My parents were raised in a village, so during my summer vacations, I would visit my ancestral village in the then undivided Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. In the eyes of a schoolboy from Chennai, Karungulam village, with its lush green fields of paddy and bananas, fresh air, and simple folk, was a peaceful retreat by the Tamirabarani river. That perception did not change much even after I became a journalist.
Many years later, when Tamil Nadu was gripped by drought and all the rivers barring Tamirabarani were bone dry, I sought to go to the pristine origins of Tamirabarani and describe it as it flowed. My local contact took me to the Kani tribes folk inside the Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. But the medicine man of the village who said he knew the place of origin refused to take me there since the monsoon had started. It was too dangerous a climb, he said. The story ended up being about the rest of the river. The saving of tigers had led to the forest being saved and, in turn, the river too.
My contact asked me where my ancestors came from. I said it was a village by the same river but there was nothing noteworthy about it. He asked me the name. When I said Karungulam, his eyes rolled up in a sign of contempt for me, the ignorant city slicker. He said it was perhaps the most important archaeological site in the State, likely more significant than Keezhadi that had made a splash in the media.
Called Adhichanallur and with only a small, rusted Archaeological Survey of India signboard as a marker at that time, it had been excavated multiple times over more than 100 years. Carbon dating has since then proved that the Adhichanallur site, which falls in Karungulam panchayat, is 3,000 years old.
Related Stories
Besides being an archaeological wonder, Adhichanallur had figured in global scholarly discussions when the origins of humanity were unresolved. Until the out-of-Africa thesis was proved, anthropologists in many countries felt that the skeletons dug up at Adhichanallur could be that of the earliest of civilised human beings. The picture postcard village had been the site of an ancient civilisation, I realised.
During my visits to report for the two stories, I stayed at a room in a lodge in Karungulam since my ancestral house had become too old and was falling apart. A few months later, the same lodge amidst paddy fields flashed in front of my eyes in a darkened cinema hall in Chennai. It had become the location for a scene in the movie, Pariyerum Perumal. Some upper caste men sought to put a lower caste youth in his place by urinating upon him in that room.
Last year, during a visit to Karungulam, a villager told me that Mari Selvaraj, the director of Pariyerum Perumal, was shooting another film based on an accident that had happened many decades ago. A truck carrying the people of Puliyangulam, another village in Karungulam panchayat where Selvaraj was born and raised, had turned turtle and many had died, he said.
Newspapers had covered that tragedy in much detail. Going beyond the news, Selvaraj’s Vazhai says the banana pickers of Puliyangulam had demanded double wages, which they got. Unwilling to cut down his profits, the contractor cut back on their transportation and was ferrying them, not in empty trucks but ones loaded with bananas.
On a fateful night, tragedy struck the overloaded truck. Vazhaiportrays the accident as a climactic culmination of poverty and desperation that lies behind the apparent beauty of rural life.
Related Stories
From a simple idyllic village, Karungulam had become an archaeological wonder and later, a cesspool of inequality. But it was always all the three, and perhaps more.
kalyanaraman.m@thehindu.co.in
Published - September 13, 2024 01:03 am IST
