Chennai: Sporting a half-sleeve white shirt and a dhoti with a jhola bag on the shoulder was the identity of the frail man, known as a roaring lion in public meetings. Engaged in the cause of the poor and marginalised, veteran communist leader N Sankaraiah, who turned a centenarian in 2021, breathed his last at a private hospital in Chennai on Wednesday.
Joining the protest against the hanging of the iconic Bhagat Singh and his associates in Kovilpatti was his baptism in politics when he was just 9 years old as a school student. There was no looking back and the journey from then onward moulded him into a mass leader.
The centenarian had spent a total of eight years in various prisons, including Vellore and Kannanur in Kerala besides three years of underground life when stayed at the house of a a washerman, a party worker in Madurai. Incarceration brought him into close contact with Congress stalwarts like K Kamaraj, Pattabi Seetharamiah, and former President R Venkataraman as well as Communist veterans like the legendary Bala Dhandayutham. It was life in prison and subsequent association with communist leader AK Gopalan during the latter's frequent visit to Madurai that slowly but steadily steered him towards the Left.
Born during the Spanish Flu pandemic, on July 15, 1922, to Narasimhalu, an engineer employed in a private mill in Kovilpatti, and Ramanujam, he was christened Pratabha Chandran. But, later on, he took upon his grandfather's name – Sankaraiah, an ardent follower of rationalist social reformer and iconoclast, 'Periyar' EV Ramasamy. His family has been traditional revenue officials in their native Athur in present-day Thoothukudi district, then a hotbed of freedom struggle. Since his grandfather was a subscriber of Periyar's 'Kudi Arasu' daily, he was attracted towards the Self Respect Movement at an impressionable age. It was in Kovilpatti, that he and his brother Rajamanickam took part in the protest against the execution of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru.
When the family moved to Madurai, he joined the American College for graduation where he became a students' union leader and invited leaders including Rajaji (C Rajagopalachari) and Satyamurthi among others. But, when Rajaji as premier of Madras Presidency introduced Hindi in the curriculum, he joined the protests against the imposition of Hindi. It was during his college days that he came into contact with AK Gopalan, who visited Madurai to build the Communist Party. Even before the Quit India movement and the Naval mutiny, he organised protests against the and was arrested in 1941, 15 days before his degree examinations. He was released, only hours before the nation attained independence on August 14, 1947. On his release, he became the Madurai district secretary of CPI. Then, he was only 22 years of age.
With the CPI being proscribed, Sankaraiah who participated in the party's Kolkata Congress in 1948, had to return to Tamil Nadu in disguise and spent three long years with the family of a washerman, a party worker in Madurai. Despite suffering from a skin infection, he could not even visit a doctor for treatment. When the ban on the party was lifted, he served as the editor of the party's mouthpiece, Janasakthi. When the party split in 1964 due to ideological differences, he was among the 32 National Council members who founded the CPI(M). Of them, only Achuthanandan, two years younger than Sankaraiah, is the surviving member.
A crusader against atrocities directed against dalits, he stood with the victims as was the case when the Dalit Panchayat president, Murugesan, and six others were hacked to death for contesting the civic polls in Melavalavu village near Madurai. Not only was his wedlock an inter-caste one, he encouraged inter-caste marriages. An avid reader, he wrote a foreword for the Tamil poetic rendering of Maxim Gorky's 'Mother' by former Chief Minister and DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi. Well, politics has not robbed him of his other interests. He read newspapers with the aid of a magnifying glass, he was also a sports lover, and listening to light music, particularly old films, was a hobby.
