Literature and Triumph of Social Modernity in Kerala
After a long
history of caste and class oppression,
followed by colonization and the complex tangle of
European rivalries that sailed in from across the
Arabia Sea, all playing itself out on the Kerala stage
(again this region was mostly a scene) in 18th and
19th centuries, the region underwent substantial cultural
transformation in the hundred years that followed the
Travancore Education Bill of 1817, promulgated by the
queen of Travancore, Rani Gauri Parvathi Bhai. Much of
the political ferment of late 19th and early 20th century
Kerala resulted from a growing popular awareness of
modernity and a willingness among the people to resist
the establishment that was sustaining the age-old casteist
society; the nexus between imperial power and its native,
high caste, royal and feudal agents made a radical resistance
all the more difficult, although in some ways the same
establishment also unwittingly contributed toward the new
ferment, a fact visible in the various popular petitions
and legislative enactments of the era resulting from more
than a century of people's struggle for individual respect.
(For a detailed study of this topic see Religion and Ideology
in Kerala by Genevieve Lemercinier. She studied 37 new
legislations enacted by the Maharajas in collaboration with
the British and found a marked shift in favor of social reforms
while the bills passed early on were economic reforms, mostly
undertaken by the Maharajah to raise money to pay tribute
to the East India Company. Click for a
peek at the high
points of this incredibly lucid research work)
It would be comforting to think that Malayalam literature
played a huge role in creating modern consciousness in
Kerala, but alas, it appears that it was the modern conscioussness
that engendered the new Malayalam literature, for even into
the early years of 20th century, the mythical mode of literary
expression persisted in poetry, and we can see traces of it even in
the
great Kumaran Asan and Vallathol, not to mention Ulloorm who never
really overcame it.
Here is a brief chronology that could offer insights into the progress
of modernity
in Kerala's political, social, and cultural life:
1800 Malabar becomes a part of the Madras Presidency
1802 abolition of special taxes on Ezhavas and Channars; grants
them right to wear jewelry
1809 Veluthambi Dalawa's Kundara Proclamation, asking the people
to throw out the foreign
invaders out
of the country at any cost (January 11); and his suicide
1810 Gauri Lakshmi Bhai becomes regent in Travancore
1812 The Maharajah confiscates vast lands held by 378 temples
1814 Special privileges of the Jews and Konkanis revoked, and
they are brought under
the jurisdiction
of the Cochin court
1815 Gauri Parvathi Bhai becomes Regent
the state declares
itself the monopoly trader in tobacco and pepper
abolition of gifts
due to the landholders from the tenants on special occasions
1821 CMS Press founded in Kottayam;
Cochin bans punishment
of slaves except by judicial process
1829 the reign of Swati Thirunal begins; Malayalam Bible published
by CMS Press.
1834 English School founded in Trivandrum
1835 The state begins to sell land, more and more repossed and uncultivated
land come into
the hands of Syrian
Christians and Ezhavas from the temples and from Brahmins
1847 Dr. Gundert begins the publication of two Malayalam journals from
Thalassery
1848 Basel mission School started in Kallayi, and a hospital in Ernakulam
1853 A Proclamation to free slaves in Travancore
1854 Slaves freed in Cochin;
1855 Slavery abolition process complete in both kingdoms
Authorization to cultivate
forest land and to bring migrant workers from Tamilnadu
1859 Proclamation allowing Channar women to cover their breasts
1860 CMS College founded in Kottayam
State monopoly over
pepper and tobacco ends
1861 Ayilyam Thirunal comes to power; railway connecting Kuttipuram
to Kadalundi in Malabar
1867 Proclamation regulating landlord and tenant transactions
1885 Sri Mulam Thirunal comes to power in Tranvancore
"Pattom" Proclamation,
granting possession of the land to tenants with the right to sell
and a ban on all forms
of unpaid work
1888 First legislative council in India established by Sri Mulam Thirunal
1890 Malayalam Manorama commences publication, March 22
1891 Malayali Memorial, demanding jobs and respect, and for ending
the practice of bringing in
high level political appointees
from outside Kerala, 10,028 signatures for the petition
1896 Dr. Palpu leads Ezhava Memorial, another massive petition proving
the rising political
consciousness of people,
especially of oppressed caste Ezhavas (13,176 signatures)
1898 Legislative Council expanded
1902 Shornur to Ernakulam railway built
1903 Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Sangam founded
1904 Travancore offers free primary education to every subject irrespective
of caste
1911 Journalist Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pilla exiled from
Travancore; his writings
routinely snarled
at the king, calling him and the Diwan corrupt, selfish thieves.
1916 Dr. Annie Besant chairs Malabar State Congress meeting
1918 The first bank of Cochin kingdom founded in Trichur
1920 Mahatma Gandhi and Shaukat Ali visit Calicut to support Khilafat
Movement,
which had its origins
in the Turkish Muslim resistance to British imperialism.
1922 Widespread student uprising in Travancore
1924 Vaikom Satyagraha begins; Gandhi participates in the satyagraha
1929 World economic crisis; civil disobedience widely adopted all over
India;
Trivandrum city electrified,
followed by Kottayam (1932)
1932 Chithira Thirunal, the final Travancore King comes to power;
Bombay-Trivandrum
air service
1934 Ideological tensions between the right and left factions casuses
a rift in the Congress party
engendering the Congress
Socialist party, and later the Communist Party
1936 Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar becomes Travancore diwan; Temple entry
proclamation on
November 12, allowing
lower castes to enter Hindu Temples
1937 Agricultural Debt Cancellation Act
1938 In Travancore and Cochin elected governments came into power sharing
power
with the kings, Ambattu
Sivarama Menon in Cochin and Pattom Thanu Pillai
in Travancore became
first ministers.
