Being a Brahmin the Marxist Way: E.M.S.

Namburipad
and the Pasts of Kerala

…the indigenous bourgeoisie denies the active role played by

Brahmins in the further development of Kerala…the theory of
‘Brahmin domination just an accident’, [is] a theory which denies the
very scientific character of history.
E.M.S. Nambudiripad, The National
Question in Kerala

In 1910, K.Ramakrishna Pillai, the editor of Svadesabhimani, was

exiled from the princely state of Travancore, on account of his
intemperate and unmitigated opposition to the monarchy and the
corruption of the court. Accompanied by his beloved wife, he settled
in northern Kerala and, in 1912, wrote a biography of Karl Marx: the
first in any Indian language. In itself, this was a remarkable and
prescient intellectual foray. The Russian Revolution was five years in
the future and Marxism had not assumed the aura of millenarian
hope. However, what is equally significant is the question of how
Ramakrishna Pillai understood Marxism. He saw two tenets as being
central to Marxism: the collective ownership of land and the abolition
of private capital. This would ‘create equality in the world by
destroying the gulf between the rich and the poor’. 1 There is not much
critical comment in the brief exposition of these ideas. Much of the
book is devoted to a biographical sketch highlighting Marx’s
unyielding opposition to the Prussian monarchy, his exile and the
travails of a peripatetic dissident life with his devoted wife. One is
struck by the remarkable parallel with Ramakrishna Pillai’s own life
and concerns. ‘Communism’, he states, ‘is incompatible with the rule
of the king and his laws’, allying Marxism to his own anti-monarchist
sentiments. At another point, writing of Jenny, Marx’s wife, Pillai
1
P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran (eds), Marx comes to India,Delhi,1978, p.108.

1
wrote: ‘Let all mothers sing in the glory of that great women who
shared her husband’s joys and sorrows…’. In a subtle way,
Ramakrishna Pillai’s own biography recasts the life of Marx’s life in
terms of his own autobiography.

Such individual understanding of Marxism may not be unusual. Lala

Hardayal, in his biography of Marx, written in the same year, called
him a ‘great European rishi’ and saw his central aim as being the
‘solution of the problem of poverty’.2 The first biography of Marx in
Chinese, written in 1919 by Yuan Quan (probably the pseudonym of Li
Dazhao), described in detail Marx’s poverty, the suffering of his family
and Marx’s ill-health. The basic point as Arif Dirlik points out was
moral: Marx’s tenacity in the face of adversity. 3 Just as in the case of
Marx’s life, so possibly in the historical engagement with Marxist
theory. All reading happens within a matrix of ideological and cultural
determination. This is not, of course, to argue that one must privilege
the idiosyncrasies of individual engagement with a text over the
possible meanings within the text itself. It is, rather, to emphasize
that ‘misunderstanding’ of a text, or a body of theory, are a window to
an individual’s mode of thinking as it grapples with a structured
ideology. We can then focus on a notion of ideology as a dynamic,
interactive and on-going activity rather than as a finished intellectual
system. More important, we can begin to look at how individuals make
meaning through the translation of ideas in terms of their own
concerns, rather than become ‘transmitters’ of a system that has a
coherence independent of individual understanding. 4
Once we bear
this in mind, then a study of Marxist thought in India becomes less
obsessed with a scholastic evaluation of the ‘correct’ interpretation of
Marx, or, indeed, with the question of the ‘relevance’ of Marxism in an
2
Ibid.,pp.47-8.
3
Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism, New York, 1989, p.105.
4
Ibid., pp.7-10.

2
Indian context(which would involve seeing Marxism as nothing more
than a closed body of thought originating from European minds).
Texts which actually mange to stretch Marxism onto Indian ‘reality’ in
a Procrustean manner become less interesting, largely because of the
overwhelming sense of unreality they mange to convey. For example,
M.N.Roy’s India in Transition (1922), treated Marxism as set of
conclusions which could be transposed on to any society and
processed on the assumption that India was largely a capitalist
society.5 This is a case in point of an individual acting a ‘transmitter’
rather than a ‘translator’ of an ideology. Marxist writing should rather
be seen as exposes to what Raphael Samuel calls a ‘promiscuous
variety of intellectual currents’. He points to the seemingly curious
phenomenon of British Marxist historians producing their most
insightful work on Puritanism and religious sectarianism, and
speculates on the possible implications of the Methodist upbringing of
some leading Marxist historians.6

So what did Marxism mean to a generation of Malayalis who became

communists? For a large number, this transition was located in the
history of local politics and the move from the Kerala Congress,
through Congress socialism to Communism. It was more an
organizational move than an ideological one. 7
The discipline that
Marxist/socialist ideology provided allowed the communists to take
over the political organisation of the Congress by 1939. They became
‘communists’ first and then discovered Marxism. To use Dirlik’s
evocative phrase they had ‘walk[ed] backwards into Marxism’. 8 It is
also possible that a widespread unawareness of Marxism was

5
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Heteronomous Radicalism in M.N.Roy’. in Thomas Pantham and Kenneth l.
Deutsch, (eds), Political Thought in Modern India. New Delhi, 1986.
6
R.Samuel,’British Marxist Historians, 1880-1980’, New Left Review, 120, (1980), pp. 42-4.
7
Dilip Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India, Malabar 1900-1948, Cambridge, 1994,
ch.5.
8
Dirlik,Origin, p.98.

3
encouraged by the very organisation of the party which maintained a
strict division between those that engaged with theory and those
involved in mass mobilization.9 K.P. Gopalan, trade union organizer,
encapsulated the mood of his generation when he stated that, ‘we had
socialist aims without knowing anything about socialism’. 10

Early perceptions of Marxism arose from an amalgam of a heightened

ethical awareness and the existence of Soviet Union as a utopian
exemplar of equality and achievement. When the nationalist
newspaper, Mathrubhumi, first began carrying articles on socialism in
the early 1930s, its pieces were more remarkable for their polemical
value. “Ignorance is the fundament of capitalism. Anger is its armour.
Cruelty is its weapon. The synonyms of capitalism are treachery,
oppression, deception, selfishness and contempt towards others.’ 11 In
a society, like Kerala, riven by caste inequality, the egalitarianism had
resonances which allowed its absorption into a local idiom. Krishna
Pillai, one of the founders of the Communist Party in Kerala, wrote in
1934, that ‘communism believes that the whole world belongs to one
caste i.e. the human caste’. At times, it seemed as if communism was
the highest stage of Gandhism: ‘The capitalist would be destroyed and
the rule of the country will pass in to the hands of the
daridranarayan’. 12
This ethical, egalitarian and emotive
understanding reflected more the aspirations of individuals than the
theoretical complexities of Marxism. For others, the experience of the
Russian revolution was the most profound argument in favour of
Marxism. As K. Damodaran was to write, ‘[they] identified themselves

9
K.P.R. Gopalan in an interview with K.K.N. Kurup, 10 March 1985 and with author,12 March 1987.K
Madhavan in interview with author, 17 March 1987.
10
N.E. Balaram, Keralathile Communiste Prasthanam(The Communist Movement in Kerala), Trivandrum,
1973.
11
Mathrubhumi, 18 April 1934.
12
P. Krishna Pillai, ‘Fascisavum kammyunisavum’ (Fascism and Communism) Mathrubhumi 1934.

