Sugathakumari wore poetry & activism on her sleeve with ease

KOCHI/THRISSUR: At a time when women had no access to power in the public sphere, Sugathakumari, who fused her spiritual, poetic, and feminist identities into a whole, became a towering figure in Kerala influencing the way people viewed the environment and along with it a generation of writers.
“She had an ecological essence, a political essence, and a poetical essence.She did not bother to keep them in containers. It was all fused into one and her life was organic in that way,” said poet V M Girija, who was deeply inspired by her writing.
Sugathakumari’s poems and sustained social interventions offered a new interpretation to Bertolt Brecht’s observation that when injustice is done there should be a revolt in the city, said Prof K G Sankarappillai. Her poetic vision, environmental activism, fight against atrocities against women were all part of a whole, and not compartmentalized projects, he said.
Describing Sugathakumari’s death as ‘a great personal loss’, environmental activist Medha Patkar said she was a feminist, and an environmentalist, who always challenged the policies that destroy nature. “Her perspective was not just related to the development paradigm, but to life and life-style,’’ Medha said.
Writer and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi president Vaisakhan pointed out that Sugathakumari was able to make the Keralites environmentally-conscious. She provided an emotional connect to the grave dimensions of ecological devastation. Her poetry and social interventions were not separate entities, but inalienable facets of her life as a whole, he said.
Sugathakumari wore poetry and activism on her sleeve with ease and her penchant for direct action through statements or participation in environmental agitations never dented qualities of the writer in her, said poet P P Ramachandran.
“For her, word was not different from action. She excelled as a poet and an activist and I think that is a quite rare quality. The only writer you could compare is perhaps Mahasweta Devi in Bengal,” said Ramachandran.
Girija feels Sugathakumari was also an evergreen romantic who could spring back to life like leaves sprouting from a dead tree. “I remember her proclaiming through a poem in 1983 that there is no more poetry in her mind, no dreams, flowers, or rain. But she continued to bring out many anthologies of poems,” says Girija, who wrote a poem titled Kadalkattinte Makal as a tribute to Sugathakumari. Poet Sreekumar Karyad feels that Sugathakumari was a one-woman army and along with Madhavikkutti, a towering presence among post-renaissance women. “Environmentalism and feminism were deeply inherent in her poetry. I think she dealt with the outside world with the emotional quotient that only a poet is capable of. There was so much of honesty in her, though one may pick faults with the laterday Sugathakumari,” says Karyad.
Writer Sarah Joseph said her early association with Sugathakumari was through her poems which covered a whole range of human emotions. Later, she gave voice to a whole range of issues like environmental degradation and exploitation of women and marginalized sections like the tribespeople, she said.
The entire cosmos was her realm of concern, and she dealt with its various dimensions with equal intensity, said writer T D Ramakrishnan.