Loner’s Battle Against Slavery: Thomas Hervey Baber and Slavery in Malabar

Looking back at a single person’s historic battle against the practice of slavery in Malabar on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the release of slaves found in an English plantation in 1811.



IN the Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad describes a moment when the mist lifts unexpectedly, revealing a view of the mysterious surrounds: A momentary revelation of the interior of a Dark Continent, converted into an area of darkness by the marauding forces of Imperialism.

In Malabar, an area which had come under European powers much before Africa surrendered itself to the builders of Empire, such a momentary flash of lightning that revealed the miserable plight of the natives after the arrival of these civilizing forces came exactly 200 years ago, when a young and energetic East India Company officer conducted a search on the premises of a European planter to discover a large number of kidnapped people, forced into slavery. The incident of search on the premises of a European, discovery and the eventual release of slaves despite heavy odds, was one among a series of developments that finally led to the formal ban on slavery in British India three decades later, in 1843.

Slavery was widely practised in Malabar even before the British East India Company took power there in 1792; it was mainly in the form of agrestic bondage, with slave castes attached to the agricultural lands for generations being bought and sold along with the lands. The Indian Law Commissioners in their report on slavery in 1841 noted that castes like Cherumas [slave castes in Malabar] were treated as “absolute property; they are part of the livestock on an estate.” Traditional Hindu and Mohammedan laws had both accepted it, and the EIC’s own fledgling legal system refused to meddle with it, accepting the practice as normal and legitimate. But in the case of Europeans and especially British citizens, the laws were definitely in a grey zone: Most of them owned slaves and used them in their domestic employ, but trading in slaves and forcing people into slavery were treated as criminal offence. The order passed in 1793, by Jonathan Duncan, then Commissioner for the Bombay province, did not prohibit sale of slaves within the province, but disallowed “the practice of shipping kidnapped and other natives as slaves.” The early English approach to slavery is explained in an observation made by Sir William James, chief justice in Calcutta, in 1785. He said, ”It is needless to expatiate on the law (if it be law) of private slavery; but I make no scruple to declare my own opinion, that absolute unconditional slavery, by which one human creature becomes the property of another, like a horse or an ox, is happily unknown to the laws of England, and that no human law could give it a just sanction; yet, though I hate the word, the continuance of it, properly explained, can produce little mischief.”

Though the slaves in Malabar were generally attached to agricultural lands and were employed as agrestic labour, buying and selling of slaves and massive shipping of them for sale outside the province were quite common. Arab ships operating from Muscat and other islands in the Persian Gulf, and many adventurous sailors of European origin operating in the twilight zones of law and anarchy, carried out this lucrative business and various ports in the subcontinent were known to be hubs of such illegal activities. In the Malabar coast, the French-controlled Mahe was known to be a major base for such operations.

Post -1792, Malabar was going through a period of disturbances mainly because of the challenges posed by rebels like Pazhassi Rajah, which continued for more than a decade.The rebels were often in control of the routes that connected the spice-producing Wayanad hill region with coastal towns, making it difficult for the East India Company to procure hill produces like pepper, cinnamon and other spices for export to Europe. In spite of an EIC monopoly on spices trade, a huge network of shady traders and dealers had sprung up, a black market for contraband wares developed, and many EIC officials were making exorbitant amounts in such deals working in cahoots with local traders who operated these networks.

It was then an idea was mooted with the presidency’s rulers in Bombay (Malabar was under Bombay presidency till1800) by a private trader in Mahe called Murdoch Brown (1750-1828) who suggested development of a plantation to cultivate spices in an area closer to the coastal town of Thalassery. In 1797, Duncan, by then governor of Bombay, agreed to the proposal and a 2000-acre plantation was decided to be set up at Anjarakkandy, with Murdoch Brown appointed as overseer of the project. Later, the company transferred ownership of the estate to Brown on a 99-year lease agreement executed in 1802. This gave him the unique distinction of being the first English landholder in India and its first planter.

Brown was a very industrious and colourful character, who was born in Edinburgh in Scotland. He travelled to Lisbon as a young man and from there reached Calicut in 1775 as a consul for Empress Maria Theresa of Austria; served various European powers, then in constant conflict in the Indian Ocean region, and eventually became one of the most influential persons on the western coast of India. Duncan, with whom he had cultivated a close relationship, described him in 1792 as the most considerable of any British subject on that side of India.

But unlike Duncan, others in EIC service had different, and not that flattering, opinions on Brown. When Brown was appointed by Duncan as Malabar interpreter to the Commissioners, Walter Ewer, another senior officer, wrote directly to Henry Dundas, company chairman in London, in 1796: “He is said to be & really appears to be, a Scotsman... [though] he has lived in Mahe as a Dane, & an Austrian, & finished his career of countries, by defending the place in arms, as a Frenchman, in which situation he was taken; let him chuse (sic) his country; being found in arms, he is certainly a prisoner of war; it’s said he was concerned in the war before last, with some merchants of Bombay, in supplying the enemy [Tipu Sultan] with provisions & stores....”

But neither criticisms nor adversities affected the fortunes of Murdoch Brown: He is said to have lost 11 ships, East Indiamen, of 1000 tons or more in the war with France; and later in 1803, in an attack on his plantation by the Coteote [Kuttiadi] rebels, all his buildings and nearly all the productive vines and coffee plants were destroyed. In those days, the plantation was a constant target of rebel attack and Francis Buchanan, who visited Malabar in January 1801, writes in his Travels:” The plantation has of late been much molested by the Nairs, and the eastern part of it has fallen into their hands; so that for the protection of what remains, it has been necessary to station a European Officer, with a company of Sepoys, at Mr Brown’s house. The Nairs are so bold, that at night they frequently fire into Mr Brown’s dwelling: and the last officer stationed there was lately shot dead, as he was walking in front of the house.”

Brown was a highly innovative planter, experimenting with a variety of plants brought from various parts of the world and introducing commercial plantation of many items like pepper, coffee, cinnamon, cotton, etc, in those early days which involved many years of trial-and-error experiments. In a letter published in Asiatic Journal in 1844, his son F C Brown, who inherited the plantation, recalls that “coffee, originally termed Malabar coffee, was produced from seeds which my father obtained from Arabia, nearly half a century ago, years before Java coffee was extensively known in Europe as an article of import.”

Murdoch Brown used local labourers for his extensive and ambitious agricultural operations, his plantation having a large number of coolies, mainly Thiyyas and Mappilas, besides many slaves, mostly Cherumas, Pulayas and other slave castes. Brown had claimed that he was doing everything to help their uplift, “educating them and Christianizing them by native catechists and German missionaries,” giving them a weekly day off and setting up a school for their children, etc; but in spite of all his philanthropic pretensions, he was rumoured to have kept a large number of natives abducted from the southern parts of Malabar and Travancore as slaves in his estate.

