The live telecasts played a big part in generating the unprecedented popular interest witnessed along the entire route of the funeral procession.

Since then the families of distinguished Keralites who have lived and died outside the state have come under official and public pressure to allow the bodies to be brought home for adulation and a funeral with state honours.

Writer and cartoonist O.V. Vijayan, who had settled down in Secunderabad after his working days in New Delhi, and musician and composer G. Devarajan, who was a long time resident of Chennai, were among those who were thus brought home to receive celebratory funerals in places they had left early in life.

Writer Kamala Surayya, who died in Pune May 31 this year, was undoubtedly the one who received the most adulation. She had lived in Kolkata and Mumbai and earned fame, writing in English under her marital name of Kamala Das and in Malayalam under the pen name of Madhavikutty, before returning to Kerala and courting controversies through words and deeds. She took the name of Kamala Surayya after embracing Islam in 1999.

Kamala had moved to Pune, where her youngest son lives, in 2007. Respecting her wish to be buried in Kerala, her sons accepted the arrangements the state government made, in consultation with the Jamaat-e-Islami, to take the body to Thiruvananthapuram for burial. The family and Jamaat officials took the body to Mumbai, where a state minister joined the accompanying party.

After giving the public an opportunity to pay their last respects to Kamala at the Kerala House in Navi Mumbai, the body was flown to Kochi. From there it was taken to Thrissur to lie in state at the office of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. The 300-km-long journey from Thrissur to Thiruvananthapuram gave hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to pay homage. The television cameras were on all through.

Before moving to Pune, Kamala Surayya had bitterly complained that Keralites had not honoured her the way others in India and abroad had done. If only she could see the adulation showered on her posthumously she would probably acknowledge that she had misread people's feelings.

Maybe she would also have touched off another controversy by asking whether it wouldn't be more appropriate for bereaved people to make the journey to pay their last respects rather than for the dead to travel long distances to receive the honour.

(B.R.P.Bhaskar can be contacted at brpbhaskar@gmail.com)