Life in Small Towns

I had an opportunity to get to know life in small towns in the 1960s as opposed to life in metros, which followed a lifestyle of their own due to the greater infrastructure and a cosmopolitan populace. Of course, in the last decade or so, small towns have also started aping the metros (which in turn are aping the West) for better or for worse, thanks to the invasion of satellite TVs even in the smallest villages, the difference disappearing rapidly. But this blog is all about 'Malarum Ninaivugal' (Nostalgic Memories) of the '60s and so I shall stick to the topic! While most of the scenario I describe here might be unchanged in some places even now, I am recording these in an attempt to acquaint the next generations who might not have an idea about what makes rural India tick. As they live and work in the metros or abroad they hardly have an opportunity to know all the little details of life in small towns.

There were no supermarkets in the towns. Usually there would be a long main road, which was called 'kadai theru' (street of shops) where the needs of the population would be met with shops of different kinds like textiles, medicine, hardware etc. This street would be part of the four streets that encircled the main temple of the town, (usually a Shiva Temple). All the other streets would be arranged around them. This would be the oldest part of the town. The suburban areas that developed later would be called Colonies or Nagar and sported a building style, which was modern. The number of such colonies was very few in those days and consisted of houses mostly let out to the government employees where our family stayed usually. In really bigger towns like the district headquarters- my mother's native place was one- there might be an additional 'chinna kadai theru' (small street of shops) for the suburban areas, the main street becoming 'Peria kadai theru' (big street) As for groceries, some street corners had a small grocery shop, usually a one-man show where we could shop for all our needs. There were no plastic packs but pulses of small quantities would be weighed (or measured out in volume using 'padi' a measure of approximately one litre-there was also a big 'padi' measuring two litres) out from huge sacks of commodities kept in a row. They were packed in cones made of old newspapers and the shopkeeper would deftly bind it with jute string from a bundle hanging on a peg in the roof of the shop. For greater quantities you could buy the whole sack or take a big bag or sack with you.

Cooking oil would be stocked in huge tins- each tin holding different oils like sesame, groundnut or coconut (the only varieties available then) at the grocers and we had to take glass bottles and baskets along to buy supplies for our household needs. Each middle class household would save the Horlicks jars they bought (usually when somebody was sick, as additional nutrition) for this purpose. There were no plastic pouches or bottles for retail selling of oil. You could see that the kitchens of the middle classes lined with empty jars of either Glaxo milk powder tins or Horlicks bottles to store the kitchen items. This was because all my neighbours who also were from families with transferable jobs found it difficult to lug around too many stell or aluminium tins used for storing things and found it easier to make do with temporary storage vessels in each town. This was before the days of plastic containers, which are so cheap and best for temporary storage.

There would be vendors selling vegetables from a big basket placed on the carrier of bicycles. Sometimes we could hear women selling their home- grown produce from the baskets carried on their heads. Fruits were sold likewise by individual sellers shouting the names in one continuous sing-song phrase at the top of their voices to pull the busy housewives from the back of the houses. If you fail to get the vegetables in the morning you had to go to the one big market in the town from where the street vendors procured their merchandise. If you had to buy from the market around noon all the vegetables would have shriveled in the heat and not at all fresh. (No cold storage). So people finished their shopping for vegetables in the morning or could wait for the temporary Evening Market to bring freshly plucked vegetables for sale.

The Milkman brought the milk in big cans and measured out half litre or one litre to each house on the street. He would jingle the bell on his bicycle in front of each house and we would rush out with a washed vessel to collect the milk from him. Warned by his loud bell at the street corner, most people would be waiting at the gate for him and would be exchanging pleasantries at the start of the day. This was before the ‘white revolution,’ which has made milk cheaper than bottled water and delivered in plastic pouches at the door!

Schooling on the Move

Due to my father's transferable job as a civil engineer of the state, we had to move every two or three years to a new town. So, we children had to be enrolled in a new school every time my father was transferred, usually in the middle of the academic year. Fortunately, we didn't miss a single year throughout these moves though we had to get admitted in the school in our father's village one year due to a transfer in the middle of an academic year when all admissions had closed in the schools of the new town.

We would have just moved into a new place, got admitted in a new school and would have started making new friends and just getting comfortable in the new surroundings when a transfer would loom in the horizon to make us all dread the heartwrenching parting from our friends. We all got used to this process as we grew older but when we were very small it looked like the end of the world to leave a known place and try to grow roots in a new place.

But this experience helped us learn to adjust to any new place as we all knew that we would make new friends real soon just as we did in the last town. Had we stayed at one place we would have moved only in the limited geographical area and would not even have been aware of the wide world outside. You have to live in a place, for sometime at least, to get the feel of what makes the inhabitants what they are.

