Social History of Kumarakom

Slavery was prevalent in this part of Kerala until the beginning of 19th century. A Slave Sale Deed (translation) kept in the Show Case Records, Government Archives; Thiruvananthapuram executed in 1763 A D is reproduced below.

A SLAVE SALE DEED

(Translation)
This is a Slave Sale Deed executed on the 9th Meenam Sunday 938 M E (1763 A D )

Mathunni, Thoppalanil House, Thottakkad (Kurukkani, Kollam, Christian) purchased the slave, Thazhathu Thevuthan, son of Pulaya slave Azhaki, belonging to Eappen Mappila, Kollettu House, Puthuppally at a price fixed by four peopleand executed this document aafter giving the price. In the same way Eappen Mappila,Kollettu House, Puthuppally sold the slave Thazhathu Thevuthan, son of slave woman Azhaki at the price fixed by four people and wrote this sale deed after receiving the price. Eappen Mappilawho had the right to tie, chain or kill the slave if necessary, transferred these rights and privileges to Mathunni.

Witnesses: 1.Pullolickal Cheriyan ( Sd/ )

2. Mootamukalil Sankara Kaimal (Sd/ )

Handwriting: Ipe Chacko, Slave Sale Deed in Palmyra leaf, Kollettu House, Pampady, Kottayam

The punishment to runaway slaves was very cruel and very often they were murdered if caught by the master. Many such incidents were narrated by Hentry Baker (Jr.) in his book `The Hill Aryans’ (1856). Benjamin Baily and Joseph Peet the missionaries through a proclamation made on 8th March 1835 liberated some slaves working under them and set them free. It was the first time in the history of the land and this was about 20 years before the Travancore Government freed its slaves in the state.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, this land was dominated by the Hindu society with its numerous sub divisions and it’s inseparable caste system. The caste system had continued in India from time immemorial, with all its evils. The worst thing about the evils of caste system was that it was a religious institution with a religious outlook and was used as a cruel weapon for fleecing the downtrodden. One section of the population consisted of free men and another comprised of bonded slaves. Several strange practices were common at that time. Child marriage, Devadasi system (girls being offered to temples as slaves of the Gods, many of them ending up as prostitutes), Dowry system, Smarthavicharam,(A Brahmin woman who was suspected by her relatives or neighbors of illegal connections with men, had to face severe trials and then she would be excommunicated,Pulapedy (during the months of February and March, if a Pulaya man happened to meet a Nair woman who was not escorted by a man, the Pulaya man might seize her and she would lose her caste and connections) Mannapedi ( if a Mannan man happened to meet a Nair woman unaccompanied by a man, he might seize her and she would lose her caste and connections) The low caste people were not allowed to walk along public roads and to enter temple premises. Their women were not allowed to cover their breasts. Learning also was prohibited to them. They also had to use special words and body language when speaking to high caste people.

The Hindu society was divided into two broad groups- Savarnas and Avarnas depending on their castes. Caste was again sub-divided into numerous sub-castes. The Savarnna Hindus consisted of Brahmins, Kshethria and Temple workers. The Vysyas, Fishermen, Artisans, Slaves, Pulayas and Parayas constituted the Avarnas.The religion dominated by caste and convention kept the various sects in their respective shells. The traditional religion served the interests of the upper class only and did not permit any change in the social set up. Those who suffered under this system were denied even the opportunity to think about their plight. There were other groups, which were not included in the caste system, such as Christians, Muslims and certain Hill Tribes. They were `out castes’ in the real sense because they were outside the caste system.

At Kumarakom more and more workers were brought from far away places to work on the land. Paddy cultivation, reclaiming the land for coconut cultivation and fishing were the main works. The wages were very low and paid in kind, such as a measure of paddy. The social system was feudal; untouchability, caste system and all superstitions related to it were strong in the past. Very few upper caste Hindus and Christians owned land and the majority were under utter exploitation. Backward Hindus were denied temple-entry and education. It was only in 1910 that Ezhavas were allowed entry in Government schools and pulayas still had to wait up to 1930 to get their children educated in public schools.

Wave of Renaissance

The consecration of Sree Kumara Mangalam (SKM) Temple by Sree Narayana Guru in 1903 marked the first wave of renaissance movement in this village. SKM Temple gave a common place for Ezhavas, the major community of Kumarakom to assemble and discuss their frequent problems. The formation of Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam in 1903 initiated the formation of caste organisations. In the same year a Pulaya Samajam was established to address the appalling conditions of the lowest caste Pulayas. The shift of land from Nairs to Syrian Christians and deteriorating material condition forced the Nair community to form the Nair Service Society (NSS) in 1914.