4
completely with the Soviet Union’. 13 The introduction of the Five Year
Plans had created an utopian space: ‘within four years, all hoarders
vanished, there was no conflict between classes and the number of
small peasants who owned land was countless’. 14 In a special number
of the socialist newspaper Prabhatham, E.M.S. Nambudiripad
(henceforth EMS) was moved to write, ‘if the world does not copy the
Soviet model, it will mean the destruction of civilisation’. The same
issue contained an exposition of the basic ideas of Marxism which
stated that ‘with the aid of this science (dialectical materialism), we
can forecast the future of man and society and thus control it’.15

The Marxism that we are dealing with here bears a close resemblance
to British Marxism at the beginning of this century as described by
Stuart Macintyre: millenarian in character and unaware of central
categories or historical trajectories.16 The transition from this kind of
Marxism to a more serious engagement was both sharper as well as
mediated by a particular brand of Soviet Marxism presided over by
Stalin. Most Malayalis theoreticians, K. Damodaran and EMS in
particular, were influenced in their understanding of Marxism by the
literature coming from the Soviet Union. The main texts were the
documents of the Comintern edited by Kuusinen and Dimitrov, and
the Short History of the CPSU(B) published in 1938 and available in
translation in Malayalam in 1941. 17 It was the Short Course which
became the textbook on Marxism. As Damodaran wrote later, ‘we

13
K. Damodaran, ‘the tragedy of Indian Communism’, in Tariq Ali(ed), The Stalinist Legacy,
Harmindsworth, 1984, p. 349.
14
P. Krishna Pillai, ‘Rashyayile Randaam Panchavalsara Paddhati’ (The Second Five Year Plan in Russia),
Mathrubhumi, 1934.
15
E.M.S. Nambudirpad, ‘Basic Principles of Marxist Economy’, in Public (General) Dept. G.O. 1351
(Confdl.) 17 August 1939; K.Damodaran, ‘Science of Marxism’, Public (General) Dept. G.O. 1351
(Confdl) 17 August 1939.
16
S. Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917-1933, London, 1986, p. 35.
17
T.V. Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist, Delhi, 1971, p. 73

5
identified Stalinism with Marxism-Leninism’.18 This was also to mean
that Marxism came to be less with revolutionary dreams’ and utopian
imaginings and more with a self-contained and rigid ‘science of the
history of society’. The clearest statement of this came in 1938 when
Stalin wrote that ‘[s]ocialism is converted from a dream of a better
future fro humanity into a science’.19

What were the features of the ‘science of history of society’ as laid

down in the Short Course? Stalinist Marxism, was in Walicki’s
description, a ‘Marxism for the masses’ (in this lay its appeal) and was
characterized by a combination of ‘blind faith with quasi-scientism’.
No freedom of interpretation was allowed to the reader and chapters
ended with a set of ‘correct and binding conclusions’. What is
important for the present discussion are two related features. First,
the crucial role allotted to productive forces as the most mobile and
revolutionary element of production and the necessary adjustment of
relations of production to the rise of new productive forces. Second,
five types of relations of productions, each higher than the previous
one and inevitably superseding it were spelt out: from primitive
communism to socialism.20 The idea that ‘dialectics pointed only in
one way- forwards; a ‘progressivism’ that saw civilization as advance
from lower stage to higher stages meant that ‘survivals’ from one
stage into a presumably higher stage were to prove difficult to
explain. This was to be true of both caste and matriliny in the case of
Kerala. The persistence of such traits complicated the deployment of
the category of ‘progressive’ since progressive societies were the ones

18
Damodaran, ‘Tragedy of Indian Communism’, p. 349; E.M.S. Nambudiripad, Deshabhimani (Patriot),
Calicut, 1943.
19
J.V.Stalin, Problems in Leninism, Peking, 1976, pp. 849, 851; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams:
Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, New York, 1989.
20
A. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of Communist Utopia,
Stanford, 1995, pp. 426-53. ; L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Oxford, 1978, Vol., 3.

6
in which the political and ideological superstructures were in
harmony with the potential forces of economic development.

The Communist Party of India’s line between 1939 and 1948 saw
bewildering shifts from opposition to war in 1939; through support fro
Great Britain during the ‘anti-fascist’ war from 1942 which invoked
notions of class harmony to keep up production; to a turn to agrarian
radicalism in 1946; followed by inauguration of a short-lived
programme of agrarian revolution in 1948. Most of EMS’s work in this
period had been programmatic and in response to the immediate
political situation. The quick-silver shifts in party positions had to be
clarified for the cadres and Onnekkalkodi Malayalikal (1946), a
summary account of the consequences of British rule for Kerala and
future prospects, was the only book to engage in a historical
excursus.21 Keralam, Mayalalikalude Mathrubhumi (Kerala, the
Motherland of the Malayalis, 1948, henceforth KMM), was the first
attempt to stand back from the exigencies of programmatic writing
and engage with the problems of the history of Kerala. The central
problematic as EMS wrote later was to find a clue to the ‘crucial
problem of the history of Kerala- how and why the matriarchal [sic]
family has continued to exist in Kerala down to the twentieth century
while it was superseded in all civilized countries’. 22 The framing of the
question is in itself significant: the idea of inevitable progress and
transcendence is explicit. It assumes that with the changes in the
modes of production, vestigial social forms like the matrilineal family
would softly and silently vanish away. The attempt tot explain the
empirical- the intransigent persistence of social forms- in terms of the

21
See E.M.S. Nambudiripad , Aikyathinulla Tadasthangal (Hindrances toUnity), Calicut, 1943;
Deshabhimani; Party Sanghadakan, (Party Organiser), Calicut, 1944; Onnekkalkodi Malayalikal (One and
a Half Crore Malayalis), Calicut, 1946.
22
E.M.S. Nambudiripad, The National Question in Kerala, Bomabay, 1952, pp. i-ii.

7
theoretical- their inevitable supersession and disappearance, provides
the underlying tension in the book.

In this book we look at two texts, KMM and The National Question In
Kerala (1952, henceforth NQK) written by EMS. I would argue
provisionally and tentatively that these theoretically informed
histories of Kerala can also be read as attempts at negotiating EMS’s
Nambudiri identity at a time when Brahmins were under siege in
south India as malevolent parasites. Marxist method, informed by
what Samuel had termed ‘a promiscuous variety of intellectual
currents’, allowed fro the relocation of the Brahmin in the past as one
of the key elements in the social and economic transformation of the
region. These issues predominate in EMS’s reconstruction of the
history of ancient Kerala. First, there is an engagement with the
Dravidianist critique of the Brahmin as an immigrant into the
egalitarian, civilized space of south India who introduced caste
hierarchy and subordinated the indigenous culture. Second, the
institution of caste is reevaluated as a necessary stage in the
transition from a primitive form of society to a more advanced one
through a more efficient organisation of production. Finally, al a time
when the ideology of language politics and of the linguistic
organisation of states was gaining prominence, it was claimed that
regional identity was premised on a unifying culture created by the
brahmins. EMS had come out of an involvement with the reform
movements within the Nambudiri community before his encounter
with Marxism. These texts stand at the end of a personal trajectory: of
his engagement with what is meant to be a Nambudiri; and at the
beginning of a political one: of a role of a Nambudiri, now an
unmarked citizen, in the modern world. The past is where the
genealogy of a progressive identity is constructed, and history is
deployed as the arena in which transformation is wrought.