Mrs. Akkamma Cherian
leads a mass rally to the Palace to revoke a ban on State
Congress; the protesters
did receive an order revoking the ban
1939 The Communist Party founded and most of the leaders had
go into hiding.
1944 Universal adult franchise in Travancore
1946 Peasant uprising in Punnapra and Vyalar; hundreds of agricultural
workers massared
1947 Sir C.P. declares independance for Travancore on July 11,
deciding against joining
the Indian union,
but following an assasination attempt on him, Sir C.P. left Travancore
paving way for
joining the Indian union.
India wins
freedom, August 15.
1948 General election in Travancore; Minimum Wages Act in Travancore
1949 Travancore and Cochin merged; Maharaja Chithira Thirunal
of Travancore becomes
Raja Pramukhan
1956 November, 1: The State of Kerala was formed on the basis
of linguistic unity
1957 In the first general election in the united Kerala, the
Communist party came to power
1958 The controversial Communist ministry enancted provisions
for land redistribution,
debt cancellation,
tenant reimbursement, and educational regulation
1959 The President of India dismissed the Communist government in Kerala
after
massive
protests organized by various religious and political interests
(Click for an elaborate Chronology
in the context historical and cultural events in the rest of India
and the world at large)
To some extent the chronology depicts a horribly depraved society. Imagine
that lower caste women did not have the right to cover their own breasts!
Lower caste Hindus win the right enter their temples only in the middle
of the 20th century. (What a relief it is that now in the postY2K years,
we can say, oh, it was all in the last century!)
However, it must be noted that in 1853-4, both Travancore and
Cochin kingdoms passed laws emancipating slaves and bonded laborers. In
the year 1888, during the reign of Maharaja
Srimulam Thirunal, first time ever in the history of an Indian kingdom,
a legislative assembly began to participate in the administration. In the
following decades, several schools, colleges, public libraries, and newspapers
were founded all over the region that the rise of a modern sensibility
was inevitable. From the above chronology, it also appears that unlike
in the previous centuries, prose literature came to play an increasingly
important role, exercising a wide of range of social and cultural power
.
In a recent analysis of the role of women's magazines
in Malayalam literary and cultural history, Champadan Vijayan emphasized
the publication date of the first literary journal in Malayalam Vidya
Vilasini
(1881), and how the first women's magazine, Kairali Suguna
Bodhini followed soon after, in 1887. During the next one hundred years,
dozens of women's magazines came into the tiny Kerala market. Magazines
like Sarada (1904) Lakshmi Bhai (1906) Mahila Ratnam
(1916)
Mahila (1921) Sahodari Manorama Samajam, Muslim Mahila,
Vanitha Kusumum, Vanitharamam and other journals celebrated women's
life and cultivated a political constituency, regularly providing them
with articles and literary works about women's role in a changing society,
not to mention bringing them news about women in the Western countries
as well as news about those Indian women elsewhere, many who had just dared
to break through the barriers to
become the first woman doctor, first judge, first
engineer, and so on. No wonder women played key roles in the Independence
movement, and in the post-independence Malayalam literature and public
culture, women's presence was particularly noted by outside observers.
While the culture's aspiration for modernity was slowly clarifying itself
for Kerala writers, some of the major poets who will be known as poets
of a modern sensibility were still writing like the ancients. The novelists
and short story writers were already busy building up their new genres
by following the Romantic tradition of the novel set by Chandu Menon (1847-1899)
and C.V. Raman Pillai (1858-1922). Soon the poets, mainly Kumaran
Asan (1871-1924) and Vallathol Narayana Menon (1878-1958) began producing
their masterpieces, setting a clearly modernist taste, clearly breaking
free of the mythical and psudo-philosophical themes that had obsessed the
poets of the ruling class up to that point--their early works were not
that different either.
One can see that the aesthetic shift was a natural extension of the
social modernity made possible by reform. Enlightened institutions of education,
the law, the press, and several reform movements imbued the people with
a robust optimism about the future of Indian society. Now that we know
that at the heart of these reforms lay self-interest of the native ruling
class and their own masters from across the seas. In any case, Malayalam
poetry was one of the early beneficiaries of the new social environment,
and retrospectively speaking, one must agree that in the latter half of
the 20th century, Malayalam literature even became a voice of modernity,
and of course, a part of the Malayali identity itself.
In one of the well-balanced accounts of Kerala political culture, T.
J. Nossiter commented that although Kerala has a diversity of sub-cultures
with itself, often bitterly divisive, there has emerged a Malayali culture
which transcends the component cultures of caste and community, region
and village, class amd party and renders Kerala politics distinct from
the politics of other Indian states and regions. The author makes
this remark after mentioning Claremont Skrine, a British agent in Travancore
and Cochin in 1930s, who declared Kerala to be virtually ungovernable (I
wonder whether anyone thinks so in this post-Y2K age!) on account of rampant
communalism, and a total absence of discipline and civic sense. Nossiter's
brilliant book, Communism in Kerala: A Study in Political Adaptation
goes on to document the political transformation of Kerala: "Paradoxically
the Keralite is individualistic, independent, excitable, even anarchic
yet at the same time capable of intense identification with the group whether
it be the extended family, the village, caste, party, or college classmates."
Nossiter credits a numbers of factors for the cultural integration of Kerala:
education, agitation, governmental action, and mass media. And I want to
argue that Malayalam literature, particularly poetry, deserves to be mentioned
as a key factor that contributed toward integration, a process that
took place in conjuction with the rise of social modernity, which was
for Kerala a radical shift in culture and aesthics, although initially
it appeared that literature was
out of touch as long as it was a pastime of the high caste and the
landed aristocracy.
(this segment is a work-in-progress)
Twentieth Century Malayalam Poetry: Next
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