Ivory Throne
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Rice and curd and plantain fruit,
Are mashed into a pulpy mess.
With this they stoke themselves,
In a squelchy, slimy, ghastly way.5
Unlike foreign Brahmins, however, the Malayali Brahmins demanded a rather more refined strategy than such obvious charity, for they were a landed class, affluent and without need for money in a conspicuous fashion. To satiate them and to win the badge of being ardent protectors of the Hindu faith, a number of public ceremonies were then instituted. It was a fact that the most distinguished Brahmins of Kerala resided not in Travancore but in Malabar, in the dominions of the Zamorin, and so Martanda Varma worked hard to attract them to him. He first convened a conference of ‘all the learned Brahmins of Malabar, Tinnevelly, and Madurai’, and at their recommendation instituted the murajapam.6 ‘It was not only a religious expiation for the atonement of sins involved in the spilling of human blood, the conquering of less powerful neighbours, and robbing them of their land and goods; it was also in the manner of a peace offering, a political concession to the barons and the landlords of the subdued principalities and a bid for the transfer of their allegiance and fealty to a better king on more favourable terms.’7 Beginning in 1751, once every six years Malayali Brahmins were invited to Trivandrum to recite Vedic mantras at the great temple there for a stretch of fifty-six days, during which time Tamil Brahmins were kept out of their way. They were feasted and feted, and with corresponding expenses to the exchequer, championed the cause of Travancore as an ideal Hindu state with a most devout royal family.8 Sins of the past and the inadequacies of pedigree were cast aside, thus, through a ‘new court culture and new rituals of state, which served to assert and dramatize’ Travancore’s monarch and his newly cemented principality.9
It is no wonder, then, that nineteenth-century state patronage was most readily disbursed among Brahmins, for the very founding of Travancore was married to such policies. In the words of one historian, the state was ‘in fact a Tamilian conception and its advancement towards the north was the victory of Tamilian over Kerala culture’, promoted by Martanda Varma ‘in the interests of his dynastic ambition’.10 A creature of Brahminism, that class were the natural beneficiaries of the Government of Travancore. On a wider scale, though, due to its claim as a generally Hindu state, the Nairs too were granted secondary benefits within the system, though nothing like their past status. The demilitarization of Travancore following Velu Tampi’s rebellion and the imposition of British supremacy, however, meant the Maharajahs were forced to, all the same, implement a modern meritocratic administration and dish out welfare schemes so as to keep the English East India Company at bay. Indeed, at one time it was openly proposed that the Brahmin feeding houses be converted into ‘open workhouses’ and that the murajapam be transformed into a ‘Grand Exhibition of products, arts, and manufactures’ of Travancore.11 Such schemes did not materialise, and Martanda Varma’s defining rituals were to continue, even though by the end of the century, English education, which officially qualified individuals for state patronage, began to spread outside the elite Brahmin and Nair communities, with results that could not at first have been anticipated. Robin Jeffrey describes the position succinctly in a comparison between the situations in the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth, by which much had changed in local society:
In Travancore in 1847, it was as if the various groups were seated at a table with stacks of poker chips in front of them. Nairs had more than most others, while Malayali [and arguably Tamil] Brahmins had so many that the ensuing ‘game’ lacked interest, and they disdained to play at all. For others, however, there was no option but to play. In the course of the game, new rules were made, new chips came into play, and the value of some of the old chips was drastically reduced. By 1908 when the players looked up to take stock, they found that the chips in many cases had been redistributed. Some groups [like the Ezhavas and Christians] had gained from others or had won some of the new counters. Other groups found that not only had they lost chips but some of those they still held were either worthless, or, indeed, carried a penalty.12
Behind all this were several forces. The Maharajahs, whose ancestors had fought hard to elevate them to semi-divine status, desired to sustain that position; the British wanted to see modernisation and progress, with all its physical manifestations; and all at once, Christian missionaries from elsewhere were educating the lowest caste groups and telling them they deserved better. Society was simmering, with the royal family swaying atop this wobbling edifice that was officially determined to continue as a ‘good’ Hindu state. The global economy also began to change the dynamics of caste and politics. The Ezhavas saw the value of their coir products more than double in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1870 the Resident would record how they were in the past ‘prevented … from keeping milch cows; from using oil mills, metal vessels, umbrellas; from wearing shoes and any but coarse cloths and ornaments’.13 As late as 1884 the Ezhavas would complain that they ‘are not allowed to come near any public office whether it be of the 1st Class District Magistrate or [the lowest] of the tax collectors. They are put to the greatest inconvenience whenever they use any of the public roads, inasmuch as they have to move a considerable distance away from high caste men whom they meet on the roads. They have, in speaking to people of higher castes, to use certain technical expressions, which if they do not, they are taken to task for it. There are many [Ezhavas] in the state but not a single one of them has ever had a situation under government.’14
Yet, ‘By the turn of the century a few Ezhavas,’ despite being an inferior caste technically, ‘owned coir factories, while Ezhava women who collected and sold coconut shells for fuel earned more than enough to feed their families.’15 The activist C. Kesavan would remember how his mother in the 1890s employed three or four weavers and joined them herself; along with a little farming and the incomes brought in by her two husbands (who were brothers), they had enough to raise a family of eight children in relative comfort.16 Into the twentieth century, an economic and socio-religious movement made them strong enough to demand more rights. Their cultural magazine, Vivekodayam, had as its motto, ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ marking out their aspiration and optimism. In 1905 they would organise an industrial exhibition in Quilon, attended by 3,000 people, to showcase the products their community brought out and to stimulate pride in their economic potential, also throwing in a Sanskrit recitation contest.
