CHAPTER- V REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN KAYAR: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

As elsewhere in the colonial societies, interaction between the structures of domination institutionalized by colonialism and the ways in which indigenous responses to it were evolved forms the central theme of the social history of the modern Malayali society as well. During the post-colonial phase, once the tumultuousness of the anti- colonial political struggles got subsided, and the society moved on to the specific historical juncture of nation building, there developed a literary trend in the literary arena of presenting the history of social change (modernization as a social experience that the various localized popular communities had undergone) through story narratives. On account of its vastness and elasticity, novel proved to be the most preferred format for epitomizing the convergence of history and literature on the theme of social change.

The novel Kayar by Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai published in 1978 presents the trajectory of the historical development of the modern society in . As has been mentioned, this novel has been conceived as a narrative depicting the transformation process in all the diverse aspects of life in a particular region, the Takazhi village, the author’s own provenance and its immediate neighborhood in from the nineteenth century colonial situation to the introduction of land reforms in the democratic era during the early 1970s. As an addendum to the juxtaposition of the literary and historical representations of the social change process, this section seeks to make a historical analysis of the same accomplished in the Kayar narrative.

All narrative representations are multi-layered process operating at three levels. We do have at first the objects in reality, and then the representations of these objects. In the third plane, each representation drags along with itself its own represented, just as we are accompanied by our own shadow on a sunny day1. This representation’s represented self image in this context may be considered as the political sensibility of

1 Frank Ankorsmit, “Truth in History and Literature” in Narrative Vol. 18 No. 1, January 2010, p. 40

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the historical representation. To make sense of this political sensibility of the historical representation, the text has to be situated in the context of the dominant institutions, social practices and discourses which shape the culture of the time of its production. Scholarship on Takazhi generally regards Kayar as a compendious tale of tales where all the motifs that had obsessed Takazhi’s mind in the earlier works taking a rebirth2. This is particularly so because deep affiliation to the land and landscape of Kuttanad have formed the spatiality of Takazhi’s entire literary universe. The interactions between the micro and macro level social processes have formed the apparent concern of Takazhi’s narratives. Historical events taking place at the national or supra-national planes have their actualization in the story narratives in relation to how it leaves its impacts on the local social terrain. Part of the Kayar narrative representation is autobiographical in nature and much of the stories and delineations are modeled after local personalities and myths and legends3. The social milieu that the Kayar narrative represents denote a shifting configuration in the social vision of the author from a perspective that sees class struggles to mutual accommodation of communities as the essence of the social relations4. While illuminating the political sensibility of the narrative representation or the representation’s self image, one may situate the literary universe of Takazhi in general in the backdrop of the transformation that the Malayali cultural landscape had undergone in the wake of its engagement with colonial modernity.

Being conceptualized as a creative response to the process of cultural amnesia induced by the colonial experience, the intuitive spirit that sets up the Kayar representation was nationalist envisioning. Since there is a close affinity between nationalism in colonial societies and the orientalist project of rediscovering the lost past, it is quite natural that knowledge forms born out of the colonial discourses starting with orientalist ventures and later being appropriated by the colonized intellectuals would continue to be a profound influence in the postcolonial imaginings as well5. To trace this linkage between the colonial epistemology and the aspects of novelistic representations with due recognition to the deviations forms another concern of this venture. While reflecting these divergences, an undertaking is made to unearth the political sensibility

2 K. , Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Trivandrum, 1988, p. 124 3 See, Introduction in N. Sreekantan Nair, Kayar (English Translation), New Delhi, 1998. 4 K. N. Panikkar, “Literature as History of Social Change” in Social Scientist Vol. 40 No. ¾, March-April 2012, pp. 14-15 5Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London and New York, 2002, pp. 17-18

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of the novel followed by a brief appendage dealing with an attempt to make sense of the socio-political meaning conveyed by the narrative.

Modernity and Transformations: The Case of Malayali Cultural Landscape

During the early years of the nineteenth century, when British colonialism was established, feudal ideologies and symbolisms had dominated the cultural landscape of the indigenous Malayali society. The forms of cultural production and reception that had been in circulation in the major princely houses of Travancore, Cochin, Kodungallur, Pandalam and Mavelikkara etc. and in their dependent feudal families had held hegemony in culture. Lion share of the total literary production were in the form of Attakatha, Thullal, short poems, instant verses, and the prose poem that appear vary rarely in the Champoos and Sandesakavyas. Those Avarnas who were adept in Sanskrit and literature were also depended on these literary models. Still, it may not be improper to estimate that the main patrons of these literary creations based on the Sanskrit and Dravidian meters, rhetoric and poetic forms were chiefly drawn from the elite classes of the society6. Even though, these literary productions conveying the aesthetic flavors ranging from devotion to erotic exuberance had exercised powerful influence in the feudal circles, they were presumed to have nothing to do with the intellections and sensibilities of the masses at large7.

During the nineteenth century, the literary horizon witnessed the production of no such creations that can be compared to the central tradition of exemplified by the folk poetry of the antiquity and later the Rama Charitam and gradually evolving through the Niranam Poets, Cherusseri, Poonthanam, Ezhutthachan and Kunjan Nambiar8. Sanskrit had formed the basis of the nineteenth century feudal cultural sensibilities as well as the specific modes of literary production and reception. The Sastris who came from Madras and Bombay Presidencies and elsewhere in South India had taught Sanskrit in the royal/feudal houses. Later on, many indigenous Gurukulams like the Kodungallur Kovilakam and Koodallur Mana had undertaken Sanskrit instruction. For certain period, Sanskrit literary ethos continued to inspire the

6 K. N. Ganesh, Keralathinte Innalekal (The Yesterdays of Kerala), Trivandrum, 1997, p. 309 7The encouragement given to the promotion of classical arts and the decline of popular art forms like Thullal during the early 19th century. See, Ibid., pp. 328-329 8 K. Ayyappa Paniker, A Short History of , Thiruvananthapuram, 2006, p.49

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feudal intellectuals even after they had undergone acquaintance with the English language and modes of literary production9. The influence of Sanskrit was greater in the Malayalam works of these feudal litterateurs as compared to the literary creations of Cherusseri, Ezhutthachan, Poondanam and Kunjan Nambiar who had lived prior to nineteenth century.

Development of prose literature was the most important impact of the nineteenth century European intellectual influences in Malayalam. It was the missionary prose that had liberated Malayalam from the conventional pattern marked by a long and complex style as exemplified in the Champoos and the Grandhavaris10. English language became the chief source of all the myriad forms of worldly knowledge for the missionaries as well as a generation got educated in the missionary educational institutions. The faint beginning of modern Malayalam prose was there in the periodicals that had emerged by about the mid-nineteenth century. The more simple, direct and informal pieces of articles appeared in these publications were modeled after English essays11. English novels were imitated in the name of narratives. The writers of the age were influenced by such genres as the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, Gothic Novels, the social novels of Dickens, M.R.S Henry Wood, Elizabeth Gaskell etc., the romantic creations of such popular writers as G. W. M. Reynolds, and the allegories like Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. While Archdeacon Koshy’s Parishkkarapathi was modeled after Pilgrim’s Progress, in Kundalata, there was said to be an explicit Gothic influence in its makeup12. As far as the development of the Malayalam language was concerned, the nineteenth century scenario was marked by the maturation of two parallel streams viz. the one represented by the Sanskritized Malayalam embodied in the indigenous feudal cultural ethos and the other characterized by a more Anglicized style becoming increasingly popular through the middleclass who were the beneficiaries of the missionary education. Out of a synthesis of these two parallel streams, emerged the standardized modern Malayalam language13. It must be noted in this context that, A.R. Rajaraja Varma who prepared rules of grammar and rhetoric for the evolving

9 V. Aravindakshan, “The Literary Traditions of Kerala” in P. J. Cheriyan (ed.) Essays on the Cultural Formations of Kerala, Trivandrum, 1999, Available on the Internet @ http://www.keralahistory.ac.in 10Samual Nellimukal, Keralathile Samoohya Parivarthanam (Social Transformation of Kerala), Kottayam, ----, 2003, pp. 512-517 11 P. K. Parameswaran Nair, History of Malayalam Literature, Translation by E.M.J. Venniyoor, New Delhi, 1956, pp. 119-120 12 K. N. Ganesh, op.cit., p. 310 13 V. Aravindakshan, op.cit.

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standardized modern Malayalam language was also well-versed in English and classical Sanskrit studies, apart from acquiring some knowledge in Tamil.

Renaissance and the Making of Language

It was through the experience of social renaissance that the newly developing standardized modern Malayalam to take roots in the Kerala society. There were several counter currents to social renaissance. During the colonial phase, once, the landlord- tenant relations came under the scan of colonial law and the land ownership rights were invested with the male heads of the families, the inherited patterns of family structure began to undergo the process of transformation14. The indigenous forms of gender relations, marriage customs and the rights of succession, all began to be subjected to a critical revaluation in the light of the newly introduced colonial values. The mores of joint family system were challenged and the monogamous conjugality based on the sentimentality of individual romance was encouraged15.

