Chennai: Born into a landless family, she completely devoted her life to uplift the condition of the landless poor in East Thanjavur.
Ninety-one-year-old Krishnammal Jagannathan, who is one of the awardees of Alternate Nobel Prize in 2009 and was nominated for Gandhian peace award in 2015 received the Tamil Nadu government’s award for Best Social Worker for the outstanding work for women, on Tuesday.
Though she had obtained university level education and got a job offer to work as the inspector of schools from the government of Tamil Nadu at the age of 22, she tore the certificates and threw them in the bin when she realized that her purpose of life was lying somewhere down South in east Thanjavur.
“Dalits or Adi Dravidars as I would like to call them are the sons of soil contributing to society through their produce. The hands that get dirty while striving to fill your plate of meal were considered impure and that is the reason Dalits were ill-treated servants of their own lands,” said Krishnammal adding that Thanjavur particularly had a lot of issues as at least 50 bonded laborers would work under a greedy landlord. After she met Vinoba Bhave, who she considers her guru in life, she devoted her life to Tamil Nadu on his advice.
A newspaper clipping of 44 people being burnt in East Thanjavur drew her to the place within 24 hours. The sight of warm blood with parts of body strewn over and the ash that choked her made her voluntarily bury her legs in the fertile land and work towards giving land to women.
Recounting one of the five occasions where she stared death right in the face, she said, “A mob supporting landowners surrounded me with bottles of kerosene and fire and I did not move. Soon, when I asked them to meditate instead and did not look startled, the mob left and villagers gathered. I was not afraid to die, they were afraid to kill me.”
Working with eminent leaders like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, she not only redistributed lands with patta in the name of women, she also inculcated political empowerment by forming Gramasabhas before the legal implementation of the 73rd amendment of Indian Constitution.
Her husband, Sankaralingam Jagannathan is a freedom fighter who had given up his college studies in 1930 to join Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. He joined the Quit India movement in 1942 and spent three and a half years in jail before India got Independence.