8
Contra Dravidian Ideology

At the time of the linguistic reorganization of states in south India, the

major contender in terms of a fully formed regional ideology was the
Dravidian movement in the Tamil speaking areas of the Madras
Presidency. Having originated in the anti-brahmin movements of the
early twentieth-century, it articulated both a positive sense of region-
Tamil speaking Dravidanadu- as well as the negative definition of who
did not belong to the region; the brahmins. The official demand for
Dravidanadu, first articulated in 1944, included, apart from the Tamil
region, parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa and the Malabar
district as well. As late as 1954, C.N.Annadurai saw Kerala and
Karnataka as autonomous states in the federal political unit of
Dravidanadu. The motto was – “Divide on the basis of language, unite
on the basis of race.”23 For Malayalam speakers in Travancore, Cochin
and Malabar, trying to define their own identity through the Aikya
Kerala (United Kerala) movement, this appeared to be an obstructive
ideology bordering on regional imperialism. An added edge was
provided by the demand raised in 1946, of the Tamil speaking
districts of Travancore for freedom from the Malayalis. This was
utilized by the Maharaja of Travancore to buttress his own demand for
an independent state, separate from “Kerala”. As EMS was writing his
text, the Dravidian ideology was a palpable political challenge in its
attempt to subsume linguistic identity within a putative racial unity.

While the cultural ideology of the Dravidian movement was inclusive

and saw Kerala as having sprung from the Tamil civilization forged in
the Sangam period, its political ideology was premised on a sharp
divide between the brahmin and the non-brahmin. In 1938, when
23
P.Ramamurti, The Freedom Struggle and the Dravidian Movement, Madras, 1987, p.82.

9
E.V.Ramaswamy Naicker analysed the meaning of the word “nation”,
he stressed the vitality of centrifugal forces in India, there by
justifying “Dravindanadu”. At the same time, he made clear that the
central opposition was between Tamilians and brahmins. The
Dravidian federation would include “all ‘Hindus’ except brahmins who
call themselves Aryans”.24 This anti-Brahaminism expressed itslf in
various ways. As cultural exclusivism it claimed that the Dravidian
civilisation had always been untainted by the brahmins and that the
two ‘races’ had always lived separately. This was explicitly argued in
Annadurai’s Arya Maya (1943) that saw the river Narmada as the
impermeable barrier separating the Tamil culture from Aryanadu. As
an argument for original Tamil glory, it saw the Tamil civilization as
originating independently of Aryan/brahmin infusion. Indeed, the
classical nature of Tamil was evaluated by the absence of Sanskrit
influence. Finally, the Aryan invasion represented the foisting of a
hierarchical, radicalist division of a hitherto egalitarian society. The
concrete manifestation of this was the caste system which put the
brahmin at the apex. The Dravidian critique constituted a rejection of
the brahmin as an unnecessary irritant in the Dravidian space.

Though the attack on the brahmin/Nambudiri in Kerala was neither as

sustained nor vituperative as the Tamil region, the brahmin identity
was under siege. An added and more profound dimension here was
that there was considerable soul-searching within the brahmin
community itself both for internal reform as well as for restructuring
its relation with other castes, particularly the Nairs. The upper
echelons of Nambudiris and Nairs were bound by an intimate and
fraught affiliation. Only the eldest son within a Nambudiri household

24
K.Nambi Arooran, Taml Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism, 1905-1944, MAdurai, 1980, pp.239-
41; E.F.Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil
Separatism, Berkeley, 1969; M.R.Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, Princeton,
1976.

10
could marry, the younger ones entered into alliances with Nair women
of the established tharavadus(matrilineal households). From the late
nineteenth century, a movement emerged among the Nairs which was
at the same time a move for internal reform- of marriage, inheritance
and division of property- as well as one that was deeply resented the
Nambudiri liaisons with Nair women.25

The critique of the Nambudiri as an effect, lecherous drone battening

over Nair tharavadus was best expressed in O. Chandu Menon’s novel
Indulekha(1889) which immortalized these concerns. This critique
also emerged from the impetus within the Nair community to move
out of matriliny, which they saw as a relic of a barbaric past. Among
the Nambudiris, there was considerable rethinking fuelled by the
emerging Nair critique as also by an overwhelming sense of being
caught in a time warp while other castes and groups engaged with the
challenge of colonial modernity. Three issues were prominent in this
intellectual ferment: endogamous marriages- that Nambudiri men
should marry within the community rather than enter into liaisons
with Nair; partition of family property- freeing the younger generation
from the coils of the joint family household; and western education- so
that Nambudiris could compete with other castes in the ‘modern
world’ instead of being confined to an arcane and irrelevant
scholarship of Sanskrit ritual. As an article put it in a language
characteristic of the times, ‘the degenerate state of the Nambudiri
community is worse that any other in the world’. 26 Another element
was added to the critique with the emergence of the tenants’
associations and the demand for fairer rent and more secure tenure
which targeted the Nambudiri community as landlord, particularly in
central Kerala.
25
G. Arunima, ‘Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Malabar, 1850-1940, Cambridge PhD.
Thesis, 1992.
26
Mathrubhumu,18 December, 1923.

11
EMS’s life encapsulates many of these dilemmas of brahmin identity
in Kerala. He was born in one of the eight most exalted Adhyan
Nambudiri families, the only ones with the privilege of becoming
Vedic hymnologists. His household, Elamkulam, was one of the largest
landowners in south Malabar and had connections with the royal
family of Walluvanad through marriage. He grew up ‘surrounded by
temples, prayers and benevolent and malevolent gods’ and had an
education in Sanskrit, being initiated early into the chanting of Vedic
hymns.27 It was only because of the presence of progressive relatives
with a favourable attitude towards English education that he got to go
to elementary school and subsequently became one of the few
Nambudiris of his class and generation to attend college. Young
widows, polygamy and the large numbers of unmarried women on
account of the practice of Nambudiri liaisons with Nair women were a
palpable presence in his childhood and youth and these experiences
drew him towards Nambudiri reform movements emerging in the
beginning of the century. At the age of fourteen, he became the
secretary of the reform organisation, the Yogashema Sabha, which
even while it was concerned with modernizing the community
conducted proceedings in a very Nambudiri atmosphere with breaks
for the performance of rituals. Inspired by the ‘Ezhava movement and
the anti-brahmin propaganda of EVR’, he increasingly became
disenchanted with religion and ritual, cropped his tuft and stopped
wearing the sacred thread. It was out of the crucible of caste reform
that EMS moved to an involvement with the Congress and became a
believer in full independence. However, in 1927, enough of his older
identity remained within him as he voted on the side of the landlords
against tenancy reforms at the Payannur Congress conference. But by
the mid-thirties, EMS had moved towards socialism and was
27
E.M.S. Nambudiripad, How I Became a Communist, Trivandrum, 1976, pp. 2-5.

12
responsible for setting up a sub-committee within the regional
Congress committee to enquire in to the conditions of agricultural
labour. Within the pages of the nationalist newspaper
Mathrubhumi(founded in 1923) and the short-lived socialist
newspaper Prabhatam(1938) he contributed articles on the priciples
of socialism and the differences with the Congress. In 1939, when the
communists finally broke away from the socialists, EMS was one
amongst the core group.

