Sometime in the 1980s, a Dalit woman walked into a tea shop reserved for people from the upper caste in southern Tamil Nadu. She ordered a cup, drank it, and walked out. “This action was her statement,” recalls her grandson N Dhanapal. Today, seated in a classroom of Gandhiji Primary School that the late V Ponnuthai started 70 years ago, the 47-year-old remembers his grandmother who “feared no one”.
Gandhiji Primary School is a Government-aided school in Vadipatti, a panchayat town in Madurai district, known for its weekly farmers’ market. It looks like an ordinary structure at first glance; colourful artworks done by children are up on the walls of classrooms, on which hang portraits of Gandhi and Ambedkar. But what sets this school apart from numerous such institutions across the State, is that it is the result of one woman’s vision.
