The viral social media post claiming to show late Tamil Nadu CM Jayalalithaa with Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
A photograph purporting to show late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa with Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has gone viral on social media.
The Twitter post has been viewed over 5,000 times, as of February 15.
(Archived link here.)
But The Hindu found that the person on the right in the photograph is writer-activist Sivasankari Chandrasekaran, not the Finance Minister.
A reverse image search led us to several sites that had the same picture with the watermark, ‘stills ravi’, a reference to Ravi Varma V., a professional photographer working in the film industry. We also came across media reports from a couple of years ago, containing links to a Facebook post in which he clarified that the photograph in question was taken by him, and showed Jayalalithaa with Sivasankari. (His Facebook profile is currently locked).
We then contacted Chitradeepa Anantharam of The Hindu Metro Plus, who has written about Sivasankari. She confirmed that the picture is of Jayalalithaa and Sivasankari.
“In the memoir of Sivasankari, titled, Suryavamsam (I translated the book from Tamil to English under the same title and launched it in September 2021), this image is used. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the friendship she had with Jayalalithaa, whom she refers to as Ammu. They both learned Bharatanatyam from K.J. Sarasa and had a deep bond until Jayalalithaa took up full-time politics,” she said.
“The photo was taken by Stills Ravi sometime during the late 70s. I had relocated to Vazhudareddy village near Villupuram by then, and whenever I came to Chennai, I would spend quality time with Amma (Jayalalithaa). On that particular day, it so happened that both of us were wearing printed silk saris, which were in fashion those days. While mine was black and green printed silk, Ammu was wearing grey and purple printed silk. She was so thrilled, and when we decided to take a photograph, she herself applied some make up for me and set right my hair, too. she made me sit on the swing on the verandah of her Veda Nilayam house in Poes Garden, Chennai, and she preferred to be seated on the handle. That was a memorable day, as we spent long hours talking and bonding,” Sivasankari said, speaking to Chitradeepa.
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