Moving from one end to the other end of the state so many times gave us an opportunity to observe the differences in the varied cultures in each place though we all spoke the same language. (After all, our state had been three different kingdoms in the ancient times and even as late as before the arrival of the British, had been ruled by smaller kings or chieftains.) So, each area had evolved its own customs and dialects. This experience helped me a lot when I had to move from state to state after my marriage and had the opportunity to observe and appreciate the cultures of people speaking different languages, as no two states speak the same language in India.

Those days there were no English medium schools through the state except in big towns and metros. As my father could be posted in smaller towns too, we all had our schooling in our mother tongue Tamil, with English as second language (from third standard onwards). When I started High School the Hindi agitation had happened and so, we did not have Hindi as a subject. In entire India, our state was the only one where Hindi could not be imposed due to the citizens' opposition. However, children who wanted to learn the language could take private tuitions and sit for the Rashtra Bhasha exams conducted by the Central Government. Many of my friends living in bigger towns did this too, which helped them when they had to work or live or travel in the North of the country.

In the smaller towns, there was no need to learn the language at all and people couldn't be bothered to learn it and they didn't miss much, they felt! Anyway, we were taught English by teachers whose teaching methods were different in each town depending on the pupils. When I started elementary school, my father had been posted in a bigger town (where a factory was being built) which had a very good school. Thanks to the teachers there, I had a very strong foundation in all the subjects, especially English. By the time I came to the fourth standard there, I was using cursive writing for English (which was taught in special 4-lined notebooks as they do now in kinder garten classes even now) and had become good at writing full sentences.

Two years later, my father had been posted to a small town, rather a big village, (to oversee irrigation projects). I was admitted to the sixth standard in the Girls' High School there. I still remember my parents telling me 'see you have come to High School, a real grown up'!) Imagine my shock when I was admonished for using cursive writing and was asked to print the letters! The teachers were starting the basics in this town as the High School where I studied was the only High School catering to the needs of all the girls of the nearby villages.

There was a Boys' High School too in this town as in many of the small towns. The villages had only the elementary schools, which had classes up to fifth standard. The children from the villages did not even know the alphabets of English, let alone words! For the people of these villages the world had not progressed at all. Some of my classmates from these villages dropped out of the school just as my aunts (of my previous generation) did when they reached puberty.

Luckily, I could weather the schooling in these small towns because of the strong foundation I had. Besides, my father had the habit of buying the Readers' Digest in addition to his English newspaper and this helped me retain the vocabulary I had learnt so far (even though I could read only the jokes like Life is like that and Humour in Uniform etc.,!) In between these schools, I had my fifth standard education (which was similar to the small town school in many aspects but for the number of students there) in a small village school which I enjoyed very much from a child's point of view and which deserves a separate write-up in the sequels to this post! Through all these years, I was growing up into a young girl learning not only the school lessons but valuable life lessons too. Schooling was fun indeed as it had the magic of childhood which saw everything with the wonder of seeing it for the very first time!

Our Entertainment-the Radio

When I think of my school days I remember them as a daily routine for ten months every year where I spent eight hours or so with persons other than our family and neighbours. Except for the three examinations that interrupted the routine, all the other days were filled with lessons taught during school hours, homework done in less than an hour and the rest of the time spent in eating, playing and sleeping. Then there were the quarterly, half-yearly and annual exams and the holidays that followed them. The routine was different, the one during the exams filled with hectic school work and the ones during the holidays filled with nothing but playing, listening to the radio and reading story books.

There were no televisions then, only radios. By the time I started school, transistor radios had become popular. Every house had a radio or transistor radio. I remember that some groups of gypsies too possessed transistor radios as they could be played on the move, with batteries! We could trust the AIR to play film songs some three or four times a day. We knew the time table by heart and used to wait eagerly for them. They were the only light music easy on the ears and easily available to us.

The rest of the time we used to fiddle the shortwave radios and listened to the Voice of America and the BBC and sometimes Moscow radio too (Moscow radio broadcast Tamil programmes every day for some half an hour or so.) We became familiar with the latest Beatles songs and groups like the Carpenters etc., thanks to the Voice of America. My father liked listening to English songs and so, we also developed a liking for them. (Of course, as he grew older he switched over to Carnatic music but he must have been in his late twenties and early thirties when we were small and had retained the influence of his hostel/college life in developing a taste for Western music and continued listening to them over the radio.)

Whenever we were in our native Thanjavur district we could listen to Radio Ceylon which broadcast Tamil film songs non-stop with commercials in-between, all through the day. So we used to look forward to the stay in our father's native village where my as-yet-not married teenage athai (the last daughter) lived with my paternal grandparents and who was an avid fan of Radio Ceylon. She kept the lyrics for all the songs, old and new, painstakingly hand-written in notebooks and we all used to sing along with her even as we were assisting her in the preparation of the breakfast, lunch, evening tiffin and supper for all of us.