Having come to know about slave-running ”by the merest accident”, as he put it later, North Malabar’s English magistrate, Thomas Hervey Baber (1777-1843), decided to investigate and ordered a team of officials to search Murdoch Brown’s premises at Anjarakkandy towards the end of 1811. He found 71 persons, many of them children, stolen from the southern parts like Travancore, in Murdoch Brown’s possession and altogether 123 persons were restored to liberty and were allowed to return to their country. But there was considerable resistance to such a firm action, not only from Brown who challenged it in court, but even from EIC’s own establishment, as Baber describes in his 1832 note to the Commissioners for Indian affairs. It was ”after a considerable opposition on the part of the provincial court of circuit, [that] I succeeded in putting an end to this nefarious traffic,” he points out.

There was nothing surprising in this response: Murdoch Brown, as overseer of the company’s plantation, had been receiving the active support and connivance of EIC’s European as well as local officers in procuring workmen, and also purchasing as many slaves as necessary for his use in the plantation. The tehsildars and their peons (armed persons with badges of office) were frequently used for such purposes and the evidence recorded after the search proved that even local police officers, called daroghas, were used for kidnapping and forwarding freeborn children as slaves to the north to work in Brown’s estates. Brown had been involved in this activity for over 12 years, from 1798 to 1811, under the authority of the Bombay Government as he had impressed upon them the need for official support as the “price of labour was more than what he was authorised to give.”

Magistrate Baber’s action, exposing the underbelly of the civilizing mission of Imperialism, in a remote part of the British Indian empire, turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the EIC establishment and a severe indictment of its own duplicity and double standards as it proved beyond doubt that the Company’s own officers were directly involved in the act of slave-running. Though there was an underlying tension between the Bombay and Madras establishments of the Company administration (Malabar was shifted from the control of Bombay presidency to Madras in 1800) that added a twist to the internal debates over slavery triggered by this incident, the Company’s governing council in India or the Board of Control back home could not ignore it altogether. First, Baber, though a lower ranking official then, his contributions had already been widely noticed with appreciation within the Company administration, as he was primarily responsible for the defeat and slaying of its principal enemy since the demise of Tipu, Pazhassi Rajah of Kottayam, in a remote and dense tropical forest in Wayanad in 1805, an action which earned him encomiums from the Governor in Council; and secondly, the most despicable practice of slavery in the western hemisphere had become quite an embarrassment for the British rulers in the succeeding decades forcing them to take firm and stringent steps to prevent such occurrences in its Indian possessions, especially at a time when more and more people were turning to plantation business in various parts of India that required huge numbers of cheap labour. Baber’s detailed replies to the questionnaire circulated by the Law Commissioners for their report on slavery in India had been extensively reported and quoted not only in Indian and British journals, and mentioned even in Parliament; but also across the Atlantic, in various journals and pamphlets brought out by anti- slavery campaigners and associations in the United States.

By the time of the 1811 search on Anjarakkandy estate, T H Baber had been for 14 years in the EIC service, having joined it early in 1797 as a 20-year -old writer in Bombay, after completing his course at the Haileybury College of the East India Company in London. The second son of a solicitor, the family had lived initially at Yorkshire, then at Lincolnshire and London. Like most of the early recruits to EIC service, he too had influential contacts within the Company administration, including his uncle Edward Baber who had been secretary to the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, in Calcutta. Thomas Baber was sent to Malabar, a newly acquired territory that has been experiencing high level of rebel activity and his immediate task was to chase rebels and restore peace in the region. His moment of glory came when he was able to trace the most powerful rebel, the Pazhassi Rajah, who was, for almost a decade, carrying on a guerrilla warfare against the Company rule with deadly effect, in his forest hideout and shoot him dead, a task in which even Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, had failed.

Thus the searches in the plantation brought two interesting personalities, who represented two distinct streams in the history of colonialism, face to face: One was described as a person among the last of the “rascally adventurous”, who always “looked after his pocket, whether as a Scot, Dane, Austrian, Frenchman or North Briton”, the flags of nationality Murdoch Brown had waved in his long career as a fortune-seeker. The other was a true representative of the new bourgeois, who had visions of civilizing the pagan lands, whose services were remembered by a native at the end of his 40 years of career, as “sterling and meritorious”, whose talents “entitled him to the highest estimation amongst the natives” and the “impartial manner of conducting his duties earned the unremitted (sic) satisfaction of the ryots and interest to the government.” But in spite of all these, Baber found himself pitted against an unresponsive and even hostile administration and he had complaints about the judicial system which put up “considerable opposition” against the release of kidnapped slave kids.

The hue and cry following the discovery of kidnapped people, forced into slavery, at an English citizen’s estate continued for decades. References to this incident were made in Parliament, and there were several articles in various journals and other publications. It was widely noted that the plantation itself was started by the Company; its official establishment was pressed into service to procure slaves and even to transport kidnapped people; and attention also focused on the miserable plight of the peasantry and slaves ever since the Company took the reins of power in Malabar. Baber contended that the practice of separating the slaves from their lands and selling them for revenue arrears of their masters, even splitting their families, was an “innovation” brought in by the British administration; he argued that the practice of kidnapping children for slavery had its origin directly in the ”impolitic action“ of permitting Brown to procure slaves; and Assen Ally, the agent of Brown, who had arranged most of these children, acknowledged at trial that during the time he was in Alleppey, in Travancore, in 1810, no less than 400 of them had been transported to Malabar.

The liberation of the slaves had other reverberations too, especially in those regions from where they were abducted. In 1812, Colonel J Munro, British resident in Travancore, wrote to Baber expressing gratitude of the rulers there for their release. He said, “I have every reason to believe that many of the unfortunate persons purchased by Assen Ally were procured in the most fraudulent and cruel manner, about the time when he was carrying on his proceedings at Alleppey. I received numerous complaints of the disappearance of children; but all my enquiries at the time could not develop the causes of them... I cannot deny myself the gratification upon this occasion of returning thanks to you in the name of many families in Travancore for your zealous and indefatigable exertions in restoring so many children to their parents and homes, and in checking a practise of a most cruel nature.”

