In 2021, when a Tamil weekly offered poet and writer Vennila Ambalavanan an assignment to write a historical fiction set against the backdrop of the construction of the Mullaperiyar dam, she wanted to know everything about the construction of the dam.
“Instead of basing the fiction on my imagination. I wanted it to be deeply rooted in history and the socio-political context of the period in which the dam was constructed,” she said.
However, she reached a dead end in her journey. Barring the authoritative History of the Periyar Project written in 1898 by A.T. Mackenzie, an engineer who worked in the project, she realised that information available in the public domain was scarce. Her initial attempts to make use of the Tamil Nadu Archives and Historical Research (TNAHR) were not fruitful as it proved daunting to look for specific topics in the non-digitised and chronologically maintained voluminous records.