With KMM, EMS stepped back from immediate political concerns to

articulate the twin concerns of Marxism and the trajectory of Kerala’s
history. As a young radical Nambudiri involved in social reform
movements within the community in the beginning of the century,
there had been a sense of revulsion towards an archaic and backward-
looking lifestyle. The task of making a human of the Nambudiri, as
one of the watchwords of the movement had phrased it, created a
profoundly divided self. In this work we see the engagement with the
history of Kerala which recovers a role for the Nambudiri as the prime
mover in the economic and social transformation of the region. This
chapter argues tentatively that the language and method of Marxism
seemed to allow for such a recasting. The second trajectory derives
from the first but addresses itself more to the political perception of
the brahmin, particularly in the polemic of the Dravidian movement.
In the enterprise of imagining a united Kerala based on a community
of Malayalam speakers, EMS argued in the text that the regional
culture is one produced by compromise and synthesis between the
Aryan/brahmin and Dravidian elements, rather than a displacement of
Dravidian civilization. Throughout the test there is the presence of the
Other- the Dravidian ideology that sought to delegitimise the status of
the brahmin in south India. EMS attempted to rehabilitate the
brahmin in two strategies. First, through a frontal engagement with

13
the theory of a pristine Dravidian culture supplanted by an Aryan one,
EMS built an argument for a benign synthesis of civilizations. That is
to say, he argued that the constant interaction of Aryan brahmins and
Dravidians within regions brought about a unity within regional
cultures which took precedence over racial differences. Second, he
recast the role of the Aryan/brahmin in the history of Kerala (and by
extension, south India) not as the advent of a superior civilization, but
in the more neutral terms of bringing about an advance at two levels:
first, economic i.e. in the mode of production; and second, social i.e.
the shift from “matriarchal” to “patriarchal” family forms. These
reconstructions created interesting tensions within the text. While
there is an acceptance of the fact that an earlier civilization existed,
the relation to its putative glory is ambivalent. It is seen only as a
stage to be transcended – an era of lower forms of culture i.e. that
which is associated with less complex modes of production, of
organisation of labour and of family forms. Thus, while the idea of a
compromise and synthesis between civilizations is being worked out,
there is simultaneously the conception of the inevitable triumph of a
gently civilizing brahmin ideology.
The question of how the brahmins came to Kerala was the
primary one: was this process the southern equivalent of the Aryan
invasion supplanting the Dravidian cultures in the north? EMS
distanced himself unequivocally from the brahmin founding myth of
Kerala in the Keralolpatti: that Parasurama had flung his axe into the
sea and reclaimed land which he settled with immigrant brahmins. 28
He went along with the Dravidian position that the existence of an
indigenous civilization in Kerala preceded the coming of the
brahmins. In speaking of the conflict between the two cultures the
persistence of the earlier cultures was recognized: “Neither the axe of

28
E.M.S. Nambudiripad, Keralam Malayalikalude Mathrubhumi [Kerala, the Motherland of the Malayalis]
(Trichur: Deshabhimani Pulications, 1965) First published 1948, p.47. Henceforth KMM.

14
Parasurama nor the advaita of Sankaracharya, or even 2000 years of
continuous brahmin power have been able to destroy the non-brahmin
way of life.”29 He argued that forms of culture, marriage and
inheritance had continued without substantial change and neither
culture had been wholly victorious or wholly defeated. However, the
question of numerical and cultural strength of the brahmins in
particular regions complicated the picture somewhat. Where the
brahmins were “strong”, as in south Malabar there had been changes:
the lower caste Tiyyas followed patriliny unlike their northern
counterparts and shrines had been converted to temples through a
“cleansing” of their ritual. But, on the whole, despite brahmin
influence, practices like equal rights for men and women in property
and the freedom to marry and separate at will had been retained.
While marriage had been considerably ritualized among the brahmins
and made a life-long covenant, for others “it is a relation entered into
for the ease of life and to satisfy a physical need.” Of course, the
brahmins themselves had not been immune to local influences and
had adopted customs peculiar to the region, later codified by Sankara,
as well as allowing for some compromises with local religion such as
the setting up of non-brahmin shrines within temples. 30 There is a
seemingly celebratory statement that the Nairs, Pulayas and Tiyyas
were able to strongly resist the dominance of men within families
which came “in the name of brahminism and culture.” 31 How are we to
understand this reconstruction of Kerala’s history which on the
surface seems to display similarities with the Dravidianist position?
What value does EMS place on this persistence of the indigenous way
of life?

29
Ibid., p.48.
30
KMM, pp.47-52.
31
Ibid., p.51

15
 As we go on we realize that the stage is being set for the next
step in the argument which is about the growth of civilization and the
transition from one family form to another. The persistence
particularly of “matriarchal” (sic) forms of geneaology and
inheritance marks the Nairs, Pulayas and other inhabitants as part of
a primitive civilization which is then provided an ideal by the
“patriarchal” brahmin household. But we anticipate the working out
of the argument here. First, there is the question: “Who did the
brahmins supplant within the regions of Kerala?” Comparing the
different theories about the origins of the Nairs which locate their
original home in places as far apart as Nepal, Chotanagpur and
southern India, EMS comes down in favour of their being a Dravidian
people. They were part of the civilization of the south proved by
“Tamil scholars” to have been no less advanced than that of the
Aryans.32 One of the indicators of their level of advancement was the
fact that they managed to retain the distinctive features of their social
organisation i.e. matriliny even after ‘clash with the people like the
Aryans who possessed a superior civilization and culture’. 33
Throughout the text there is a constant movement between the term
Aryan implying a northern origin fro the Nambudiris and being
consonant with Dravidian position, and the more neutral term of
brahmin locating the Nambudiri as one among the brahmins
originating in the southern peninsula. Immediately undercutting the
idea of Nair ‘advancement’, EMS went on to add, ‘Today the vestiges
of matriliny only survive among the Negro race; and in our region
among the Pulayas, Parayas and other races who are more backward
socially and culturally.’34

32
Ibid., p. 58
33
Ibid., p. 57,emphasis added
34
Ibid., p. 57

16
Even as the Nairs were seen as part of the developed Dravidian
peoples, their practices were seen as belonging to an earlier stage of
civilization. In the Introduction to the second impression of KMM in
1965, this evaluation of the Nairs was elaborated with a creative
misreading of Engels’s hierarchy of family forms from group marriage
to patriarchal family. EMS read Engels as arguing that the move away
from mother-right represented an unqualified advance, though Engels
saw in it the ‘world-historical defeat of the female sex’.35 EMS adopted
the trajectory of Engels’s argument: ‘Marxian point of view of
development from group marriage to monogamy’, 36
but not the
critique. What made possible, even necessary, such a misreading?
Beginning in the late-twentieth century, there had been much debate
about matriliny and marriage among the Nairs. In 1881, the Malabar
Marriage Commission had been set up to enquire into the question of
whether the institution of marriage existed among the matrilineal
communities and amidst the dust raised by the debate it became clear
that there was a deep belief in the inevitable progress towards the
patrilineal family and monogamous marriage. The works of John
McLennan, John Lubbock and Lewis Morgan were already current in
Kerala at the beginning of the century as reforming elites gathered
intellectual ammunition to engage with these problems of family,
marriage and the division of property. 37
In 1908, K.P Padmanabha
Menon who wrote the pioneering history of Kerala, citing McLennan,
had stated with the confidence of the modernizer that, ‘the
promiscuity of savagery had passed into the polyandry of barbarism
and the polyandry of barbarism into the monogamy of civilization’. 38
For the Marxist thinker, Engels had complicated the picture of the
transition to the patriarchal family. This was evident in K.
35
F. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, London, 1972, p. 20
36
E.M.S. Nambudiripad, Kerala, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Bombay, 1964, p. 20
37
G. Arunima, ‘Colonialism and Matriliny’, ch. 5.
38
K.P. Padmanabha Menon, Memorandum on the Report of the Travncore Marumakkathayam
Commission, 1908, p.9