During the trial, Murdoch Brown took the defence that it was a widespread practice in Malabar and there was no family among the Mohammedans and Christians in Malabar towns where they did not have slaves brought from other places. Later on, he blamed his agent, Assen Ally, for providing him with kidnapped children without his knowledge, though a few children, who were born high caste, had given evidence that they had been forced to eat with the low-caste boys by Valia Achan (Brown) with a view to polluting them so that they could be [legally] kept as slaves. With reference to the evidence produced before the court, Baber noted that these slaves had been ”kidnapped in Travancore, and sold to British subjects, and even the free-born children of various castes of Hindoos, subjects of the Cochin and Travancore rajahs, reduced to slavery in the Honourable Company’s dominions, who had been procured by the most fraudulent and violent means, and deprived of their caste by cutting off their lock of hair (the distinguishing mark of their caste), by making them eat prohibited food, and by otherwise disguising and polluting them.” The Advocate General in Madras, Ansthruther, who had examined the case more than once, refers to “Mr Baber’s perseverance in restoring the kidnapped children, in spite of very extraordinary opposition” and to the “extraordinary support Mr Brown appears to have received in these dealings in stolen children.” Ansthruther further remarks in his observations following a reference of the case to him in 1813: “The conduct of Mr Baber, in the whole investigation as to the slaves, appeared to me at the time to be highly praiseworthy... I see every mark of a strong feeling of compassion for the children who had been stolen from their parents, and a determination to restore them to liberty, zealously pursued in spite of very extraordinary opposition, without any symptom of that personal rancour which is strongly charged against Mr Baber.”(quoted in report on Slavery in India, Asiatic Journal, December, 1828.)

However, no one was surprised in the outcome of the case: In spite of the hard evidence Baber had marshaled, none of the accused --only the agents of Brown, who were persons in his employ, were brought to trial-- were found guilty and the case was dismissed on some technical grounds in Mohammedan Law, then practised in criminal courts in Malabar, as Baber himself points out in his deposition before the Select Committee of House of Lords on East India affairs in April 1830. He never concealed his bitterness about the provincial court of circuit-- to which he himself had been elevated later as a judge --taking a view that helped continue and legitimize a practice he thought reprehensible and nefarious; and he openly spoke about the considerable opposition he faced from the court in putting an end to this practice in Malabar. Even the report of the Law Commission on slavery, while praising the substantial work done by Baber for the “suppression of the trafficking in slaves” from the south to Malabar, refers to the fact that the court had an opinion quite different from that of Baber in the matter.

For Baber, this incident of discovery and release of slaves in an Englishman’s estate was not just a matter of a legal case; he considered it as an issue of principle and policies pursued by the British administration in India, and he had to take on a reactionary establishment; in the process earning himself powerful enemies that put his life and career at stake in the ensuing years. In his 1832 note, he says that “unfortunately the measure was not supported by those in whom the legislature had reposed the controlling authority, over the acts of the executive administration, but on the contrary, I had to contend even against their systematic opposition in those individual acts of violence and cruelty; the conspiracy that was formed against my life, through the machinations of the principal slave-owner,. ..but all this had no effect in deterring me from persevering in that righteous cause I had engaged in, and it was not until I found myself deserted by the Government itself, by an avowal of their apprehension of repeating the expression of their approbation of my conduct, lest it should aggravate this distempered feeling, as the struggle between the ardent zeal of an individual and the selfish views of a party, was called.”

One of the principal disputes Baber had with the Company administration was over the way the slaves were treated as commercial property; auctioning them off to recover revenue arrears of their masters, often dividing families in the process, separating parents from children and husbands from wives. As a judicial officer in the Company’s provinces, he took cognizance of such complaints and demanded explanation from the Revenue authorities which evoked considerable friction and enmity as the latter thought no action was improper in the pursuit of revenue collection as demands of taxation were exorbitant and hence called for every ruthless act on their part to realise it. In fact, James Vaughan, collector of Malabar, makes this view explicit in his comments when the issue of prevention of sale of slaves for revenue arrears came up for discussion in 1819. He argues for the continuance of this practice, saying ”that the partial measure of declaring them not liable to be sold for arrears of revenue, will be a drop in the ocean; though, why Government should give up the right every proprietor enjoys, is a question worthy of consideration.”

These larger questions of policy seem to have been underneath many of the disputes Baber had with his superiors, especially after the untimely death of Governor Sir Thomas Munro (1761-1827), with whom he had maintained a very cordial relationship and who generally approved of his views, until his suspension from service in January 1828, on an alleged charge of assault in Mangalore where he served at that time, and afterwards. It was S R Lushington, Governor of Madras who took over after Munro, that ordered the suspension, an action which Baber fought successfully in London, and was eventually reinstated as principal collector and political agent at Dharwar in the Bombay presidency a few years later. It is interesting to note how this battle went on uninterrupted, even years after. In 1833, on his return to service, Baber hits back at his detractors, keeping in mind a dig taken at him by Lushingtons’s brother in some official records, some time back, as follows: “...and here it will not be out of place to notice Mr C M Lushington’s most wanton attack on me, in his report dated the first of July 1819, (for no other reason that I can see, than that like his brother the late governor of Madras, he would prosecute every man who had not his political prepossessions--for I never saw the man in my life), wherein, after vindicating this custom of “selling human beings like so many cattle”, and “this system of perpetual labour,” (as he himself writes), he insolently observes, “it is however possible that the advocate of freedom may think with Cicero and the third judge in Malabar [a reference to Baber], “Mihil liber esse non videtur qui non aliquando nihil agit”[Only a free man can be idle], and this further calumny (instead of returning the letter as every authority that did not countenance these attacks upon character would have done) the Board of Revenue actually incorporate in their own proceedings without a single comment upon the impropriety of such personal allusions in official documents.”

These tussles, however, were not confined to official files and internecine sniping within the administration; but as Baber himself notes, his unconventional views and bold actions had earned him many enemies who were conspiring to finish him off. One of the incidents, widely discussed in official documents, refers to an attempt to provoke him into a duel, a practice that had been prevalent in colonial outposts in the early 19th century. Baber had complained to the authorities that Lt. F C Brown, then a young man with the 80th Foot Regiment of Her Majesty’s Army, came to his residence at Thalassery in October 1812 and demanded an explanation on the rumours that were allegedly spread by Baber against his father, Murdoch Brown. Baber denied he was involved in any false campaigns against Brown, but Brown Junior was not satisfied and he and his friends, all EIC servants, challenged him to a duel.

Baber refused to oblige, asserting he was not answerable to them on matters concerning his official responsibilities. Brown Jr, who accused him of being a professed enemy and persecutor of his father, proceeded to put up posters in the town accusing Baber as “a liar and a coward.”