In Kumarakom, Ezhavas were organised under SNDP and centered on the SKM temple. This was an instrument of emancipation from the social and economic subjugation, which the caste system had imposed on them. They started a school near the temple and organised more and more home-schools (Kudippallikudams) under a single learned Asan or Teacher. Teaching was done as a service and only a “Dakshina” (small gift) was given at the time of joining school to the teacher. Pulaya’s worship was at Muthente Nada Temple built on the outskirts of Kumarakom on an outer bund of a polder. Nairs also had a temple, Puthiyakavu Devi Temple and a village council of Nair elders (Karayogam) was formed near this temple.

The social reformers working with SNDP organised the lime-shell co-operative society in 1928. The society enlisted all the lime-shell workers who dive into the lake and collect shells for livelihood. The members of this first workers’ co-operative society were Ezhavas, Pulayas, Valas and backward Christians. Lime-shell, the sub-fossil deposits of shellfish found extensively in the lake Vembanad is the chief source of calcium carbonate in Kerala whereas in other parts of India limestone is used in its place. Shell lime is used mostly in the construction of buildings, as soil conditioners, for the manufacture of cement, calcium carbide, glass and bricks and also as an important chemical in the manufacture of paper, rayon, sugar etc. This society had to wage a long struggle with other individual license-holders in the field of marketing lime-shell. The Government at last gave monopoly right to workers’ co-operative society to collect lime-shell from the Lake Vembanad and took steps to stop all illicit collection and sale of lime-shell by private individuals. The lime-shell co-operative society thus became a big job provider for the poor people of this village.
Three cooperative banks now functioning in Kumarakom were started under the initiative of three major communities’ in the past. One, which started in 1922 under the initiative of the Nair Service Society as a multi purpose cooperative, is the oldest. Following the Nair Community’s path the Catholics and the Jacobite Christians also initiated formation of cooperative credit societies respectively in the years 1931 and 1941.All the three cooperatives developed in to Banks with seven banking offices in different parts of the village and almost all adult members in Kumarakom are members of these banks. The poor farmers and workers hitherto considered unbankable obtained loans from these banks on liberal terms and many could purchase lands and improve their living conditions, especially after the land reforms in the 1970’s. The State Bank of Travancore and South Indian Bank are the other scheduled banks having branches in Kumarakom.The District Cooperative Bank also started a branch in Kumarakom in 2005. A big private financial institution (Muthoot Bank) is also functioning here.. Three other small private moneylenders’ establishments and many other individual moneylenders are also doing business at comparatively higher rates of interest. Their security for loan is mainly blank cheques from the debtor. If the debters fail to pay back the loan the cheque is presented to the bank to get bounced. The lender will immediately file a criminal case under Negotiable Instruments Act, which really put the debtor in great trouble. Sometimes even muscle power and police help are also used to realise money from defaulters.

Modern Education in Kumarakom

A primary school was started in Kumarakom with the blessings of the king of Travancore in 1868. This was the first modern school in public sector, followed by the establishment of Sethu Lakshmi Bhai Government LPSchool in 1910 and Government North LPSchool in 1911. A.G. Baker started the Anne Baker Memorial School in the northern remote area of Kumarakom in 1886. The Christian Churches started St. John’s LP School in 1910, St. Mary’s LPS in 1914, Sacred Heart LPS in 1929, Consalatha Memorial LPS in 1929, St. Peter’s LPSchool and NNCJM LPSchool in 1964.
The first English school was established at Kumarakom in 1943 for which Attamangalam St. John’s Church donated the land. SKM High School was started in 1964. The local government started a Panchayat LP School at a remote area of Kumarakom in 1966 and surrendered it to the Government later.

Now there are 14 schools, 6 government owned, 7 fully government aided and one unaided, in Kumarakom imparting education up to standard 12 and about 3500 students attend schools. All the teaching and non-teaching staff of the government schools and aided schools are getting salary and pensionery benefits from the exchequer. Now the school enrollment is 100% and even pre-school education is also nearing 100%. The SNDP has started P G Radhakrishnan Memorial Sree Narayana College in Kumarakom in 2004.This is unaided but affiliated to the Mahatma Gandhi University.In 2005 the Government has sanctioned an aided Sree Narayana Arts and Science College to the SNDP Union, in Kumarakom.

In Kumarakom there were 1044 children in the age group of 3 – 5 in 2003. Almost all of them were undergoing pre-school education in 28 Nursery Schools and Anganvadies spread across the village. Government run Anganvadies provide food to the children. In Kumarakom the spread of education changed the rigid social customs and practices of the predominantly agrarian society, which changed the attitudes of the people too. The educated found it difficult to practise their hereditary profession and any menial jobs and they created a pool of `educated unemployed’.

