Smt. Mary Chacko lived eighty-five years of a life divided, in roughly equal measure, between literature and service — two pursuits she never regarded as separate. Her twenty-two published works of Malayalam fiction and non-fiction, produced over five decades, established her as one of the more distinctive voices in mid-to-late twentieth century Malayalam literature: a writer whose concerns were consistently with the lives of women, the conditions of the marginalised, and the particular moral weight of ordinary human suffering.
Read more ↓
"She used to say that writing and teaching were the same act — both were attempts to place a light in someone's hands and trust them to find their own way." — The Chacko Family
Alongside her writing, she devoted four decades to a practical project of a different kind: the education of blind children in a district where such provision barely existed. The Navajyothi School for the Blind, which she founded in Kottayam in 1972 with twelve students and no government support, has educated more than 3,000 children in the fifty years since its establishment. She ran it without salary for the first fifteen years.
The Padma Shri she received in 2005 and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award she received in 1989 represented the formal recognition of a contribution that those who knew her work had understood for decades. She continued writing and teaching until two years before her death, completing her final collection of essays at the age of eighty-three.
Read more ↓
Commissioned by Navajyothi Charitable Trust and the Chacko family, Kottayam
Preserve a life's professional contribution in the In Memoriam archive.
Enquire about In Memoriam →