Kayyur
is a remote village in the Western Ghats in the Kasargod
district of northern Kerala. It is so remote that, when
I was visiting the village recently, I saw women NREGS
workers by the roadside pushing a python, which they
had stumbled upon and captured, into a gunny bag. But
Kayyur is the village which had produced perhaps the
first peasant revolutionary martyrs of modern India.
My visit to the village was in fact intended as an act
of homage.
It
had been, like most of Malabar, the site of landlord
(jenmi) oppression for centuries. When the Karshaka
Sangham of the newly-formed Communist Party unit in
Kerala gave a call for peasant resistance, Kayyur, like
other villages of Kasargod, responded with enthusiasm.
There was merciless police action against a peasant
demonstration in March 1941demanding the release of
leaders who had just been arrested. On March 28 there
was a second demonstration which happened to come face-to-face
with one of the policemen involved in the repression
on the previous occasion. To escape the wrath of the
peasants, who were sought to be restrained by the leaders,
the policeman jumped into the Kariangode river flowing
below and drowned. Five Communist activists, all less
than 25 years of age, were sentenced to death (and several
others to varying terms of imprisonment), charged with
the ''murder'' of the policeman; of them four were hanged
in the Kannur Central Jail (the fifth was spared because
he was a minor). E.K. Nayanar, later Chief Minister
of Kerala, was the third accused in the FIR, despite
not being present on the spot, but escaped trial because
the police could not capture him.
There was no evidence that any of those executed had
actually undertaken any act of violence against the
policeman. But the verdict was that everybody present
there could be deemed to have had the ''intent to kill'';
so there was no question of any ''miscarriage of justice''
arising from the lack of direct evidence against those
convicted. P.C. Joshi, the then General Secretary of
the Communist Party, P. Sundarayya, Party organizer
for south India at the time, and P. Krishna Pillai,
a founder of the Communist Party in Kerala, had visited
the Kayyur martyrs in Kannur jail before their execution,
and Joshi had published an extensive account of their
conversation. It is a remarkable testimony to the courage
of the Kayyur martyrs and their commitment to the liberation
of the people.
While visiting Kayyur I was reminded of a similar incident
which had occurred in a remote region of Orissa called
Ranpur two years earlier. In the prajamandal uprising
against the ruler, which was led by a group of Communists
who were inside the Congress Party, the British political
agent Major Bazelgette was lynched by an angry mob.
Major Bazelgette had waded incautiously into the mob
and had shot one person who had slapped him for showing
disrespect to some victims of action by his own entourage.
Two leaders of the uprising were hanged for Major Bazelgette's
''murder''; one was not even present at the site and the
other had tried in vain to pacify the mob and save Bazelgette's
life.
I mention Kayyur and Ranpur because I happen to have
some familiarity with the two incidents, but there were
many such incidents, led not just by the Communists
but by socialists and progressive Congressmen. These
incidents constitute the backdrop to the Quit India
movement, and a prelude to uprisings like Telengana,
Tebhaga and Punnapra-Vayalar, which were to come later.
What they testify to is the fact that starting from
around the middle of the thirties and right until the
end of the forties there was an upsurge among the people,
the like of which in terms of strength and synchronicity
the country had perhaps never seen. Kayyur and Ranpur
were both remote places more than a thousand miles apart,
with populations that had been quiescent for centuries,
conditioned into bearing with silence the burden of
feudal oppression, buttressed by colonial rule. The
synchronicity of these and numerous other incidents
which occurred during this period underscores not only
the commonality of the experience of the people, despite
their diversity of locations and circumstances, but
also their common new-found strength to convert dormant
anger into active resistance. The Depression and the
war had been the last straw; and they brought about
an upsurge, which even though it did not burst into
peasant revolutionary struggles except in pockets, was
no less real for that reason.
Indeed, this upsurge spanned across several countries.
It characterized China, Burma, Malaya, Indo-China, Indonesia,
and the Arab world, not to mention other parts of the
third world. Of course in other countries of East and
South-East Asia, this upsurge took far more militant
forms than in India, because of which there is a tendency
to see India as an exception to this upsurge, as a country
that was by-passed by this worldwide upsurge. But this
is unwarranted. The upsurge in India was not only strong,
but shaped the subsequent history of modern India, both
the achievement of independence and the institutionalization
of a democratic polity characterized by one-person-one-vote.
The conjuncture that ensured a break between post-independence
India and all that had preceded it, can be traced to
those fateful years.
The fact that that upsurge remained comparatively more
subterranean than its counterparts in other regions
of Asia, has tended also to give the impression that
India's emergence as a democratic polity was a gift
to the nation by the ''liberalism'' of a Gandhi or a Nehru,
and that its attainment of freedom from colonialism
was a result of the sagacity of an Attlee or a Mountbatten
and of the enlightened Indian leadership, who could
come to a cozy and sensible settlement.
This however is sheer reification, looking at things
in an inverted form. It is not that the people of India
were quiet and it is only the leaders who acted, and
acted wisely, but that the leaders acted as they did
precisely because the people were on the move, and,
had they acted otherwise, the subterranean anger of
the people would have taken the form of an open conflagration.
If the call for armed revolution given at the Calcutta
Congress of the Communist party of India was a failure,
then the reason lay not just in the fact that the world-wide
revolutionary upsurge had begun to abate; it lay above
all in the fact that significant political gains had
already been achieved by then by the people. These gains
in short were achieved both where peasant revolutions
were successful and even where the people's movement
remained subterranean and did not translate into a general
and open revolutionary upsurge. Indeed it is precisely
this success because of which the post-war upsurge everywhere
had begun to abate by the late forties.
Some historians have carried the process of devaluing
the popular anti-colonial struggle in India to a point
where they even deny its very existence. The entire
tool-kit of the English empiricist tradition is used
to make elaborate studies of individual popular struggles,
and to show that one was against some local landlord,
the other against some corrupt official, the third against
the tyranny of the Dewan of some Maharaja, and so on.
And then the question is asked: since these were all
separate, individual, local, and disparate struggles,
where was the so-called anti-colonial struggle that
the ''nationalists'' and the Left so fondly talk about?
One is reminded here of a short story by Jainendra Kumar,
the renowned Hindi writer, about two persons in the
midst of the forest asking: ''where is this thing called
'forest' that everybody talks about? There are banyan
trees, there are mango trees, there are jackfruit trees,
and there are tamarind trees. But where is the 'forest'?''
No matter what these historians say, the birth of whatever
freedom we enjoy today lies in that period of upsurge.
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