Inside a copy of her book that a journalist asked her to sign, Dhanuja Kumari scribbled in Malayalam, “Come again, not in search of prathikal (criminals) but of prathibhakal (geniuses)”. In a couple of lines, she has echoed the whole sentiment of her book: Chengalchoolayile Ente Jeevitham (My Life in Chengalchoola).
Chengalchoola – wedged into pockets in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram city – is a widely-known slum area in Kerala, bearing the label of notoriety imposed on it for decades by the world outside. With her book, written 10 years ago, Dhanuja wanted at least a few people who’d read it to shed the many misconceptions about Chengalchoola, about the people living there, and about the undying prejudice that has kept them away from things as basic as a proper education.
But she’s had more than a few readers. In 10 years, the book has run into its fifth edition. The biggest cause for celebration came when it got picked into the curricula of the Calicut and the Kannur Universities this year. The recognition for Dhanuja, a worker of the Haritha Karma Sena (a government initiative for waste management), became an in-your-face reply to the society that has for long shunned the people of Chengalchoola.
A lot has changed in the past decade, she says on a day she is running from gatherings to honour her, to the job, collecting plastic waste from homes of Kudappanakunnu. “If earlier the kids found it hard even to secure a school admission because of their address, now glories come in search of them. There is a doctor here now, there are artists, a football player who got selected into the Kerala Blasters team, a civil servant,” Dhanuja lists out the achievers who have emerged from ‘Choola’, as she calls her beloved birthplace. The love for Choola echoes across the pages of her book, the author unflinching in her loyalty to the place.
“I am proud to be known as a dweller of Chengalchoola. My son, whom we once hoped would add Kalamandalam (a prestigious institute for performing arts) to his name, is now happy to say he is from Chengalchoola,” Dhanuja says.
In her book, Dhanuja narrates the experience of her elder son Nidheesh when he joined Kalamandalam as a child of 13 to learn Chenda, the percussion instrument mastered by his father. He had endured a lot from a teacher and fellow students, including repeated humiliations and beating, before giving up and coming home in six months. Turning his fate around, Nidheesh later joined AR Rahman’s KM Music Conservatory in Chennai and completed a course in Music Direction. He also composed a promo song for a film called Y, but is still waiting for his big break.
“Caste and religion will never go away from the minds of some people. Despite everything we have achieved, it will still show in one way or another, in the way they treat us,” Dhanuja says. Bank loans are still hard to get, even auto rickshaw drivers are reluctant to come to their destination.
It is different in her colony, where people of all castes and religions live together in harmony, without any of it ever coming between them.
Dhanuja can’t seem to stress on this enough. She has written chapters about the mix of people living in Choola, the many inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, and the acceptance they all have in each other’s homes. If there is any problem in any of the homes, the rest of the neighbourhood will come rushing to help, she writes.
Not that she denies the issues that the colony is usually branded with. Yes, there is a problem of alcohol and drug abuse, there are fights between people, there is the hullabaloo of movie stars’ fans’ associations. “But aren't those issues everywhere?” she asks. The label that had once fallen on the residents of Choola refuses to fade away, she says, because they are slum dwellers, because of their lowered castes, and unprivileged locations.
Even the authorities conveniently ignore them, she writes. Flats built for them by the State have become dilapidated in the absence of maintenance works for too many decades. They were also not given documents of ownership, without which they can offer no surety to avail loans.
Her biggest complaint is that none of the attention that comes to them when there is a problem is seen when there is a success story. She mentions the viral dance video that a few young men performed as a tribute to Tamil star Suriya, which was then shared by the actor on Twitter and brought them a lot of media attention. “After a few days of media glare, these kids were forgotten. No one would ask what came of them. There are so many such talents here,” Dhanuja says.
All her woes are about the lives of others in the colony, neglected and denied the opportunities they deserve. She writes about Susan Raj, an actor who had once shined in theatre, but was later driven to odd jobs to make ends meet. “There are so many stories to tell, I am writing a second book now,” she says, even as she consistently shies away from calling herself a writer. It was Vijila, a poet, who helped Dhanuja put her scrambled thoughts in order for the book.
Dhanuja attended school only till class 9, and had spent years at the Sree Chithra Home for children due to circumstances at home, before getting married at the age of 16. She had a tumultuous few years of married life when her husband took to drinking, during which she attempted suicide twice. But together, they came out of it with their two kids, she writes in her book. Once he stopped drinking, she did everything to promote his art, organising a 48-hour Chenda performance at the Ayyankali (VJT) Hall, during which he neither ate nor drank a sip of water. Both her sons, Nidheesh and Sudheesh, followed in the footsteps of their father Satheesh, choosing music as their career.
Dhanuja made other interventions too. Active in multiple cultural societies, she and a few women in the colony formed a group called Wings of Women during the COVID-19 outbreak. About this, she says, “When our kids could not go to school or even step outside their homes, we wanted to help.”
It had been her long cherished dream to build a library in Chengalchoola and the Wings of Women, with the help of the Excise Department, built one. “If our kids should prosper, we should make the effort ourselves,” she says.
She reads too, naming poetry collections and autobiographies in her book, but refuses to name a favourite, saying she cannot claim to have been such a big reader. Sitting on a cot in her one-room apartment, she takes out big diaries and shows us the random one-liners she scribbles on the pages as and when they occur to her.
“These are books of accounts I keep for Kudumbashree (a government initiative for women empowerment and poverty eradication). I am no writer, I just put down my thoughts and hopes for the people in Choola,” she says, before turning back to pat two street dogs and exchange a few words with a boy next door.
One of her little jottings that made it to the book is:
Once, Ayyankali (social reformer) confronted [privileged caste] teachers for the education of a [Dalit] girl called Panchami. Much later in the 1980s, not a long time ago, the parents of Chengalchoola had to become Ayyankalis for the education of their children.
The lack of a high-school education has clearly not stood in the way of Dhanuja making passionate pleas for the people of Chengalchoola. Words that tumble out of her, in speech and writing, touch a chord even with complete strangers as she urges her interviewers to “not write about me, write about them”.