In the context of the changing land relations under the colonial rule, the hegemony of the elite castes in social relations was strengthened16. The members of the colonial middleclass, especially during the early phase were also chiefly drawn from these powerful caste groups. Colonial restructuring of the economy facilitated the economic empowerment of the intermediary caste groups17.When forces of socioeconomic changes released by colonial reforms deeply penetrated into the relatively stable Malayali agrarian society, many of the social controls and restrictions that had been survived as part of traditional social hierarchies came to be increasingly felt as obsolete. Awareness of caste oppression became intense18. Reactions to them took the form of social reform movements. Starting with the reformist discourses set in by the Ayya Vaikuntar and the Shannar uprisings, the lineage of these anti-caste social reforms went on to encompass the Sree Narayana movement and the reform endeavors of Aiyan Kali, Poykayil Appachan and Sahodaran Ayyappan. Vary often, those sections

14 G. Arunima, There Comes Pappa Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala Malabar, New Delhi, 2003, p. 191 15Meera Velayudhan, “Growth of Political Consciousness Among Women in Modern Kerala” in P. J. Cheriyan (ed.), Perspectives on Kerala History: The Second Millennium, Thiruvananthapuram, 1999, pp. 487-488 16 David Washbrook, “South India 1770-1840: the Colonial Transitions” in Modern Asian Studies Vol. 38 No. 3, July 2004, p. 506 17 D. Damodaran Namboodiri, “Caste and Social Change in Colonial Kerala” in P.J. Cheriyan, op.cit., p. 436 18 Ibid., p. 434

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of the subaltern castes groups who were benefited from the expansion of colonial economy could be seen to have stood in the front of such agitations, or at least only such social movements organized by those economically empowered communities could successfully negotiate with modernity19. Anyhow, these anti-caste agitations turned out to be an important episode in the Malayali social transformations. With the unfolding of modernity, a new public space marked by such modern cultural symbols as education, public health, print media- press and the periodicals and the public platforms at large had gradually come to be constituted. These new space was opened to all and all sections of society including the lower caste groups and the various religious communities had actively came forward to participate in it. It had progressively replaced the various localized social spaces marked by the different caste identities that had been well a part of the feudal social order20. The different religious communities had appropriated their own distinct domains within this new public space. The organizations of the various Christian denominations, the Muslim organizations, and various caste and community associations, the organizations of the pan-India based socio-religious associations etc. had endeavored to create their own autonomous spaces within the broad public domain and attempted to act as pressure groups in the socio-political spheres21. Within each of these caste and religious communities, drive for self-revitalization had preceded the formation of their respective social organizations. Parallel to the social reformation and purification movements among the Christians and Muslims, there had been attempts to integrate the various caste communities under the umbrella of a common Hindu community. A new temple culture inclusive of the various caste groups had become a referential marker for this newly projected Hindu culture22. It was through the experience of social renaissance that the standardized modern Malayalam language and diction which emerged towards the close of the nineteenth century and had been continuously molded through the critical craftsmanship of a long line of literary critiques ranging from A.R. Rajaraja Varma, Sahitya Panchananan P.K. Narayana Pillai, , M.P. Paul, Kuttikrishna Marar etc. to the numerous

19 Sunil P. Elayidom, “Cross Currents within the Cultural Critique of Social Renaissance in Kerala”, Paper Presented in the Seminar on Kerala Towards New Horizons, Organized by Jan Sanskriti, New Delhi in Connection with the Centenary Celebrations of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, 2009, Available on the Internet @ http://www.janasamskriti.org/ilayidom.pdf 20 J. Devika, Engendering Individual: the Language of Re-forming in Twentieth Century Keralam, Hyderabad, 2007, pp. 4-7 21 D. Damodaran Namboodiri, op.cit., pp. 440-441 22 Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858-1936, New Delhi, pp. 149-187

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contemporary critiques came to be popularized in the society at large. The popularization of standardized Malayalam was actively aided by such developments as the expansion of the print media, dissemination of modern education and the wide circulation of text books23. Spirit of renaissance had its implications in the themes and forms of literary productions. Preoccupation with such emotional sensibilities as romantic love and loss, elegy, ecstasy and the celebration of the innate endowments of the nature and the humans had progressively replaced the emotional expressions of devotion and eroticism in poetry. Fictional writings in the form of novels and short stories carrying themes based on various episodes in Kerala history as well as the evolving conditions of social life had appeared in the literary scene. Social criticisms attuning to the renaissance ideals had formed an integral aspect of such literary productions24. Reflections of the contemporary socio-political life were conspicuous in the historical novels as well25. The social novels like , Sarasvativijayam, Vasumati etc., the trilogies of C.V. Raman Pillai on the history of Travancore and the short prose narratives of such writers as Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar and M.R.K.C., were all representative of this tradition. Elements of powerful social criticism were also obvious in the burlesque forms of literary productions that had been flourishing since the early decades of the twentieth century26. Even though, the standardized version of modern Malayalam that matured through these writings had assimilated into itself the politico-cultural ambiance of the social reformations and nationalist sentiment, these works could not transgress the limits set in by the age-old feudal traditions and the western world view internalized by the colonial middleclass. The values, norms and concepts regarding the purity of the literature and social discourses that had been carefully nurtured by the new middleclass had reordered the normative structure of the newly standardized language. Consequently, the diverse colloquial dialects and linguafrancas belonging to the different localities of Kerala were excluded from the standardized version of writing language. The language used by the elite middleclass men who had dominated the nascent public space born out of the colonial discourse

23 V. Aravindakshan, op.cit., p. 36 24 K. Ayyappa Paniker, A Short History of Malayalam Literature, pp. 58-73 25“Though it is the practice to designate his (C.V. Raman Pillai’s) novels as historical novels, it is more appropriate to call them as Prof. N. Krishna Pillai has suggested, political novels.” See V. Aravindakshan, op.cit., p. 37 26 See the discussions on the dramatic works by C.V. Raman Pillai, Kocheepan Tharakan, K.P. Karuppan and E.V. Krishna Pillai in K. Ayyappa Paniker, op.cit., p. 77

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became the accepted writing language27. Even though, contrary movements in the form of the Mappilapattu tradition of Malabar and the Pacchamalayala Prastanam which were counterposed to the aforesaid dominant strand by envisaging literary activity in the pure Malayalam (as opposed to the over Sanskritic influence), they could not emerge as dominant literary trend. The works based on localized colloquial dialects were also received no encouragement from the contemporary periodicals as well28. Whereas dialectal variations had appeared in some of the early fictional writings even though there were no dialogues in them, later on, that too had ceased. Literary Associations and the Stabilization of the Language Formulations

During the early half of the twentieth century, there was a marked expansion in the dissemination of school education. In consonance with this, the number of writers as well as platforms of readership began to show a steady increase. Periodicals and other literary publications as well as the number of writers contributing literary pieces to them also grew in number. The literary journals like Bhashaposhini, the Matrubhumy Weekly, Sujananandini, Rasikaranjini, Mangalodayam etc. had attained name and fame. Literature discussions and literary conferences (Sahityasamachams) also gained popularity in the literate circles. In due course, Samasta Kerala Sahitya Samacham came to be established as the common forum of the litterateurs29.

Along with the popularization of the renaissance ideas, many of the literary movements and ideals such as romanticism and naturalism became influential with the writers. The writers of the age came to be increasingly introduced to the literary creations and movements in the European languages other than English30. European luminaries like Tolstoy, Victer Hugo, Emile Zola, Ibsen etc. were unveiled before the literary enthusiasts. During this face, the literary field could be seen to have increasingly come under the influx of the nationalist movement and such political credos as socialism and communism as illustrated by the production of many literary works carrying the themes and messages of nationalism and social reformation. The echoes of such a socio- political mooring are well-evident even in the writings of Ulloor, and

27K. N. Ganesh, “Malayala Sahityathinte Samskarika Bhoomisastram (The Cultural Landscape of Malayalam Literature)” in Nammute Sahityam Nammute Samooham (Our Literature and Our Society) Vol. II, Trissur, 2000, pp. 640-651 28 Ibid. 29 P. K. Parameswaran Nair, op.cit., pp. 284-286 30 Ibid., p. 133

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Vallathol, the poets otherwise being labeled as the representatives of the romantic tradition31.

Still, the emergence of writers clinging to patriotic nationalism as an outright endorsement of the anti-colonial politics typified by such figures as Bharatendu Harishchandra and Bankim Chandra Chatopadhyay was comparatively late to witness in the Malayalam literary horizon. K.M. Panikkar who wrote historical novels extolling nationalist figures was an exception to this general trend. Only after the 1930s that, such works began to appear in Malayalam32. On the other hand, there appeared many works produced as part of the social reform campaigns portraying the pathos and decadence as survived in the established social order and evoking affirmative action from the social conscience in favor of a better society. To this category, one may include the writers like V.T. Bhattathiripad, M.B. Bhattathiripad, K.P. Karuppan, Sahodaran Ayyappan, Premjee etc33. K. Sarasvatiyamma, Lalitambika Andarjanam34 and the group of writers who were the authors of the play Tozhil Kendrathilekku35 representing the women voices.