17
Damodaran’s work Manushayan [Human] (1947). He began his
discussion of the family by mentioning the work of McLennan,
Lubbock and Morgan, stating that the last named had made the most
important contribution in establishing the historicity of the family as a
social institution. He then went on to cite Engels on the origin of
marriage, patriarchy and the subordination of women. However, since
his concern was with the move out of matriliny, he observed that the
survival of the ‘freedom’ of women as in the case of Kerala was
characteristic of the ‘lower’ stages of savagery and barbarism. 39 If
Damodaran side-stepped Engels even as he acknowledged the
difference in his position, EMS absorbed Engels into the trajectory
posited by Morgan et al. It is interesting to note that Dange, coming
from Maharashtra had little problem in accepting, atleast
theoretically, Engels’s critique, when he wrote that the ‘monogamy of
class-ridden society…becomes a mockery for the woman’.40

EMS made an interesting and unsubstantiated connection between

matriliny and the caste regime. Since the Nambudiris were able to
make the sharpest break from mother-right to father-right they
became the highest caste while those who retained the maximum
amount of freedom in marriage and preserved the ‘mother-right’
became the lowest of the caste Hindus.41 So here again the argument
of the superiority of the brahmin civilization was the phrased in the
language of Marxism: as representing the teleological end which the
inferior family forms strive towards. EMS stated sharply in 1964 that
give time and with the transference of descent from mother to father,
‘the Nair family will become the Nambudiri’. 42 The family was central
to many of the debates among Marxists in Asia, since it was seen as
impeding the development of the individual. A move from the
39
K.Damodaran, Manushyan, Trichur, 1947, pp. 60-3.
40
S.A.Dange, From Primitive Communism to Slavery, Bombay, 1949, p. 131.
41
KMM , pp. xvi-xvii.
42
Nambudiripad, Kerala, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, p.20.

18
extended family to the nuclear family was necessarily progressive
inasmuch as it freed the individual simultaneously from the trammels
of tradition and a collective identity. 43 The dilemma in EMS’s case was
two-fold. Before the issue of the individual relation to the family was
the more important one of the move from an inferior to a superior
family form.

By the time he came to writing the NQK he had more fully worked out
the place of the scale of the family forms in his evaluation of the role
of the brahmin within the indigenous civilisation. The critique of the
Dravidian ideology was much sharper as well: “the new bourgeois
theory of Dravidian superiority seeks to attribute all the
characteristics of modern civilized society to a people whose family
life was dominated by matriarchal relationships.” 44
The other
dimension to the argument was the evaluation of the political
structures which had attempted to rule over Kerala, particularly the
Chera Empire. Later in the paper we shall look at how EMS denied
the role played by kings and empires in the construction of the region
of Kerala and made an argument for the brahmins as having provided
the political and cultural cement within a fragmented, primitive
society. Here the Chera empire was evaluated and found wanting for
its inability to ‘transform family organisation from one based on
mother-right to that based on father-right’. 45 It was argued that this
was inevitable since there had been no central imperialized
government which in turn could have been possible only with a shift
to field cultivation on the basis of irrigation such as in the Kaveri and
Godavari delta. Since there had not been an advance in the mode of
production and consequently no increase in wealth, empires were an
‘artificial superstructure on the material foundations of Kerala’. 46 The
43
D.G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, Berkeley, 1981, pp. 131-2.
44
NQK, p. 7.
45
Ibid., p. 18.
46
Ibid., p. 19.

19
Tamils could deal ‘a crushing blow to family life based on mother-
right’ because ‘the necessity for the organisation of such a mode of
production [based on artificial irrigation]…compelled [them] to
develop their Chera, Chola and Pandya empires’.47 In Kerala, these
sets of imperatives did not obtain and the persistence of the
indigenous way of life was both cause and effect of a lower form of
social organisation, production and political development.

As to when the brahmins actually entered Kerala, EMS preferred the

date suggested by R.C.Dutt – 4th century B.C.E. – for the immigration
of brahmins into south India, rather than 8th century C.E. as suggested
by William Logan. However, he disagreed with both on the question of
origins. The migration was presented as the result of an internal
movement from within the southern peninsula of India i.e. from
Maharashtra, Karnataka and the banks of the Krishna and the
Godavari rather than an invasion from the north. By arguing this he
was mapping onto the territory delineated by Dravidian ideologues
and locating the brahmin firmly within it, rather than as an outsider.
Moreover, the idea that the brahmins were conquering Aryans was
subtly undermined at the same time; he was careful to avoid the use
of the word Aryan and Aryan culture at this juncture, except for
occasional slippages throughout the text: “It is more logical to assume
that the brahmins came to Kerala in different groups, from different
regions at different times than to suppose that there was a single
immigration of one body of people from one region.” 48 There was no
originary migration attended by disastrous consequences as in the
Dravidian representations. EMS’s alternative history was presented as
a ‘surmise’ (abhyuham) for which he offered no evidence. The regional
differences between Nambudiris in Kerala were seen as arising from
their migration from different parts of southern India e.g. the
47
Ibid., p. 19.
48
KMM, p.53.

20
observances of the Nambudiris from northern Kerala reflected their
Maharashtrian past. However, here again there was a tension. EMS
stated that the Nambudiris of central Kerala had had the most
influence on the history and culture of the region. He traced their
origin to the banks of the Krishna and Godavari ‘because after the
coming of the Aryan culture, the foremost civilisation in India was in
the Andhra region.’49 Therefore, even as the idea of northern Aryan
origin for the Nabudiris was rejected, it was argued that the advanced
sections among them were only one remove away from the superior
Aryan civilisation.

In the ‘Introduction’ to the second impression of KMM in 1965, EMS

returned to an argument about the Brahmins having come from north
India, but the ramifications of this reversal served radical purposes.
He hypothesized that the brahmins came to Kerala at a time when
changes were coming about within marriage practices and family
organisation. A section from the ‘caste Hindus’ (this is curious as EMS
argued later that it was the brahmins who brought caste to Kerala;
although as in the use of the word Aryan, there was a decided
inconsistency throughout the text) had gone some way towards
imposing monogamy on their women while allowing the men to
cohabit with women of other caste Hindu families and marry within
their own caste. This group also accepted the study of the Vedas and
along with those who ‘came from the north’ became the class known
as Nambudiris. This surmise (abhyuham) regarding the origin of the
Nambudiris was given a radical edge by the statement that they were
the result of jati samkara (mixture of castes). The brahmin was moved
from originating within the Dravidian space, albeit of a different race,
to becoming one among the Dravidians.: ‘After several generations it
became impossible to tell who the immigrants and who the natives

49
Ibid., p.54.

21
were.’50 Throughout the text, Marxism and its notion of historical
development – the motor of the mode of production- was deployed
against the Dravidian rhetoric of the brahmins as aggressive
immigrants. As EMS puts it, ‘the development of a region is not
determined by forces which enter the region from outside. It is rather
influenced by the existing social forces which are growing within it.’51

The caste system and landlordism

Here we come to the next stage in the argument: what allowed the
brahmins to establish themselves in Kerala in the midst of a people at
a high level of civilization? EMS puts it thus: ‘the Nambudiri
possessed an advantage that Nair society lacked. What was that
advantage? The answer is- the caste system’. 52 The caste system was
the marker of the superior economic organisation which the brahmins
instituted allowing the shift from one mode of production to another.
Just as slavery helped human society to progress towards a more
civilized state in Europe, the caste system played a similar role in its
time. In a context of agitations against caste both in Kerala as well as
in the rest of the Madras Presidency, the characterization of caste
provided is benevolent, as a means of organizing production alone.