That led to another round of troubles, and after an investigation, the Government resolved to remove from Thalassery the persons involved in the affairs, namely Lt. Brown, and his friends Douglas, Gahagan and Harrison. The Government also allowed Baber to proceed with criminal action against them, which resulted in jail term for all the accused. The sentences were as follows: “Brown Jr to be imprisoned for two months and two weeks, and pay a fine of 100 pagodas; Douglas, to be imprisoned five months and two weeks, and pay a fine of 1000 pagodas; Gahagan, to be imprisoned three months and two weeks and pay a fine of 100 pagodas, and all of them bound to keep the peace for three years.”

An interesting aside to this story is that F C Brown (1792-1868) later became one of the sharpest critics of colonial administration in India, and during his 1848 deposition before the House of Lords Select Committee on cotton production in India, he accuses the colonial rule of causing the complete destruction of Indian agriculture, anticipating and powerfully articulating some key arguments later developed by Indian nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and Ramesh Chander Dutt. His long experience and intimate links with the natives as a planter and an agriculturist in Thalassery had made him acutely aware of the tremendous negative impact of colonial policies in India. In fact, after his return to England in 1838, he emerged as a pioneer in reform movements focused on India, associated with launching the first of such organisations, the British India Society, in London a few months later, in July 1839.

For Baber, despite his huge efforts and some minor victories against his personal detractors, it was proving to be an uphill task: As most of the first-generation EIC officials were leaving the scene and new administrators taking their place, the colonial policies were changing and attitudes getting harder. He found himself abandoned by the Government, in his pursuit of a humane policy towards the native slaves, when the Government in an official minute (Dated 22 January 1823) made it clear that it thought “the simple intimation that Government approves of the conduct of Mr Baber, might even increase these evils.” A frank and forthright declaration of its abdication of the rule of law!

Then he goes on to declare: “Since that time, I have confined myself to occasional notice of the condition of Malabar slaves, as often as my public attention has been drawn to the subject, but with little or no benefit to the unfortunate slaves, who continue the same reprobated people as ever, as their half-famished persons, their sieves of huts, and the diminution of their numbers, while every other class of people is increasing, abundantly testify.” In a recent study on slavery in colonial India, historian Tanika Sarkar makes an objective assessment of Baber’s disenchantment with colonial policies: Baber, a British officer, wrote in indignation that it was colonial rule that really put into practice the evil custom of selling slaves off the land they habitually tilled and of separating slave families by sale. Even though the Indian slave-owners did possess the right theoretically, they seldom exercised it….Baber strongly criticized the stock anti-abolitionist argument that forced labour ought to be retained because the higher castes would otherwise be totally helpless, being as they were traditionally divorced from the cultivation process. According to him, such rigid caste prescriptions were being steadily eroded, and the upper castes were increasingly drawing closer to production, a process that would have been encouraged by the emancipation of captive labour. Colonial policy then, not only continued the old hierarchy but actively froze it and choked the potential for change. A similar process was observed in the case of slaves: “I have observed amongst the slaves in the vicinity of large towns a growing spirit of industry and independence which, but for the countenance their masters have received from us [the British]…would have ripened into an assertion of their liberty long ago.” (Tanika Sarkar, Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India, eds. Utsa Patnaik& Manjari Dingwaney.)

Thomas Baber signed off his historic note referring to himself as Late First Judge, Western Division, Madras territories, an office which he had held for a long time, bringing him into close contact with the lives of common people. A few years later, Baber tendered his resignation, and having been relieved on first of March 1839, he returned to live among the natives in Thalassery where he had started off his career four decades earlier. After the death of his wife Helen Somerville Fearon in 1840, the lonely crusader was practically alone-- as his only surviving son Henry Fearon Baber had shifted his base to far-away Kurseong in Darjeeling--and he died in Kannur in 1843. Now, two centuries later, his words remain a powerful testimony of the injustice done to a section of Indian people oppressed by a cruel caste system, and a harsh critique of the insensitive colonial policy towards these people, who, unfortunately have to struggle even today for their true emancipation in a liberal and democratic Republic of India.

(I am thankful to Dr John E C Roberts, New York, and Nicholas Balmer, London, for their comments on an earlier draft and support in the research work for this article.)

A version of this article has been published at www.infochangeindia.org, January 2011.

Caste, Half-Caste& Outcaste, in India and Outside

CASTE SEEMS to be coming back to our lives with a vengeance. And sadly not only in India, but in other parts of the world too where there is an Indian connection. We made effort to remove it with the help of sour secular Constitution. But see what some of our learned judges in the Supreme Court had to say in a recent judgment:

“The murders were the outcome of social issues like a marriage with a person of so-called a lower caste. However, a time has come when we have to consider these social issues as relevant, while considering the death sentence in the circumstances s these. The caste is a concept which grips a person before his birth and does not leave him even after his death. The vicious grip of caste, community, religion, though totally unjustified, is a stark reality. The psyche of the offender in the background of a social issue like an inter-caste marriage, though wholly unjustified would have to be considered in the peculiar circumstances of the case.”

In other words if a Brahmin murders a lower caste person because he married his sister, then the seriousness of the crime gets reduced because of the higher caste status of the criminal! Well, going by this, we can very well expect a day when our learned judges offering some special privileges for those involved in Dalit lynching in our wonderful land. After all, the Dalit, by his very existence, is a sinister presence that evokes a sense of nausea and anger among the higher castes, don’t they?

After reading from this Supreme Court judgment, I got a mail from my friend John who was traveling in the Caribbean islands where there is a huge Indian presence. He wrote from Guyana:

“Today I discovered about how caste perceptions are pushed to this society by the Indian Indians. Two very well-off guys here told me how they do not like the Indian diplomats here as they looked down upon people of Indian origin -- telling they were low caste coolies "shipped" from India. This kind of Brahminism and caste attitude of Indians is there deep inside, and they even impose it on those communities (like Guyanese) who have outgrown or escaped from caste.”

Then elsewhere in global discussion group I was talking abut the problems of Anglo-Indians, a group often described as half-castes by the English. I never knew it was a widely held practice all over the English-speaking world until Ainslie Pyne, my artist friend in Adelaide, Australia, wrote to me:

“Interestingly the term 'half-caste' was quite common in Australia and New Zealand for those who were the product of a Maori/white - Australian Aborigine/white liaison.

In the case of my mother's ancestry - I still used the term 1/8th caste to denote that Mum was part Tasmanian aborigine and 7/8th English ancestry and I think the term half-caste Maori is still common in NZ; but maybe they have bans on labelling NZ’ers based on the percentage of mixed blood they have.

I doubt it is any more debasing to say someone is 'half caste' or whatever percentage it happens to be, than saying someone is of 'mixed' blood.

As a matter of interest - what is the acceptable term in India for someone of mixed Indian/European ancestry?”

