Madurai Family - Brief details

Devadanapatti is about 75kms from Madurai comes on the highway between Madurai and Theni.In those days they used to travel by bullock cart from Madurai to Devadanappatti. There was so much of discipline among the Kallars that they will not attack a bullock cart in which the Kalla women were sitting in the front and back and so when they traveled they used to have two Kalla women one in the front and another in the rear as protection. Similarly when they were in Devadanappatti Kalla women used to sleep in the front and rear entrances so that anyone who wants to come in must jump over their bodies.

M Venkatrama Iyer was very well known and a distinguished person in Madurai.

V.Kamashwara Iyer

Written by C.R.Natarajan

Sometimes one gets an instinctive update on life and death. I was thinking of Mrs V.K exactly a week back and in her death, a link with a past of the past is removed. R Savithri and Meenambal as she was known lived under the same roof but there was always a tension. Meenambal was the only child of her parents Rajamani Iyer.
Rajamani Iyer came from Veeravaballur and was very well to do. His wife was one of those Hindu wives whose personalities never bloomed in public but was very powerful behind the throne. Rajamani Iyer was an imposing man. We had been to his home in Veeravanallur close to Kallidaikurichi and my memories are of a manor house with a broad frontage protected by fencing of iron rods as in Cadavasal House but with a large Thinnai. All his properties came to Meenambal, whose mother survived Rajamani Iyer by long years and died only a few years back. He was always clothed in a dothy and a half sleeve shirt a la Kamaraja Nadar. That the ups and downs of life does not spare anyone is a lesson that I learn all the time.

Meenambal as the only child and the senior Mattupponn of the House,( Muthuramalinga Iyer's wife. Nagammal alias Ammanji Manni having moved to Madras to the home of her father Justice Seshagiri Iyer) was Maharani in her right, a loving husband, a doting father, a protective mother,and fulfilling her duties to provide succession et al.She lost her husband who was virtually in a coma for a few years, the first son Nagaraj to a vendetta killing, a daughter Vasantha, another son and yet survived through the years. What memories she should have carried and on whose shoulders she could have cried?