The son follows the profession of the father; in every boy is

implanted the desire to gain training and then expertise in his
family profession; this expertise in the family profession
becomes the basis of creating the means to live a happy life: this
is the essence of the caste system. As a result men and women
of different castes had the opportunity to develop their
professional skills; each generation learned from the
experiences of the previous generation…53

50
KMM, p.xix.
51
Ibid. p.xiii.
52
Ibid. p. 59.
53
Ibid. p.60.

22
The brahmin was seen as the prime mover in this system, the ‘one
who organized production’ by allocating to each caste a profession.
Political overlords were unable to systematize an advanced mode of
organisation of labour or of production, stultifying society in the
‘matriarchal’ mode. The organisation of caste as a superior form of
the division of labour allowed for two possibilities which were
expanded upon in NQK. The development of productive forces was
given an impetus by the new social division which led to the
accumulation of wealth, division of labour and the division of society
into classes. This finally paved the way for transition to father-right
among the more advanced groups.54 While KMM had argued for caste
as a division of labour with people allotted professions which they
then developed over generations, in NQK, the argument was
expressed in terms of differential ranking in terms of movement
towards ‘father right’. However, there was another major shift in
NQK. Earlier he had argued that the Nambudiris had instituted the
caste system (where he shared ground with the Dravidianists, though
they ascribed different meanings to the founding of caste). He now
argued that the process of division into castes had been ‘facilitated or
even stimulated’ by the Chera Empire and contacts with ther ets of
India. He continued that ‘whether these contacts did also include the
immigration of of a whole caste (Nambudiris)…is an open question’. 55
Caste existed before the coming of the Nambudiris, prior to which the
‘soil of Kerala was prepared for the sowing of the seed of
brahminism’.56 On the same page he referred to the ‘brahmanical
scheme of division of labour’ i.e. caste which left unresolved the links
between the advent of the brahmins and the institution of caste: ‘the

54
NQK, p.29.
55
Ibid. pp.34-5.
56
Ibid. p.29.

23
difference between one caste and another is a difference in the stage
reached by them in the evolution of society’.57

EMS was not alone at this time in characterizing caste as if it were

devoid of all connotations of ritual and social lowliness. It was only as
late as 1948, at the Second Party Congress that opposition to
discrimination based on caste was officially made a part of the
‘Programme of the Democratic Revolution’. Even then discrimination
against the untouchables was denounced instrumentally as a
‘bourgeois attempt to keep the masses disunited’ rather than as
possessing a deeper resonance at the experiential level as well. 58
Moreover, in 1946, following the consolidation of the Communist
Party in northern Kerala through a pragmatic political line during the
war, the issue of caste had been summarily shelved. This arose from
the successful attack on certain forms of caste discrimination as an
effect of the class hierarchy through peasant mobilization during
1938-40 which then relegated the issue of caste to the reforming
influence of the rival Congress through the largely ineffective Harijan
Sevak Sanghs.59 In 1944, this issue blew up in the face of the party
when, following the dismissal of C.H.Kanaran and Raju, Tiyya labour
organizers from the provincial committee, there was considerable
discontent within both the ranks and the leadership about the ‘caste
systemt’ within the party. EMS rode the storm by arguing that the
party should not become the ‘display case of the religions and castes
of India’. 60 Kanaran and others within the party continued to press for
an engagement with the issue of caste, arguing for associating the
communist party with caste associations and stating that ‘caste was a
reality in contemporary society’ which could not be ignored.

57
Ibid. p.32.
58
M.B.Rao ed. Documents of the History of the Communist Party, New Delhi, 1976, pp.85, 111-2.
59
Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communsim, ch. 5 and 6.
60
E.M.S.Nambudiripad, Party Sanghadakan, pp.3-6.

24
If the rational organisation of production through the caste system
was one of the innovations imported by the Brahmins, the other one –
‘the special contribution of the Aryans to Kerala’ (emphasis added) –
was the landlord system. It helped institute the system of private
property in Kerala and here EMS moves towards a curious blend of
traditional Nambudiri myth and Marxist method. Observing that there
is a direct relation between brahmin dominance and the prevalence of
landlordism – least in north Malabar, most in central Kerala – he goes
on to ask, ‘Does this show that the tradition of Parasurama having
granted land to the brahmins is correct?’61

The details of the origins of landlordism were equally curiously

worked out. Once the Nambudiris had instituted the caste system it
became necessary to compensate those who provided services either
in terms of land or grain from lands. The Nambudiris generated ways
of making an income by playing an entrepreneurial role and in return
for this they took a portion of the harvest. Te local rulers (naduvazhis
and desavazhis) were given a portion of the harvest in return for
protection. As the status of the Nambudiris and rulers increased, the
importance of the share they received also went up. Over a period of
time, ‘it became absolutely necessary for the cultivator to relinquish a
portion of the harvest and it came to be established that the
Nambudiris and rulers had rights of overlordship on the land’. In
EMS’s narration, this was represented as an inevitable, painless and
uncontested transition which was accompanied ‘by an increase in the
devotion of the cultivators towards the Nambudiris and the gods they
had brought with them.’ The belief became entrenched that the
produce of the land belonged by rights to the Nambudiris or
particular deities. If on the one hand it was the rationale of the
superior organisation of production by the Nambudiri that gave them

61
KMM, pp.65-6.

25
status, on the other it was a growing and unexplained devotion to
them which lay at the bottom of the creation of private property.62

The greatest advantage of the caste system was that it paved

the way for a major economic revolution. What the transfer of
the rights over land from the hands of those who cleared the
forests and cultivated the lands to those who lived off a portion
of the produce without engaging in cultivation actually meant
was the emergence of a new sense of private property.63

In Kerala, private property was instituted with the coming of the

Nambudiris while in the rest of India it had to wait till the coming of
the British. A form of absolute rights over private property which
extended not only over the land but the vegetation ad natural
formations on it was prevalent here to the great astonishment of the
British. By the time NQK came to be written, EMS had moved to the
position that there was no intrinsic connection between the coming of
the Nambudiris and the origin of private property. Indeed, where the
Nambudiris came from (the geographical location was unspecified),
they had been used to communal ownership by village communities
rather than the idea of individual ownership. Therefore, even before
their coming, ‘land had already gone far towards being turned into
private property’.64 We are not told how he arrived at this reversal of
the earlier assumption. However, this can be explained if we see that
the argument had shifted from seeing the Nambudiris as the
harbingers of a new economic order, which would associate them also
with the deeply ambivalent heritage of caste and landlordism. Rather,
it was argued that they were the catalysts for a social transformation
– from matriliny to patriliny – which was part of the ascendant
ideology within Kerala and therefore had more unequivocal support.

62
Ibid. pp.67-70.
63
Ibid. p.72.
64
NQK, pp.32-3.

26
It was in another context that EMS took up what was lying beneath
the surface of his benign delineation of the caste system: the question
of inequality. In an attempt to locate the history of Buddhism in
ancient Kerala he argued for a clash between those who espoused
Buddhism and those who welcomed the newer immigrant groups.
Buddhism was seen as having arisen in response to the ‘subordination
of the majority of the people to a tiny minority’ despite the ‘social
advancement’ brought about by the division of labour through caste.

