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The last Gandhian in Tamil Nadu "A pig with feathers behind its ear is still a pig and not a bird of paradise." This saying will take a beating in Tamil Nadu. Here, persons of porcine disposition routinely decorate themselves with feathers behind their ears and the Tamils have no hesitation in accepting them as birds of paradise. A few real birds of this genus that remain in the Tamil country have no interest in making an exhibition of themselves in public. Fortunately, perhaps, they are unheralded and unnoticed. Krishnammal is one of them. Krishnammal was born in a Dalit family 84 years ago. I first heard about her, and her upper caste Gandhian husband, some 40 years ago, in the backdrop of the Kilvelmani massacre - when 44 Dalits, mostly women and children, were burnt alive in a remote village of Tanjore district by the goons of a landlord. The Communists were very angry with this Sarvodaya couple and I was with the Communists. Kilvenmani was a Communist village and we thought that Jagannathan and Krishnammal were meddling there and blunting the revolutionary sword. We were nowhere near the scene. Krishnammal stayed there for more than a year. She worked ceaselessly in the teeth of opposition from all her opponents and succeeded in getting 74 acres of fertile land for that many landless Dalit families. Today, the villagers of Kilvenmani consider the Jagannathan couple Shiva and Parvathi incarnate. Krishnammal was fortunate in that she was in Mahatma Gandhi's entourage when he travelled in Tamil Nadu in 1946. Gandhi's magic cast an abiding spell on her and she married a fellow Gandhian, Jagannathan, to lead a life of continuous struggle in support of ordinary people. It was this spirit that took her to various corners of our country and to its prisons. She was in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar with Vinoba Bhave at the height of the Bhoodan Movement, speaking in public meetings in Hindi and pleading with landowners to gift away land. What she and her husband achieved in the Tamil country during the movement was stupendous. They redistributed 100,000 acres of land to the landless. One hundred thousand acres! Today, a square foot of fallow land in Chennai's suburbs is close to Rs 3,000. This quiet couple came to limelight recently for their spirited fight against the mushrooming prawn farms in the coastal villages of Tamil Nadu. In 2000, the 87-year-old Jagannathan underwent a 56-day fast against prawn farming and was imprisoned by the State. The 2004 tsunami proved the couple right. The destruction of tidal estuaries and the green belt to make way for prawn farms was one of the reasons why the damage was colossal when the tsunami hit the Nagapattinam coast. It was the couple's organisation - LAFTI (The Lands for the Tillers Freedom) - that provided succour to thousands of Dalit families rendered destitute by the tsunami. I have had the privilege of observing closely two followers of Mahatma Gandhi and they both had a unique, indefinable radiance. I saw it in Sarat Sinha of Assam. I saw it in Krishnammal when my wife and I called on her recently. It was clear within a few minutes that she had no trace of bitterness and hate. When I told her of my link with the Communists in the 1960s, she immediately pointed out it was the selfless groundwork of the Communists that made the landless gather courage and ask for higher wages. "We often work together, though they are often angry with me," she said with a smile. She was happy she could recently acquire more than 300 acres of land - received voluntarily from landlords - and give it to Dalit families. "Krishnan, the land has been transferred to women and not men," she proudly proclaimed. She had no illusions about men. "In rural India, the immediate oppressor is the husband, who is forever short of money and usually very drunk. Land gives the wife what she is short of - confidence." Krishnammal was in Chennai to raise funds for cultivation of the land. "We require only Rs 1,500 per acre for cultivation. The land, then, will take care of itself and of the families that toil on it." Her optimism was amazing and it gave me a clue as to why the followers of Gandhi are a special breed. As we hit the Mount Road while returning home, I saw Rajinikanth glowering at me from giant hoardings. It occurred to me that the black market rate for a single ticket to his latest film could well be Rs 1,500.
