For over three decades, many of the people who encountered it simply knew it as Muthu. Only very few knew that behind that identity there was the story of a widowed mother just 15 days after the wedding and that, shortly after, she discovered she was pregnant.
His name was Petchiammal.
After the death of her husband, she found herself having to grow her only daughter, Shanmugasundari. To keep it accepted several works, working in the yards, hotels and tea shops. He later worked as a cook and in the fields.
But working as a woman also meant facing unwanted attention and harassment.
An episode, in particular, changed his life.
As he went to work, according to what he would tell years after the press, a driver bothered her. That experience deeply shocked her and Petchiammal came to a radical decision: she would try to be perceived as a man.
He went to Tiruchendur, shaved his hair, wore his shirt and dhoti and began to appear with another name: Muthu.
In the following years he worked as a cook in Tuticorin and spent a few years in Chennai. It was while working in a local in Tuticorin that the name Muthu added the nickname “Master”.
Later, when her daughter was about ten years old, she moved with her to Kattunaickkanpatti, Tamil Nadu, where almost no one knew her past. He also worked as a laborer and for the inhabitants became Muthu Master.
He changed some everyday behavior to make that new identity credible in the eyes of others. Among these was also the habit of smoking the blessed.
The weight of that secret inevitably marked the daughter's childhood.
According to one of the most detailed journalistic reconstructions, Shanmugasundari discovered, around seven years, that Muthu was actually his biological mother. A few years later he went to live with her in Kattunaickkanpatti.
Years passed. The child became adult and married.
Petchiammal, however, decided to continue to be known as Muthu.
He explained that identity had given her something that, after being alone, felt she had no more: safety and the possibility to work and grow her daughter without facing the same harassment.
In 2022, after about 36-37 years when she was publicly known as a man, her age no longer allowed her to carry out the heavy work of a time and asked for economic assistance to the authorities.
His story tells a lot more than a change of clothes or name.
It tells how far a mother, in the social conditions in which she was, felt that she had to change the way the world saw her, in order to be able to work, protect herself and carry out her family.
For others it was Muthu Master.
Behind that name there were over three decades of sacrifices that only his daughter, some family and few other people really knew.