Umayakkal Nachiyar

This is the history of the noble and loving commoners,the truly great in spirit,of Ramnad region in South India in the beginning of the 20th century,told through the life of a young woman who lost her well-eduacted rich husband at nineteen,lost the family lands to predatory creditors,but did not lose the spirit of the humankind to fight against the odds of odds to survive, to establish the life of their progenies and ensured that the link of human existence is carried on to their future generations.The world survived,you and me are in existence today because of this instinct to survive and thrive.
This is the story of the spirit that made sea into land,spun river sand into a bow and held five kalam paddy in one handful
All writings of history are not great,most writers wrote to pay the bills and keep the fires burning.
So they wrote the story of those who could pay them,the kings and the rich.
So it is a form of paid self-publicity.
And the tradition built itself into a heinous absurdity,that the kings’ crimes towards humanity were written as great victories,the more they killed of your and my forefathers and the more they enslaved and the more they tortured and subjugated,the greater they were called and we allowed our children to be taught their monstrous evils as as glory of the humanrace.what better absurdity of the written word is possible to prove the futility of recordings by paid servant-scribes.
Neither publicity nor murder should be taken as criteria for greatness but the stupidity of the human race and its traditions are such that they exactly do the same and perpetuate for the future generations also to follow.
They in the mean time forget their forefathers and their love and care and sacrifice to bring up them and establish them in life.They are carried away by the heinous power of tradition and forget the vitals of human nature that has saved them from extinction and made them to survive and thrive.Their parents and grandparents must be their Gods and Heroes.
History of the world should be the history of the common man,the noble,unsung,humble man who cultivated the soils and cultivated his progenies with love.Not that of the greedy,lusty,devilish murder mongers and their satanic killing spree.
This is an example of the love,sacrifice,hope and the eternal longing of the human soul to see its progenies live a life better than theirs.

When her husband died Umayakkal was nineteen with two children,one boy of five and a girl of three.Umayakkal was proud of her children who were too fair bright and brilliant to be born in the villages and in their community,who were always dark in colour.The children exactly resemled her husband who was blessed with such rare good looks that one village elder used to exclaim that the holy vilva sapling has sprouted in such an unlikely place.The children were exhibiting more than the normal smartness of the children of their ilks.Everything like their father,who was educated by the 'vellaikaran'the white men(Britishers) and worked as the only teacher for the entire villages surrounding theirs,Keelathooval.In the early 20th century,the schools were called 'thinnai pallikkoodam' and one existed in Udaikulam.Children have to reach there by four o'clock in the morning by walking upto five kilometres and the school ended at ten in the morning,for children to be free to join their parents in their tiny farms.They wrote the alphabets of Tamil with their index fingers on sand spread before them and sang them in chorus with the class and teacher.There will be one 'sattaampillai' also,who is a senior student who will lead the chorus of the very junior students.They taught only Tamil verses and some tables and fractions.The teachers were mostly pillais and brahmins.The students were also mostly pillais and brahmins and only those who intended to teach in similar Thinnais or those who were from the Karnam (village accountants,who inherited their posts and received a pittance as salary and a prince's ransom as their own side earnings,perhaps traditionalising and institutionalising the personal gratification system which later morphed into the systems of bribery India is very 'famous' for) families.Others probably had no expectations of making a livelihood out of the verses,tables and fractions.Life was too difficult.'Pasiyadha annamum kiliyadha udaiyum venum'Give them food so they feel no hunger and clothes that are not torn' Umayakkal used to pray for her children.Such was the food situation in those parts.Finding one square meal a day was the greatest need for almost all in the villages.The entire family had to toil under the dry steady stare of the Ramanathapuram sun,which made almost all of the year summer for them.Only the landlords who had acres and acres of the dry black soil irrigated by the village tank 'kanmai'were able to hope for enough yield to feed them.Keelathooval kanmai was an ocean of a lake,circling over a ten kilometre circumference and held water in a mysterious yellow colour, could provide irrigation only for one 'bogum'(crop) with the best of rains.All water evaporated in the intense sun that did all things that made life hardy for all things in these parts.That who on earth had dreamt of such a vast reservoir twenty times the size of the village that ended up despite the best of anyone's intentions ended up irrigating land of one tenth its size.Though they called only the 'punjai'land as 'vaanam paartha bhoomi'(land looking to sky,'for it's water needs ofcourse),the kanmai itself was a 'vaanam paartha kanmai'having no river or canal to feed water to it.