There was a virtual absence of a clearly evolved anti-colonial literature in the Malayalam literary arena. To work out a satisfactory formulation to explain such an absence may be a difficult proposition. Apart from the political reality of administrative disunity into which the three localities viz. Malabar, Cochi and Travancore were placed into, such an explanation would involve the way in which the standardized version of modern Malayalam had evolved into a fully grown writing language. It has been pointed out that the standardized Malayalam had born out of a social engagement between the vanishing feudal cultural traditions and the emerging colonial middleclass36. Along with the avenues of print media and the sprouting print publications, one of the important factors that became crucial in this respect was the expansion of institutionalized educational initiatives paying way for the promotion of literacy in society. In the sphere of education, the part played by the private agencies and the state brought about positive

31 K. K. N. Kurupp, Nationalism and Social Change: the Role of Malayalam Literature, Trissur, 1998, pp. 61-71 32K. N. Ganesh, “Malayala Sahityathinde Samskkarika Bhoomisastram” in op.cit., p. 648 33 K. Ayyappa Paniker, A Short History of Malayalam Literature, pp. 77-79 34 Ibid., p. 88 35 Sunil P. Ilayidom, op.cit., p. 12 36 See, B. Rajeevan, “Cultural Formation of Kerala” in P. J. Cheriyan (ed.) Essays on the Cultural Formations of Kerala.

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changes in terms of the expansion of education in the princely states as compared to the Malabar region which was directly under the colonial rule37. In the backdrop of the general social environment facilitated by the print, media and education, the standardized Malayalam soon got adapted as the common popular language. Distinct from the familiar colonial experience, there had been no attempts at developing fresh articulative forms for the linguistic and literary processes in Malayalam through the anti- colonial struggles38. The experience of writers deriving stirrings from resistance movements- as was the case with Deenabandhu Mitra, Bharatendu Harishchandra, Bankim and others were motivated by the nineteenth century political struggles could not be seen to have reenacted in Kerala in the similar mode. Still, there were literatures echoing powerful anti-establishment sentiments. Anti-feudal sentiments of Travancore were reflected in the writings of K. Narayana Kurukkal and the anti-colonial politics in Malabar was vindicated through the writings of Vidvan P. Kelu Nair39. However, during the early decades of the twentieth century, In Malayalam, there was no such popular nationalist litterateur comparable to the stature of Subramania Bharati in Tamil.

It was during the 1930s that, change began to witness in this situation. The works of Rabindernath Tagore, especially that of Gitanjali introduced a new pan- Indian nationalist sensibility in Malayalam, the influence of this, at its best was reflected in the writings of G. Sankara Kurup40. The works of Edappalli Raghavan Pillai and Changampuzha Krishna Pillai heralded a new sensibility moulded by an outright rejection of the feudal traditions and the modernity induced liberal romantic perceptivity41. The Ibsonite traditions were prolific in the writings of N. Krishna Pillai. It was in this context that, the Malayalam literature broke off from the semi-feudal colonial mould which was accomplished through the growth of the Jeevatsahitya) life- oriented literature) movement.

The Importance of the Jeevatsahitya Movement

It was during the 1930s that the life-oriented literature movement began to grow. It was not merely the adherence to socialism and the politicization of the masses that

37 P. R. Gopinathan Nair, “Education and Socioeconomic Change in Kerala, 1793-1947” in Social Scientist Vol. 4 No. 8, March 1976, pp. 28-43 38K. N. Ganesh, “Malayala Sahityathinde Samskkarika Bhoomisastram”, p. 651 39 Ibid. 40 P. K. Parameswaran Nair, op.cit., p. 233 41 Ibid., p. 240

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signified the Jeevatsahitya Movement. As far as the new breed of the life-oriented literature was concerned, there was a conspicuous change in the selection of themes, modes of representation and the practice of language42. It was the social anxieties and the personal sentiments of the downtrodden and women that conveyed through the Jeevatsahitya. Munshi Premchand, Rashit Jahan, Ismat Chughtai, Makhdoom Mohiyuddin, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Mulk Raj etc. were the prominent faces of the movement at the national level. They had penned several works which may be qualified as the finest examples of the realist trend. The part played by the progressive literature in fashioning a popular literary sensibility was considered to be a remarkable one. It was the Jeevatsahitya movement that had proved to be seminal in democratizing the social sensitivity of literature in Kerala43. The middleclass orientation of Malayalam literature which had hitherto been the norm was broke off by such creations as and Rakta Pushppangal by Changampuzha, Tottiyute Makan and Randitangazhi by Takazhi, Odayil Ninnu by Kesavadev etc. The influence these creations had exerted on those people who had got schooled during the 1930s and 40s and turned up as marginal workers was not insignificant44. This influence was fostered by developing a popular language as distinct from the standardized writing language. In this respect, it differed from the North Indian experience where the visual forms of communication such as dramas and cinemas had lavishly been employed for taking the messages of progressivism effectively to the illiterate public along with conscious literary production in Urdu (the language of the commoners) as opposed to the more Sanskritized Hindi. This popular Malayalam developed through the life-oriented literary discourse possessed immense potentialities. While Ponkunnam Varkey welded together to it the dialect of the farmers of Central Travancore, the tongue prevailed in Ponnani and Tirur got expressed through the writings of . Similarly, Vaikam Muhammed Basheer added to it the texture of the popular dialect in the regions around Vaikam and Talayolaparamb, where as the writers like P.P. Muhammed Koya and N.P. Muhammed

42Selvyn Jussy, “A Constitutive and Distributive Economy of Discourse: Left Movement in Kerala and the Commencement of a Literary Moment” in Social Scientist Vol. 33 No. 11/12, November-December 2005, p. 38 43 E. V. Ramakrishnan, “Radicalizing Literature: Role of Translation in the Creation of a Literary Public Sphere” in EFL Journal 3:1 January 2012. 44 K. N. Ganesh, “Samskarika Parivarthanathinde Sahacharyangalil Takazhi” (Takazhi in the Situations of Cultural Transformations) in Jnanapeettha Punarvayana (Jnanapith Rereading), Ernakulam, 2013, p. 156

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crafted the Mappila Malayalam in it. Now that through the Dalit literary movement and women’s writings, this popular language bears the possibilities to grow further45.

The popular language which had been main-streamed by the Jeevat Sahitya literary discourses personified the diverse speeches of the various socially downtrodden groups such as the scavengers, the Pulayas and Parayas, the Mukkuvar, marginal farmers, workers in the urban environs, the illiterate masses of all classes and social backgrounds etc. Beyond the representation of these diverse tongues, the delineation of the subaltern stories would inevitably involve the portrayal of their life surroundings, social customs, believes and traditions46. Very often, the representation of such social facets as family systems, man-woman relations, occupational patterns, socio-cultural relations, political behavior etc. had amounted to the reiteration of the historically evolved divergences between the value systems and cultural markers of the elites and the popular. A simple celebration of these cultural heterogeneity would have certainly resulted in a situation characterized by the saturation of these immense plurality long survived as part of the social traditions. Strongly committed to the cause of nationalism and the ideal of an egalitarian social order, the life-oriented literature had been quite reluctant to construct such a profile for the social diversities. Instead, its overarchic preoccupation was with the conjoining of these diversities in a common front against capital and the feudal traditions47. An integral aspect of this political project was the dovetailing of a popular language form combining the elements of the earlier standardized Malayalam and the social discourses capable of generating a popular communication.

The advances made by the life-oriented literature movement in furthering the cause of the popular language and cultural forms which had begun since the 1930s have still remain as more or less an incomplete socio-political project. During the period leading to the formation of the Kerala state and the decade immediately following it had witnessed the production of several literary, dramatic and cinematic creations in the genre of social realism, there by epitomizing the peoples’ struggle for socio-political changes. However, the remarkable progress attained in terms of the making of such a popular culture and language since the 1930s had been backlashed in the wake of the

45 Ibid. 46 P. K. Parameswaran Nair, op.cit., pp. 133-139 47 K. N. Ganesh, “Samskarika Parivarthanathinde Sahacharyangalil Takazhi”, p. 156

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1970s, when the middleclass values and cultural forms became strengthened in the dominant social consciousness48. It was the stumbles and weaknesses involved in the project of the ‘popular language and culture in the making’ that has contributed to the genesis of the various contemporary discourses centering identity formation in Malayalam literature.

