Social Scientist Temple-Entry Movement in Travancore, 1860-1940 Author(s): Robin Jeffrey Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 4, No. 8 (Mar., 1976), pp. 3-27 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3516377 Accessed: 05-04-2020 11:23 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Social Scientist is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Scientist This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Sun, 05 Apr 2020 11:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ROBIN JEFFRET Temple-entry Movement in Travancore, i860-1940 AN EXTREME, yet popular view of the princely states suggests that they were sloughs of decadence and inertia, their people enduring unrelieved miseries, their rulers pursuing unspeakable pleasures. Only in the 1930s, if indeed then (so the argument runs), did Congress victories in the provinces, and the rising tide of nationalism, begin to ripple the stagnant waters of politics and society in the princely bog. For some states, such an appreciation may even be correct. However, in others there were vigorous political movements, involving large numbers of men, their course influenced far more by the peculiar nature of the princely-state arena than by developments in British India. Such a state was Travancore, which roughly corresponded to the southern half of today's Kerala. This article is a study of the movement among prospering low-caste Hindus for the right to enter schools, government service and ultimately government-controlled temples in a staunchly theocratic Hindu state. The right of temple-entry was within the gift of a strict, high-caste Maharaja (as it could never be within that of a British government) and was the ultimate "symbolic conversion of wealth into honour" for which educated men among the low castes strove from the 1890s. Initially a new, wider concept of caste developed, as college-educated men sought to involve their less wealthy and less educated castemen in a political community of This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Sun, 05 Apr 2020 11:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST such numbers and solidarity that the princely government would have to reckon with it. Issues of temples and religion were capable of arousing the interest of people from diverse educational and economic backgrounds, and in Travancore, moreover, even the poor tended to be literate. There were large numbers capable of being rallied. The princely government, caught between its trusteeship of Hindu orthodoxy and its desire to consolidate all its Hindus against the threat of Christian proselytizing, sharpened the issues first, by resisting low-caste pressures and then seeking to defuse them. By the time the definitive accommodation, the Temple Entry Proclamation of November 1936, had come about, thousands of literate, low-caste peasants and workers had acquired a keen political consciousness. This in turn was increasingly responsive to the rhetoric not merely of caste, but of class. State and Society at a Glance In discussing society in Travancore in the twentieth century, one encounters a problem of categories. Literacy in Travancore was higher than in any other state or province in India. Male literacy in 1931 was 41 per cent and in 1941, 68 per cent. In 1931, more than 70,000 Travan- coreans were literate in English out of a population of five million. Most of these 70,000 could probably be categorized as "middle class" in that at least part of their livelihood came from government service, teaching, law or clerical work. However, there were cash-crop farmers, merchants and small bankers who were not literate in English but who would fall into a "middle class" category. Moreover, of the more than two million Travan. coreans who were literate in 1931, large numbers were small landholders, tenants, landless labourers or factory workers. To be literate did not mean to be "middle class." Among Ezhavas, male literacy was 43 per cent in 1931, though Ezhavas were low caste and mainly poor labourers and tenants. I have tried to deal with this problem of useful categories by generally referring in the pre-1920 period to an "educated elite" which can be measured through the English-literacy statistics in the censuses. I begin to use the expression "middle class" only from the 1920s when the admittedly unsatisfactory economic data permit some tentative statements about class formation, and when Travancore politicians and labour leaders begin to use the rhetoric of class consciousness. Travancore covered an area of 7600 square miles, and among the princely states was exceeded in population only by Hyderabad and Mysore. It was the most literate state or province in India; by 1941 its male literacy rate had reached 68 per cent. It was also one of the most densely populated areas. Its population grew from 2,952,000 in 1901 to 6,070,000 in 1941, an increase of 106 per cent. The all-India population increased by 32 per cent in the same period.2 Much of the cultivable land in the state was, by the 1920s, given over to cash crops-coconut, pepper, cashew, cardamom, rubber, sugar This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Sun, 05 Apr 2020 11:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TEMPLE-ENTRY MOVEMENT IN TRAVANCORE 5 cane and tea. European planters had opened estates in the Western Ghats, the border between Travancore and the Madras Presidency to the east in the 1860s, and from the 1880s the products of the coconut palm- copra, coconut oil, coir and coir matting-were increasingly commercial- ized and exported. By 1920 large numbers of Travancore landholders and labourers were involved with these crops and had come to depend on the cash economy created thereby.8 Two features of traditional society had struck European visitors since the sixteenth century. The first was the matrilineal system of family and inheritance followed by most caste-Hindus, particularly the Nairs, who formed the warrior-gentry. "These kings do not marry," the traveller Duarte Barbosa wrote in 1516, "only each has a mistress, a lady of great lineage and family, which is called Nayre." The second feature was the rigidity, refinement and ruthlessness of the system of caste. Men polluted their caste superiors not merely on touch but on sight. In the extreme case, a Pulaya was said to pollute a Nambudiri Brahmin from 95 paces. "When [the Nairs] walk along a street or road," wrote Barbosa, they shout to the low caste folk to get out of their way; this they do, and if one will not, the Nayre may kill him without punishment; even if he is a youth of good [high-caste] family but poor and worth- less, and he finds in his way a manl of low caste who is rich and respected and in favour with the King, yet he makes him clear the way for him as if he were a King.4 This was largely the system that the British found when they imposed a political Resident on Travancore in 1800. In the next 60 years, little attempt was made to tamper with the state's society or local politics. From the 1860s, however, powerful forces came increasingly to bear on the lives of Travancoreans. There were a number of reasons. Travan- core had fallen into grave disfavour with British governments in the 1850s for its careless, corrupt and cruel administration. In 1860 a young and well-educated Maharaja came to the throne. His Minister was his former tutor, a brilliant product of the formal English education offered in the Madras High School from the 1840s. British pressure to reform the administration complemented the enthusiasm of the Maharaja and his Minister to be seen as innovators and modernizers. The administration was increasingly centralized, examinations were introduced for govern- ment servants, commercial monopolies abolished, sweeping land reforms promulgated conferring ownership rights on thousands of government tenants, and a wide network of schools established. By the mid-1870s there were a thousand miles of roads where in the 1850s there had been no roads at all. European missionaries, more numerous in Travancore than in any comparable area of India, intensified their educational and proselytizing work among avarna (low-caste) Hindus. In the hills, European planters opened estates; in the port towns of Quilon and This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Sun, 05 Apr 2020 11:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Alleppey, merchants, both European and Indian, began to export Travan- core crops. Travancore, according to the Secretary of State for India in 1867, had become a "model state."5 The Travancore government emphasized its modernity and efficiency in 1875 when it carried out the state's first "scientific" census on the lines of the British Indian census of 1871. The census put the population at 2,311,000-74 per cent Hindu, 20 per cent Christian and 6 per cent Muslim. Of the total population, about 40 per cent were avarna Hindus, and about a quarter savarna (high caste). This in itself was a surprise to those who had studied the earlier attempts at censuses in 1816, 1836 and 1854, all of which had put the savarna population well in excess of the avarna.