Five years ago, when cow vigilante groups began to unleash terror in the north, poet Sugathakumari wrote an article in a newspaper in which she took beef eaters for Muslims, putting the onus on them not to provoke cow-worshippers.
Around the time, she also gave audience to then Bharatiya Janata Party national president Amit Shah who was touring the State ahead of the impending Assembly elections. While her article decried political and religious violence, there was no reference to the violence fomented by Hindutva outfits which attracted criticism.
But when writer Zacharia described her as a guerilla fighter of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, it pained her. So much so that, she went to the press to declare that she believed in openness and that her role models were Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda. For someone who steadfastly followed in the footsteps of her father, Gandhian-poet Bodheswaran, Sugathakumari stayed committed to her dharma, which was Hindu and puritan.
That is what made her political views problematic.
As a poet, Sugathakumari was deeply meditative and lyrical. Born to a freedom fighter and a Sanskrit scholar, she immediately took to books and writing. While the first poems were written taking cover of her cousin’s name, Sreekumar, an accidental publication of the same poem in two names made her reveal her identity. Poet and editor N.V. Krishna Warrier was instrumental in that. This was in the early 1950s. .
In the late 1970s, however, an article by M.K. Prasad on the imminent destruction of a patch of rainforest in Silent Valley caught her eye. Upon enquiry, she came to know about the dangers posed by a proposed hydroelectric project there. She mobilised writers, including ONV, Kadammanitta, NV and Vishnu Narayanan Nampoothiri, politicians like K.V. Surendranath and activists to campaign against the project. What was launched as Prakrithi Samrakshana Samithi (environment protection forum) also fostered her poetry to branch out to areas so far untrodden by her. In the poet’s own words, the parallel between nature and women and the plundering both suffered made her talk of them, without the poetry sliding into mere sloganeering.
It is the 12-year meditative trance of the deep blue hills that results in the iridescent blooming of the Kurinji flower, she wrote in Kurinjippookkal.
Face of conservation
She remained at the forefront of most environmental struggles — Mavoor, Koodankulam, Aranmula, you name it — often inviting criticism for her views. More recently, her views on allowing women to enter Sabarimala temple earned her brickbats. For her, it was not an issue of gender equality, but of the crowds overshooting the carrying capacity of the fragile hills.
A dreadful sight of helpless, persecuted, suffering women at the Government Mental Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram inflicted deep anguish following which she founded Abhaya, for destitute women, which spawned Athani, for homeless girls; de-addiction centres, care homes for little children and the like. She forced the government to put an end to the squalid single cell system of mental hospitals.
As chairperson of the Kerala Women’s Commission, she earned laurels for her proactive interventions. Compassion, in life as well as poetry, came naturally to her, but that was tempered by ‘her’ sense of Hindu dharma, which was evident in her vegetarianism, call to ban alcohol, call for purity of language and a much-loathed view about controlling the influx of migrant workers.
She learned to live alone, as she says in the poem Ottayku, and the death of her younger sister Sujatha a few years ago struck a deep blow from which she never really recovered.
Compassion to all beings
Compassion to the hope-driven fickleness of human character, which was in full view in Pavam Manava Hrudayam, got extended to all creatures on earth in her twilight years — her concern for the temple elephants of Kerala remains an example.
As someone who did not want to have any post-death adulation and State honour, she realised the end was near after two heart attacks. Poet Balachandran Chullikkad, who saw her as an elder sister, said in a couplet: The cold palm that you placed on my feverish forehead has fallen; may your anxieties, suffering quieten.”
