Ponnusamy read the world through a village

The world was his village. My first glimpse of the fifth standard dropout turned great literary figure was in Pudukkottai in 1993. Later, I met him at his home in Melanmarai Nadu village in what was then called Kamrajar district (now Virudhunagar). With the death of Melanmai Ponnusamy, 66, on October 30, India has lost one of the most authentic literary voices of the countryside. Ponnusamy was more than a great creative writer, though. His was a fine political mind, an incisive, analytical one that probed and unveiled the character and causes of poverty and deprivation in his ancient homeland of Ramnathapuram (better known as Ramnad).

He focused on the village – and through it, understood the world. Almost a decade before the words ‘agrarian crisis’ came into popular use, Ponnusamy was talking of the devastation he thought the new kinds of seeds would bring to farmers in his village. “The cost of production is now much higher for those who have begun to use these seeds,” he said. And that was in 1993.

Despite being a famous literary figure, a Sahitya Akademi awardee and winner of innumerable other prizes, he resisted the idea of shifting from his village to a larger stage in Madurai or Chennai. Ponnusamy felt he drew his authenticity as a writer from living in a village in the old Ramnaddistrict (now in Virudhunagar). Only in the last three or four years of his life, dogged by illness, did he shift to Chennai to live with his son and to be closer to his doctor daughter.

What a great writer. What a wonderful human being. What a terrible loss. Below, is the story on him that appeared in my book Everybody Loves A Good Drought.

Apart from being a highly regarded writer, Ponnusamy is also, in some ways, one of the great experts on the backwardness of this district. His isolated little village, Melanmarai Nadu, is now in Kamrajar district after the division of Ramnad. From here, he churns out insights into why Ramnad remains the way it does. Every story he has written in the past 21 years is about and located in Ramnad. 

Though a Kalki prize-winning writer, and a leading figure in the Progressive Writers Association, Ponnusamy prefers to live in his cut- off village.   Why not move to a big city? “That would harm the integrity of the writing,” says he. So he remains in Melanmarai Nadu. A place so difficult to find that I arrived six hours late for our appointment. 

“You’re going to interview me as an expert on Ramnad’s poverty? Not as a writer?” Ponnusamy clearly found that entertaining. 

“Ramnathapuram district was formed in 1910,” says Ponnusamy.   “To this day it does not have a university of its own. It has now given birth to three districts and two ministers, but not a single medical college.”  Nor a government engineering college.  And the one private engineering institution here might wind up this year. There are just three colleges of any sort across the new district and only two post-graduate courses offered at these. 

“Backwardness breeds its own mindset,” he adds.  “There has hardly ever been even a demand for a university in Ramnad. Only in the recent past have political parties begun to speak about it. Accepting basic education is going to take a couple of generations here.

“Making demands and petitions didn’t come easy to the people of Ramnad. For 83 years, the district headquarters was located in another district, in Madurai! Even our law courts were located in that town till just six months ago. Only with the division of Ramnad into three districts in 1985 did that change.”

This means, says Ponnusamy – who calls himself an unrepentant leftist – “that the administration has always been distanced from the people. Officials were so far away, they knew little of local issues.  The area’s complexity was not understood.  Now we have the courts, collectorate and other structures. Yet, the old pattern prevails because basic issues have not been touched.”

The district is among the lowest in the state in terms of income and, as a rule, lags behind the rest of Tamil Nadu by about 20 per cent on that score. “This is an ex-zamindari area. It really consisted of many small fiefdoms or principalities, mostly run on a caste basis. The extent to which caste has contributed to backwardness here is enormous.”

The British period unsettled even that way of life. It destroyed the few avenues that existed for employment and income. “A large number of people took to illegal activities. They were left with few other means of survival.” To this day, Ramnad has a very high level of violence, mainly caste-based, and of crime.

“Land reform here, of course, has been meaningless. Contrary to common belief, this district does have good agricultural potential. But who has ever worked with that view in mind?” More than 80 per cent of landholdings in Ramnad are less than two acres in size and uneconomical for many reasons. At the top of the list is a lack of irrigation.