Vaathiyar Valivittaa Thevar was not from Keelathooval village.He was fromKeelasaakkulam village,a few miles away,beyond Mudukulathur and before Kamuthi.He had inherited seventy acres of land from his father Siraimeetta Thevar and he had such estimation of the utility of his land that he left it for good to the use of his cousin -sister or niece.When he was very young,a British man on his horse,who was passing that way, saw him playing with other boys and he was found far out-jumping everyone else.He took the boy with him to 'Pattanam'(city) and gave him English education for years,upto Matric 'of those times"(andhakkaalathu Matric).By the time he reappeared he was employed as teacher in the Mission school in Paramakudi.Meanwhile how he ended up marrying an already-married daughter of Keelathooval's main landlord and 'Periyaveettukkaaran.(the man of the big house) is not known or spoken of.Everyone was sure that it was the woman's beauty and the man's looks and talents that made such a union inevitable and everyone left such things as they were,as was the custom of the lofty people in these parts.But it was when he was grieving and crying inconsolably that Umayakkal's father Chinnu Thevar saw him and consoled him with the offer of his daughter in marriage.That was the way Umayakkal happened to get married to Vaathiar Valivitta Thevar,when she was near thirteen and the teacher was thirty-two.At this time,they were living in a house opposite 'pooli veedu'but soon Valivitta Thevar built a 'fortress' of a house,with tiles from S.A.S, Quilon.He went to Quilon two hundred kilometres away by riding the bullock cart himself and brought the tiles.He used to race the bullocks while standing on the fork of the yoke and this stunt of him was a minor talk of the town.Perhaps this was the outgrowth of his athletic days which brought him the attention of the Britisher.
But problems came with the lifestyle that Umayakkal was expected to follow as the wife of the Mission school teacher.Women of her folks are not used to wearing 'sattai' and the female teachers of the Mission school in Paramakudi found fun in prodding her to dress the way they do.That was too much for Umayakkal and she proptly returned to her father's house.Chinnu Thevar made the strict condition for the marriage to continue that the teacher should leave his mission school job and christian association,which was not becoming for his folks.And the inveterate lover the teacher was,he left the Mission school and found himself the job of a Government school teacher in Kothandaramanpattanam,a smaller village,despite its citylike name,a few kilometres away and to be reached by walking along the palm fringed fields.
The man imself turned out to be a missionary.He took it upon himself to'open the eyes' of his folks and zealously enrolled the children and youth of the villages and taught them the English education energetically.The school was a Government Grant school and received an annual grant of twelve and half rupees,whether the money was small or less he did not pause and in time he became known for his energetic and vigorous ways of education.His committment and force persuaded the villagers to free their children from their toil in the fields and give them a chance with education of 'four letters'(naalu eluthu padicha nalladhudhane).You can take the man out of the mission but not the mission out of this man.The villages had so many more needs.And ills,literally.There were no health care and medical facilities.He happily laboured on to learn the Siddha system of medicine from experienced practitioners and treated the villagers himself.He learnt Astrology and became the astrologer also.He had music and dramatic talents with which he developed a group of artists from the village youth and staged dramas of AlliArasani Maalai and Harichandra.The folk artists made names and status for themselves and went on to entertain their people for decades to come.He also settled the families of his relatives in jobs in railways and removed them for ever from the clutches of adversity.So versatile was he,that a relative of him,who was the owner of seven and half villages'Elaraikiraamathukkaaran' made over all his villages to him to save himself from the legal battles that he was being subjected to.
