One of the most active activists in the Save Silent Valley Movement, Sugathakumari became as well known for her activism as for her poems, written in pain.
Renowned poet and activist Sugathakumari passed away on Wednesday, after testing positive for the coronavirus on December 22. She was very critical and did not respond to the medication. She was admitted to the Government Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram and passed away at 10:52 am on Wednesday.
A year and a half ago, Sugathakumari, as a premonition, said that he had to reveal some things to Mathrubhumi, one of the most popular Malayalam newspapers in Kerala. In the interview that followed, the renowned poet and activist said she thought ‘her time was drawing near’. She had just had a heart attack and was in a lot of pain. She spoke of her family, Abhaya, the home she started for homeless women and people with mental illness, and her dying wish to visit Silent Valley again.
She was one of the most active activists of the Save Silent Valley Movement when it took shape in the 1970s. Silent Valley, an evergreen tropical forest in the Palakkad district, was proposed at that time by the Kerala State Electricity Board ( KSEB) to house a hydroelectric dam. Environmentalists around the world fought against the proposal that would not only destroy part of the forest, but also threaten the lives of endangered lion-tailed macaques. Sugathakumari wrote a poem, Marathinu Sthuti (Hymn to a Tree), which was recited at every other protest to save the Silent Valley.
It was also in Palakkad that Sugathakumari and a few others created Krishnavanam, turning a barren stretch of land in Attappady into a natural forest.
In the following years, he became one of the first people to be called by the state’s environmentalists when there was some kind of threat to nature. Even in her advanced years, she would be the first to go and stand in front of a tree when the authorities wanted to cut it down for no good reason.
In 2006, when he received the Padma Shri for his poetry works, he told a journalist that he was getting away from it all, that he had seen too much and much of it no longer seemed important to him. But in 2018, when five nuns protested in Ernakulam against the bishop accused of raping his colleague, Sugathakumari, then 84, he thawed. He participated in a protest in support of the nuns outside the Secretariat and simply said that it was his duty to be with them.
Read: ‘My duty to be with them’: Why the poet Sugathakumari supports the protesting nuns
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