Family history 1

My father P N Venkatraman was born on 10 April 1919 to V Narayanan and Sarada at Madras. The family was orthodox south Indian brahmin, which among other things, means they were originally from the priestly class, though already in my grandfather’s generation, leaning towards professions of a more secular nature. Grandfather Narayanan was a lawyer by qualification, but an academician and journalist by profession at different stages of his life. He was proficient in three languages—Tamil, Sanskrit and English--in all of which he wrote commentaries on matters spiritual and theological. He was for a while Editor of The Indian Express, an English language daily, in which I worked as an apprentice sub-editor in the sixties.

My boss then, C P Seshadri, a veteran journalist highly respected in the newspaper world, often told me what a good editor my grandfather had been, how much he, a young reporter, had learnt from him. Narayanan was a major contributor to the first Tamil lexicon of modern times, as an assistant to the celebrated S Vaiyapuri Pillai, its editor. He also edited numerous publications of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, the spiritual headquarters of the saivite subsect (followers of Siva) of Brahmins to which my family belongs. It is hardly surprising that Narayanan wrote beautiful Tamil, the language he spoke at home, but samples of his English writing I chanced upon some 20 years ago stunned me with their timelessness—they could have been written in this day and age, so simple yet sophisticated his style. (I hope I can unearth those samples again).

According to a family tree drawn up for me by the late M Krishnan, eminent naturalist, photographer and writer of fiction and non-fiction in English, and a great-grand uncle of mine, Narayanan’s ancestors were Avadhanis[1] who moved from neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh to Tirunelveli in present day Tamil Nadu.

Narayanan married Sarada before either of them reached the age of ten, and I believe he was older than her by some five years! She grew up to be a six-footer (a rarity among women even today) and he was a short man, so they were to become quite a physical mismatch in their grown years. He died in his early fifties and she was barely 36 when she died. They had eight children, the eldest a son, Sundaresan and my father, the second. The youngest, Pattabhiraman, was only two when his mother died. In between were five sisters, Janaki, Visalakshi, Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati. Of the eight, only Saraswati, now in her seventies, survives.
Narayanan was a rather unworldly person who enjoyed hardly any material success. Moving to Madras from his village on marrying Sarada, the daughter of a judge of the Madras High Court, P R Sundara Iyer, he lived in Suprabha, a two-storeyed house built by his father-in-law for his daughter. This was on Murray’s Gate Road, a street in Alwarpet close to Mylapore, an ancient village turned suburb, which had become the home of the Brahmin aristocracy of Madras. Between Mylapore and Alwarpet, on Luz Church Road was Sree Bagh, a vast property that had been Sundara Iyer’s home in the early 20th century before a business misadventure by his sons had resulted in its sale along with much of his other assets. (In fact, his sons had to file for bankruptcy, and the family was able to salvage only property standing in the name of the youngest son P S Ramachandran, who was then a minor).

On Murrays Gate Road was another house, Srimukha, belonging to Narayanan and Sarada, and this was rented out in the 1940s to a young executive of Burmah Shell, the oil company which had a major presence in India then. Ramaswamy was an engineer who qualified from the famous Benares Hindu University of Kasi, the famous centre of pilgrimage in north India every Hindu of the time visited once before his death to attain salvation. (The true believer actually went to Kasi to die there). Ramaswamy was the son of Sivaramakrishna Iyer who had retired as Inspector of Schools in the princely state of Travancore-Cochin (now the state of Kerala), the southernmost tip of India. Like my father, he was the second of eight children including five daughters. The eldest, Sita, is 95 today and all her sisters are alive, the youngest, Saraswati, at 75, while Ramaswamy and his brothers Ramachandran and Mahadevan are no more.

Sivaramakrishna Iyer (known in the family as Anna or elder brother) and his wife Subbulakshmi came to live with Ramaswamy at Srimukha, and soon there developed a friendship between Anna and Narayanan as the two men shared a common love of literature and philosophy. There was tremendous mutual respect between the two and they spent hours discussing books, both literary works as well as the Indian epics. The two families became friends and before long, Ramaswamy found in Narayanan’s second son, the gentle self-effacing Venkatraman a future brother-in-law! Sivaramakrishna Iyer made a formal approach to Narayanan, horoscopes were exchanged and found to match and Venkatraman married Rukmini, Anna’s fourth daughter.

[1] An avadhani is a person who speaks extempore (preferably in verse) on different topics at a time—to an audience of eight, 100 or 1,000 people who pose a question each to him or her—and answers them all. To an audience of 100, he has to answer questions or create verses based on the questioner's hints, after every 25 questions. The art is known as avadhanam.