In the meantime the Government of Madras invited the collaboration of Travancore also in the project, mainly because the expenses were far too forbidding for them and Cochin to bear alone. Besides, while the harbour itself was not part of Travancore territory, much of the land around it was, which necessitated several permissions from its government for railway lines, communications, canals, etc. Additionally, as the Governor of Madras noted, of all the goods that paid import duty at Cochin, 62.5 per cent were for consumption in Travancore.58 So when the Rajah of Cochin objected to his neighbour’s involvement in the harbour, citing material as well as ‘sentimental and other objections’59 (Cochin was always touchy about its size, squashed as it was historically between rival Travancore and the enemy Zamorin), the Government of Madras asked him to reconsider.
For Travancore, on the other hand, developing the Cochin Harbour was a worthwhile investment, as the benefits of trade were only too well known and the potential of lucrative customs was tempting. The state had its own port at Alleppey, which faced the same problem of access as the Cochin Harbour. Ideally they ought to have developed this one but it was beyond the resources of the government to do so on its own. So when the proposal to bear only a third of the expenses to develop Cochin Harbour instead came in 1919, in return for a third of the profits, Sir Krishnan had pounced like any discerning businessman would have done.
But then politicians in Travancore did not like the proposal for reasons of pride, mainly. It was believed that ‘Cochin has gained a point and has inveigled Travancore into the scheme in Cochin’s interest’, and the whole thing became a matter of petty rivalries. This perception about what was basically a good investment plan gave Mulam Tirunal cold feet and by 1921 he was looking for an excuse to withdraw from the project to end all the criticism.60 Thereafter the Dewan of Cochin and the Government of Madras played it carefully so that nothing would prompt Travancore to declare an exit. The Maharajah, having failed to find an appropriate excuse, grudgingly gave his consent in principle to a draft agreement by 1923.61 Cochin still, however, had many suspicions (naturally, since it was on its territory that two other governments were getting comfortable), so nothing was finalised up until Mulam Tirunal’s death.
When Sethu Lakshmi Bayi succeeded to power, the matter came to rest in her hands. The political pressure groups that were against the investment sought to exploit her unfamiliarity and get Travancore out of the proposal, even as Mr Raghavaiah worked hard to highlight its very many advantages to the state. Protests in Trivandrum continued and indeed even some members of the special committee set up to consider the project advised against it,62 as did Mr Watts, soon after his arrival.63 None of them was certain that the returns would be worth the investment, which was expected in four stages and could exceed Rs 50 lakh. More negotiation and discussion were suggested but Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, once again with a great deal of courageous prescience, thought otherwise. She was strongly inclined towards thinking like Mr Raghavaiah, as was her husband. And so convinced that enough time had already been wasted, and finding that Cochin and the Governments of Madras and India (who were also involved by now) only awaited Travancore’s consent, she decided to go ahead. On 23 July 1925 the Maharani signed the agreement and realised the long-awaited Four-Party Alliance to develop Cochin Harbour, ending decades of indecisiveness. It was to become one of the best and most far-sighted economic decisions she took during her reign, the benefits of which are enjoyed to this date.
As per the agreement, both Travancore and Cochin advanced Rs 5 lakh each to the Cochin Harbour Trust to commence dredging as an experiment. This was intended as a loan and would be taken as capital investment only if the experiment were a success. Construction of a special dredger called The Lord Willingdon, named after the Governor of Madras, began and in October 1926 it was taken out to sea for the first time. But technical difficulties resulted in actual work commencing only by February 1927. Thereafter everything progressed well and in December 1928 when The Lord Willingdon dredged a 2-mile-long, 450-foot-wide channel to the inner harbour, a world record was set.64 Earlier that year in May, a steamship from Bombay called The Padma became the first deep-sea ship to harbour in Cochin, picking up ‘every bale of cargo, which the port could offer and which could be crammed into the vessel without sinking it’.65 By the second stage of its development, thus, the Cochin Harbour was already set to be a success.
Over the next few years, work continued and the port grew. It slowly became clear that the Cochin Harbour was not something that would benefit two coastal princely states alone but would serve as a gateway to south India. Goods poured in from everywhere and trade became robust. The investment made by the Maharani started paying dividends so that by 1935 Travancore’s share of profits from this one harbour’s revenues alone stood at nearly Rs 13 lakh.66 This was in comparison to the Rs 1,75,000 that all of the state’s own ports put together yielded, marking an enormous surplus.67 By 1946, which is when the project would finally be completed, the customs revenue would mount to about Rs 27 lakh.68 By now the Government of India would have taken over the management of Cochin Harbour, classifying it officially as a major port of India, and using it for strategic purposes in the Second World War. A new island had also sprung up in Cochin, built from all the soil dredged and this was, quite predictably, named Willingdon Island, which is today a key location in the city. But as early as 1935, when Sir Robert was invited on the BBC, he proudly told the world: ‘I live on a large island made from the bottom of the sea. And from the upper floor of my house I look down on the finest harbour in the East.’69
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi too would remember with well-merited pride her role in building the modern city of Cochin and returning Kerala to its rightful place on the map of the commercial world. Again, it was a serious gamble for her as a new ruler to commit such large amounts of money to be spent on what was, essentially, the property of another state. All hopes of success and profits were speculative, and given the local political opposition to the proposal, any failure would serve only to disgrace and blemish her reputation. But with commendable wisdom and remarkable vision, the Maharani saw where in history she was poised at that time. Neighbouring countries were seldom bosom friends and this was especially true in the case of Travancore and Cochin. And it was even more exceptional for the monarchs of both states to agree on matters such as this. So her choices were either to make the most of a moment like this that came but rarely in history, or to succumb to regional pride and petty grievances. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi chose the former. Joining hands with Rama Varma XVII of Cochin and the Governor of Madras, the Maharani presided over one of the most momentous developments in the history of south India, crowning Cochin as the Queen of the Arabian Sea.
