Veteran Marxist ideologue P Govinda Pillai passed away here on Thursday night. Born to M N Parameswaran Pillai and K Parukutty Amma on March 25, 1926, at Pulluvazhi in Perumbavoor, the leader had his tryst with the Quit India struggle when he was a student at UC College, Aluva.
Drawn subsequently by the Communist precepts, he joined the Communist Party in 1946.
The veteran had courted arrest for taking part in the Communist agitations during his undergraduate (BA Hons) days at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. After coming back to Kerala, he fully immersed himself in the party’s activities. He was elected from Perumbavoor to the Thiru-Kochi Assembly in 1952.
In 1957, he represented Perumbavoor in the Kerala Assembly.
The leader, fondly called PG, stood with the CPM after the split in 1964. Three years later, Perumbavoor constituency once again sent him to the Kerala Assembly. He served as the chief editor of CPM mouthpiece Deshabhimani daily from 1964 to 1983. He faced the ire of the party in 2003 after a controversial interview in which he criticised E M S Namboothiripad and the CPM.
He was censured and subsequently stripped of his membership in the party state committee and the editorship of the book ‘Complete Works of EMS.’
‘An Ideological stalwart of CPM ’
KOCHI
‘One of the ideological stalwarts of the CPM in Kerala since EMS Namboodiripad’. This is how veteran CPM leader and trade unionist M M Lawrence terms P Govinda Pillai.
Even when he was not in the party’s state committee and other top forums, PG continued to be the major ideological figure in the CPM. “He was one of the major driving forces behind the Kochi edition of Desabhimani daily, when it was established. We had a good relationship. On an ideological level, PG had a deep knowledge that helped him deal with various issues. In the initial phase of his party activities, he had a stint with the Karshaka Sangham. He had shown a deep interest in the issues being faced by farmers and the agrarian crisis,” recalled Lawrence. At one point of his active party life, P Govinda Pillai faced some issues within the party. “Of late, he was not active in party forums like the state committee and Desabhimani. However, even in his absence, he was one of the party’s best ideologues.
Though I had heard that PG was not keeping well, I did not expect his sudden demise,” he said. PG’s younger brother P Gangadharan Pillai alias Gangan was also a prominent party activist, recalled Lawrence. “I had maintained a good relationship with him.
Many of PG’s family members and close relatives were well known in the public sphere, he said.
A life devoted to preaching communist ideology
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
PG the two letters have always been revered by Communists across the state for his devotion to commitment to the ideology. PG had a special place among the comrades even during the era of EMS. Once, his son and journalist M G Radhakrishnan rightly said in a magazine that his father had bibliophilia. He recollected in an article written a few months back that his father as one who had used to buy all newspapers and magazines to give him company during train journeys and he used to deny a copy of a paper to his fellow passengers like a child who was asked to share his toy.
“He loathed lending books and in case he was forced to lend it he would take special care to ask it back within a few days,’’ he said. Radhakrishnan also recollected that he and his sister Parvathy had found their lost books on the cupboard of their father. He used to miss bus while awaiting at a bus stop reading books. He had left his son once in New Delhi railway station when he was just five years old. He had left the station as if in a day dream to buy books from a shop on the opposite side of the station.
His inclination to spirituality was of an uncommon kind. The people outside his immediate friend circle are still not sure whether he was an atheist in the true communist tradition. It was a known fact that he revered spiritual leaders like Sai Baba.
In the late nineties when he was the chairman of the KSFDC, he was presiding over an open forum at the IFFK and the chief guest was renowned Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi. Zanussi was speaking about the spiritual starvation of the communist world. A visibly perturbed PG stood up to counter Zanussi arguing that it was sheer foolishness to say that communists had no regard for spirituality. In fact, he scored over him by presenting an array of instances to prove that communists also follow a different level of spiritualism.
‘He contributed many Words to Malayalam’
KOCHI
“PG was a voracious reader who contributed many new words to Malayalam through the CPM mouthpiece ‘Deshabhimani’ where he served as the chief editor. He was a great visionary who had new concepts and ideas on all aspects,” said P Rajeeve MP who is the former resident editor of ‘Deshabhimani’. “What Kerala has lost is an activist and an intellectual.
He had won the hearts of the people,” he said. “Even on sickbed one could feel the enthusiasm of the writer in him. He was much excited about his new English book when I visited him at the hospital,” Rajeeve said.