But soon,Life started showing that it had other things in mind.Life is what happens when we have other plans.The best laid plans of men and mice go awry.Valivittaa Thevar,the man with the restless missions and enthusiasm and energies,started suffering from an illness.He treated himself with his own knowledge of Siddha medicines but the disease got the better of him.He was so unwilling to let go of life.He wanted to live for his two young children to save them from the hard life the hot black soil hands out to its dependants.One day,when the man he sent to Paramakudi to bring sweets and delicacies came with the delicacies he called his little son near him and told'when I am gone,people may treat you lightly,you tell them that your father brought you up with sweets and delicacies. He told nineteen year old Umayakkal that when he is not there,the creditors wil take possession of the lands and they will be left with only the house.They may have to 'live by gathering from the fields and boiling in the pot'(kaatile perakkittu vandhu ottile kodhikka vachu pilainga).Evidently,the man had grand dreams for his son and daughter and the dreams were falling away and he could have wanted to do whatever to live his life.He died so unwillingly,fighting to escape from the clutches of fate,helpless to escape from the destiny despite his soul crying to leave him alone with his children,he died an entirely physical death.with so much attachment to his children his spirit might have hovered on in care of his children.
When Umayakkal rose,she rose not like the phoenix,but like the typhoon.She was not the delicate teenage girl,looked after with comfort by her husband,the towering personality he was, who commanded the service and respect of a whole lot of villagers and students and also was well to do for the standards of that era in that area.She will prove to the destiny that she was the wife of Vaathiyaar,the man incomparable and beyond words to describe.It can take her man the teacher,but she can make a teacher out of her son.Come what may.Let the sun scorch ever more.Let the black soil not yield any more.She will make her son an educated person and a government teacher like his father.
Her father wept and lamented the fate of his young daughter,whenever he happened to see her on the way.Her brother wanted her to remarry a person of his selection and to leave the children with him,yet she sensed his plan to possess their house in this guise.He will not look after her children the way she will look after and love.Her mother gave moral support but not of means to give her support in livelihood.The Ramnad rains will come once in four years and the other three will be drought years.It does not matter whether one has lands or not,because the lands do not yield and all have to find some work to keep the wolf away.Umayakkal joined another of her relative in bringing salt from the coastal villages and sell it in the interior villages.With this meager profit she fed and clothed her son and daughter and sent her son to the Gurukulam style Thinnaipallikoodams around for the elementary education which was recognized in the Government schools in faraway towns as equivalent to one of the standards after conducting tests on the students.For his middle school education and onwards to E.S.L.C examinations,she migrated to Karaikudi and did odd jobs in the households of the rich chettiars.Her son Narayanan once suffered a strange variety of joint disease and had to be kept in the District Hospital in Ramnad which made his eligibility for the examination a question mark.She fell at the feet of the kind-hearted headmaster of the School and narrated the story of her husband who was a teacher like him and the fate that has made her to do odd household works so that her son will become a teacher like his father.The headmaster took pity and condoned the shortage of attendance and thus came the first E.S.L.C of the village called Keelathooval,a village known far and wide for the villagers’ fiery and independent spirit and their otherwise noble nature and inborn native wisdom.In her struggle with the sickness and hospitalization of her son she was given a very hearty helping shoulder by her cousin brother Annakalanjiam Swamiar,who had been a wandering mendicant and lived around Ganga and Kasi for many years before returning to the village.
He also gathered the villagers on the boy’s return to the village with his ESLC education and arranged for their own village school in the English style with the boy as the sole teacher.He was thirteen at that time and the year was 1935.Umayakkal saw her dream coming true before her,her son taking over as teacher of the village school,just as her husband had been.Along with her,her husband also would have been proud to see his preciously loved son becoming a teacher like him,a revered vocation in those days in those parts.Now in Heaven also he would be still happy and proud.

Struggle for livelihood,education,health care and early deaths of the bread-winners are common in this region and it does not dampen the spirit and determination of these people.They persist with their zest for life and swim against the current like the salmons until their life's aim is achieved.

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