Kavitha Muralidharan

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“You’re here to listen to my story?” Pon Harichandran is
astonished. “I can’t remember anyone coming to me for that. And frankly, I have
nothing much to say.” The 60-year-old has spent a lifetime telling the stories
of others, of his village Kilakuyilkudi and of the over 2,000-year-old city of
Madurai just 15 kilometres way. 

His listeners have ranged
from the illiterate to the erudite, locals to visiting literati. They have used
those stories in award-winning novels, some have turned them into films. Yet
others have utilised them in anthropological research. “These days, I get more
visitors from colleges and universities. Professors bring their students to
listen to me. Shall I tell you also one of those stories?” he asks earnestly.

We’re sitting in
Kilakuyilkudi, located between a pond choked with lotus flowers and the
expansive Jaina caves of this region.  The
village is in the Thiruparankundram block of Madurai district. We’d
been asking village elders sitting at the Karuppasamy temple where we could
find him. “In a tea shop or at home,” they said. “But now that you are here, he
will come soon.” And so he does, riding in on his bicycle.

He’s on the ball at once –
greeting us with: “Did you not find the route to this village slightly
complicated? Our ancestors designed it that way to delay British forces coming
to attack us. Before they arrived here, our messengers would have brought word
of their movements. So the village would be ready to take them on when they
showed up.”

Kilakuyilkudi was a village
of Piramalai Kallars (a sub-group of the Thevar community – now the dominant
caste cluster of Tamil Nadu). The village had a history of conflict with the
British, whose sovereignty they never accepted and often challenged. The racist
and draconian Criminal Tribes Act was introduced by the British in this part of
the then Madras Presidency to quell them. It didn’t quite do that, though. “You
may have heard of people paying taxes to the British rulers. Our village was
different,” says Harichandran. 

For a while, he says, the local
administration of the British paid a tax – to at least one family in
Kilakuyilkudi. “The family of Kazhuva Thevar,” says Harichandran. Kazhuva
Thevar took upon himself the challenge of stealing the jewellery of the queen
of Madurai. That was before the British and in the time of Thirumalai
Naiyakkar, king of Madurai between 1623 and 1659. A king whose grand palace –
barely two kilometres from the famous Meenakshi Amman temple – remains a great
tourist attraction to this day.

And the story begins…

Kazhuva Thevar thought up
an ingenious method of robbing the queen’s jewellery. His trained ‘burglars’
were two monitor lizards, a species known for their characteristic of holding
on stubbornly to anything they catch. In this case, prime pieces of the queen’s
jewellery, which they then carried back into Kazhuva Thevar’s possession. “You
will still find a board in the Thirumalai Nayak palace that says the queen’s
jewellery was stolen from this place,” says Harichandran. (While it may
well have existed in the past, there is presently no trace of that board in the
palace).

At first agitated, but
later impressed, the king told Kazhuva Thevar he would grant him a favour.
Thevar sought a veshti (traditional men’s garment
from the waist down), a vallavettu (a towel-like upper garment) and an uruma (turban-like
headgear).

“He also sought the right
to be protector of Madurai – and to receive an annual fee for running a small
security force, or ‘police’ of that time,” says Harichandran. “This was
granted, and his family enjoyed that privilege for a long time until a British
officer refused to honour the practice.” The officer, says Harichandran,
conceded knowing its history. “But he wrote a letter to his superiors on the
‘shameful episode of an administration as great as ours’ having to pay tax to
an ordinary family from a little-known village.”

Harichandran is not typical
of traditional storytellers here, for many of whom the preservation of folklore
is a hereditary occupation. But the art has fascinated him from childhood days when
village elders sat together and narrated anecdotes from their own lives and
those of their ancestors. Ranging from stories spoofing the authority of
pre-British kings to many of the village’s anti-British escapades. From his
teens, a spellbound Harichandran lapped up that folklore, not knowing he would
one day be its custodian – the only one left to tell those stories to other
audiences.  