That meant I had to explain to her what caste, half-caste and outcaste meant to us India, especially to those who were at the receiving end of these social practices. Here is my note to Ainslie:

I think the Europeans took the expressions caste, half-caste and out-caste from their Indian connections and experience. Caste as a social organization actually came to exist in India and it got deeper and stronger as an institution here, that for the past 3000 years it defined the essence of Indian society and culture. It remains so even today, though caste oppression is now officially extra-legal and discrimination based on caste could get you a jail term, at least in theory.

Caste means a society which is divided on the basis of one's birth: If you are born to a Brahmin you are at the a top of the social hierarchy and if you are born at lower order, you are in the lower or middle order and there are out-castes who are outside the caste system and hence they are outside the social stream.

According to ancient Indian custom, there were four castes: Brahmin (priest), Ksahtirya (soldiers and rulers), Vasiya (traders), and Sudra (peasants, artisans.) and those outside were outcastes or Avarnas. There was a stiff social stratification and often untouchability was practised even among these sections. Hence if a Brahmin is polluted by a Sudra, he would have to pay a heavy penalty, and at times it even meant death to the Sudra, the polluter.

But the severest pains were reserved for the out-castes, Avarnas, those who were seen to be outside the caste system which was called Varnashrama or Chaturvarnya, as there were four main castes. (Chathur is a word which denotes four and Varna means colour.) Hence you can see casteism is something like racism, but more sinister as it goes very deep and is extremely complex and divides the entire society vertically and horizontally.

It has been a painful thing to India and most social scientists do agree that it has done immense damage to the social fabric. Still, it remains intact and strong because it gives a comparative advantage to each segment in the system (except the lowest underdogs), because they have people lower down whom they can boss around and despise. I think this system was devised by people who had a great insight into human mind, his venality and meanness.

Islam has been a religion which originally had no such social divisions, but once they came to India they adopted it in their lives. So had the Europeans and Christians, who seemed to have developed similar caste prejudices as they lived in India. But I never knew they carried it even to their homes as you tell me such expressions do exist even in Australia and NZ.

Funny.

My Dalit Servant and a Case of Thermodynamics

SOME TIME ago, Sajan, a friend, was busy setting up his biogas plant in his kitchen. I was one of those who keenly monitored the progress of the effort, and in fact I was disappointed when Bindu came up with a note of dissent, reporting that the plant simply did not give sufficient gas to do the cooking. That was bad. Hence Sajan started hunting around for kitchen waste to refuel his plant.

I was interested in the affair not (only) because all of us are very keen on what goes (wrong) in the other guy's kitchen (and possibly bedroom too.) I had a private motive because I was also having troubles in my kitchen. My problem, then, was a Parishad-type chulha which I had set up that simply did not work.

I talked to many people what was the problem with this chulha, which instead of pumping out smoke through the chimney, was spreading it inside the kitchen making the claim a 'smokeless chulha' somewhat of a misnomer. My wife kept grumbling, and I kept my mouth shut (I was the person who suggested we must have a chulha too!).

Then our servant, a dalit lady who travels from a village to the city to work, said the problem was with the way it was designed: It did not have sufficient space for allowing the smoke to escape into the chimney pipe especially when we kept big pots above it. The problem, then was that of thermodynamics and I decided this was too much of a task for me. I left it at that accepting failure.

But the indifatigable lady was not like me. One day she showed me how to do it. Push it a bit lower and allow more space, and it worked beautifully. Now we cook in it quite often.

I wrote about it because this week I read Sunita Narain, in her Down to Earth column, write about a woman she met in Udaipur, Rajasthan, 25 years ago. She too had such an improved chulha which, however, did not work. What she did was to break it a bit and make it useful, or using our own improved terminlogy, re-engineering it.

I think these incidents are very important and they give us lessons about how to go about improving our people's lives. We need to listen to people who have grassroots level experience, or in other words our technocrats and knowledge-creators need to be a bit more down to earth. Otherwise their wonderful inventions would remain just that: inventions with no practical application.

(For those interested in the Sunita Narain column, see www.downtoearth.org.in)

Dalit Identity & Politics of Access to Land: Will It Really Help Dalit Liberation?

IN INDIA, dalits and adivasis are on struggle, mainly for right to land. The adivasi, dalit land question today is one of most critical issues in the country. From Singur to Chengara, the anti-globalization campaigners to Gandhian satyagrahis to cause junkies to causeless politicians looking for a saleable slogan, are now speaking about dalits, adivasis and their right to land.

No doubt, adivasis and dalits were denied access to land and their lands were alienated treacherously by the vested interests and crooks. In Kerala, the Adivasi Land Alienation (Prevention) Act which sought to stop this trend and restore the land to the original owners) was watered down to such an extent that the adivasis who were owners of huge chunks of forest lands are now left with nothing.

Still, the present struggles raise some other questions relating to the strategy and slogans of these struggles. Here is a post I made to a discussion groups on the issue:

Will access to land help dalits and the other most disadvantaged sections in our society liberate themselves really from their slavery and poverty? In reality, how far these struggles like Chengara where access to land is made the central point will help dalits?

I am really confused here because I do have a sneaking doubt that for all practical purposes, the projection of land and land alone as the central feature of dalit life and identity would only help perpetuate their past and present miserable state of affairs. In fact, when they agitate for land and land alone and not for anything else, they are accepting an asset that had always been a curse, keeping them in the social position that they found themselves in, all these years, all these generations.

I am extremely doubtful whether those anti-globalization movements, those romantics who are convinced industries are bad and must be kept out at whatever cost, who now come to the aid of dalits and landless, would really help dalits. They are opposed to globalization because they are disturbed about the familiar, laid back idyllic life going for ever. They now enlist dalits only because they are suitable allies for the time being. Look at their priorities: They do not want manufacturing industries that will pollute (but will ensure more jobs to unskilled and semi-skilled people from dalits and adivasis) and they are fine with high-tech industries like information technology that would not pollute and would ensure good jobs for their kids …

I think Chandra Bhan Prasad and Sree Narayana Guru were right. Prasad says globalization and industrialization would help dalits lose for ever their segregated existence, will take them into a kind of existence that will make them part of a global work force with no name, no caste, and no discrimination on the basis of mere birth.

Guru said, for him what was important was fighting this segregation than the fight against British colonialism, whom some Chalappuram-based lawyers were waging hammer and tongs in their own drawing rooms, which at a later stage Muhammed Abdurahman called Sunday Congress. Still, people even today are asking where had been the Guru and his people when "we" were fighting for freedom! Well, those tapping toddy at tree tops never knew they had lost freedom in the first place because they never had any freedom to speak of.