Situating Takazhi in the Context of Cultural Transition

The literary universe of Takazhi is the landscape of Kuttanad with the horizon being focused on its geographical and socioeconomic identity getting interacted with the rest of the world and undergoing transformation in the wake of the major socio-political changes of the twentieth century. While reflecting these social changes, Takazhi is not merely practicing literature subscribing to a subaltern perspective, but portraying the functioning of the feudal order i.e. the landlord-tenant relations and the master-slave relations, its customs and practices, sorrows and joyfulness and the pathos and tragedies which had been intimately known to him through the acquaintanceship with the land and the people49. The perspective shift brought about by the Jeevat Sahitya discourse in the form of a departure from the themes revolving around elite social spaces to those centering the everyday life of the commoners has formed the basic frame to which the over-all complexion of Takazhi’s writings is orientated50. While there was an obvious eloquence for socio-political reforms on socialist lines in his writings of 1930s and 1940s, the period following independence, there had been a waning away in the reformist overtones. To historicise the processes of social change i.e. to fictionalize the travails endured by the indigenous communities firmly rooted in the localized socio- cultural moorings in assimilating the forces of modernity as represented by the nation- state and its rhetoric of social equality, secularism, democracy and development on the one hand and the universalization of capitalistic and patriarchal values as civilizational advancements on the other seemed to become the major literary concern. A survey of Kayar amply illustrates it51. Critically reflecting the societal implications involved in the

48 K. Satchidanandan, “Society and Literature” in Seminar No. 637, September 2012, Available on the Internet @ http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/637/637_k_satchidanandan.htm 49 K. N. Ganesh, “Samskarika Parivarthanathinde Sahacharyangalil Takazhi”, p. 157 50 K. Ayyappa Paniker, Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai, p. 136 51 See Venu Menon, “Pantheon Revisited: Takazhi”, Available on the Internet @ http://www.venumenon.com/articles/article page.asp?catid=6&artid=15 Retrieved on 3/27/2011

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historical transformation from feudalism to capitalism form the core of the Kayar narrative.

Chronicling Social Change-Representations In Kayar: A Synoptic View

Configured in the mould of an epic encompassing several short stories and sub- stories, themes and sub-themes, local legends and oral memories, Kayar narrates the process of social transformation involving several generations. Kayar is the story of an entire epoch unfolding through the events of four generations. In the author’s own words, its scope goes on like this:

I have tried to depict in this work the process of transformation in all aspects of life of a specific region of Travancore, from a particular phase to the introduction of land reforms. I have tried to narrate all changes in society beginning with the story of human thirst for land. There is no hero. There is no heroine. Society is the hero and society is the heroine.52

The novel is focused on changes in social structures, institutions and ideologies as experienced by individuals who accounts for large number of characters, over several hundreds in number reflecting different dimensions of the social transformation process. Among the numerous themes of social history coming for treatment, three facets being represented as central to the social transformation to modernity. They are changes in the land control regimes, man-woman relations and ideological reorientations and their political implications. In between the two supposedly defining events in the history of Malayali modernity i.e. the Kandezhutth or the first systematic land settlement of the nineteenth century and the land reforms of the democratic era, 1957 onwards culminating in the Land Reforms Act that came into force in 1970, society was represented as undergoing transformation in an exhaustive manner. However, not withstanding these dimension of transformation, there was an intriguing continuity in terms of the essential impulses of the peoples’ social psychology53. This continuity is marked by a disguised appearance of a social sensibility reminiscent of feudal mentality manifested by the middleclass habit of despising manual work, corrupt and nepotistic tendencies in political power structure, enduring influence of the primordial traditions like caste, community, locale, family and kinship over social consciousness etc.

52Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Preface to Kayar, Kottayam, 1978-2011 53 B. Rajeevan “Kayarile Rashtreeyaghadakangal” (Political Factors of Kayar) in V. S. Sharma (ed.) Thakazhiyum Malayala Novalum (Takazhi and ), Thiruvananthapuram, 1991, p. 333

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The beginning of change in the narrative was heralded by the coming of the land classifying officer in the village as per the royal directive to conduct land settlement. The settlement introduced a fundamental change in revenue collection by replacing the traditional mode of payment in kind by cash54. This was a part of the ongoing process of monetization of the economy. Cash collection of land revenue together with the removal of controls over land transfers were bound to have a far-reaching impact on the rural society. Kayar presents the changes it brought through the meticulous delineation of the life of six upper-caste feudal families who progressively lost control over land. The decline of their control over land was correspondingly led to a rise in the fortunes of the Christian and Muslim communities. The members of these communities who had began their career as crop sharing cultivators, petty traders or dependents of the Nair families become owners of large landholdings. Gradually this class benefited from the commercialization of the economy, expansion of plantations and thereby became the effective protagonists of land-based capitalist production. Profits from commercial ventures began to be invested in land purchases, advancing of cash loans, organizing agriculture on capitalist lines and thus stabilizing monitory exchanges in the local agrarian society. In the meanwhile with the introduction of cash wage, the institution of attached labour began to crumble and thereby making the functioning of feudal order unfeasible55. Production for market progressively replaced production for subsistence.

With the growth of capitalist relations in agricultural organizations, intermediary interest on land matured and rent appropriation on landholdings became extensive. The landholdings came to be increasingly concentrated with the non-cultivating sections such as creditors and capitalist landlords. Forceful evictions of the landless tenants and hutment dwellers increased. In this context, there emerged political mobilization of the peasantry56.

Land reforms in the democratic era marked another phase in the transformation process. Even though, landlordism was formally abolished and landless householders and cultivating tenants were invested with ownership rights, the reforms in general had reinforced the already emerging prospects of increasing fragmentation and subdivision of landholdings on account of the mounting pressure of population. Consequently,

54 See, Kayar, 1. 9-10 55 Kayar, 29. 217 56 See, Kayar, 93. 542 and 94. 547

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organizing agriculture, especially the low-cash profiled subsistence agriculture turned out to be less viable for marginal cultivators. The notion of absolute ownership rights over soil was firmly established in the people’s consciousness. Ownership rights over land became a matter of contention between various interests connected to agriculture57. In fact, changing control over land was central to the process of social transformation that Kayar depicts.

Another significant dimension of the social change representation is the documentation of transforming relations of gender in consonance with the wider societal changes. In the feudal order, Women sexuality had been manipulated and controlled by patriarchal authorities to the extent that arbitrary imposition of conjugality upon women by family heads in the name of family honour without a concern to their will was the norm. However, there was no greater insistence for ensuring the maintenance of those relations, thus giving way for more elastic kind of conjugality. While in most cases, women meekly submitting themselves to the decisions of Karanavans, a few faces appearing by asserting their independence and idealizing enduring relations. Importantly, such voices of dissonances in the narrative were from non-aristocratic backgrounds58. In the context of the structural changes institutionalized by the colonial economic reforms, matrilineal joint families as production units began to decline. Conflicts over resource sharing which had conventionally been there in the joint families assumed newer proportions. Family heads misappropriating the corporate property of the family which was exclusively meant for collective enjoyment had led to legal disputations eventually leading to the dissolution of joint families themselves.

With the spread of liberal values through modern education, many fundamental changes began to appear in the man-woman relations. Ideas of monogamous union, patrilineal descent, individual partition of joint family property and separate living, all became part of the social imaginations of the emerging middleclass which owe its fortunes to both colonial education and to a lesser extend the various socioeconomic changes impelled by colonialism. Personal acquisition of property strengthened natural inclination for more stable conjugal ties. Despite the structuring of internal relations in the matrilineal families along the hierarchies of gender and age, rules of descent and practice of matrilocality afforded a permanent identity for women in their natal home.

57 Kayar, 131. 702-703 58 See, Kayar, 39. 257

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This identity was born out of the economic foundation of the Tarawad which had afforded women a sense of belonging and stability. With the disintegration of joint families in the wake of the expansion of the commercial/capitalist economy, patriarchical small families were universalized. Shift from customary practices to modern laws to regulate marriage, family, property and other related aspects had given an edge for men. Men became the legal protectors and providers of the nuclear families with the women being pushed back to economic dependency. The new marriage ideals that sanctify monogamous conjugality had in fact lessened the individual’s control over their own sexuality59.

Colonial discourse and the ideological reorientation with their implications on the socio-political processes form the major aspect that got representation in the narrative. The narrative begins in a context where feudal ideology reigns supreme in the society. Notions of protection and dependence had formed the ideological basis of social hierarchies. Power and wealth were monopolized by a few elites having superior caste status. However, elements of conflicts were present in many ways. Though unquestioning loyalty and obedience by the subordinate classes to the feudal aristocracy led by Brahmins and king was the greatest norm, voices of dissent and protest were impinged upon social relations60. The agrarian social ethic which had sway over the indigenous imaginations, especially over the perceptions of the middle classes who had served as the vindicators of the feudal institutions and power structures was characterized by a feudal orientation and self-consciously elitist texture. Wealth attained through any means other than working in the land was not favorably perceived. The virtues of accumulating wealth, incurring debts and profiteering were looked down on with disdain61. In the course of time, customary form of governments functioning on the basis of loyalty and attachments gradually replaced by modern style administrative institutions and practices. However, since both the men who run the administration and the local populace upon whom its rules were imposed were influenced by the deep historical forces exemplified by the age-old feudal traditions, vary often feudal practices were successfully adapted to the impersonal system of administration that became popular under the colonial influences.

