Themes > Current Issues
12.10.2010
The Birth of Our Freedom
Prabhat
Patnaik
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.
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.
© MACROSCAN 2010