P. Manickavasagam, who wrote as Poomani, dies at 79

Poomani died in Chennai on Sunday, July 12, aged 79. His birth name was P. Manickavasagam, and the name on his books came from a village. He was born on May 12, 1947, at Andipatti in Thoothukudi district, and worked for most of his life as a deputy registrar in the cooperative department — a career he left for literature without ever appearing to have considered a sacrifice.

The writing started late and moved fast. His first short story, Aruppu — harvest — appeared in the literary magazine Thamarai in 1975. He was already in his twenties. What followed was a body of work about the karisal bhoomi, the black-soil region where he was born, and about the people who farm it under conditions that offer no margin for error.

A 170-year novel about one district

Agnyaadi, the work that won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 2014, runs across roughly 170 years and turns on caste conflict and discrimination in Sivakasi and the districts around it. Its reach is the striking thing: a book about a single landscape's social history, on a scale that required more than a single lifetime of events to earn.

Accounts of his method put his mother's habit of telling him stories as a formative influence, alongside a close working relationship with the karisal writer Ki. Rajanarayanan, and an early attraction to Kalki. He was still working at the time of his death on material that would have followed Agnyaadi.

The Tamil Nadu government moved quickly on the response. Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay announced that the final rites would be conducted with full state honours at Andipatti on Tuesday, July 14 — the writer's own village, and the place the obituaries keep returning to as the thing that made the work possible.