Renowned poet and activist Sugathakumari passes away

Renowned Malayalam poet and activist Sugathakumari passed away on Wednesday due to COVID-19 related complications. She was 86.

She has been admitted at the Government Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram after testing positive for the coronavirus on December 22. Her condition had been critical and was placed on ventilator support and passed away on Wednesday at 10.52 pm.

According to reports she has not been responding to medication. Sugathukumari has been suffering from bronchopneumonia, a type of pneumonia that causes inflammation in the alveoli or air sac in the lungs.

In an interview to Mathrubhumi in June, she had said that there shouldn’t be any state honour by the government for her funeral. “Don’t wait for anyone. I should be immediately cremated at Santhikavadom (the electric crematorium at Thycaud in Thiruvananthapuram city). No flower should be laid on my body. There shouldn’t be any big rituals,” she said in the interview.

A well-known activist too, Sugathakumari had been part of the protests against a private airport project at Aranmula in Pathanamthitta and that of the people’s movement against a hydroelectric project at Silent Valley in Palakkad, which was called as Save Silent Valley Movement, which started on 1970’s. It was one of the greatest protest that world saw as environmentalists all over the world fought against the proposal that would have destroyed a part of the forest and threatened the lives of endangered lion-tail macaques.

It was based on this Sugathakumari wrote the poem- Marathinu Sthuthi(Hymn to a Tree)- which became the anthem during the protest.

Besides being the founder of a home for people with mental illnesses and the destitute home called Abhaya, Sugathakumari, the founder secretary of the Prakrithi Samrakshana Samithi was also a leader of the 1973 Save Silent Valley protest.

The daughter of freedom fighter Bodheswaran and VS Karthiyani, she was awarded the Padma Shri in recognition of her poetry in 2006, and recieved the award from then Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam. Sugathakumari is also the former and first chairperson of the Kerala State Women’s Commission.