59 Kayar, 127. 689 60 Ibid., 16. 122-125 and 40. 259-262 61 Ibid., 1. 13

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Transformation of society from a subsistence orientation to the market orientation was marked by the emergence of a middleclass, economically empowered through commercial activities and socially symbolizing liberal outlooks attained through exposure to modern education. By effectively challenging the feudal controls, this class had served as the agents of modernity in socioeconomic as well as political spheres. They gave the led to the various socio-political movements of the twentieth century culminating with the end of colonial and monarchical regimes and the heralding of constitutional democracy. However, the political class in democracy, reminiscent of the feudal era has continued to be tempted towards exercising power in favor of vested interests by sacrificing their much aired commitments to public goods.

Narratology and Ideological Context: Breaking New Grounds in Imagination

Just like coir shaped by yarning fibers made of coconuts husks into each direction, the narrative pattern of Kayar is coiled up by spinning together various short stories dealing with diverse aspects relating to rural life situations embedded in different socio-historic contexts. As one wishes, it can be spun over both backwards from the late nineteenth century land classification processes where the narrative begins and to forwards from the reforms of the 1970s to where it ends to the contemporary land situation62. The narrative pattern is marked by an intriguing style combining the linear and cyclical mode of chronology. Such a style signifies the political message that the narrative sought to convey. As has been mentioned, the overarchic assumption of the narrative is that, notwithstanding the multifaceted changes in the social structure, institutions and ideological sensibilities in conjuncture with the historical dynamics, there was a remarkable continuity in terms of social psychology63. A constant interlacing of the present which is a concrete historical reality and memories from the past can be seen to have been characterizing the narrative technique of Kayar from its very beginning till the end. Every present situations of the narrative carry a past memory

62 M. B. Benni, “Akhyanathile Nattormakal” (Folk Memories of the Narration) in Grandhalokam Vol. 61 No. 10, August 2011, p. 44 63 B. Rajeevan, “Political Aspects of Kayar”, p. 333

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along with it. Thus the narrative advances through the continuities of the present and recedes into the past memories at the same time64.

The Kayar narrative begins with a plane statement; “The moment, Kodanthara Mootha Asan heard that Eramathara Madhom was to be rented out, he ran to the place.65” The very next sentence furnishes memories about the past of Eramathra Madhom.

….That house had never been let before, there was no precedent. No one had lived in Eramathra Madhom as a permanent resident. Only high-priests and other learned priests on their way to Trivandrum to participate in Murajapam would stop there for some times.” The building was intended solely to accommodate Brahmins.66 Old stories getting reincarnations in the narrative through the reminiscences of various protagonists. Scene is the repair works being carried on Eramathra Madhom to get it ready for the classifier (Klasiper) to occupy; the stories associated with the old land settlements began to be narrated by the Kodanthara Mootha Asan seemingly inspired by the soul of his uncle Kodanthara Kurup who had been a skilled raconteur and had been nicknamed ancient lore in the locale. Numerous stories, story about the Hanuman worship of Kodanthara Ittunna Kurup, the story of Mullapilli family getting the perpetual office of the village accountantship etc. being told. The anecdotal narratives by the Asan gave to the present land settlement in the offing a new meaning in the backdrop of the old land settlements67. These illustrations are from the first chapter of the novel that spans over 139 chapters. They signify only a particular level in the constant repetitions of the divergence between present and past in the narrative. The present events themselves become past memories as the narrative proceeds on. In every present moment, time and again, those memories get reiterated without effacement. The past memories become even more dynamic as the narrative moves towards the end. They in due course assume the maturity to become the backdrop of the present. At this juncture, Repetition of the divergence between the present and past appears to be the repetition of the different times which have been unified in their essentiality. To be

64 Ibid., p. 330 65Kayar, p. 1. 1 66 Ibid. 67Whereas there were land settlements ever since the formation of the modern-styled state system during the eighteenth century, land settlements of the late nineteenth century introduced certain new elements. Introduction of taxes in the form of cash, sanctification of private ownership rights over land and the principle of eviction were some of these new elements. They strengthened competition for land in society in the long run.

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precise, divergence in the temporal forms become outward phenomenon and repetition proves to be the inner continuity of the unchanging time essentiality68. Kodanthara Mootha Asan, Konnothu Valiyachan and Cheratta Kaimal were the chief protagonists among the symbols that unlace the past memories throughout the narrative. They were the village headmen who represent the old world. A situation has been generated in the novel towards the end of the narrative where in these village headmen revisiting their locale from the netherworld. However, by then the social as well as natural ecology of the region has been transformed so exhaustively as to evade the ancient’s cognition. They have been watching over the various oddities. Amidst the numerous panoramas to which they have been introduced to, one incident that has the potentiality to nullify the various striking divergences between the past and the present to a zero has caught on their observance.

….An office with its name being inscribed on a wooden slab. It appears like a place where legal trials had been conducted in the past. It is not a wooden stool, but a chair and there is a toll table in front of that. A man is being seated on the chair. Another man steps into that office. “O Asan! That seems to be a petitioner”, muttered Konnothu Valiyachan. “Yes, it seems to be so. It may be that, the person being seated on the chair is the headman of the village.” Cheratta Kaimal retorted. Kodanthara Asan asked, “Where does he belong? It seems that he is not from any of such feudal families as Konnothu or Cheratta.” “Why doesn’t the petitioner carry any offering?” Konnothu Valiyachan expressed his doubt. It is the office of the party in power with the local committee secretary installed on the chair. He seems to be the great grandson of Iravi who was once the cowherd of the Mangalassery family and his name is Raman. The petitioner is Krishna Pillai, a person belonging to the Mangalassery family. The secretary promised to look into the matter and packed him off. Konnothu Valiyachan asked, “Why did the village headman simply pack him off, is it because of that he didn’t carry any offerings!?” Cheratta Kaimal retorted, “In the past, we too had behaved in the same manner?” Konnothu Valiyachan; “That is what I have asked. Let comes first the offerings, then shall have the petition considered. Oh!, perhaps, that may be the reason why the village headman had indeed said so.” Kodanthara Asan Soliloquized, “There is no difference at all between us and them.” “No, there’s no difference at all”, Cheeratta Kaimal retorted. Kodanthara Asan remembered what once Mullappilli village officer (Adhikari) had told. “From Now on, my nephew won’t be the village officer. The Mullappilli family had lost the position of the perpetual village officership with that land settlement. Thenceforth, that position has been changing hands. Even now, the change goes on. Who had been the last village headman?! There is yet another office on the other side of the village; a man is being seated there as well. Once, he had might be holding that position. Now that he sits free. But once again, a good time might be possible for him.69

68B. Rajeevan, “Political Aspects of Kayar”, p. 331 69 See, Kayar (Malayalam), 127. 889-890

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The apparently unchanging character of the temporal essentiality being presented in the form of an eternal human nature or power relations have amounted to deduce all sorts of changes starting with changes in property ownership, order of descent, administration, man-woman relations and caste-sub-caste structures into a simple superficial change70. The narrative idiom of Kayar marked by a distinct pattern combining the parallel ordering of the present and past epochs in its structural representation make the plot-time of Kayar a cyclical one. While encompassing the history in its totality, the plot-time of the novel can be seen to have attaining a complete circle at a peculiar juncture of transition71. The novel opens up with a discussion of the imminent changes that the new royal proclamation for land survey and settlement would bring about as anticipated by the local community. Protagonists on the scene are the head of the largest feudal family in the locale (Kodanthara Mootha Kurup Asan), the village officer (Mullappilli Adhikari- a member of the prominent feudal family having administrative responsibilities) and the temple manager. Later appears the Brahmin head-priest of the temple (Mukundaru of Palathol). While the village officer got aggrieved by the changes envisaged by the new regime, especially at the abolition of feudal privileges, the priest protagonist is presented as interested in upholding the Brahmaswam privileges. The village elder (Asan) is presented as insisting on the importance of placating the officers concerned in enforcing the royal orders leniently without causing harm to the local community. At the same time, he advises the temple manager to get as much as land as possible assigned in favor of the temple, which is tax- free. From now on, land becomes the effective property of only those families who have the strengths and capacity to supervise and organize cultivation is the conclusion derived by the village elder from the maze of changes that the new system purports72.