Those who believed that the earlier Kerala without the caste
system and janmi overlordship [Nair lordship] should be
restored espoused Buddhism, and those who wanted the
destruction of the old order and the institution of a new one
[Nambudiri-janmi overslordship] took recourse to the brahmin
religion.65

The victory over Buddhism of Sankaracharya and the advaita

philosophy represented not only the triumph of an ideology but a shift
in the relations of production. For EMS, this was a crucial watershed
in the history of Kerala an he went along with the tradition held by the
Nambudiris in the Keralolpatti that the Malayalam era which begins
in 825 C.E. commemorated this event. His preference for this
Nambudiri myth is interesting considering the other options available
to him.66 Buddhism perished because it had to; it represented an older
order which may have had greater equality between people as a
premise but was tied to a stagnant mode of production. It is curious
how the triumph of advaita and the caste ideology are presented as
two sides of the same coin when the contemporary radical critiques of
caste whether by Narayana Guru or by Swami Vaghbhatananda drew
upon advaita for arguing against caste inequality.67

65
KMM, p.74.
66
For a discussion of the various theories regarding the origin of the Kollam era in 825 A.D., see A.
Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History, Kottayam, 1967, pp. 114-22.
67
V.T.Samuel, ‘”One Caste, One Relgion, One God for Man”: a Study of Sree Narayana Gru (1854-1928)
of Kerala, India’, Hartford Seminary, 1973; Swami Brahmavratan , Maharshi Vaghbhatananda Gurudevar,
Thottapally, 1971.

27
Aikya Keralam: Kerala as a Linguistic Region

It was in the laying out of an argument for Kerala as a cohesive

regional unit bound by a common history, language and culture that
there was a more detailed and direct engagement with the Dravidian
position. EMS argued against the idea of a pristine Dravidian
civilization invaded by an Aryan one and put forward the gentler
suggestion of a compromise and exchange between the brahmin and
the Dravidian. Just as in Kerala the brahmin became a player in the
matrilineal system of the Nairs, similarly, in Tamil Nadu, they had to
adopt the prevalent alphabet and content themselves with the fact
that they could influence the local literature but little. Nevertheless
the culture that emerged in South India was a composite one ‘formed
by the conflict between Dravidians and Aryans’, in which the different
strands had become inseparable. Even Tamil literature, which ‘prides
itself on being the most independent of Sanskrit influence’, had had
its rules of grammar codified by the sage Agastya.68 From an
argument establishing the synthesis of cultures, the next step was a
leap forward to state that over the centuries, there had been a shift
away from a pan-Dravidian culture to regional ones in which ‘there is
a greater similarity between the brahmins and non-brahmins within a
region than between brahmins, or Dravidians across regions’. 69 The
brahmin had been naturalized and attained a unity with the
Dravidians in linguistic regions, while there are’ differences and
contradictions between the Dravidians themselves’. 70 In Kerala,
moreover, ‘Dravidianised Aryans’, i.e. Nambudiris and ‘Aryanised
Dravidians’, i.e. Nairs had created a distinct new culture. The rug was
pulled out from under the Dravidianist position by arguing that the
Dravidians had less in common with each other and mre of an affinity

68
KMM, pp.83-4.
69
Ibid. p.85.
70
Ibid. p.86.

28
with the brahmins. The argument of racial difference was undermined
by positing an emergent unity.

The next step brought together the important components of the enw
society – caste and a distinctive culture which integrated regions and
gave them their unique character. The origins of regional identity lay
in the possibility of the creation of a high culture premised upon a
division of labour.

In fact, it was on the basis of the caste system which

subordinated the majority of the people socially and culturally to
the brahmin, and the janmi system which subordinated them
economically to the landlord, that Kerala developed its own
culture and form of government and the Malayalis grew as an
independent people.71

And again,

If these two arrangments [caste and the landlord system] had

not existed, the Nambudiris would have been unable to engage
in cultural activities and develop the sciences and literature and
the Nairs could not have improved agricultural practices and
developed their martial and physical prowess.72

The cultural argument is made with greater specificity in NQK.

Developing upon the earlier critique of the Chera Empire, he argued
pace Stalin that like ‘the empires of the slave and medieval periods’, it
had managed only to maintain Kerala as a ‘conglomeration of tribes
and nationalities, each of which lived its own life and had its own
language’.73 Thus, Kerala was moving from ‘clan languages to tribal
languages’ at a time when Tamilnadu was moving from ‘tribal

71
Ibid. p.71.
72
Ibid. p.105.
73
In the Introduction to NQK, EMS states that it was Stalin’s On Linguistics [Concerning Marxism in
Linguistics (1950)] that allowed him to rethink the ‘crucial problem of the history of Kerala’, i.e. the
continued existence of the ‘matriarchal’ family, with is suggestion that the ‘superstructure does often act
independently of the basis’. Of course, Stalin remains obfuscatory on the nature of the relation. He says
both that the superstructure is not ‘passive and indifferent’ but actively assists the base to take shape as also
that the superstructure is ‘created by [the] base to serve it’, J.V.Stalin, Selected Works, II, Calcutta, 1976,
p.251.

29
languages to the languages of nationalities’. 74 Under the system of
‘feudal landlordism’ that developed after the coming of the brahmins
there was a division of labour between the ‘manual and the
intellectual workers’ and the allotment of a definite share of the
produce to the latter. The brahmins were then able to devote
themselves to the ‘unification of several dialects into a national
language’.75 It became possible for Kerala to shear off from the Chera
Empire of which it had been a part and for Malayalam to develop as a
language independent of Chentamizh only under the umbrella of the
brahmin. Moreover, ‘in a Kerala which was populated by different
communities across its length and breadth, a uniform government,
society and culture came into being’.

Here again the contrast with the Dravidian movement is striking. EMS
argued that the geographical region of Kerala was unified by the
cultural production of the brahmins. This is despite his critique of
existing historiography as being ‘largely about the rulers of Kerala
and the higher classes associated with them’ and excluding the ‘lives
of Cherumas, Parayas and Nayadis who were slaves under the sway of
these ruling classes’. He stated that, ‘in Padmanabha Menon’s history
176 pages are devoted to the Nairs, 109 to the Nambudiris and only
22 to the Tiyyas’.76 The Dravidian movement drew upon a geneaology,
built assiduously from the late 19th century, of a unified and glorious
Tamil civilisation which was given a concrete definition by the anti-
brahmin movement. The trajectory of regional identity in the
Malayalam speaking area was different. Starting from the early 20 th
century, the spate of caste reform movements had undermined the
notion of a coherent regional culture. In Travancore, the introduction
of community based politics has fragmented the political as well as

74
NQK, pp.24-5.
75
Ibid. p.55.
76
KMM, p.43.

30
cultural realm into mutually opposed and infrequently united spaces
of the Nair, Ezhava, Syrian Christian and so on. 77 In Malabar, the
attack on the janmi sampradayam (the culture of landlordism – often
loosely translated as feudalism) from the late thirties ranged from a
critique of excessive exactions of rent to a rejection of forms like
Kathakali as being subsidized by peasants but culturally restricted to
the landlord. The emergent socialist critique had undermined the
possibility of appealing to the canonical literature of the region, by
characterizing it as a product of a ‘feudal’ culture in a language
removed from the experiences of the masses- Sanskrit and a highly
Sanskritised Malayalam. The progressive writers’ movement of the
forties attempted to create a new demotic, populist culture which
drew upon the lives of the subordinate and to a lesser degree from the
folk culture- popular ballads, ritual performances and so on. 78
However this was as yet in its infancy.

A high culture was being attacked for it ‘feudal’ overtones while the
relation with a popular culture was fraught with contradictions.
Beginning with the Ezhava reform movement of Sri Narayana Guru,
the route for social mobility involved a jettisoning of ‘barbaric’ and
‘primitive’ customs and practices. The roots of caste inequality were
seen as lying in the unclean professions and uncivilized culture of the
lower castes.79 Popular religion cme in fro censure from the upper
castes as well as lower caste reformers, and by extension so did
popular culture which had largely religious connotations. The brief
attempt by The Communist Party at an instrumental deployment of

77
Robin Jeffrey, ‘Travancore: Status, Class and the Growth of Radical Politics, 1860-1940, in R.Jeffrey ed.
Peoples, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in Indian Princely States, Delhi, 1978.
78
E. Sardarkutty, Purogamana Sahitya Nirupanam (Criticism of Progressive Literature), Trichur, 1985;
P.K. Gopalakrishnan, Purogamana Sahitya Prasthanam: Nizhalum Velichhavum (The Progressive
Writer’sMovement: Light and Shadow), Trichur, 1987.
79
Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism, chs. 3 and 4.