When AIR introduced their commercial broadcasting for the first time, with the promise of non-stop broadcasting of film songs, we were all sitting in front of the radio in our house waiting for the first song of 'Then Kinnam', a program for popular film songs (It is being broadcast even now). The first song was, I remember, 'Pournami Nilavil' rendered by the still popular SPB. We were so delighted and thrilled to have our own commercial channel for film songs regardless of where my father had been posted, without depending on Radio Ceylon for our aural entertainment. This was actually during the time when man had landed on the moon and the Americans were watching this event live on their TVs! Anyway, economic 'Progress' had started to happen in our country too, I guess, with the first commercial ever broadcast by the state owned radio!

Earliest Memories

We capture some moments in our life in a snap shot memory which is very vivid in detail. In our entire life, these moments occupy only a few instances every year. Maybe we are so excited, thrilled and aware of every moment at that particular point of time in our existence. I remember the very first memory as a trip to the temple of Pazhani. I had been taken there on my first birthday as our family was living in the temple town at that time. In the sloping path down, I was being carried by an elderly woman who was my grandmother's neighbour. My mother and grandmother were closely follwing her. My Dad and some other relatives were still in the temple while our group was slowly making our way down to a shelter midway on the winding steps. All of a sudden the old woman could not control her steps as she started hurtling down the slope, with me in her arms screaming my head off! Thanks to my Mom's quick thinking she stopped us both from falling down by charging in front of the old woman and stopping her momentum. Perhaps because of all the screams, the drama of the incident and all the fuss everyone made of me, this incident has been indelible in my memory.

When I was a very small kid, we were living in a small town. I was four years old. Those days we were admitted in schools only when we had completed five years of age. Now I read about babies in the cradles being shown flash cards with 'lessons' about colors and shapes 'to help them fare better in the competitive world'! Poor things!

All the children under five years of age used to stay at home. How did we spend the time? We were roused from the bed sharp at 6 AM (as my mother adhered to the Indian custom of getting up early in the morning and welcoming the new day scrubbed and clean after our bath). When I got up, sometimes I would help my mother draw the 'kolam'. Then after ou bath and breakfast, all the kids in the neighbourhood used to gather in one of the houses in the street and play any of the indoor games-kallangai, pallankuzhi, snakes and ladders and thayam and many more indoor games which could be played sitting indoors during the hot daytime-all the games handed down from generation to generation. Each game had its own song that had to be sung along when the game was played. These games developed hand-eye coordination, shape and sizes. We learnt counting in the course of the game-sort of play and learn, I guess. Definitely better than being shown flash cards!

In the evening we gathered in the street and played all sorts of outdoor games like 'kalla, manna', 'pandi', hide-and-seek etc., These were all games played by both boys and girls till the boys could join the older ones for their own 'kittipul' and 'kabadi'. We were playing throughout the day and were learnig teamwork, and

dealing with failure and successes, without knowing that was what we were doing!

If we felt tired we used to 'discuss' all the things we saw around us and offer explnations of those things. Radios had made their arrival in small towns. This was before the advent of transistors. So, the radios were as big as a 14 inches TV. We had to buy a licence to have one and there was a long ariel wire that went across the terrace between two poles. Our house possessed a huge Philips radio which had been placed near a window. We could see its back from the outside verandah and when the radio was playing we could see some lights through the air vents. I recollect how we were convinced that there were little men who were giving speeches and playing the musical inetruments. We vied with one another to prove how we could actually make out the features of those little men we could see through the slots!

Throughout our playing, we had to be called again and again by our mothers to have our meals, so engrossed were we in our games! In the end we had to be dragged inside with the occasional slap administered! I recollect that once I rushed to join my playmates with a 'pappad' in my hand still unfinished and a crow swooping down to grab it! What a shock I got!

When it got too dark to play we persisted in playing 'kalla, manna' changing the name to 'shadows and lights' to make use of the shadows cast by the moon during the brighter nights. [In this game the catcher will declare whther he will catch those standing on 'kal(Stone) or 'mann' (sand) to our question of kalla manna? (stone or sand?)]

When it was supper time all had our dinner at our homes and gathered again for another round of play, this time it being around the knees of our mothers. The mothers (all being stay-at-home, not a single career woman in those days among the middle classes), having served dinner to their husbands and left them to complete reading the newspapers or listening to the news on the radio, would have finished winding up the kitchen. The school-going children would have finished their homework. They would sit at the 'thinnai' (raised verandah at the front of the house-usually open to the street where any passers-by who wanted to rest their feet could sit-and were offered buttermilk or cool water by kind houseowners in those days) of any house surrounded by the children. In a little while, some woman would start telling stories-usually from the Maha Bharatha or it could be any imaginary story depending upon the person. Listening to the stories, the small kids would fall asleep one by one and the respective mothers would make them lie down on their laps or after sometime take them into the house to lie down on the mats which served as beds. Then the women would have a round of 'grown-up' talk and then retire for the night. What a laid-back way of life indeed!