Towards the end of the narrative, a similar situation has been generated which portrays the discussion of the imminent changes expected to be effectuated by the Land Reforms Act. Protagonists on the scene are the Panchayat President (Surendran – a communist), Panchayat Member (Narayana Panikkar –a small landlord) and a protected tenant come landlord (Kochoutha). Historical juncture is nearly a hundred years after the advent of the classifier. Background is the arrival of the Land Tribunal which is in charge of the execution of the Land Reforms Act. The Panchayat offers its office for the

70 B. Rajeevan, “Political Aspects of Kayar”, p. 333 71 Ibid., p. 334 72See, Kayar (English), 1. 17

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Tribunal sitting. The fact that the Land Tribunal would oversee the allotment of ten cents of land to the hutment dwellers and register their holdings was pointed out by the President. Further it was pointed out that surplus lands beyond the sealing limit would be taken over by the government. The small landlord protagonist expresses astonishment over the emerging situation in which occupation of the property is all in all and the ownership recorded in the deed would be counted for nothing. Particularly disturbing is the prospect that ensures the demise of feudal landlordism once and for all and the legal sanctification of capitalist landlordism in its place. He points out, the 500 Para field of the Palathol Illom (a Namboothiri family) which is being cultivated by Thumbekkalavan (a Christian cultivating family) would simply become the latter’s property. The mere facts of the property belonging to the Illlom, its title name and the right of tax remission- all would become insignificant matters. He feels that it is a crime and seizure73. The protected tenant cum landlord protagonist became anxious to know the caste of the incumbent Land Tribunal officer in seeking to find a way to placate him. When he was told by the President that the land legislation would be implemented in the immediate future, he says that according to the partition deed, he is having not an inch of surplus land. But the President pointed out that the law is having retrospective effect over the last six years and none of the devises adopted by the landlords to salvage their properties would achieve anything. Further they had to give hutment residents on their lands ten cents of land around their huts with the fruit bearing trees that might be growing in this area74. These hutment residents could not be shifted to a new area.

Still, the landlords contrive to mollify the personals of the Land Tribunal. Concerns about lower caste incumbent would be biased against the landed gentry is ruled out and put forward that when decisions are taken, no one would show undue partiality towards tenants because whatever be his caste, the Chairman of the Land Tribunal would be an educated person. Men of learning whether Pulayas or Christians or Nairs would consider themselves above the other members of their community and would want the people to respect them. It would make no difference even if a Pulaya become the officer in charge as he would look only to his own betterment and would

73 See, Kayar Chapter 130, 704 74 Ibid., 130. 704

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strive for a bigger house, and to get money to buy a car for himself. So they decided to fix up a house in their locality for the officer to live in75.

Critics have noticed the striking similarity in the conception of these plot situations at the beginning and towards the end of the narrative. Even though such a conception is a conscious design by the author, it bears certain organic affinity with the structure of the narrative76. Thus, a kind of confluence between the beginning and end of the narrative can be seen in Kayar. There are certain points in the novel where one witnesses a curious historical consciousness emerging as a self-consciousness of the plot time from the inevitability of the narrative. This historical consciousness personifies apparent movements and stillness at one and the same time77. For example, there has been given a relatively lengthy philosophical speculation in chapter 122 of Kayar that reflects on the changes taking place in the conceptualizations of such abstract notions as god, truth and justice in accordance with the concrete reality of time and space.

….Whether truth or justice appear first!!? It may be that truth comes first, and that it is followed by justice. Again, it is possible that the god will himself change form and style. If not, the divine manifestation will indeed go on changing. Truth, justice, all will undergo transformation. How would the god be look like after one lack years!? Would the god become old and week!? Then, truth and justice would also change. Carrying a walking stick in hands, the veteran god with wrinkles on his skin and gray hair would have been roaming around through the garden of heaven. It would have become difficult for him to walk due to cramp and atrophy. Will the truth be affected by old age!? Heaven is a large garden. What may be its area!? In what way or means it has been organized!? Those who had gone there have not yet come back and told how it looks like. No one, including even Buddha or Christ. Heaven may be like a large farm field. A field in which everything will be grown. So far there has not been developed even a single small-scale industry in it. After lakhs of years, heaven would perhaps be moving on to an industrial age. Then chimneys could be seen spread around everywhere. All the coconut trees of heaven have been cut down for setting up factories. There is not even a sapling. Seed of the coconut tree has become a rarity in heaven. Somewhere there is a small piece of seed being preserved in the exhibition bungalow as a model. The legendary Parijatam is no more in heaven. An artificial mechanism has been tried to preserve the fragrance of the Parijatam flower for the coming generations. But that too has failed. God of olden days has passed away. He has been overthrown due to over age. In place of an incompetent and inefficient god, came to be installed another energetic god. He too has issued a proclamation about truth. Corpuses of morality and justice have also been redefined. As days passed on, the appearance of the god too changing. Whatever be the manifestation of the god, humans always need a god. Even if we enter into yet another epoch from the present nuclear age, they require a heaven, truth and justice. All these

75 Kayar., 130. 705 76 B. Rajeevan, “Political Aspects of Kayar”, p. 337 77 Ibid., p. 338

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concepts will be redefined again and again. Thus, new laws will be there in every age.78 The socio-historic meaning loom large in these portrayals is not something that perceives change as an illusion or false reality. All the changes are real and concrete, still certain factors are there behind all these changes as unchanging. In other words, when everything underwent change in the course of history, there remains certain continuity in terms of essential expression79. The structure of Kayar depicting the history of a Malayali agricultural village has been moulded in the confines of the chronological schema represented by the liberal notion of history. With the advent of liberal historical credo, the seemingly changeless life process characteristic of the non- modern world governed by the notion of cyclic time had come out of the cyclical ambit. The temporal relations itself assumed linearity synchronizing the epochs of present, past and future into a single continuous chain marked by the concept of social evolution. This change in the temporal structure brought about transformation in the mutual relation between the present, past and future as well. Under the changed scenario, it became an exigency for the present to validate the past and future to justify its own actualization80.

The coherent essentiality of the time concept that allow the construction of the past and future in the image of the present form the fundament of modern historical discourse. Having laced into the rubric of the modern linear time, conceptions of present, past and future were combined in its essentiality to a single whole. The essence of time began to be conceived as common in the present, past and future. It was the ideological space marked by the contradiction of representing a dynamic historical process in the framework of an unchanging time essence that resulted in the realization of a distinct mode of narrative involving linear and cyclical pattern in Kayar81.

The Kayar narrative has been styled on the pattern of Mahabharata the content of which could be developed into different time spans by different communities by vivifying continuity and diversity. However, apart from the structural similarity, Kayar possess no comparison with Mahabharata or any other Sanskrit narratives. It encompasses a folk style of storytelling, indigenous to the Malayali cultural landscape

78 Kayar, 122. 889-890 79 B. Rajeevan, “Political Aspects of Kayar”, p. 340 80 Ibid., p. 341 81 Ibid.

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which had been replaced by the influx of Western literary models through the colonial influences82. In this way, Kayar breaks the established rules and conventions of narration ingrained in the novelistic genre which is essentially a Western literary model. The attempt to orientate the Western genre of novel and its rules of narration in a national mould that worked behind Kayar makes it a culturally significant literary production83.

Conceiving a Historical Profile: Colonial Knowledge forms and Post- colonial Imaginings

The intellectual and cultural appropriation of the subjugated society was perhaps the most important accomplishment of the colonial project. Through the various cultural technologies of rule, colonial enterprise had generated a knowledge profile for the subjected society which in due course turned out to be the model for the indigenous mind to imagine themselves84. In Kayar, an autarchic village economy self-sufficient and self-contented can be seen to have counterposed to the social experience of modernity. This image of a self-sufficient village community as an Indian social heritage was a construction born out of the colonial experience. Though we find detailed reference to village life in the ancient and medieval times, it was during the colonial face that the image of an Indian village was constructed by the colonial administrators which was to have far-reaching ideological and political implications for the way in which Indian society was imagined85. The historical roots of this peculiar imaginings of Indian society may be traced to the writings of several administrators, politicians and scholars, so wide ranging as Charles Metcalf to Henry Maine and Karl Marx86. Metcalf had conceived Indian village communities as self-sufficient little republics totally independent of all sorts of foreign relations. Speculating on their spatio-temporal attributes, Metcalf glorifies them as: “They seem to last where nothing else lasted. Dynasty after dynasty tumbled down. Revolution succeeded revolutions, but the village

82 V. K. Narayana Menon, Forward to Kayar in Kayar, Kottayam, 1978-2011. 83 M. B. Benni, “Folk Memories of Narrative”, pp. 44-45 84 See the Forward by Nicholas B. Dirks in Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, New Delhi, 1996. 85Surinder S. Jodhka, “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar” in Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 37 No. 32, August 10-16 2002, p. 3343 86 M. N. Srinivas and A. M. Shah, “The Myth of Self-sufficiency of the Indian Village” in the Economic Weekly, September 10 1960.

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community remained the same.87” This assessment of Metcalf became the most popular image of Indian civilization, despite the fact that not all the colonial administrators did share this perspective.

The Indian village as emerged out of the colonial discourse was one characterized by the communal ownership of land, functional integration of various occupational groups and economic self-sufficiency88. Village was taken to be the basic unit of Indian civilization and an Indian village presumed to be symbolizing such qualities as simplicity and socio-economic harmony. Each village was an inner world, a traditional community, self-sufficient in economy, patriarchal in governance and surrounded by hostile villages and despotic governments89. The nationalist self- imagination was in many ways a postscript to the colonial representation of Indian society. The language of the village remained part of the nationalized ideology. Image of the village was projected as the repository of the civilizational ideas of the Indian nation90. Though Gandhi was careful enough to avoid an outright glorification of the decaying villages of British India, he nevertheless celebrated the simplicity and authenticity of village life, an image largely drawn from the colonial representation. Decadence of the village was attributed to the colonial rule and village reconstruction began to figure as a major agendum in the nationalist project of revitalizing the lost self. It was reiterated as such significant a programme as the attainment of political independence in the nationalist, especially Gandhian discourse91.

