Unsung Heroes Detail

C.S. Chellappa was born on 29 September 1912 in Madurai. He left his collegiate studies to take part in the Freedom Struggle and in the Swadeshi Movement and Non-cooperation movements launched by Mahatma Gandhi and courted arrest and imprisonment. During the Freedom Struggle, modern Tamil writing flourished because of the poetic spirit of Subramanian Bharathi. Chellappa and his relative B.S. Rammayya were as involved in the freedom struggle as in writing. Both were flowering short story writers and the release of the film Manikodi was considered the best forum for the short story. Chellappa’s singular achievement was Ezuthu, a literary magazine that he founded in 1959. It emerged as a seminal force in Tamil literature and has continued to influence literacy initiatives in Tamil for the last half a century. He was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Academy Award in 2001. His own long poem Nee Indru Irundaal (“If you were alive today”), addressed to Mahatma Gandhi) and individual collection of poems by several poets were also published. He passed away on 18 December 1998.