By
Published: 18th June 2013
A creative work
should have its own impact on you. If the character feels pain, the reader
should feel the pain, said Malarvathi, the first woman writer from Tamil Nadu
to bag the Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puraskar Award for her second novel Thooppukkaari. True to her words, her
novel makes the readers feel the pain. “Life isn’t complete without feeling the
pain of the others,” she said.
Born and brought
up in Kanyakumari, Malarvathi was educated only till Class IX. It was her
continuous efforts that got her a degree in Tamil literature through
correspondence. Her mother Ronikkam once worked as an ayah in a nearby school.
Watching her
mother cleaning the toilets and garbage, Malarvathi came to understand her
family’s struggles and went for work in a cashewnut factory.
“All these
experiences pushed me to write. In those days, I did not write for the sake of
publication. I just wrote for my personal happiness,” she recalled.
Malarvathi, who
recently arrived in Chennai to participate in her book review meeting organised
by the Tamil Nadu Murpokku Ezhuthaalargal Sangam, told City Express about her
novel and literary career.
“I first wrote a
short story titled Ennulley… Ennulley…,
and it was published in one of the college magazines. That happiness encouraged
me to write a play when I was 13. We would stage plays in our village during
festival occasions and mine was staged at one such event,” Malarvathi says with
a smile.
Before penning her
novels, she had published three essay collections all related to religion. “At
first, I focused more on writing essays which are informative to others.
But
the continuous struggle of toiling masses that I met in my region pushed me to
write fiction. I decided to write novels that would have themes surrounded by
suppressed castes that were unfamiliar to the readers, she explained. And so
came to be her debut novel Kaathirundha
Karuppaayee.
Her first novel
revolved around the lives of stone quarry workers. Interestingly, the author
published the first 1,000 copies of the novel on her own. “I recently recovered
the gold I had mortgaged in order to publish those copies,” she said.
Her second
award-winning novel Thooppukkaari,
published by Anal Veliyeedu is about the lives and struggle of conservancy
workers from the Nagercoil and Kanyakumari regions.
The idea for this
novel came to Malarvathi from her own life. “My mother worked as a conservancy
worker in a nearby school for five years,” she remembered. “I was a little girl
then.” The stench from the toilets was hung all over my mother. But because of
her hard work, we ate — she said simply.
“Though it is an
inspired work, I had an unexpected chance to meet some of the manual scavengers
and conservancy workers in our region,” the young writer revealed.
Also, she
continued, “I planned to write this novel in a regional dialect style, since I
am interested to document some of the regional words that are slowly
disappearing from our day to day life.”
According to
Malarvathi, in her region there is rich-poor discrimination, but no caste or
religion violence. So she pointed out, “In our locality, even the higher caste
people do the works of manual scavenging, since they are poor”.
As she got more
laurels for this novel, she went on to earn the title ‘My literary heir’ from
noted writer and Sahitya Akademi awardee Ponneelan, who is also from
Kanyakumari. Malarvathi is now set to work on her third novel. “My next work
will also be in the same genre — writing about the margins. To write a novel
about the people who are in margins, we need not to be born or work like them.
If we feel their pain, that itself is enough to pen,” Malarvathi concluded.
Courtesy: The New
Indian Express
