AMMAACHI
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N. Bala Baskar
Balammal was born in Palayamkottai a small town in Southern Tamil Nadu in 1907. She was the fifth among nine - or may be tensiblings. Her father was a well knwon contractor to the British Sahibs and some of the buildings put up by him stand solid testimony to his professional capability and integrity. Life in the big contractor’s house as a small child may not have been all that unpleasant for young Balamma who was by far the fairest and the most beautiful of the brood. But the father died rather prematurely and the task of bringing up the children was taken up by an iron willed maternal grandmother. She saw to it that all the children including the girls, got an education. This must have been a revolutionary step during the second decade of this century. So there she was, this young woman of great beauty, at just 17 years of age given away in marriage to a short and dark complexioned young man of 20 years of age. One suspects that Balamma must have accepted the young man as her husband only because she may have had no choice in the matter. But then it may not have taken her much time to realize that her husband possessed an extraordinary intellect. I believe that Thondaman Muthiah Bhaskara Thondaman could not have achieved all that he did in his lifetime but for the unstinting love and quiet support of his wife.
Balammal was my maternal grand mother, fondly addressed as Ammaachi in Tamil. Ammaachi followed her husband to all the places where his government job took him. He rose from being a humble clerk in the Collector’s Office in Tirunelveli to retire as a Collector himself form the old North Arcot District. This in itself would have been a great achievement for most men. But in the case of T. M. Bhaskara Thondaman, this paled into insignificance compared to his artistic and literary achievements as a connoisseur curator, exponent, orator, scholar and writer.
I was brought up by Ammaachi almost form my birth. When my
