Telling far more than one person’s lifestory, this gripping book is about a great newspaper, Malayala Manorama, and the people who kept it going for more than a 100 years, turning it into one of the world’s premier dailies. It is also a history of the 20th century in Kerala, which until 1947 was divided into three parts: the princely states of Travancore and Cochin and the Malabar district of Madras presidency. Yet Mathew’s rich tale is fired by what may be seen as a single event occurring in 1938.
In the autumn of that year, Mathew was an ‘utterly shattered’ 21-year-old student of Madras Christian College waiting at Tambaram station for a train that would take his remarkable father, K.C. Mammen Mappillai, to prison. Mappillai’s newspaper, the Manorama , edited by him for 34 years, had been banned a few weeks earlier; a bank he headed, the Travancore National and Quilon Bank, had been forced into liquidation; and a Travancore court had ordered Mappillai’s arrest.
The Travancore Dewan, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, had directed these steps. He was enraged by the Manorama ’s support for joint action by Travancore’s diverse groups against his policies, which were aimed at acquiring total power for himself, bypassing both populace and palace. As freedom approached, Aiyar tried openly to create an independent Travancore state, a reckless move that aroused great hostility. All-powerful in Travancore until the summer of 1947, Aiyar fled the state in secret on August 19.
Though Mammen Mappillai had come out in 1941 from the prison into which Aiyar had forced him, it was not until November 1947 that the Manorama reappeared. A few months earlier, Aiyar had told Mappillai’s eldest son, K.M. Cherian, that he would assist the paper’s revival provided it supported an independent Travancore. It was not a deal that Cherian or his father could accept.
Aiyar’s departure from Kerala and India’s independence cleared the way for the Manorama ’s rebirth, but the trauma suffered from 1938 to 1947 by Mappillai, his wife and their nine children (eight sons and a daughter) was severe. That old unforgotten trauma, together with Mathew’s determination to describe Aiyar’s role in it, is what supplies electricity to this recent text, which was first published in 2008 in Malayalam and is now available in an excellent translation that flows like original writing. (The translator has chosen to remain anonymous.)
Whether Aiyar (who died in London in 1966) ever recorded his version of what was done under his dewanship to Mammen Mappillai and his enterprises is not known to this reviewer, who knew K.M. Mathew (who died in 2010) and was a friend and admirer of Mathew’s wonderful older brother, K.M. Cherian, who died in 1973.
Mathew was in his late 80s when he wrote this book, but his sharp memory brings to life the story of the Malayalam country from the early 1920s onwards, starting with a village and a riverbank in the district of Alappuzha (where Mammen Mappillai’s children were raised) and the town of Kottayam, where the Manorama first appeared in 1890. Going back and forth in time, the story is brought to an end in 2008, by when the Manorama organisation had expanded and diversified to become a multi-media empire.
Following the death of his wife in 1952, Mammen Mappillai had given a ring made from their mother’s jewels to each of his nine children. Being the eighth child, Mathew, the Manorama ’s chief editor from 1973 to 2010, called his book Ettamathe Mothiram, or TheEighth Ring .
Two deep loves come across from his memoir: love of his family (especially mother, father and eldest brother Cherian) and love of the Manorama. But scores of other individuals are also portrayed or brought up, including presidents and prime ministers (Indian and non-Indian), persons like Mother Teresa, Communist stalwarts like E.M.S. Namboodiripad, a few of Kerala’s chief ministers, and numerous members of the Manorama staff.
When the Congress split in 1969, Cherian, then the editor-in-chief, took the call to support Indira Gandhi’s side. Six years later, when she imposed the Emergency, inclusive of censorship, Mathew, who had taken over following Cherian’s death, responded by withholding support for it. The Emergency was not directly criticised by the Manorama, which sought to spotlight non-political stories that did not interest the censor.
Another note struck steadily throughout Mathew’s text is of gratefulness to the Almighty for timely help from friends which softened blows or provided springboards as the Manorama enterprise went forward.
The book will be of value to anyone interested in the Kerala story or in the history of a 125-year-old newspaper now printed in 11 towns in Kerala, in three places in the rest of South India, in Mumbai and Delhi, and from three centres in the Gulf, altogether selling well over two million copies a day. Since many will want to refer to the book, the absence of an index becomes conspicuous.
Rajmohan Gandhi is an author and research professor at the Centre for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