As retribution to the Gandhian socio-political envisioning which was largely brushed aside at the time of constitution making, independent Indian state had espoused village rejuvenation as a major political programme to be pursued through the agency of the government. Thus, villages continued to be treated as the basic unit of Indian society. Partly as a reflection of this increasing stress given to village in the politico- administrative discourses and partly under the influence of Western academic traditions, village studies continued to remain as the single most important area of enquiry for the

87 Ibid. 88Irfan Habit, “Marx’s Perception of India” in Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, New Delhi, 2002, pp. 20-21 89 N. K. Wagle, “Review of Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India” in International History Review Vol. 15 No. 4, November 1993, pp. 59-60 90Sujata Patel, “The Nostalgia for the Village: M.N. Srinivas and the Making of the Indian Social Anthropology” in Journal of South Asian Studies Vol. XXI No. 1, 1998, p. 58 91Surinder K. Jodhka, op.cit., p. 3344

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Indian sociologists and social anthropologists. They carried out large number of studies focusing on the social and cultural life of villages in India. Most of these studies were published during the decades 1950s and 1960s. Though most of the studies provided more general account on the social, cultural and economic lives of the rural people, some of the later studies also focused on certain specific aspects of rural social structures such as stratification, kinship, religion etc92. Exploring different aspects of social life in the villages from within i.e. understanding them in terms of the values and meanings attributed to it by the people themselves was the chief concern of these studies. Particularly, emphasis was on the cultural life lived by the people, and the way in which the rural life was interlocked and interdependent in an attempt to understand the village community93.

The colonial constructions of the village community as the Indian social essentiality and its subsequent nationalist internalization resulting in the postulation of village as representing the authentic native life and a socio-cultural unit uncorrupted by alien influences had profoundly shaped the twentieth century Indian literary imaginations. To this may be added the scientific conviction that villages represent India in microcosm and are invaluable observation centers where one could see and study real India, its social organizations and cultural life94. These discourses might have had their own indelible influences on the literary landscape as well. Consequently, village depictions became an integral trope in literature for narrativising the socio-political processes in a historical perspective. The possibility for reclaiming a pre-colonial indigenous subjectivity unsullied by colonial inequities had been projected on to the village in the literary representations produced in the colonial societies95.

One of the overarchic assumption got emphasis in the representation of village society in Kayar narrative was an agrarian community functioning largely on its own and progressively incurring transformation in the wake of an engagement with the

92Surinder K. Jodhka, “From Book View to Field View: Social Anthropological Constructions of the Indian Village” in Oxford Development Studies, 1998, p. 12 Available on the Internet @ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24119465_From_Book-view_to_Field- view_Social_Anthropological_Constructions_of_the_Indian_Village 93 See the importance of Field work and Participant observation in social anthropological studies in Ibid., p. 13 94 Ibid., p. 2 95 See Anupama Mohan, The Country and the Village: Representations of the Rural in Twentieth Century South Asian Literatures, Ph.D. Dissertation Submitted to Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Programme in South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, 2010, pp. 1-11.

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outside world. Bond of mutual reciprocity was the hallmark of the social relationships in the agrarian village. Notwithstanding the existence of groups and factions within the village settlement, people of the village had encountered the forces of change unleashed by colonialism as a compact whole. However, , there were obvious differences in assimilating those forces of change by different sections of the society. Conceptualization of social relationships among caste groups in the Indian villages in the framework of ‘Reciprocity’ was made for the first time by W. H. Wiser in his study on the Hindu Jajmani system. Framework of ‘Reciprocity’ implies that, even though hierarchy forms the obvious feature of social life in the Indian villages, it was the interdependence among different caste groups that characterize the underlying spirit of the Indian village. Reciprocity implied, either explicitly or implicitly an exchange of equal services or non-exploitative relations96. Mutual gratification was supposed to be the outcome of reciprocal exchange. Each serves the other. Each in turn is master and each in turn is servant97.

However, even while sticking into the notions of unity/reciprocity characteristic of the pre-colonial villages, the Kayar narrative did not entirely rule out the shades of conflicts prevailing in the caste-based social relations in the village universe. Side by side with the practice of interdependence among different caste groups, the power of coercion enforced by the dominant caste was an important factor that sustained the social order in the pre-colonial villages was implicitly spelled out here and there in the long narrative. However, the fact that element of conflicts got only indirect representation in the narrative point towards certain self-contradictions in the dominant ideological sensibilities that made the narrative possible. Since the very location of narrative itself situated in the postcolonial political spectrum marked by the spatiality of the nation state, the pressure of nationalist political sensibility upon the social production of representation was only imaginable98.

96Surinder K. Jodhka, “From Book View to Field View: Social Anthropological Constructions of the Indian Village”, p. 24 97 See Introduction Robert Eric Frykenberg (ed.) Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, Madicen, 1969. 98 M. R. Mahesh, “Desham Novalaakumbol” (When Nation Becomes Novel) in Grandhalokam Vol. 61 No. 10, August 2011, pp. 50-51

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Situating Kayar Narrative in the Political Context

The political sensibility that worked behind the representation of society in Kayar was shaped by an ideological space born out of a social transformation process characterized by the vanishing of feudalism, matriliny and bonded labour and the rise of a social order based on such conceptions as universal land ownership, monogamous conjugality and industrial progress on their place. The evolution of an economy functioning on the basis of production for market, private property ownership rights, profits, purchasing power etc. and their societal implications constitute the central concern of the narrative. A new class of capitalists coming into prominence in place of the feudal lords; money replaces paddy as the medium of exchange; shares in the factories and plantations similarly substitute paddy stocks in the granaries as markers of economic affluence; an erstwhile intermediary class rising into financial preeminence; an educated class of salaried government employees emerging as the new middleclass; in this transformed situation, the exchange rates of paddy become immaterial; through the unified currency system, the locale was getting welded into the national economy. Thus the shift of an agrarian economy to a modern capitalist predicament is the case in point furnished by the narrative. In the changed scenario, there are no emotional fond regards towards agricultural lands. The old joint families came to be regarded as the cesspools of darkness and decadence in the new glittery lights of modern civilization. Agricultural fields were being fast converted into plantations meant for commercial crops. At all these junctures, the narrative speaks eloquently for the fecundity of farmlands even though it did not openly contest the diverse changes brought about by modernity99.

The structural changes brought about by colonial policies in the indigenous economy and society had established individuals with private property rights at the centre of all social discourses. The liberal democratic values centering such individualistic identities in due course of time had emerged as a powerful force opposing the ideological forms shaped by the feudal systems. It was since the late nineteenth century that, the Malayali society had witnessed the burgeoning of new ideological forms that could transcend the regimented social spaces which had survived as part of the feudal traditions. In the beginning, the influences of these liberal reformative

99 Ibid., pp. 54-55

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discourses were confined to the educated middleclass, mostly belonging to the upper castes and these influences proved to be the political background for the works of Chandu Menon, C.V. Raman Pillai, Asan, Vallathol and many others100. With the national movement steadily expanding its social reach and scope, democracy and universal political participation came to be embedded in the nationalist political agenda. Since the 1930s onwards, these liberal reformative values began to percolate down to the downtrodden sections of the society.

Disruption of the practice of subsistence farming and the growth of commercial cultivation were the two major changes that the agricultural economy of Kerala had undergone during the colonial period. These developments had wider implications as far as the social relations are concerned101. Expansion of economy on commercial lines nurtured a small indigenous capitalist class comprising merchants, traders, moneylenders, businessmen, planters etc. In the absence of industrial expansion, by and large, land proved to be the chief means of investment for the indigenous capital. Foreign capital was invested in manufacturing industries, plantations, railways and import export trade. The absentee interest in land institutionalized through colonial land reforms effectively promoted capitalist relations in the agrarian sector based on market- oriented production and rent appropriation. Consequently, in addition to the traditional social oppression as sanctioned by the feudal ideology, economic exploitation became a major factor to be reckoned with in the social relations102.

This was the socio-historic context in which the masses began to be mobilized for impelling socio-political change. Campaigns against untouchability were the earliest plank upon which the lower caste groups were mobilized and sensitized of their civic rights. Later, attempts had been made to mobilize them on class lines by politicizing their socioeconomic rights103. This was the socio-political milieu of the progressive literature movement as represented by writers like Vaikam Muhammed Basheer, P. Kesava Dev, Ponkunnam Varkey, Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai, K. Damodaran, Toppill Bhasi, , S. K. Pottakkad, Uroob and several others. It was the educated sections among the various social classes who had directed the course and direction of

100See K. Satchidanandan, op.cit., p. 12 101 S. Ramachandran Nair, “Land Reforms and Agriculture in Kerala” in E. K. G. Nambiar (ed.) Agrarian India: Problems and Perspectives, Calicut, 1999, p. 124 102 Ibid., p. 125 103 T. J. Nossiter, Communism in Kerala: A Study of Political Adaptation, New Delhi, 1982, pp. 77-79

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the mass movements. Therefore, the formation of modern middleclass in the wake of the various socioeconomic transformations engendered by colonialism was an important agency of change in the Malayali society.

