TEMPLE / MRM SUNDA
13 April 1913 – 11 November 1995
Amma’s younger brother — a celebrated Tamil writer, playwright, journalist, and one of All India Radio’s most respected voices.
Full name: Melnattham Ramachandra Iyer Meenakshi Sundaram
AT A GLANCE
Her younger brother
Tamil writer, playwright, journalist & News Editor
30 years at All India Radio, New Delhi
BBC London’s Tamilosai programme; Doordarshan, Chennai
Sunda began his career as a munsiff in his native village of Melanattham, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu. But it was literature, not law, that shaped his life’s path.
His love for the Tamil language was nurtured at literary gatherings hosted by the scholar T. K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar. There, a young Sunda met stalwarts of the freedom movement — Rajaji and Kalki R. Krishnamurthy among them — and absorbed their discussions on Tamil literature.
Sunda joined All India Radio at its Trichy station, and was later transferred to AIR, New Delhi, as News Editor cum News Reader. He was soon promoted to head the Tamil News Unit, and went on to retire as News Editor in the News Division after thirty years of service — with a brief spell afterward as News Editor at Doordarshan, Chennai.
During his years in Delhi, Sunda coined a number of Tamil words that remain in everyday use today, and devised several of the catchy Tamil slogans used in the government’s Family Planning Programme. He also taught journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.
In Delhi, Sunda acted in amateur plays alongside thespians of the stature of Poornam Viswanathan, and staged a humorous musical titled Kuravan and Kurathi. He also turned singer-storyteller with a modern kathakalakshepam, accompanied on the harmonium by the noted music critic Subbudu.
Sunda spent two and a half years in charge of the BBC’s Tamilosai programme in London, where he interviewed many visiting Indian celebrities. Among the essays and stories he wrote set in London, “Mary and the Mahatma” — published in both Tamil (Dinamani Kadir) and English (The Illustrated Weekly of India) — remains a standout for its theme and style. His experiences of life in Delhi were later serialised in Dinamani Kadir as well.
Sunda’s writings spanned essays, short stories, humorous skits, travel writing, and poetry — several of them prize-winners, and many published in the special Deepavali issues of leading Tamil magazines.
A collection of essays.
A collection of poems.
In this work, Sunda crafts a narrative style entirely his own — novel, piquant, and arresting. With subtleties glinting beneath its limpid flow, it stands as a fine contribution to biography as history, and to Tamil literature more broadly.
In his personal life, Sunda remained a devoted husband to Minakshi, and a loving father to Jayamani Sankaran, Project Co-ordinator at CVS Health, USA, and Ramamani Sundar, a retired Senior Economist at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, now a freelance consultant and Tamil writer in her own right.
“Sunda was Amma’s younger brother. The family carries his memory alongside hers — two siblings from Melanattham whose lives, in very different ways, were both given entirely to service: hers to the temple and the people of Salcete, his to the Tamil language and its readers.”
Remembering the multi-faceted Sunda — writer, journalist, and storyteller — with love from the family he left behind.
13 April 1913 — 11 November 1995