So I wonder, perhaps this dalit identity that non- dalits are quite vocal of these days can be the most dangerous trap the dalits are falling into in their current social and economic plight? Why not at least think of a subaltern identity?

Ayyankali & the Missing Chapters in Kerala History

Remembering the Dalit fighter on the centenary of his historic struggle for entry to Dalit children to schools in Kerala.

By N P Chekkutty

Ayyankali, the legendary Dalit fighter from Kerala, seems to be caught in a trap of history: On the one side his name is evoked by left-wing extremists who have christened themselves as the Ayayankali Pada, or the Fighters of Ayyankali, and on the other it was Sonia Gandhi who came to inaugurate the centenary celebrations of his historic struggle for the right to education to Dalit children.

Ayyankali was a fighter who took on the powerful upper caste elite as they prevented Dalit children by force from entering the school in his village. But paradoxically, the Naxalite group in Kerala who calls themselves the Ayyankali Pada stopped a European woman scholar and her Dalit associate from conducting an academic research work among the tribals in Iritty in north Kerala. The same hypocrisy can be seen in the traditional attitude of the Congress party towards the concerns of Dalits in this country.

Still, the question to ask today is why Ayyankali remains such a powerful symbol, for forces as inimical to each other as the left extremists and the Congress party? Perhaps, the great Dalit leader from Venganur in Travancore, who came to eminence in the Malayalee public sphere in the first few decades of the 20th century, represented both these trends: He was a fighter and an anarchist revolutionary at one level; and at another, a social reformer and institution builder who made use of the established pillars of society for seeking the right to education and social equality for his brethren who were the ones severely ostracized in our society for many centuries. Ayyankali was the leader of a band of Dalit youths who themselves called Ayyankali Pada and he was also the first Dalit member in the Travancore Praja Sabha, the Maharajah’s nominated Assembly.

This year marks the centenary of the year-long strike of agricultural workers that he had organized in various parts of Travancore in the early years of the last century. Of course there are differences among historians about the actual dates of the Pulaya farm-hands’ strike in the princely state, whether it took place in 1907-08 or earlier in 1904-05, the time when Travancore Dewan first gave permission for Dalits to enter public schools amidst stiff resistance.

Let the dispute among historians stay. Let us look at what happened in our history. What we confront here is a deafening silence of the mainstream historians, as precious little has been written on this critical part of our social history. It is a fact that even E M S Namboodiripad, veteran Marxist who wrote a people’s history of the land of Malayalees, had said very little about Ayyankali and his band of Dalit fighters acknowledging that he knew little about those developments.

Surprisingly, even after a century, Ayyankali remains a figure whose contributions are not properly studied or understood by the mainstream school of historians. Even the liberals in his own time, like the famous editor Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai, who was deported from Travancore for his critical writings against the dewan, failed to appreciate his effort to get Pulaya kids into public schools. This is how Ramakrishna Pillai looked at the Pulaya demand for common education: “We don’t find any reason to support those who demand complete equality in customs and manners and on that basis seek admission to schools without taking into account the respective caste merits. To provide admission to those from castes cultivating land on a par with those castes cultivating knowledge is worse than tying a horse and a buffalo under the same yoke to make them plough…”

Ramakrishna Pillai was a man who was familiar with liberal and even Communist ideas in those days preceding the Russian Revolution. In fact he was one of the first Indian journalists to write on the life of Karl Marx, in his 1912 monograph on Marx which appeared in Malayalam. The only other article on Marx, in an Indian publication, was published in Calcutta’s Modern Review, note P C Joshi and K Damodaran, veteran Communist leaders in their book on the origins of Indian left, Marx Comes to India. But neither they nor any of the recent historians of the Indian left movement who traced the origins of working class agitation in India, give any reference to the historic agricultural workers strike that Ayyankali launched in 1907-08, almost a decade ahead of the Russian Revolution. Nor do they ever mention about those frail and weather beaten farm-hands like Thaivilakkathu Kali and Moolayil Kali, Pulaya women who were in the leadership of the SJPS who led the historic agitation to a success conclusion a century ago.

That leaves the difficult task of reconstructing Ayyankali and the Dalit struggles he led a century ago, to a new generation of historians. This is no easy task. Ayyankali and his comrades had no initiation to the world of letters and the media of their times had largely ignored them. What we have today is largely the negative references in some publications of those days and the anecdotes in oral history passed through generations.

But the main facts remain largely uncontested: The Travancore rulers had issued orders permitting Dalits and other outcasts into the schools run by Government following severe public pressure. But the upper castes were firmly opposed to this and they used violence to stop lower-caste children from entering schools. That led to violent confrontations between these two forces. Such confrontations had been reported on a number of occasions, mainly during 1904-05, 1907-08 and 1913-14, according to historians like Dr M S Jayaprakash and T H P Chentharassery, biographer of Ayyankali.

The first of these clashes took place in 1904-05 when the Government first gave permission for Dalits to enter schools. The resistance from upper castes was fierce and the Dalits fought back. Since none of the Dalit children were allowed to enter schools, Government allowed them to start their own schools called Kutippallikkootam to teach Dalit children.

It was then Ayyankali launched a school in his village, Venganur, for Pulaya children. His task was daunting. He knew no reading and writing and so had to find a teacher for the school. No teacher was available as the upper castes threatened anyone willing to take up the job. Finally, Ayyankali succeeded in persuading a Nair youth to work in his school, but as the teacher entered the school with his Dalit bodyguards, he found the place burnt down.

It was in 1907 that Ayyankali and his friends launched the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (SJPS) on the lines of the Sree Narayana Dharma ParipalanaYogam (SNDP) started by the followers of Sree Narayana Guru, among the more progressive Ezhavas of south Kerala. The SJPS primarily worked among the Pulayas and its activities spread soon in most parts of south Kerala. The SJPS demanded that the Pulayas who worked in farms be given a weekly off day and all the members were advised to meet every Sunday to discuss their common problems.

The SJPS gave Ayyankali a powerful forum to address the Dalit question in Travancore: In 1910, as Dewan P Rajagopalachari and the director of education department, an Englishman named Mitchel, issued orders permitting Dalit admission to schools, Ayyankali went to the Uruttambalam school in Balaramapuram seeking admission for Panchami, a Pulaya girl. The headmaster refused, and that set of a series of clashes between Nairs and Pulayas in various parts of Travancore. According to one set of historians, it was then Ayyankali called for the farm workers strike that lasted almost one year, forcing the land owners to sue for a negotiated settlement.