Increasingly frustrated by Kilakuyilkudi’s
stubbornness, the British introduced the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871
here. Indeed, Madras was the last presidency to introduce the CTA which had
been mostly been used to brutalise tribes resisting British authority in
northern India.

“It was only after the
British unleashed the worst kind of oppression on us that our villagers were
forced to turn to stealing,” says Harichandran. “They banned anyone belonging to Kilakuyilkudi from visiting Madurai
between 5 p.m. and 10 a.m.” That destroyed many forms of work and trade for the
villagers here.

“There are,” says Harichandran,
“four kinds of theft: kalavu (to steal what is
available), thirudu (to steal what is necessary), kollai (to leave nothing for the victim) and soorai (to steal everything from that spot or victim and
from neighbouring places, too). One thing common to all these types of robbers
was that they did not hesitate to kill or rape. But look at any historical
records or documents. You will not find a single instance of people of our
village doing that.”  

In their efforts to
‘reform’ the defiant village, the British offered them loans and even set up a
school for women – who they thought were ‘misleading’ the men. “They had a jail
in Kilakuyilkudi to imprison those whose offences were relatively minor, and
another big jail in Madurai.” But the villagers simply “refused the loan and
burnt the school,” says Harichandran.

Hours and many tales later,
we have still not got his ‘own’ story. By now, he’s fully charged by those
stories he is narrating and grumbles when we seek to bring him back to his
personal tale. “I am a farmer with a piece of land that yields enough to
sustain my family. What more do you want to know?” he asks, sounding slightly
irritated. He has a wife and a son but says little about them. It seems there
is no successor in the family for his extraordinary craft.

But he does have a story – a
big political moment when M.G. Ramachandran broke away from the DMK in 1972 to
form his own party, the AIADMK (presently in power in Tamil Nadu). “I joined
the party and used to address local meetings. I was very close to K. Kalimuthu,
a senior AIADMK leader. He was an avid reader and we often had long
conversations on many issues.” After Kalimuthu’s death in
2006, Harichandran left the party. “Now I am just happy narrating
stories,” he says. 

Su
Venkatesan, whose Sahitya academy-winning novel Kaaval Kottam was also based on endless conversations he had
with Harichandran, vouches for his authenticity. “He said the CT Act was
first introduced in his village. In the extensive research I did for my novel,
I found government records confirming this. Kilakuyilkudi was the first village
in Madras Presidency where the Act was introduced.

“I believe
every village somehow finds a person who can carry its stories on his back. He
is rare but he is there. Harichandran is one such rare person. He carries the
entire story of Kilakuyilkudi on his back. Even when very young, he only spent
time with people who were in their 80s and 90s. He is unique, gifted, and we
are lucky we can keep hearing his stories,” says Venkatesan. 

Aravaan (2012), a film by
acclaimed director Vasanthabalan, was based on one of Harichandran’s stories. (The
historical-fiction film, set in the 18th century, follows the lives of a group
of people stealing from the rich to help their tribe survive).

But the oral
folklore has remained just that. Does Harichandran have any plans to document
them? He seems to be toying with the idea. But, he says, “Nothing is as
charming as telling a tale. But to think that there is no one interested in
knowing these stories is sad – leave alone passing it down to other
generations. Maybe I should just find someone and hand over everything I carry
in my heart to him.”

The master storyteller of old Madurai

প্রাচীন মাদুরাইয়ের ওস্তাদ গল্পবলিয়ে

मदुरई के उस्ताद क़िस्सागो

পুৰণি মাদুৰাইৰ কথকজন

பழைய மதுரையின் கதைசொல்லி

ପୁରୁଣା ମଦୁରାଇର ପ୍ରମୁଖ କାହାଣୀକାର

Kilakuyilkudi

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The master storyteller of old Madurai

Pon Harichandran, 60, is the custodian of stories going back centuries from his Kilakuyilkudi village and the old kingdom of Madurai. There are very few like him left in this line of work

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