The year was 2009. At Chinnathambi’s hut in Edamalakkudy, deep in the jungles of Idukki, PK Muraleedharan, the village teacher, was in a deep conversation with his friend Unni Prasanth, a man who worked with Akashvani and RedFM in Thiruvananthapuram. As the duo mused over the state of education among the villagers, an idea struck them: they could establish a library.
A few months later, carrying dozens of books, Prasanth and his friend BR Sumesh, a sub-editor at Kerala Kaumudi, returned to Edamalakkudy, a tribal hamlet in the Idukki. But on reaching the Muthuvan community, the group encountered a pressing problem.
They had planned to establish a library at Iruppukallu but had no space to set it up. This was when their former host, Chinnathambi, offered his humble tea shop.
‘Chinnathambi believed people would come to his shop for tea and snacks, and they could either read the books or borrow them at a minimal fee. Shortly after, our library took flight, with more and more people in the community visiting the shop for books and not just tea,’ said Muraleedharan.
Thus, with a meagre collection of 160 books, Akshara was started in 2012. Today, Akshara houses over a thousand books, but its story is etched with struggle.
The Library with a story
After an eighteen-kilometre trek from Pettimudy, one comes within sight of Edamalakkudy Society, the gram Panchayat headquarters. It takes five more hours of trudging through a dense jungle to reach the library.
Twenty-five families live in the hamlet, where radio remains the only mode of communication. Until March 2019, no vehicle had made its way to Edamalakkudy. In this far-flung corner of Kerala sits Akshara—the library with a story.
It had sprouted in Chinnathambi’s tea shop, where, with a one-time membership fee of twenty-five rupees and a monthly charge of two rupees, residents could browse through works such as Silappathikaram and Randamoozham and enjoy the creations of literary greats like MT Vasudevan Nair, Kamala Das, Lalithambika Antharjanam, and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. The library also has comics for children.
With no shelves to stack the books, the volumes were kept in jute sacks. But this would change after a group of journalists, led by P Sainath, visited Edamalakkudy.
‘For them, ‘kaatiloru library’ or a ‘library in a forest’ was something unheard of, and they wanted to help Chinnathambi expand the library. One of the journalists, KA Shaji, put up a Facebook post, which led to a massive collection drive for about 1,000 books. Alongside, IV Babu, Mangalam’s editor, teamed up with his friends and donated an almirah to safeguard the books,’ Muraleedharan recalls.
Unfortunately, the aid soon ceased, and obscurity swallowed the library. During its inception, the panchayat had encouraged the establishment of the library, and a whopping sum of fifty thousand was earmarked and allocated to the local body, but these promises were never met.
Chinnathambi grew old, and in June 2017, the library was moved to the Mulakutharakkudy School. Muraleedharan and the community, headed by Parent-Teacher Association President G Raju, now manage the library.
In 2019, the library was brought into the limelight again when Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned it during his monthly radio broadcast Mann Ki Baat. He said:
You would be surprised to learn that this library is situated in a small village in the deep forests of Idukki.
The books now sit stacked on a wooden table in these deep forests. Satish TK, a teacher at the school, says, ‘students from the tribal communities are actively participating in reading the books every day. There is no proper mobile network and electricity connection in this region, and so there is no way to connect with the outside world. The library provides them with that window to get more information.’
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