The ancestry of Thanga Mani

In an earlier post (Part 11 of my life in Wadi) I had mentioned about the family of Venkatachala Vaadhyaar of Koovappady. In around 1917 (I remember Thangi saying that she was born in the same year as Indira Gandhi so that would make it 1917, I guess), as far as I could gather on the 23rd of May 1917, or on Makayiram day of the Malayalam month or Edavom that year, Thangammal was born as the tenth of the sixteen children of Sankari Ammal and Venkatachala Vaadhyaar in Koovappady. Koovappady was a small village near Perumbavoor town and was at a walking distance from Kalady (the birth place of Adi Shankaracharya), located in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. Of course it wasn’t Kerala at that time, it was Thiruvithankur Kochi province. Koovappady was an exclusively Brahmin (Iyer) village, with most of the families belonging to the Ashtasahasram sect, in which the Vaadhyaar lived with his family in a house called Puthan Madhom. The Madhom still exists. Thangam’s father died before she was thirteen. I have heard many tales of those days from Thangi. The Vaadhyaar saved money for his daughters’ marriage in bronze kudams or pots. Eight grams of gold (one sovereign or pavan) in those days costed thirteen rupees. That means one tola would have costed sixteen rupees. The Vadhyaar allotted about 10 sovereigns of gold for each daughter. But it is understood that the Vaadhyaar died before Thangam could be married off. Possibly around the age of sixteen, Thangam was given in matrimony into a family in the Thrippaloor village (near Alathoor) in the Palakkad District, to Ramaswamy Iyer. Not much is known about this family, except that they were extremely well off. Most of what follows is hearsay as a lawyer would say, but the information is gleaned from authentic sources. Their house was huge and Ramasawamy Iyer had brothers. There appears to have been some curse on the family and all children in the family were male. No daughter was ever born in the family. Ramaswamy Iyer’s parents were Narayanaswamy Iyer and Bhuvaneshwari. There was a pond belonging to this family in which lotus flowers, which were used for poojas in the house, blossomed. Certain customs in this house were different from that in Thangam’s paternal house since this family belonged to Palakkad. Narayanaswamy Iyer seems to have been an astrologer and a Sanskrit Pandit in the court of Kochi Maharaja. Ramaswami Iyer seems to have been in Governement service as a forest ranger.Eventually, when she was 17-18, Thangam became pregnant with her first child, and as is the custom in those days, went to her parents house after her Seemantham, for the delivery. But it so happened that, when she was at her parents place, news reached her that Ramaswamy Iyer had passed away. I would never know the reasons for this unfortunate incident because all people who knew what could have happened are now dead or lost. However that condemned Thangam to the life of a widow, which wasn’t as happy a state of a woman’s life as it is, today. She gave birth to Mani or Narayana Iyer on the Ayilyam day of the Malayalam month of Karkidakom in 1933 (26th July 1933). Since atleast one male child of each daughter in Venkatachala Vaadhyaar’s family was called Mani, Narayana Iyer was called Thanga Mani to signify that he was Thangam’s son. Widows went back to their parents house most of the time after their husband’s death, so Thangam stayed back in Koovappady thereafter. There also appears to have been some wrangling over property, as a consequence of which, Ramaswamy Iyer’s brothers declined to settle anything on Thangam. Her brief sojourn to Palakkad was thus over. Subramania Iyer, the elder brother of Thangam – popularly called Manian Vaadhyaar (he also appears to have been the local postmaster), built another house to the north of Puthan Madhom called the Vadakke Puthan Madhom and took over the moral reins of the family, which consisted of the widowed Sankari Ammal and her several widowed daughters and younger brothers like Hariharan, Kuttappan, Sivan, Raman etc. Living as a dependant of one’s maternal uncles after the death of ones father is never a pleasant business, but unfortunately this was the fate that destiny had crafted for Thangamani