He walked in the street with his arm around his wife, Chellamma. In the conservative early 20th century, this was seen as public, explicit display of a man’s affection for his woman—a cardinal sin. The renowned reformist, renegade poet and freedom fighter, Subramanya Bharathi, was promptly thrown out of the village.
To the villagers, the poet walking with his wife by his side—and not duly a few respectful steps behind—was the last straw. The poet had already got their goat by getting his Muslim friends visit him in the agraharam—a Brahmin locality—or going to a mosque and singing in praise of Allah. Worse, he had successfully fought for admitting his daughter into the local school. In that milieu, woman’s school education was taboo—those who wished to learn could only be home-schooled.
Today, in the village of Kadayam, near Tenkasi in southern Tamil Nadu, not far from the famous Kuttralam water falls, stands a statue of the couple renowned reformist, renegade Tamil poet, Bharathiyar with an arm around the shoulder of his wife.
It stands in the middle of a new memorial for Bharthiyar that has recently come up, on the erstwhile premises of an old, dilapidated public library, thanks to the efforts of the Sevalaya Trust.
Subramanya Bharathi lived in Kadayam for two years from 1919, after a brief incarceration for writing against the British. Appa Durai, the poet’s brother-in-law, entreated him to stay in his (Appa Durai’s) ancestral house in Kadayam, and in doing so, invited trouble into the village.
Sevalaya, a charitable Trust that runs orphanages and schools, which was set up by an ardent admirer of Bharathiyar, V Muralidharan, has spent ₹3 crore in renovating the old library building and installing the statue there.
The ‘take over’ of a public library was fraught with legal difficulties, but Muralidharan somehow managed it—he even had to pay the government library’s dues to the government-owned electricity utility to get permission to pull down the crumbling library building and putting up a new one there.
Muralidharan told businessline that Sevalaya intends to further develop Kadayam into a heritage tourism attraction. The Japanese company, Komatsu, has paid for the furniture for the new building, but there is a lot more to be done, for which funds are needed.
Tourist attractions
There is potentially plenty for a tourist to see. For example, vatta paarai, an outcrop just outside Kadayam, where Bharathiyar stayed for some days after his ex-communication from the village, is a nice picnic spot.
Chellamma would bring food to him, but the villagers stopped even that. After a few days, a worried wife braved the villager’s opposition and went to vatta paarai to see her husband—only to find him happily singing to himself. He had been given food by some nearby low-caste people living in hutments, which angered the village elders even more.
Another attraction is a temple where Bharathiyar composed the famous nandalala song. The school, whose first girl student was Thangamma Bharati, is now called the Chattram Bharathi School—it has around a thousand girl students today.
Muralidharan says that Kadayam could easily be hypenated with Kuttralam waterfalls, just 7 km away, as a tourist destination. He dreams of putting interactive audio-visuals depicting Bharathiyar’s life in the memorial building and a digital library that can give access to Bharathiyar’s works.