With each year trade only grew here, bringing with it greater revenues and a number of forward and backward linkages: businesses, banks, hotels and more. Employment was generated in the vicinity and incomes rose for common men and women. Cochin resumed its place among the great ports of the world and became the thriving business capital of Kerala, symbolising enterprise and industry. The harbour expanded, as did its services, and eighty-five years after the signing of the agreement, goods worth Rs 5,000 crore would be loaded on to ships from here. By the first decade of the twenty-first century the number would be in excess of Rs 10,000 crore,70 while the customs revenue in 2011 would stand at Rs 2,900 crore.71 Nobody in the 1920s could ever have even dreamed of these gargantuan figures but they did know they were laying the foundations of a new, prosperous metropolis when they ratified that historic agreement all those years ago. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was one of those enlightened visionaries and to her modern Kerala owes a tremendous debt of gratitude and respect.
Other economic and political reforms also made a steady headway throughout 1925. In June that year the government passed orders to establish a state-aided, joint-stock Bank of Travancore with a start-up capital of Rs 30 lakh. Within two years the public purchased shares worth two-thirds of the amount and operatio
ns began soon afterwards, with the primary focus being on improving the state’s trade and industrial capacity.72 But one innovative administrative act of the Maharani is particularly noteworthy. This idea was borrowed from the Government of India, which had passed a resolution to foster rural self-governance in 1918. Indeed as early as 1909 a Royal Commission on Decentralisation had determined that it was ‘most desirable’ to ‘associate the people with the local tasks of administration’, for which power ought to be granted to locals in basic village units.73 Thus on 13 August 1925 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi affixed her sign manual and passed into law the Village Panchayats Act of Travancore.
This new law classed villages or clusters of villages as administrative units to be governed by panchayats (literally, an assembly of five). Each such panchayat was to consist of between five and eleven members of whom at least two-thirds had to be elected from the local population, with the remainder being nominated. These members were to be responsible for governance but were granted a degree of judicial authority also in disposing of small civil suits within their jurisdictions. Panchayats were given obligatory as well as discretionary functions with the former including maintenance of roads, communications, cleanliness and hygiene, irrigation and wells, etc., while the latter involved development of cottage industries, agricultural improvement and education. It was hoped that the panchayat system would ‘accelerate the rate of progress’, ‘stimulate the sense of responsibility in the average citizen’, and widen their horizons and perspectives towards public life. Citizens were made stakeholders in local government and the reform was hailed as a long-needed development.74 The Act also stressed on autonomy and development, so that money collected from each village, along with grants given by the government, was to be spent ‘in the village, for the villagers and by the villagers’.75 To start with, however, due to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s sometimes excessive sense of caution, only seven panchayats were constituted and brought under the purview of the new law.76 These were studied for a few years to determine the feasibility of the Act, which proving positive, plans to expand the scheme across Travancore were on the horizon by 1931.
Despite the limited nature of the experiment, what is perhaps commendable is that at a time when the vote normally came with a property qualification even in advanced Western nations, elections to the panchayats were based on adult suffrage.77 This made the Maharani one of India’s earliest administrators to contemplate the vote as a democratic right as opposed to a privilege accorded to economically better-off classes of her people only. She did not, however, extend this to elections at higher levels such as of the legislature, presumably because while she was ready to experiment with smaller units having local effects, she did not want to open up the principal legislative organs of the state yet. The unceasing communal problem was one rationale for her reserve. If the current experiment proved successful on a large scale, steps to extend the right vertically could be taken in due course.
Unfortunately, when the Maharani relinquished power, her nephew’s government did not share her enthusiasm for devolving power and while the existing panchayats were permitted to continue, expansion plans were not realised. Instead, in 1940, Village Unions, where representatives were nominated and not elected, and which had fewer powers than panchayats, were constituted. By 1947 there would be seventeen Village Unions and the old seven panchayats in the state, covering 1,605 sq. miles and governing a population of 1.8 million.78 The Maharani’s long-term project to decentralise the administration therefore never fully took off, and its benefits reached only a fifth of Travancore’s total population. Yet the intentions of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi to grant village folk, who constituted the bulk of the state’s people, a basic democratic say in how their daily lives ought to be governed, came to be highly appreciated. The Government of Kerala would take over and complete the process after Independence when the panchayat system took root with full vigour in the state, in each of its 978 villages.
