Passing of Renishaw folklorist
Renishaw folklorist and singer Sivakami Chetty* died of a heart attack on Monday. She was 91. Chetty was well known in the Renishaw and Park Rynie districts for her moving devotional singing and for her skilled storytelling. Her youngest daughter, Priya Paul, said her mother died soon after returning home from a prayer service. Paul said that despite her mother’s age it had nevertheless come as a shock to the family. “She was healthier than people half her age, and walked every afternoon.” Paul said. Born in the barracks of Esperanza in 1916, Chetty moved to Renishaw with her husband, Jayaseelan, a sugarcane labourer, at the age of 14. She worked her entire life as a vegetable hawker and was a mother to seven children. When Jayaseelan died of liver failure in 1985, Chetty moved in with her son, Devan. Though illiterate, Chetty amassed an impressive oral store of sugarcane plantation and barracks folklore.According to Paul, her mother regarded these stories not as fiction but as part of the history of the region. Paul said her mother often went into a trance-like state while reciting the stories. “If you didn’t know her you might be scared by what you saw, but it was no different from the typical trance-state seen at any temple.”
Pravasan Pillay, a Durban writer, who, for the last three years, has recorded Chetty’s stories, songs, and trances said that her death was a huge loss for occult and folklore archivists. “There is a shortage of sustained accounts of plantation creatures, demons and, for lack of better phrase, badmen. For instance, Sivakami’s story of Tumbi - Tamil for little brother - a devil, who dressed in sugarcane leaves, and murdered young girls, is essentially a spoken novella.” Pillay has recorded fourteen tapes of Chetty,but has no immediate plans for them: “The tapes are bedfellows to books like Fort’s The Book of the Damned, the Lesser Key of Solomon and Dictionnaire Infernal - as well as numerous universally found folktales and traditional songs. Sivakami has been the central intellectual influence in my life and I hope that her parallel history of the south coast and her occult ontology reaches a wider audience.” Brahmin Kasey Naidoo, of Beach Road Temple, said Chetty was a devote Hindu who rarely missed a service or prayer. He added that her fine voice would be missed during services. A service will be held for heron 22 October at the Beach Road Temple.
James Moodley, Park Rynie Gazette (12 October 2007)
*Sivakami’s family were unhappy with the occult characterisations I made in the above article. At their request and with journalist “James Moodley’s” permission I have changed the all relevant names and locations.
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