The exhibition had a wide impact. C. Kesavan, then a boy of thirteen, wrote a vivid four-page account in his autobiography nearly fifty years later. He recalled the dress of the leading men: their dark suits, long coats, and turbans. It was rare then, he wrote, for an Ezhava even to wear trousers; the honourable dress was a single cloth around the waist and another draped around the shoulders. He remembered also the typewriter, which he saw for the first time, the skilful exhibits of the Ezhava craftsmen and agriculturalists and the resentment of [upper caste] Hindus at such Ezhava pretensions. As a result of the meeting and exhibition, he wrote, Ezhavas began to awaken.17
Such was the electric mood created by this movement that in the same year riots were provoked between the Nairs and Ezhavas when the former objected to the women of the latter, with their new-found confidence, covering themselves above the waist in the upper-caste fashion. But the Ezhavas were undaunted. They became the driving force behind the satyagraha in Vaikom in 1924–25 and in the future would push the government to open even the gates of the most hallowed temples to them on a basis of equality. By Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s time, there were over 27,000 workers employed in coir factories in the state, most of whom were Ezhavas, not to speak of the nearly a quarter million people who were connected to the industry through forward and backward linkages.18 As Jeffrey continues,
While Nairs acquired BAs and BLs [i.e., degrees], scrambled for the [state] services, formed genteel associations (usually, one feels, with Cobden and Bright strongly in
mind) and preached about the dignity of labour and the need for social reform, without doing much about either, necessity forced the Ezhavas into more practical organisations. In spite of their crumbling institutions, Nairs could still afford to play at social reform; Ezhavas could not.19
Syrian Christians too prospered at the same time, while resenting official state policy of denying them many rights. Their faith gave them an affinity with the British masters of India, and through modern education and by taking enthusiastically to new economic opportunities, their wealth and influence grew each year. Yet when one of them in the early 1870s returned eminently distinguished with degrees from England and sought a job in the government service, he was turned down. Officials, it was made clear, had ‘duties connected with temples’ and so only high-caste Hindus could be appointed.20 In 1895, similarly, it was shown that of the eighteen magistrates appointed in the previous eight years, only five were Christians, all of whom drew not more than Rs 70 per month, while Nair and Brahmin magistrates were paid not less than Rs 125. Of the 5,850 jobs listed on the government rolls, only 174 belonged to Christians, while of the ninety-one prized positions that offered more than Rs 200 per month, they only held five. In 1898 when the head of the Medical Department appointed two Christians who had returned following advanced studies in Scotland, he received a stern note from the Dewan asking him to cease all further hiring.21 Since official patronage was not a reliable option, trade, plantation, business and so on brought to the Christians higher incomes and aspirations for a better social status. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Nairs, with their relentless tendency to persist within ‘the unyielding shell of custom’22 were selling land injudiciously to maintain their old way of life in a socio-economic system that could no longer sustain it. This in turn benefitted affluent Christians and, to a smaller degree, Ezhavas. The Nairs were horrified and,
… for the Syrians to point to their prosperity merely alarmed western-educated Nairs and made them cling more tenaciously to their remaining privileges under the [state]. Where Nairs were losing land, Syrians were acquiring it; where Nairs were plagued by litigation, indolence, and [problems of the matrilineal] taravad, Syrians were experimenting with banks, joint stock companies, and cash crops.23
With Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s passage of the historic Nair Regulation of 1925, a longstanding demand from the Nair community itself, ancestral property could now be partitioned. But if it were expected to free Nairs from the grip of custom and give them the wings to flourish, it did not succeed entirely. Unable to come to terms with their diminishing social position, alienation of property continued; in the fifteen years that followed the Nair Regulation, 45 per cent of all property sold came from Nair hands, while most buyers were Christians and Ezhavas.24 This was a culmination of a long process. Early in the twentieth century, a Nair leader noted with resignation how travelling in north Travancore, ‘I was surprised and not a little concerned, to observe that not a single patch of wasteland was being cultivated by a Nair. From one end to the other, the hillsides, from top to bottom, were all aglow with cultivation. But it was the hand of the industrious Native Christian or Ezhava that was at work, and the Nair—he was nowhere. I was informed that all the land once belonged to him. But now it has flown out of his hands into those who deserve to keep it.’25 ‘The Nairs: Do They Rise or Sink?’ asked a 1905 headline of the Malabar Herald, and as Robin Jeffrey notes, while they ‘did not plunge to the bottom of some social and political sea’, it was apparent to the Nairs by the beginning of the twentieth century ‘that they could no longer regard buoyancy as their birthright; in future like Christians and [low-caste] Hindus, they too would have to swim’.26 As a prominent Nair of that generation remarked with resignation,
