Tamil Nadu

Shoring up her lot against heavy odds

CHENNAI: N. Shanthakumari retains her maiden initials even after marriage. For her, that must have been a bold thing to do, having been born in a fishing community. But it is, perhaps, the least of the bold things Shanthakumari, Ph.D., has done so far.

Not surprisingly, Shanthakumari of Thoduvai village in Nagapattinam is the first Ph.D. in her family. Except one uncle who went on to do an MA, no member of her family has gone beyond school; several of them have dropped out.

The going was not easy though for Shanthakumari: living off the sea, her family of seven (parents and four siblings) has found it hard to make ends meet.

Paying for the children’s education was, therefore, never a priority.

“Right from the beginning, we had financial difficulties. Every term I had to pawn my mother’s jewels to pay tuition fees. Unless you were determined to move on, it was so easy to just stop—like everyone else. Poverty is a hurdle,” she says. And so was the community. “Only to an extent, though. They used to say that if the girl went out to study, she would fall in love and marry out of the caste. But I told them that I would do no such thing—I had time only for my studies,” Shanthakumari recounts. It helped that her uncle (the one with an MA) stood steadfast by her, taking the difficult steps along with her.

In fact, it was one of her conditions to her husband and mother-in-law before she said yes to marriage: “I told my husband that I was marrying him on the condition that he let me study. It did not matter to me that he had only completed Standard V and thankfully, it did not matter to him that I had ambitions to go as far as Ph.D.”

Not that it was any easier—financially—after the marriage.

Shanthakumari married her cousin Tamilarasan, also a fisherman, in 2003. The very next year, the tsunami took away their boat and nets, besides damaging the house. There was a son to take care of, and soon, a daughter. However, Shanthakumari never lost sight of her ideal—she would do her research inside the temporary shelter the government had built to resettled them. It did help that in all these crises, the then Collector, J. Radhakrishnan, whom she met by chance, kept encouraging her right through, she gushes.

Naturally, Shanthakumari’s thesis was on the fishermen of Nagapattinam. She deals with the key components of the work that won her Ph.D. from Bharathidasan University: “There is an introduction to the coastal fishing villages of Nagapattinam; a detailed analysis of their religious and social practices; and the effect of the tsunami on their lives and livelihood.

Currently, she is working on a temporary basis in the Tamil Department of AVC College at Mayiladuthurai, supplementing her husband’s varying incomes with what she makes.

She is still a long way from the economic independence that education is supposed to endow the steadfast learner with, but knowing Shanthakumari, fame and money are probably just round the corner.

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