One of the most fascinating social legislations Sethu Lakshmi Bayi presided over in 1925 concerned the final demise of the matrilineal system of inheritance, after decades of debate and dissent. She would be hailed at the time as a progressive ruler, and indeed as a leading light among women, but years down the line sociologists and feminists would ponder whether or not, after all, the passing of matriliny was such a laudable event in history. Scholarly circles would lament that Victorian morality and the insecurity of men destroyed what had once stood out and positively shaped the very identity of Kerala. There was no doubt that in 1925 many things contributed to the inevitable fall of matriliny, but an air of nostalgia would diligently persist against the forces of modernity that withdrew from Malayali women those uninhibited rights of power and independence they had enjoyed for centuries.
There is a substantial diversity of thought on the origins of matrilineal kinship in Kerala. Some anthropologists regard it as the continuation of a system that at one time existed all over the world, while others contend that it was conceived due to some mysterious, compelling circumstances that replaced patriarchy at a historical point. There are, however, two views on this that have been passed down within the region. One is mythological and based on a Malayalam treatise called Keralolpathi and a Sanskrit work called the Kerala Mahatmyam. These refer to the creation of Kerala by the legendary hero Parasurama, who is supposed to have hurled his battleaxe from Gokarna to Cape Comorin and claimed from the sea all the land in between. He is then said to have awarded this new region (conveniently) to Brahmins after which he summoned (equally conveniently) deva (divine), gandharva (celestial minstrel), and rakshasa (demon) women for the pleasure of these men. The Nairs, the principal matrilineal caste, were, according to this theory, the descendants of these nymphs and their Brahmin overlords, tracing their lineages in the maternal line. Of course nobody of any intelligence was deceived by this version, dismissed quite appropriately by William Logan in his Malabar Manual as ‘a farrago of legendary nonsense’.79
The other theory relates to the ancient martial tradition of the Nairs. Boys were sent off to train in military gymnasiums from the age of eight, and their sole occupation thereafter was to master the art of warfare. For them death by any other means than at the end of a sword on the battlefield was a mortifying ignominy and in their constant zeal for military excellence and glorious bloodshed, they had no time to husband women or economic resources. So a man would never ‘marry’ a woman, as in other parts of India, and start a family with their children. Instead he would visit a lady in her natal home every now and then, solely for sexual purposes, and the offspring would be her responsibility entirely. Matriliny was, as per this theory, consequent upon the men purely being instruments of war rather than householders. So the onus of family and succession was taken care of by women, who formed large establishments and managed their affairs independently in the absence of men. While the military tradition of the Nairs, famous for its suicide bands called chavers, was well known, this theory is also more circumstantial than absolute. Either way, thus, there is a lack of clarity on the origins of matriliny.
But as K. Saradamoni points out, ‘None of these theories appear to have taken note of the fact that matriliny offered an identity and security to women.’80 For under the matrilineal system, women were not dependent upon men, having control over and access to economic resources. This was something women in the more conventional patriarchal system did not enjoy; they were guests in their parents’ houses till marriage; at their husbands’ will after marriage; and under their sons’ control in later life. On the contrary, Nair women always had the security of the homes they were born in throughout their lives and were not dependant on their husbands. Sexual freedom was also remarkable so that while polygamy was happily recognised in other parts of India, in Kerala women were allowed polyandry. Nair women could, if they wished, have more than one husband and, in the event of difficulties, were free to divorce without any social stigma. Widowhood was no catastrophic disaster and they were effectively at
par with men when it came to sexual rights, with complete control over their bodies.
The marriage system itself was something that never ceased to fascinate visitors to Kerala. This was simply called sambandham (relationship) and as one distinguished observer noted, it was not seen as a ‘sacred contract’ but as a ‘purely fugitive alliance, terminable at will’.81 The bond between brother and sister was considered more sacrosanct than that between husband and wife. And with reason too, for if women were economically protected and independent in their natal homes, they needed outside men only to father their children. Sambandhams in fact even permitted remarkable interaction among Kerala’s higher castes, leading to an interesting, advantageous mixing of culture and various bloodlines. Among Nambutiri Brahmins only the eldest son was permitted to take a Brahmin wife and all other men had to seek sambandhams from the high-caste matrilineal communities. This meant that Brahmin property would be protected, as the issue of these younger men belonged to their mothers’ families with no claims on their patrimony; and for the women, in turn, alliances with a superior caste amplified prestige. To take the Travancore royal family itself as a case, for instance, husbands were always Koil Tampurans, who in turn were necessarily fathered by Brahmins. Every Maharajah, in other words, had a Brahmin for a grandfather and a Nair for a grandson, both of whom were commoners; the Nair’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather came from different rungs of the social hierarchy. The very procedure to enter into a sambandham was rather easy and simply involved the man handing the woman a piece of cloth before an oil lamp. In fact, when Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff was Governor of Madras, he once met a lady from Travancore and the talk somehow came to the topic of textiles and he ‘innocently said that he would like to send her a cloth from Madras as a specimen of the handiwork executed there’ to which the lady blushed and quickly responded that while she was ‘much obliged’, she was ‘quite satisfied with her present husband’.82
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