On a bright day in 1971, Tamil Nadu Education Minister V.R. Nedunchezhian was addressing a gathering at Mayiladuthurai. He said the people of a village, named Thillaiyadi, had carved a niche for themselves in the nation. Much of the credit for this would go to one South African Tamil teenager, with roots in the village, who embraced Gandhian philosophy and took on the apartheid system there. Born on February 22, 1898, in Johannesburg to Tamil immigrants Mangalam and Munuswamy, Valliammai Munuswamy Mudaliar, as late writer and journalist S. Muthiah documents in a report for The Hindu, was the 16-year-old girl who had protested against a judgment that declared all Indian weddings invalid.
“She was introduced to political activism by Mahatma Gandhi when the colonial South Africa invalidated all marriages conducted outside South African or church law, leading to the annulment of thousands of marriages. Valliammai, accompanied by her mother [and many other women protesters from Gandhi’s Tolstoy Farm], marched from Transvaal to Natal, defying regulations to prevent unauthorised crossings, to protest against the unjust [practices] in 1913. Valliammai, along with Gandhi’s wife Kasturba, was arrested,” says Professor S.S. Sundaram, Head, Department of Indian History, University of Madras.
