Chakkoru Master

Chiramel Chakkoru was J.C. Chiramel in official papers and Chakkoru Master to everyone else. He was a schoolteacher, but his real classroom was the whole of Aranattukara. The book calls him a friend of the poor and a man of deep faith, and admits that a few pages cannot hold all he did.

Gandhiji at Mathaipuram

He worked among the Dalit families of the colony at Lalur. He ran a school for their children when few people would teach them, and some in the village resented him for it. When Gandhiji toured South India to campaign against untouchability (the book dates the visit to 1933), he heard of this school and asked to see it. He came to the colony, and Chakkoru Master translated his speech into Malayalam.

Making peace

For decades Aranattukara’s Catholics were split between two rival churches. Chakkoru Master was one of five men working to bring them together; their opponents mocked them as the “Pancha Pandava army”. He led the purchase of land behind the East Church for a tennis court where the young people of both parishes could play. In 1941 he helped start a “Catholic Truth Society” that argued for unity through pamphlets. For all this, the book says, people threw stones at him from hiding.

Serving the poor

He was diocesan president of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and started its work in Aranattukara. Around 1951 he ran a school for workers, a shelter called “Boys’ Town” for boys living rough in the town, and food parcels for the hungry and for hospital patients. He often paid for them from his own salary.

When the new Tharakans High School needed a headmaster in 1947–48, he persuaded his only son, A.C. Chiramel, then a major in the army, to resign and take the post. The son later became a priest, Fr. Antony Jees, and wrote a two-volume life of his father.

Chakkoru Master later moved his work to Kuriachira, where he founded St. Joseph’s Model School. He died in a road accident on 7 February 1988.