These efforts did have a positive impact on the education of Pulayas and other Dalit groups in Travancore. According to the census figures in 1875, among the 188,916 Pulayas in the state only 183 had been marked as literate. But between 1913 and 1916, there is a five-fold increase in the Pulaya enrollment to schools. According to figures published in Mitavadi, a local newspaper, the admission of Pulaya children to school was only 2.01 per cent in 1913. But it had risen to 10.91 per cent by 1916. Still they were way behind the Nairs with 99.50 per cent children going to schools, and Ezhavas with 45.43 per cent. Another interesting point this statistics brought out was the comparative fall in Muslim enrollment during this period: They were 4.85 per cent (much higher to Pulayas) in 1913 but in 1916, their enrollment of 9.55 was lower than the Pulayas’s 10.91 per cent. Still, all these efforts together put the state on the road to its record of near total literacy by the end of the 20th century.

Illustration courtesy: Raghavan Atholi, Kozhikode.
(An edited version of this article is available at www.indiatogether.org)

What Keeps Me Worried These Days...

Here is a post I made to the WASHINGTON POST’S POSTGLOBAL discussion forum recently:

N P CHEKKUTTY, CALICUT, INDIA:

What kept me worried this week has been the way the Indian legal system revealed its weaknesses and elitist bias, through a series of judicial orders that went against the oppressed classes in Indian society like the dalits and the tribal population. The court says that the creamy layer, those who have a decent income in these sections, shall be denied access to the government postings through the system of reservation. But the fact is, in educational institutions and government posts, there are often less number of qualified people from these sections to fill the vacancies that belong to them. Now when those who may stand a chance to enter these offices are kept out because they are economically well off, it would mean the Indian administrative system will be filled by the upper caste sections.
Surely a recipe for disaster because already the backward classes are on the brink of revolt. They have taken up arms in many areas.

N P Chekkutty


And there were some responses like the following:

IF YOU ARE TRYING TO PAINT INDIA AS BEING A GOOD PLACE TO BE FROM:
I suggest that you turn your tone to honesty.
as right now you look more primitive than those you attempt to stain with your bile...
at least I shoot at ugliness, you're like a cholera infected child.

(www.newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal)

Interesting, isn't it?

Tsunami Breaks Villages, But Fails to Break Caste Walls

Remembering the Tsunami Experiences on its Third Anniversary Day

By N P Chekkutty

The tsunami disaster brought into sharp focus the deep chasm between the two Indias : the India that is marching confidently ahead in the comity of nations and the India that lags behind, discriminated against and sorely lacking even in basic necessities. Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry in Kolkata, asserted that India’s decision not to accept external assistance and rely solely on its own resources to fight the calamity was an instance of turning adversity into opportunity, dalit workers who toured coastal areas of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh were briefing the national media in Delhi on glaring instances of caste discrimination, even in the face of this horrendous tragedy.

Activists from the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), Safai Karmachari Andolan and Sakshi Human Rights Watch, who toured dalit villages in the two states for over a week, brought back accounts of serious discrimination in aid distribution and rehabilitation between the fishermen community and dalits, both of whom were equally affected by the tragedy that struck on the morning of December 26. The tsunami knew only geographical boundaries, but we could see the deep and entrenched boundaries of caste dividing the affected people, said Paul Divakar, an activist from Hyderabad who is associated with the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, Delhi .

Dalit activists Paul Divakar, Bezawada Wilson (Safai Karmachari Andolan), Dr S D J M Prasad (Sakshi) and others toured the districts of Kanchipuram, Thiruvallur, Chennai and Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, and Prakasam and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, for an on-the-spot assessment of aid delivery and rehabilitation in the weeks following the tsunami tragedy. They reported several cases of caste discrimination against dalit refugees in both states, even amongst the official machinery.

In a note prepared by the activists, based on their enquiries, they report extensive damage to dalit households and property in all the five districts they toured. Livelihoods have been destroyed and water sources contaminated by seawater. In many places relief camps were organised along caste lines, with separate camps for dalits, with aid distribution in the camps often erratic. There were instances of dalit hamlets being completely ignored by officials and organisations involved in aid delivery. Official estimates of loss of life and property have not been properly carried out in dalit areas; where they have, the losses have been underestimated. There were cases of unidentified bodies being buried close to dalit settlements despite the availability of land elsewhere. Restoration of drinking water, roads, public health services, communication facilities etc were done faster and more efficiently in fishermen areas while dalit areas were neglected. The extrication of bodies was done only by manual scavengers who are exclusively dalits. For this, ‘safai karmacharis’, as they are called, were brought in from neighbouring municipalities and corporations. They were offered no additional benefits and were paid only Rs 25 a day as additional wages. They had to work without proper protective clothing like gloves, face masks, etc.

The team of activists visiting villages in Prakasam and Nellore districts in Andhra Pradesh said relief deliveries of rice, medicines etc reached only fishermen communities, not dalit areas. At Urla Palem, in Prakasam, the district collector, local MLA and MP who toured the fishermen village did not visit the dalit colony which was also badly affected by the disaster.

Activists reported that assessments of dalit loss of property were underestimated as the dalits did not own pucca houses, unlike the fishermen community which was comparatively better off. They said revenue officials generally took the view that fishermen communities were the only ones that were financially destroyed by the tsunami, as they owned tangible assets like boats, nets, etc. In the case of dalits, who are equally dependent on the coastal economy and environment and who suffered just as much as the fishermen, the losses could not be quantified in the official sense. So dalits are at the receiving end of a double loss, as official estimates of losses from the tsunami do not take intangible losses, like damage to the coastal environment, into account.

The Urla Palem salt cultivators are an example. Around 500 dalit families in the village of Urla Palem were engaged in extracting salt from 175 acres of land near the sea, under the auspices of the Binginapalli Scheduled Caste Salt Cultivators Society. These fields are now completely submerged, filled with saline water and sand, and it will take at least another month to clean up the area and resume work. Villagers told the team of activists that officials assessing the losses had not visited the dalit colony once to find out what the situation there was.

A survey by the team in five districts of Tamil Nadu reveals the following information: In Kanchipuram, although 2,332 dalit houses were damaged, 365 head of cattle swept away, and 55 acres of land affected, no dalit family had received any aid. In Cuddalore, 20 dalits died, 614 houses were damaged, 13 boats lost and 19 head of cattle perished. But no aid was given to the dalits. In Thiruvallur (16 deaths, 102 people missing, 3,810 houses damaged), there was some aid distribution among the dalits. In Chennai (30 deaths, 2,825 houses damaged), aid has been made available. In Nagapattinam/Karaikkal (113 deaths, 1,914 houses damaged), aid has been distributed among the dalits.

Dalit activists say the discrimination does not seem to be a conscious effort on the part of the officials. It stems from age-old practices and prejudices. Separate camps for dalits and non-dalits were set up in places where there had earlier been incidents of conflict between the communities.

