Remembering Dr E. Madhavan — Feast of Memories
हिंदी | English
In memory of Dr E. Madhavan. Explore his 18-part memoir on his author page and discover more portraits in the Writers section.
On Vrikshamandir his pen is one long English memoir — Feast of Memories, eighteen parts — almost entirely the Erode years under Operation Flood. Unlike MK Sinha, he does not ask what happiness is, and unlike Manubansh, he does not write battlefield case-studies for future managers. Instead, he asks, and answers, the charge Dr Kurien gave him in October 1973: go to Tamil Nadu and find out if there is milk there, and whether the Anand pattern can take root.
A Kerala boy who once spoke on “cooperation” in a 1950s school debate, he graduated veterinary science in Bangalore in 1962, spent ten years at Amul, then joined NDDB to replicate that philosophy. Seven years as Spearhead Team Leader at Erode leave a scorecard he is careful to state: some 260 societies, over 30,000 producers, about 50,000 litres a day, a producers’ union registered on 2 February 1975, land and plants paid largely from farmers’ own paise — and Erode remembered, in Kurien’s words, as “Anand of the south.”
The method is fieldwork before argument. He finds progressive farmers by the tallest haystack; had milk samples drawn from a hundred buffaloes, milked in his presence, and tested, showing that their fat and SNF were as good as Gujarat’s; insists on kg-fat pricing, stamped measures, passbooks, weekly pay. He arrives at Paramasivan’s village exactly at six — no government officer ever had — and lets a communist sceptic test Anand for himself. He converts adversaries rather than crushing them: the contractor who bet his moustache, the ex-convict strongman who funds a society then loses its election, even Nilgiri Dairy’s Raja after a complaint to Kurien that Madhavan reads as a tribute. When caste threatens the cooperative, he desegregates the can in stages. When credit binds farmers to a creamery, he escalates quietly until SBI’s top clears repayment through the society. Autonomy is non-negotiable: he refuses government share capital that would own the union, pockets a NOC, and outsmarts registration stonewalls without breaking the law.
Humour runs through the grind — five in the morning to eleven at night. He is the wasp on the mongrel’s tail when something good must stick. He treats uterine torsions so farmers ask, “Are you doctors?” He sells pasteurised milk in Erode town against Madras-first logic, until bicycle bells fall quiet and a friend jokes that people will remember sleep. He fights Seshan, who once asked Kurien to withdraw him, then helped write the statewide Anand-pattern order — a “hate and love” that Madhavan records without bitterness.
His Erode years ended when a new, elected Board raised staff salaries without consulting him and he felt he had lost its trust, so he resigned, an exit he likens to a scene from Manthan. But the friendships outlived the job. He and Paramasivan stayed close for life. In 2010, Paramasivan stayed with him in Bangalore to receive the Dr Kurien Award, which Madhavan calls the happiest moment of his life, and in 2015 he presided as Paramasivan unveiled Kurien’s statue at the Erode training centre. Kurien’s thank-you letter of January 1979 remained, for him, a lifetime achievement award.
Where MK Sinha’s Haridwar writing trusts अनुभूति, and Manubansh’s Bihar writing trusts the locked gate and the Kundali, Madhavan’s feast trusts measurement, punctuality, and the craft of converting a hostile milk order into producer democracy — one society, one sample, one letter at a time.