The historical experience of a close kinship between the left ideological trends endorsed by the Congress Socialists and later Communists on the one hand and the nationalist trend represented by Congress on the other had resulted in the establishment of a socialist hegemony at an ideational plane in the political public sphere of Malayalis at the time of independence itself. Variety of agencies such as the political press, progressive literature and theatre movement, social initiatives like the public library movement became active agents in the materialization of this ideological hegemony104. The middleclass, especially the economically declining middleclass literati gave the lead in this process of reorienting social consciousness. It was this broader social consensus existed among the intelligentsia in favor of a restructuring of the society on a socialist pattern that had been translated into political action by the Communist government of 1957105. Even though those efforts at restructuring social relations through radical laws had been aborted by a regrouping of the reactionary forces as exemplified by the liberation struggle, the governmental actions had succeeded in establishing a precedent of effective laws seeking meaningful social changes, especially regarding land relations. Consequently, a situation emerges in which even those groups who perceive the question of land relations in a different light could not depart from the agenda of land reforms under the conditions of adversary political pressures. Thus the various governments in power had implemented land reforms with varying levels of success and effectiveness106.

Land reforms of the post-colonial phase were legislative initiatives intended to confer ownership rights on the most vulnerable sections of agrarian populace by illegalizing arbitrary evictions, fixing of fair rent, sealing on ownership and possession of land and redistribution. Even though these reforms could make the landless householders owners of a tiny plot of land (10 cents and 3 cents in the rural and urban

104 K. N. Panikkar, Left Cultural Interventions: Perspectives and Practice” in Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 32 No. 15, April 12-18, 1997, pp. 761-762 105 See K. Ramakrishnan Nair, How Communists Came to Power in Kerala, Trivandrum, 1965,. 106 P. K. Michael Tharakan, “When Kerala Model of Development is Historisized: A Chronological Perspective”, Working Paper No 19 Center for Socioeconomic and Environmental Studies, July 2008, Available on the Internet @ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.424.3594&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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areas respectively) and relieve the cultivating tenants of all feudal obligations by investing them with full ownership rights, it had reinforced the already emerging trend of subdivision and fragmentation of landholdings in the context of mounting population pressure on land107. This made the organization of agriculture, especially low cash profiled subsistence agriculture even less viable for marginal cultivators. Besides, several flaws had popped up when land reforms programme were implemented in a democratic setup with a highly bureaucratized administrative framework. Political influence enabled many big landholders to bypass the legal provisions regarding sealing limits by creating counterfeit tenancies108. The socially and economically uplifted middle class strongly grounded in the expansion of market engendered by the colonial economic environment had considerably expanded its social range by incorporating the class of cultivating tenants who had been vested afresh with land ownership rights through land reforms of the post-colonial period to its fold and continued to serve as the chief political negotiators of the state.

With the socio-political orientation of the state was transformed from feudal to democratic structure, feudal landed gentry was replaced by the civilian masses as the legitimists of the social system. When constitutionalism based on the notions of equality and liberty of all became the official ideology of the state, the state had to espouse the rhetoric, welfare of all classes as its ultimate aim. In pursuance of this goal, new laws and rules had to be framed, and existing legal codes, concepts and machineries had to be construed and reinterpreted. As part of breaking the exploitative elements deeply embedded in the social relations, there was a deliberate effort to purge off the feudal vestiges from the socio-economic structure. There was a social consensus against absentee feudal landlordism109. Ownership rights of the cultivators over the land they till received legal acceptance through political interventions. Those groups of landlords who could not organize cultivation in their land on commercial lines had lost their ownership rights. However, those sections of landed gentry who could adapt themselves well into the evolving capitalist economy through commercial farming could preserve their economic interests. It was this marginalization of the subsistence farming practices and

107 T. J. Nossiter, op.cit., pp. 47-48 108 Ibid., pp. 300-301 109 Bipan Chandra, “Indian Peasantry and National Integration” in Social Scientist Vol. 15 No. 2, September 1976, pp. 3-29

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their socioeconomic implications in the theory and praxis of state craft that constitutes the political sensibility of social change representation in Kayar.

Further, with the polity passed on from the colonial to the post-colonial phase, the nature of political activism in the society was changed. Those groups pursuing nationalist politics on anti-imperialist plank underwent transformation from the status of a movement to a party organization engaged in the quest for power110. The post-colonial state shaped by the anti-colonial nationalist political engagements had retained a hybrid character in its makeup. While on the one hand it monopolized control over military and civil bureaucratic power characteristic of the colonial regime, on the other it incorporated various ideological trends espoused by the nationalist movement like democracy, civil liberty and independent economic development by giving institutional embodiment to them111. The state in the post-colonial situation continued the colonial practice of appropriating a large share of the economic surplus, but started deploying them more vigorously through bureaucracy in promoting development. The state also continued the pattern of infrastructure development within which it was to carry out the gradual process of transition from above112. All the same, the close nexus between the propertied interests and bureaucracy, a trend which had been well-established since the colonial epoch continued well on to the post-colonial period. Political work ceased to be a voluntary public service. With the institutionalization of modern social values, economic success began to be increasingly considered as the principal basis of individual merit and worth. Monitory consideration began to pervade to all avenues of human personal and social life. Middleclass standards and aspirations came to be deeply embedded in the social consciousness113. With politics began to operate as an appendage to commercial economy, the importance of money became all the more significant in political processes. When individuals with middleclass life aspirations came to occupy the leadership of power politics in a social climate characterized by commercial culture, the trend of persons dominating public life facing conflicts of interest and fell into the trap of corruption became ever more pervasive. The disjunction between the theory of

110 Bipan Chandra, Mridulla Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, India After Independence 1947-2000, New Delhi, 2000, p. 186 111 See Introduction in Paul R. Brass, Politics of India Since Independence, New Delhi, 1999. 112 Idem. 113 “The post 1970s mark a period of embourgeoisement of Kerala expect for its most marginalized.” See K. T. Rammohan, “Contemporary Politics: Horrors and Hopes” in Seminar No. 637, September 2012, Available on the Internet @ http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/637/637_k_t_rammohan.htm

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planning, equality and social justice and the reality of statecraft dominated by the privileged classes enjoying exclusive access to the administrative apparatuses and control over material resources generated a social predicament in which the visions of equity and justice turned out to be a mirage. This could be the socio-political backdrop that conditioned the speculative contemplations about the societal implications of control and coercion as functioned in the feudal and democratic setup in the Kayar narrative.

Estimation

A historical perspective of the relation between land and the various social classes who exercise control over it becomes the essentiality of Kayar. The primary political understanding that those who enjoy control over land would remain as whole- powerful, privileged and influential in the society is the wisdom that the Kayar shares. Through the various thematic convergences, Kayar narrative sought to convey that the triumph of modernity in the context of indigenous Malayali society had amounted to a social experience which assumed the magnitude of a civilizational discourse. Modernity unpacked as the projects of colonialism and capitalism had the effect of unsettling the more stable and sustainable social system that had been in existence during the pre- colonial epoch without passing on completely the benefits of economic advancement and the resultant socio-political incentives innate to the modernization programme114. Expansion of economy on commercial lines and an ever increasing migration of people from agricultural occupations to other avenues of livelihoods came to be established as a pervasive trend in the society. With localized societies were fused into national territorial spaces with the advent of modernity, diverse ideological currents coexisting in the local terrain have lost its significance. Development of transport and communication broke off the insulated existence of local spaces resulting in the large scale mobilization of population between regions. Increasing physical and social mobility considerably enhanced the horizons of human consciousness. Various popular pantheons, faiths and patterns of worship symbolizing collective believes conforming to a more or less isolated social existence belonging to a pre-modern epoch fell into oblivions under the socio-cultural influences of modernity. Education proved to be the chief disseminating agency of the modern culture and ideology. The new ideology born out of the colonial

114 S. Ramachandran Nair, Social and Cultural History of Colonial Kerala, Kalady, p. 133

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discourse was neither purely indigenous nor alien, it represented a kind of hybridity characterized by the concealed adaptation of feudal ideologies and practices even in the functioning of the modern structures and institutions of power115.

One of the overarchic assumptions conveyed in the narrative was that, the collective characteristics to which the various social groups had imputed for generations as part of the traditional customs were often proved to be vibrant and vivacious. These identities underwent change, when they were exposed to new influences under the garb of modernity and civilizational discourses. But these changes were multidimensional in nature. There were modifications in the idiosyncrasies of the entities having undergone conversion. However, in conscience, emotional attachments and social conceptions, they were saturated by the powerful influences of the forces of tradition.

115 J. Devika, “Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State India” in Journel of Asian Studies Vol. 69 No. 3, August 2010, pp. 799-820

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