The activists also came across areas where camps had been jointly organised, and where communities lived together. One example was Poppukar camp, in Nagapattinam, where activists witnessed fishermen, dalits and members of other communities living together in a relief camp after the tsunami struck.

Activists say that once media attention is drawn to instances of discrimination, higher officials respond quickly. But lower down the ladder, apathy and animosity towards dalits still exists in many villages.

(The information detailed above is based on discussions with the team members in Delhi on January 12, 2005 . The situation regarding aid delivery is likely to have changed as local officials have been briefed about the survey’s findings)

(N P Chekkutty is a senior journalist based in Delhi )

InfoChange News & Features, January 2005

Get out Dalits, We Are Here to Develop!

Valanthakkadu: A Dalit Island’s Encounter with Development


By N P Chekkutty

The tiny island of Valanthakkadu in Maratu panchayat off Kochi is a unique ecosystem. Just one kilometer away from the national highway in the midst of the commercial capital of Kerala, the 246-acre island is surrounded by the richest mangroves in the southern parts of the State. Situated in the Vembanadu Lake, Valanthakkadu is home to a variety of fishes that are unique to estuaries as the lake itself is a mixed water-body of salt and fresh water extending to hundreds of kilometers to the east spread over the districts of Ernakulam, Alapuzha and Kottayam.

Till a few months ago, Valanthakkadu was a sleepy village where only 44 families lived, all of them poor fishermen who eked out their livelihood from the lake around. The main sources of their livelihood were fishing, collection of shell fish like clams, growing of prawns in enclosures and cultivation of a particular variety of rice known locally as pokkali, a unique rice variety seen only in these parts. The rice plants are seen above the salt water while their roots are sunk in the lake’s bottom.

Valanthakkadu’s social and ecological system is now in turmoil: The island in the heart of the commercial hub of Kerala is the envy of builders and land-developers. Around 200 acres of private land, which remained idle for generations giving a common fishing and cultivation ground for the people – normally they are submerged in water except in summer-- have been taken over by the builders’ lobby with a view to developing it into a high tech city that will bring huge investments and money.

As the workers from the builders’ firms recently descended on the island in large numbers and started cutting down the mangroves surrounding the village, people rose in protest converting this small island into a scene of contest between the band of developers on the one side and the deprived people on the other.

“We lived here for generations and all of us supported ourselves with the natural resources available in the island,” said Sahajan, a youth in his twenties, who is now one of the leading activists of the Committee for the Protection of Valanthakkadu, set up recently. He pointed out that except for a few youngsters who are employed as casual labour in the booming construction business in the city, the entire population of the island depend on the rich ecosystem for their living.

He says the people are not impressed by the offers being made by the builders and developers who have promised the State Government to set up a high-tech city that would generate 75,000 new jobs and modern houses for those who live in the island. “Why do we need those houses as without this ecosystem we will have no way to survive here?” he asked.

But Valanthakkadu has many other aspects that speak of the lesser known casualties of the march of development. On a visit to the island last week, this correspondent came to realize that of the 44 families living in the island, except for one Christian family, all others are Dalits, belonging to the Pulaya community. As untouchables in a caste-ridden society, they were sent to this uninhabited island in the midst of the lake a few generations ago. Now they are once again being uprooted, as much of the land in the island is originally owned by rich families who live in the mainland. Each of the settler family in the island own around 15 to 25 cents of land in their possession, while major share of the land in the island is owned by outsiders whose properties were till the other day hired as common fishing and cultivation areas.

A socio-cultural study of the island revealed much more interesting aspects: Most of the families have their own fishing nets and other traditional implements which are now predominantly used by womenfolk or older people as the youngsters prefer to cross the lake in search of jobs outside. The island is connected to the outside world through a ferry boat manned by 65-year-old Vasu Chettan, who says he gets around Rs. 50 a day. It was evening as we crossed the water, little fishes jumping in the still silver-coloured water partly covered by green hyacinths and the island a majestic view of scenic beauty.

The boat lands at the foot of the Primary Health Centre, the only public institution in the island which has not even a primary school to boast of. The few and scattered houses, a few of them tiled and concrete structures, can be reached through narrow footpaths. Most of the houses are modest dwelling places and one could see the fishing nets and other implements hanging from the walls. There are two types of nets, the prominent one mainly used by men who go out into the lake in boats and swing them wide, and the other- a smaller variety-- used by women who tackle the smaller species of fish. Women also collect clam and other items of shell fish diving deep into the water. The mesh-size of nets are made in such a way that younger fishes are allowed to escape.

“We go for fishing early in the morning and sell whatever we get at the market across the lake,” said Biji, a 36-year-old woman who is unmarried. She said her mother Chinnamma, 65, takes the fish to the market and normally they get nothing more than 50 or 60 rupees a day. “We have no other income, our brother is bed ridden, and we don’t know what we will do when we are forced out,” she said.

Ambika Gopi is a mother of two and she was on her way to the lake with her small net as we met her. A former president of the island’s micro finance group, Kudumbasree, she said her family’s only income was from fishing. They have recently bought a small boat and fishing net with a loan of Rs. 10,000 from the micro finance unit and have to repay Rs. 350 towards the loan every month. She said she has two children, a girl going to a degree college and a son who is admitted to a private course for which she has to shell out Rs. 400 a month as fee. “The new owners of the land are not allowing us to fish and we will face doom if the Government does not intervene to save us,” she said.

Most of the families have similar worries to share with the outside world. But except for a few activists like C R Neelakantan, a nuclear scientist turned environmental activist, who is associated with the Valanthakkadu Protection Committee, few people from Kerala’s public life have come here to investigate. One exception was Kallen Pokkudan, a Dalit activist and campaigner for the protection of mangroves, who is known for his heroic efforts for the preservation of mangroves in the northern parts of Kerala. “Pokkudan came here and he was horrified by the way this precious ecosystem is being wantonly destroyed,” said Neelakantan who accompanied him on the visit. An indigenous expert in local mangroves, Pokkudan was able to identify 12 varieties of them in the island. He felt that this is the largest system of natural mangroves in the southern parts of Kerala.

Neelakantan said the Valanthakkadu Protection Committee has petitioned the State Government against any destruction of the fragile ecosystem in the area. The committee also has filed a petition with the Kerala High Court against any move to destroy the mangroves in the island. The Chief Minister has instructed the Industries department to take into account the concerns of the local people before any MOU is signed for the development of the proposed high tech city. But the local people are wary about the promises as they fear they are powerless against the immense resources of capital invading their village.

Originally published at www.infochangeindia.org)