My Background

I’m belonging to a family which inherited its footprints from a weaving community in Kottar area of Nagercoil town in Kanyakumari district in Tamilnadu. Some one thousand people belonging to that community were living there around for about thousand years. It was the time when the weaving profession started to face difficulties due to unsustainable trade practice of British rulers and wake of new industries in and around the town in the 25 years period since the ouster of Britishers from India. People belonging to my community were, then, able to form horizontal connections by getting to mingle with people from different communities at the various levels of survival.

So many people from my community were falling in the commercial activities which had been fast emerging and so were my ancestors also engaged in provisional needs sales business. Both of my grandfathers (my parents’ fathers) were provisional shop owners and their wives were simply housewives. With regard to the pre-industrialist history of society in Nagercoil, it is significant to note here that educated youths were attracted towards the newly emerging political bandwagons. Many of them were in the National Congress party which was, then, under the captainship of Jawaharlal Nehru after Mahathma Gandhi. The nearly half-century old Communist Party of India was being led by many popular leaders like Jeeva in Tamilnadu. The newly emerging Dravidian party D. M. K. was setting another trend in the country by contributing to the self-respect identity of Tamilnadu citizens.

My father Mahalingam, son of Pichandi, shopownere was an ardent follower of Mahathma Gandhi and strictly observing Gandhian code of living. He used to wear hand-made ‘khadi’ clothes and abstained from all unwanted habits like smoking, drinking, sneezing, chewing tobacco, etc. My mother, a high school complete simple woman was married to my father at her 14, after the expiry of my father’s first wife. My father Mahalingam was at that time 34 though such a sort of age difference was not a matter of bothering during then. Till marriage Mahalingam was switching his interest from community bound weaving profession to shop keeping to government teaching profession and to his involvement in the activities of National Congress. Earlier he managed to live in North India for some years in his life and learned Hindi for qualifying to be a ‘Pandit’ (one like a master or to be a teacher). After his return from the North he joined first a missionary school as a Hindi teacher and then transferred to Scot Christian High School and Assissi Missionary School in Nagercoil town. He retired as a Hindi teacher in 1972.

My father had a variety of reasons to attend and participate in the gatherings of political parties and become an activist in the freedom struggle movement. He participated in many demonstrations and struggles and consequently had been jailed for many months. In my knowledge he had been jailed for atleast six months. Many stories were told around in my family about my father’s jail life. He operated also a theatre company in the name Devi Natak Sabha. The name Devi was chosen by him because the famous poet from Kanyakumari district Desika Vinayakam Pillai was in close friendship of my father, and it was the poet who performed the marriage ceremony of my father and mother.

During the course of my father’s political participation he did not have enough money to run his theatre company. So he sold all family properties including the jewels of my mother for staging some plays on freedom struggle. Finally the theatre company fell in bankruptcy, leaving my father a poor man who was to depend only on his teaching profession afterward till his retirement. We were seven children in our family, who needed to continue our education and fulfill our dreams of growing in to good youths. However my parents were merely in a good position to provide medical education to my eldest brother and educate other children till graduation and post-graduation.

Ironically my father participated in many Anti-Hindi Agitations in the mean years. Being a Hindi Pandit he dared to participate and lead many demonstrations which was carried out in Kanyakumari district then against the imposition of Hindi and he was a warrior in the Kanyakumari – Travancore merger struggle. This struggle was organized and carried out by Tamil warriors, because the Malayalam State Kerala claimed the majority Tamil populated Kanyakumari district to be part of their state as the district was formerly within the purview of Malayali Travancore Rule during Britishers’ time.

On the other hand, my mother had been the inevitable major influence on our growth and well-being. She. Apart from nurturing a good mother acted as a good teacher to all of the children in the family by sharing her social knowledge through regular story telling. By listening to her stories I was emotionally encouraged to involve more interestingly in my child hood. I will, often, share the stories told by my mother one after another as go on posting more and more episodes.