Egalitarian interests

The mobilization of the working class has its roots in the identity politics of Pulayas or Ezhavas. But from the 1930s there was a conscious mobilization along class lines. While supporting and actively participating in the social reform movements in various communities, particularly of the oppressed castes, the communists sought to build class and mass organisations of various sections of people irrespective of caste and raised caste-reform slogans as part of their anti-feudal democratic struggle. The growth of the working-class movement and the Communist Party of India were concomitant in many ways. This was different from the earlier communal mobilizations since it was based on secular ideologies and the mobilization was largely vertical. The working class mostly belonged to the former untouchables (scheduled castes such as Pulaya), and backward castes such as Ezhavas. The mobilization of these groups was done on identity lines at the beginning, as that was the only legitimate point of rallying for rights and hence for a politics of emancipation against the hegemonic classes.

Social Empowerment in Kumarakom

The lowest castes were denied any form of literacy in the traditional rigid Hindu caste structure. From the end of 18th century, European missionaries who started schools throughout Kerala began to spread their ideas among the deprived sections. The social revolts by Pulayas were for freedom to walk along public roads, for school entry, temple entry, etc., and these paralleled the growth of political consciousness, which gave Pulayas a new identity, consciousness, and political status. By the early 1940s the political developments in Travancore and Cochin (with anti-state agitation on the rise) provided an environment conducive for organizational work for the Pulayas and other landless laborers. This has made their traditional exclusion from public spaces impossible and paved the way to their social empowerment, although this did not lead to economic empowerment.

Breaking the barrier of Castes in Kumarakom

The Communist Party made the first attempts to break the barrier of communalism, to build organizations for working-class unity. The trade unions organized by the leftists among coir factory workers had formed themselves into a union in Alleppey (Alappuzha) in the 1920s and started agitations by 1938. The Ezhavas’ Social Reform Movement also took this egalitarian struggle forward. The proletarian mobilizations by the Congress Socialist Party and later the Communists led to the development of a new `class’ consciousness in the place of former `caste’ consciousness among the workers of all castes. Having realized the limited possibility of their attaining equality vis-à-vis traditional upper class Christians, the neo-Christians (Pulaya converts) started responding to leftist ideology and the non-converted Pulayas tended to follow them.

Anti Communist Struggle in Kumarakom

Another radical measure was the attempt at land reforms by the Communist government through new laws to alter or abolish old land tenures and to create new ones. A few days after it took office in 1957, the legislative process for land reform began. By an Ordinance of 11 April 1957 (the Ministry was formed on 5 April), evictions were prohibited and land holdings restored to tenants who were evicted after the formation of the state of Kerala. Secondly, arrears of rent were cancelled. Thirdly, the rights of janmi landlords and intermediaries on tenanted land were taken over by the government. Where land rights vested in the government, all rent payments were stopped. Fourthly, tenancy legislation sought to give land to the tiller. There were peasant marches by the beneficiaries in support of land reforms, but `reactionary forces unleashed a massive campaign against it.’ The leaders of the two main landowner communities, the Christians and the Nairs, whose organizations radically opposed the land reforms, launched the main offensive. The upper class Christians was a dominant group in all economic and administrative spheres and business as well as farming, controlling most of the tea, rubber and coffee plantations. Alarmed by the moves of reforms (of education and land) of the Communist government, `their class position and traditional links with international anti-Communist church organizations united them with similar social and economic interests which constituted the anti-Communist resistance’. The Nair Service Society led a crusade against the bill, because the Nairs were the principal landowning community in the Travancore-Cochin area and the bill affected them. In Kumarakom the majority among Nair community were with the Communists. Among them also a shift towards anti communist camp was conspicuous.

The Churches were the meeting places of agitators of Vimochana Samaram.In 1959, the Vimochana Samaram (liberation struggle), staged by the communal organizations and political parties led to the dismissal of the Communist state government by the (Union) Government of India on 31 July 1959.

Land Reforms

After a prolonged political battle that broke two Communist governments, the Kerala Land Reforms Act was passed, effective as of 1 January 1970. It was followed by a vigorous process of political mobilization and agitation for the implementation of the legislation. The main component of the new law involved homestead land (kudikidappu) occupied by the rural poor. Occupants of such land were to be given ownership rights. The size of the plot allotted varied from 3 cents in a town or city, to 10 cents in a village, and could be purchased at 25% of the market rate and half that if the owner had land above the ceiling.

The other component of land reform concerned the imposition of limits on land ownership and the distribution of land identified as surplus to the landless. The land ceiling in Kerala, varied with the size of household; it did not exceed 25 standard acres.