Whenever you see a person that is strong in physique, smart, and of good bearing, you may infer that he is either a Syrian Christian or an Ezhava; and if you see one that is weak in physique, pale and listless in bearing, your inference that he is a Nair will not often be mistaken. Similarly, if you see a garden—land with a good hedge and first-rate coconut palms in it, you can infer that the owner is a Syrian or an Ezhava—if hedgeless and unattended, you can be sure that the land belongs to a Nair.27
By the 1920s, the Nairs, psychologically withdrawn and depressed, were in dire straits as a social class and the battle of the many communities in Travancore was inching towards its final stages. The people, in any case, as Samuel Mateer put it, were ‘not a nation, but congeries of artificially and widely-separated, for the most part mutually opposing, sections of the population’.28 Among them, the Nairs still held much land, but the burden of history prevented progress and stagnated their existence. Once political powerhouses of the land, they were first fleeced by the rise of a monarch who centralised authority, before being emaciated by the British following their uprising. Brahmin dominance in the nineteenth century and sneering debates on matriliny, the ‘chastity’ of their women, and the failing system of joint families plagued them, even as Christians and Ezhavas, perceived as socially inferior, flourished and chipped away at the few social privileges and prestige the Nairs still enjoyed by virtue of caste. By the 1920s, the bleeding of power and economic influence continued not only unabated, but more painfully than before owing to the new official policies of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi. As they continued to live in an erroneous fallacy of their own ‘glorious past’ and ‘refused to change with the times’, they found that the new ruler was more than happy to let them go, and champion those whose efforts were more dynamic and oriented to the future.29
In 1929 although the Maharani presided over the murajapam ceremony and ensured everything was conducted according to tradition, this was despite vocal discontent expressed in newspapers across the state.30 Many called for the whole thing to be banned altogether, but as the head of an interim government, who was accused consistently of being too favourable to the minorities, this was not possible for her. It also does not appear that Sethu Lakshmi Bayi wished to tamper with old customs in any case, even though for the first time as ruler of Travancore she adopted a policy of fairness towards all communities in the state. She seemed to persist in pro-Brahmin traditions and did not seem to cause that community as much angst as she did Nairs, while also initiating policies that were pro-Christian or pro-Ezhava. As J. Devika points out, ‘She really took the minorities on board and recognised that they had contributions to make, which they had been making for long, fighting their own battles in a Hindu state.’31 For her it was a policy of fairness; for the Nairs, a first-class betrayal by the monarch, to promote nouveau riche classes and a still-powerful clique of Brahmins. The Maharani herself would put the matter in plain terms:
Another and perhaps the immediate cause [of Nair agitation] is the change in the Government’s outlook on the question of recruitment to the higher ranks of Government Departments. This [new policy] has done away with the inequalities under which the non-castes [i.e., lower castes and other minorities] have for generations past laboured. The giving of practical proofs to the policy, long since foreshadowed, of throwing open all the temporal appointments as the gift of the Crown to all classes of subjects of the State, gave umbrage to the most vocal among the privileged classes, who had hitherto regarded the higher appointments in the State as their exclusive monopoly. The discontent and disappointment arising from these circumstances have expressed themselves in an organised effort to create troubles for the Government in various ways.32
In other words, the Nairs, beset with pressures from everywhere, looked to state patronage as their only hope to withstand the traumatising changes around them, since rivals already took other, better-yielding avenues. But now even this was declared fair game for everybody. The Christians and Ezhavas ought to have stayed within the business and entrepreneurial sectors of the economy; why hanker for the state services and jobs, that final bastion of Nair pride, where Brahmin competition was in any case a longstanding factor? From Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s point of view, however, this was an emot
ional rather than rational plea, and the Nairs were still in a position of power. The right of franchise in Travancore, for example, was based on ownership of landed property, which favoured them. In the Legislative Council elections of 1931, of the twenty-three seats available, Nairs won a majority of fifteen, while Syrian Christians got only four and Ezhavas and Muslims none.33 By 1933 the Public Service Commission she had formulated would declare that Brahmins and Nairs held 75 per cent of all government jobs, high and low, which was three times their share of the total population.34 And of the 24,534 jobs, Nairs specifically held 54 per cent at 13,435 offices, while Christians, Muslims and Ezhavas together held less than 5,500 jobs.35
So, for all the crisis of identity among Nairs, labouring under a psychological sense of loss of power and prestige, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was convinced that they were not worse off than other communities in the state. She thought it eminently fair to create an environment where minorities also had as promising as possible a shot at success if they worked hard, and that the government could no longer act as a purely Hindu concern. That is why when Changanassery Parameswaran Pillai, a Nair leader she had appointed as a judge (besides appointing also a Christian judge, Joseph Taliath), spoke at a public forum in a communally provocative manner, he was promptly admonished. Writing to him at the Maharani’s orders the Dewan made it clear that,