Nevertheless, my parents sent me to the nearby elementary school with the neighbour's kids just to keep me engaged for some hours of the day (and perhaps one less child to keep an eye on, as two of my siblings were toddlers still). My name was not in the register but I could listen to all the lessons taught to the students of the first standard and learnt to sit still. I picked up the Tamil alphabets and the numbers during this unoffcial stint at school.

One day I went to the house of the girl sitting near me (a complete stranger to my parents as she lived in another street) when she invited me to her home. I never knew that you need to inform your parents before you venture into the outsid world! When I failed to turn up after school hours my parents were worried and had dispatched all the neighbours, who offered to help find me, on bicycles to search for me. By this time my dad had returned home from office and he was also searching for me on his two wheeler. In the meantime I had finished my 'visit' with my friend and was walking back home. I spotted my father on his two wheeler coming towards me on the street and hailed happily 'Hi Appa!' and was rudely shocked when he hit me on the head asking where the hell had I gone? This was one of the very few times I got a slap from my father!

My Grandfather

My Grandfather

Each person's life is a novel and he/she is the hero/heroine. By recollecting my own memories of my childhood I might be covering an entire generation's childhood experiences. In the time frame when I was a small girl thousands of other girls and boys would have been sharing similar social conditions, movies, magazines, film songs, political turmoils etc., If somebody finds some common thread you are welcome to post your comment!

I was fortunate enough to be born into a family where my father was a first-generation educated person. My paternal grandfather who was a farmer in a small village on the banks of the river Cauvery in Thanjavur district, had three sons and four daughters. Those days there was no family planning and people had many children and each family had a number of children. Grandfather decided that his three sons should go into the three main professions known in those days. In all the Tamil movies of the time, the hero would become (1) a doctor, (2) an engineer or (3) a lawyer.

Accordingly he educated the first son-my father and had made him an engineer by the age of 21. My father had to walk four kilometres everyday to finish his high school in the nearby small town.Then he got a bicycle when he was in the ninth form. As my Thatha (grandfather) had bestowed genes of intelligence to all his children, my father had finished his high school with flying colours. Then he went to the nearby town, eight kilometres away, on his bicycle to finish his Intermediate education to go on to a professional college. It was unheard of in my thatha's circle of relatives that one of his sons was sent to the distant Ananthapur in Andhrapradesh for his engineering degree.My father was a conscientious son and strived hard to fulfil his father's expectations.But, being a first generation student he lacked guidance in choosing his engineering branch. As he knew that emgineers build bridges and buildings, he opted for civil engineering and was regretting it all through his professional career in the PWD of our state. All his college mates had gone ahead in their respective government departments as they had chosen other subjects like electrical or mechanical etc.,

When he got his B.E. degree he was given an appointment in the Public Works Department of the Madras State. A government job was 'the ultimate ' in career those days! With his first son earning a steady salary, it was easier for my grandfather to educate his other two sons as my father was footing the bill for their education. In the meantime, my father had been married to my mother, a school dropout like the other girls of her generation.Girls could not continue their education once they attain puberty and had to stay inside their homes till they got married in a year or two after that.

This brings me to the regressive ideas of my grandfather. Keen as he was in educating his sons, he treated his four daughters as outsiders who had to be brought up till their teenage years and then sent off to their husband's homes, once he could get grooms who would take care of them in some comfort. After that, the daughters could come to their parents' home only when they had to deliver their babies or to attend some marriage or temple pooja in their village! Of course, the society as a whole was like that in those days with very rare exceptions.

My grandmother was the incarnation of Sathi Savithri and her husband's words were the law for her. She spent her entire life in bringing up the children, cooking meals after meals and looking after her husband's needs. She belonged to the generation who believed what her husband says should be the truth and law. So she too believed that her daughters were liabilities and was not enthusiastic to receive them in her home. I particularly remember how she used to scold my athai's kids for playing noisily while she put up with us (her son's kids) with a smile. The women also took it for granted that they were inferior to men and meekly put up with the injustices meted out to them for being born a girl.

So, all my athais(auntie-sisters of my father), though being as intelligent as their brothers, had to drop out of the school when they attained puberty, mostly when they were in the 8th std. Only one of my athais completed her school final as she was lucky enough not to attain puberty till then!

My mother was very bitterly regretting how some of her FC friends were forward enough to finish at least their school education in those days. So, my mother made it a point to educate all her daughters till they all got a college degree each and one of them has become an engineer too. Anyway, lucky me, I was not born a daughter to my grandfather, but a granddaughter! Since then all the successive generations in our family had been educated and we are all reaping the benefits of a proper education thanks to my paternal grandfather.