Painkulam, and the country between two rivers

The name that follows Kateekal Sankaranarayanan through every account of his life is Painkulam, the ancestral village in Thrissur district where his family home stood and where, in April 2022, his body was cremated with full state honours on the family land. It is a modest place in the belt of paddy, palm and temple ground that lies between the Bharathappuzha country of Palakkad and the older cultural centres of Thrissur, and it anchored a man whose working life would take him to six Raj Bhavans across India.

He was born on 15 October 1932, to Aniyath Sankaran Nair and Lakshmiyamma, in the Palakkad region of what was then the Madras Presidency. It was a childhood lived under colonial administration in a district that would, within his lifetime, become part of a new linguistic state. Kerala itself was formed only in 1956, when he was in his twenties. By then he had already found the vocation that would occupy the next seventy years.

A student who never left politics

Sankaranarayanan entered public life absurdly young. He was active in student organisation work from 1946, a year before independence, when he was barely fourteen, and he carried that apprenticeship straight into the Congress party. He worked his way up through the least glamorous rungs of the organisation, serving as a secretary of district Congress committees, learning the arithmetic of village committees and the grammar of factional peace-making in a state where the Congress would spend decades contesting ground with a formidable Left.

His legislative career in the Kerala Legislative Assembly spanned four different constituencies across four separate terms, a pattern that says something about both his adaptability and the volatility of Kerala politics. He represented Thrithala in the fifth Assembly, Sreekrishnapuram in the sixth, Ottapalam in the eighth and Palakkad in the eleventh. All four lie in the Palakkad region, the belt of paddy land and gaps in the Western Ghats through which the trade and the monsoon winds have always passed.

Minister in the Kerala governments

His first ministerial appointment, in 1977, was also his briefest and most dramatic. He was sworn in with the agriculture portfolio, together with animal husbandry, dairy development and community development, in the ministry headed by K. Karunakaran. Within a fortnight the government fell apart over the Rajan case, the disappearance and death in police custody of an engineering student during the Emergency, and Sankaranarayanan left office after only sixteen days. It was an early and unusually sharp lesson in the fragility of power.

He returned to government in later United Democratic Front ministries under both K. Karunakaran and A. K. Antony, holding the agriculture portfolio again and, in the ministry formed in 2001, the finance portfolio. As finance minister from 2001 to 2004 he presented the state budget in a period of acute fiscal stress, when Kerala's revenue deficit, its pension liabilities and the cost of its unusually large social sector were the central arguments of state politics. He also held the excise portfolio until February 2004. Colleagues across party lines described him, then and afterwards, as a man of plain habits and unusual personal probity, an old-style Congressman who had never accumulated much beyond his reputation.

Six Raj Bhavans

The second half of his public life belonged to the constitutional offices. On 3 February 2007 he was sworn in as Governor of Nagaland, a demanding first assignment in a state where the office carries special responsibilities under the Constitution and where the long negotiation with insurgent groups formed the political background to everything else. He held that post until 28 July 2009, and during it he was also given additional charge of Arunachal Pradesh between 2007 and 2008 and of Assam for a period in mid-2009.

He moved next to Ranchi as Governor of Jharkhand from 26 July 2009 to 21 January 2010, a brief but consequential tenure in a state then passing through repeated crises of government formation. On 22 January 2010 he was sworn in as Governor of Maharashtra, the office with which his name is now most closely associated. He served in Mumbai until 24 August 2014, a span of more than four and a half years that covered a change of chief minister, a period of considerable political turbulence in the state and, from September 2011 to May 2012, additional charge of neighbouring Goa. In all, he held the governorship of, or additional charge over, six states.

His exit from constitutional office in 2014 was itself characteristic. Offered a transfer to Mizoram as the new government at the Centre rearranged the Raj Bhavans, he chose to lay down the office rather than accept the move, and returned home to Kerala.

Last years and legacy

Sankaranarayanan spent his final years quietly in Palakkad. He died on 24 April 2022 at Sekharipuram, at the age of eighty-nine, following complications of a stroke. His wife was Professor K. Radha, and he was survived by his daughter Anupama. The cremation was held on the family property at Painkulam in Thrissur district, and the tributes that followed, from across the political spectrum and from Raj Bhavans in several states, dwelt less on any single achievement than on temperament: honesty, plainness, an absence of self-promotion.

That is, in the end, the fairest summary of his career. He was not an orator who moved crowds or a strategist who reshaped his party. He was the sort of public servant a democracy quietly depends on, one who spent seventy-six years in continuous political work, from a student volunteer in 1946 to a former Governor, and left office with his name intact. For Painkulam, and for the Palakkad villages that elected him across four decades, that is a substantial inheritance.