In December, 1969, in a huge meeting at Alappuzha (under the auspices of the CPI (M)) in which 500,000 people attended, it was proclaimed that even if the land reform legislation is implemented or not, fencing will be done around the homesteads of agricultural laborers to assert their rights. Eighteen agricultural labor comrades became martyrs in the agitation that followed. The process of land reforms with the demand being built up from below brought about a change in the agrarian class structure. Tenancy was abolished and owner-cultivators who directly hired labor and supervised agricultural operations replaced the earlier non-cultivating renter landowners. The farmer-tied laborers were converted into an agrarian labor force with contractual relations with the employer, and these former landless laborers, whose conditions of life and work were appalling, have undergone conscious politicization enabling them to articulate their demands. The small plots transferred to landless households were also an important element in the qualitative changes brought about in the distribution of economic and social power in the Kerala countryside. According to a data from the Government of Kerala, of all rural households not less than 93% owned land and houses in which they lived. These households could now improve their bargaining power in the labor market, especially with the Agricultural Workers’ Act of 1974 and similar labor legislation by successive governments. The economic mobility obtained by the social and political changes described above impacted on the societal power relations. During the nine years from 1970, the highest percentage (63%)of increase in real daily wages of men and women were in Kerala.
Plantations, private forests, and land belonging to religious and charitable institutions were exempted from the ceiling limit. Hence, rice cultivation was the most affected by land reforms, and mainly rice and coconut lands were subdivided. The land ceiling, i.e. government appropriation and distribution of surplus land during land reforms created a large number of new landowners, most of them small and marginal.

All Owners of Land

All the families in Kumarakom thus became owners of the land they lived in. Thousands of acres of agricultural lands were declared surplus and distributed among the landless. The big landlords were forced to sell their lands at a very low price, which also helped a re-distribution of land to the landless. Thus the percentage of households not owning land drastically came down. Tillers of land became owners of their agricultural land. No other state in India achieved such a sharp fall in the number of landless.

The areas of state government intervention in Kerala that have been most significant for the people have been land reform, health, and education, and the public distribution system. All households in Kumarakom are cardholders for low priced rice, kerosene, wheat and sugar. There is one Maveli Fair price provisions shop selling domestic items run by the state owned Civil Supplies Corporation. The state has also introduced a series of measures that are intended to provide protective social security to persons outside the `organized’ sector, who are not usually covered by such schemes.

Health Service in Kumarakom

In terms of hospitals and dispensaries, the health infrastructure in Kerala is far better developed than in India as a whole: in 1989, there were 106 hospitals and dispensaries per 1000 sq km in Kerala against 12 in India, and 254 hospital and dispensary beds in Kerala per 100,000 persons against 77 in India. But Kumarakom enjoys better medical service in the public sector. It has a 50-bedded Primary Health Centre, 4 Mother and Child Development Centres, an Ayurvedic dispensary and a Homoeopathic dispensary in public sector. Under private sector there are 3 small hospitals 12 dispensaries and 3 Dental clinics.

Education

The proportion of total government expenditure spent on education in Kerala is much higher than the corresponding proportion spent by all states. Most primary school children go to state-run or state-supported schools. There are 13 schools run or supported by the state and 140 teachers working. The cost per student from government fund in this village is Rs. 3500/- per annum and 3480 students avail this benefit irrespective of their income level. In 1987-91 the Government successfully provided administrative and institutional support to the total literacy campaign.

Social Security Measures in Kumarakom

Kerala has social security measures that cover most sections of rural workers. These are mainly contributory welfare funds in which the government,the employers, and the workers participate including welfare funds for agricultural workers, fishermen, toddy, coir workers, handloom and khadi workers, and construction workers. There are also pension schemes for the destitute and the physically handicapped persons and for assisting the unemployed. In Kumarakom about 2500 people are getting various welfare pensions such as agriculture workers pension (1084), old age pension, pension to widows and destitutes, physically handicapped, fishermen etc. About 800 young men get unemployment doles at the rate of Rs. 120/- per month. Although the amount received by individual pensioners appears low, the entitlement is enough to pay for half the food-grain requirements of an adult, and that pension entitlements make an appreciable difference to the status and acceptability of older persons in the households to which they belong.

Kerala’s development experience and Kerala’s development future are matters of great importance for other states in India and internationally. Working within the constraints imposed by the Constitution of India by hostile central governments, the Left in Kerala has mobilized the people for kinds of social change unprecedented in the rest of the country.

Kerala’s achievements were possible because of the universal literacy and because of traditional patterns of gender, caste, and class dominance were transformed radically. In the conditions of contemporary India, it is worth remembering that public action, and not policies of globalization and liberalization, was the locomotive of Kerala’s progress.