An excerpt from Perumal Murugan’s Students Etched in Memory: ‘I regard that phase as the most wonderful time of my life’

An excerpt from Perumal Murugan’s Students Etched in Memory

As a teacher for three decades, the Tamil writer says he learnt to see the world through the eyes of his students. In this edited excerpt from Students Etched in Memory, he writes about a gifted student, an actor of remarkable talent, who missed his vocation because he couldn’t get past one English paper:

I joined Arignar Anna Government Arts College, Attur (Salem) as a Tamil lecturer in 1996 and worked there until 2001. It was a rural college untouched by the influence of city life. The students from surrounding villages came there only because there happened to be a college nearby, but they had no great dreams about higher education. They were innocent and loving souls to whom their teachers meant the world. I was fortunate to have good teachers as my colleagues. Since we were also young, the students treated us as friends. There might have been some invisible divide between the teachers and students, but generally we were all on the warmest friendly terms. On the whole, I regard that phase as the most wonderful time of my life.

During my stint there, we revived the inactive Literary Forum to showcase the various talents of the students. It was a platform that offered the participants a chance to exhibit all their talents, and the stage witnessed myriad brilliant performances.

We had a student named P. Chinnadurai. True to his name, he was a little master — diminutive in stature but a prodigy in his craft. He had a great passion for acting and a mobile face with quicksilver expressions. He showed no stage fright or self-consciousness; his body language outdid his dialogue delivery. He could internalise any emotion and infuse any role with life. Such was his extraordinary talent! Where did he learn such a skill? Which acting school did he go to? Where could he have acquired such training? Like the mythological Eklavya, he had taught himself everything he knew from the folk performances and films he had watched in his small town.

Usually at the end of the year, we held competitions and awarded prizes to the students. Initially, we started with about half a dozen contests. However, because we wished to provide space to the various talents of the students and because the students themselves kept coming up with new ideas, the competitions gradually expanded to about twenty events. We usually hosted a singing contest where invariably everyone sang Tamil film songs. After all, film music had permeated the popular taste and turned everyone into a music lover.

One year, we divided the usual singing contest into two categories: film music and folk music. Even folk songs, if they had featured in a film, would be counted as film music. The rule was meant to encourage students to sing authentic folk songs that were actually sung in their villages.

On the day of the folk song competition, Chinnadurai hesitantly asked us if the registration was still open. We told him that we would let him join the contest even if he came up to us at the last minute without registration. He immediately asked, ‘Would you permit singing an oppari, a dirge?’ We told him that it was perfectly acceptable and asked him who was planning to sing it. He replied, ‘I am.’