of prestige in ordinary households. A firearm, meanwhile, symbolised authority and protection. Pushkaran, who handled both with equal mastery, was not seen as an ordinary mechanic by the townspeople.
He was regarded as a craftsman-scientist whose skill combined engineering intuition with practical genius. The collection of weapons that arrived at the workshop itself revealed its reputation.
Rifles and hunting guns manufactured in Germany and England regularly came there for servicing and repairs. Elders still recall that even a French Army-used 1777 model flintlock pistol and an 1850 Canadian rifle had once found their way up that wooden staircase. The room, filled with the smell of oil, metal, and polished wood, resembled a miniature military armoury.
Pushkaran was not alone in that world. Men such as Irumban Vareeth and Payamman Baby, along with several others locally referred to as “scientists”, worked around the establishment. Their expertise did not come from formal engineering degrees but from observation, experimentation, and exceptional craftsmanship. They belonged to a disappearing generation of rural inventors and mechanics capable of dismantling broken machines and bringing them back to life.
Kunnamkulam of that era was not merely a commercial town. It was also a vibrant centre where ideas, technology, literature, theatre, politics, and cultural exchanges flourished. Printing presses, bookshops, and active public discussions gave the town a uniquely progressive character. In such an atmosphere, a place called “Guns and Radios” did not seem strange at all.
Old-timers still fondly remember the humorous remark often made by Thiruthikkattukaran Gopalakurup and Ithipparamban Kunjippa: “If Kunnamkulam ever became an independent republic, the weapons for national defence would be supplied from here.”
Behind the humour lay the town’s strong sense of confidence and self-reliance. But time changed everything. The market slowly lost its old vibrancy. The once-busy gateway fell silent. Radios gave way to mobile phones, and gun repair workshops gradually disappeared with changing laws and changing times. Pushkaran and the other “scientists” moved on, faded into memory, or passed away.
Today, few dare to climb upstairs into that old structure. Dust gathers along the walls, wooden beams bear the scars of time, and the growing wilderness behind the building threatens to swallow what remains of the workshop. Yet there remains a lingering feeling that history still breathes quietly inside those rooms.
Perhaps, somewhere in that forgotten attic, an old rifle born in Birmingham or Germany still leans silently against a wall — once roaring with gunfire, now resting as a relic of another age.