31
popular cultural forms in the forties had not been serious enough to
make a break from this civilizing impulse. Explainign this shift to the
cadre, EMS had written in 1944,

There is a common assumption that expressing an interest in the fine

arts or developing a taste fro it, is not suited for a communist. Those
communists who have an interest in kathakali, festivals and temple
festivals often are embarrassed about admitting it. Today the
circumstances are such that we have the opportunity to lead the
renaissance in literature, music and the other arts.80

Once the movement for regional identity- Aikya Keralam- began to

gain mass following, cultural fissures across caste and community
were subsumed at least momentarily ina an exaltation of Malayalam
and its literature; an unequivocal return to the older classical
tradition as in Tamilnadu.81 Of course, though the trajectory was
similar to that in Tmailnadu, for EMS, the ideological underpinning
came also from Stalin’s cocept of nationality, in which language was
one of the major constituents of a peoples’ identity. In September
1942, in a resolution at a plenary meeting of the central committee,
sixteen Indian ‘nations’ were classified, ‘Keralas’ being one of them.
However, the turn to language as an unifier of a region remained a
deeply ambivalent solution; coming at the end of a redefinition of
politics in Kerala establishing the rightful place of the ‘working
classes’, the new Kerala and the definition in terms of culture of the
janmis.

So was there a sense of region, or any form of political unity prior to

the cultural unification wrought by the Nambudiris? Had Kerala been
politically united under the rule of the Perumals (9 th to 11th centuries
C.E.)? Here the central traditional account is the Keralolpatti.
80
E.M.S. Nambudiripad, Party Sanghadakam, p. 6.
81
S. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970, Berkeley, 1997.

32
Parasurama, who founded Kerala, divided the land into sixty-four
brahmin villages and prescribed an oligarchical government in which
all the villages were represented. Over a period of time, dissensions
arose and under these circumstances representative authority was
conferred on select villages to act on behalf of the community. When
this too failed to prevent disputes, protectors were appointed to hold
office for three years and four advisory boards, each under an officer,
were set up. Finally, the brahmins assembled at Tirunavayi and
resolved to bring in alien kings (Perumals) to rule over the country.
Each Perumal was to rule for twelve years and then retire from public
life. The Keralolpatti gives a list of twenty-four such Perumals who
ruled over Kerala and the last of them is reputed to have converted to
Islam and left for Mecca, after partitioning the country among his
relatives. The mythical account points to a political unity of Kerala
under the Perumals which was fragmented after the last Perumal
renounced his rule.

EMS went along with the then existing historical consensus that even
under the ruleof the Perumals there had been no unity; under their
overlordship there had been several kings who owed allegiance to
them.82 It had been a form of feudal rule with the Perumals exercising
a fragile control and their ‘empire’ disintegrated after their departure.
However, he made a significant departure from the consensus in two
respects. First, he disagreed with Padmanabha Menon’s assertion that
the Perumals rather than being invited by the brahmins were sent to
rule here by the Chola-Chera-Pandya kings i.e. they were the
appointed governors following the incorporation of Kerala into the
southern empires. He prefers the account in the Keralolpatti which
ash the brahmins inviting the Perumals, thus casting them squarely as
the movers in the political realm as his account of caste had made

82
K.P.Padmanabha Menon, A History of Kerala, Cochin, 1924, vol.I, pp.420-67.

33
them the lynchpins of the economic realm. Second, and more
important, he argues that rather than rule by a brahmin oligarchy
prior to the coming of the Perumals, there had been a democratic
framework (janadhpatya vyavastha) which was supplanted by the
despotism of the Perumals. ‘The establishment of feudal rule meant
the destruction of ancient democracy’. 83 This characterization is
derived from a reading of the ‘Nambudiri tradition’ which he
preferred to Padmanabaha Menon’s own historical reconstruction
from a variety of sources. Here he attempted a reconciliation with the
Dravidian ideologists by recasting the Aryan-Dravidian conflict as that
between two forms of democracy: the ancient Aryan democracy
brought from North India by the brahmins and the existing Nair
system of local and village assemblies (tarakoottam and
naatukoottami).

The Nmabudiris are seen as having provided the only unifying

government within Kerala, and that too, a ‘democratic’ one, just as
earlier they were shown to have provided the bonding cultural cement
for the region. In NQK, another evaluation of the ‘empires’ of the
south was provided, arguing against the ‘theorists of Dravidian
superiority’ that the ‘racial origin of the founders of the two types of
empires –the Indo-Iranian in the north and the Turanian in the south –
is irrelevant in a study of the respective roles they played in the
development of human society in India’.84 There had been
considerable interaction between the north and south – wars of
conquest, attacks and counter attacks – which meant a considerable
diffusion of ideas and peoples. He went on to argue that the
brahminical civilisation may have been the common product of the
‘Indo-Aryans’ and the ‘Turanians’ (note the conscious avoidance of the

83
KMM, p.93.
84
NQK, p.26.

34
term Dravidian). Conditional on this the hypothesis being accepted,
EMS took the next breathtaking step:

We are led to the very interesting conclusion that the Dravidian

empires of the south were not (as is generally supposed)
bastions against brahminism which were ultimately broken
down, but the agency through which brahminism was reared on
Dravidian soil.85

The final step in the argument against Dravidian ideology had been
made: the Dravidian ‘civilisation’, if such existed, was necessary only
in as much as it allowed for the inevitable establishment of the
brahmin and brahminism in south India.

A Usable Past

What did Marxism allow EMS to do? First, it facilitated a

reconceptualisation of the idea of caste as having played a historical
role in organizing production in such a way that it promoted the
development of both individual skills as well as a regional culture. The
latter was developed by the brahmins at the apex of the caste
hierarchy who were freed from labour to devote themselves to
intellectual and cultural activity. Second, and following from this,
amidst the general condemnation of the brahmin in south India,
Marxism allowed the reinstatement of a role for the brahmins by
putting them at the heart of crucial changes in the organisation of the
family, a theme with major resonances for a society engaged in an
attack on the legacy of matriliny. Contradictions remained: the use of
Nambudiri myths along with a scientific approach to history; the
putting of the working classes at the heart of the theoretical exercise
but in practice, exalting the high culture produced by the brahmins.
D.D.Kosambi, in one of the earliest reviews of Nehru’s The Discovery
of India, observed that it reflected the bourgeoisie coming of age in

85
NQK, p.28.

35
India. EMS’s work is a powerful example of the brahmin coming of
age in south India, emerging out of the critiques of the Dravidian
movement as well as the soul searching within the Nambudiri
community to forge a history that restored the brahmins to their
rightful place.

On the face of it, EMS’s use of Marxism and its concepts is

idiosyncratic at best and instrumental at worst. As we have seen,
Engel’s argument about the transition to a patrilineal, monogamous
family was taken on board to serve EMS’s own concern with the
persistence within Kerala of a ‘barbaric’ form like matriliny. Engel’s
critique of this transition was ignored. Morover, the historical location
of institutions like caste remained unclear: was its origin at the
juncture of primitive communism, slavery or feudalism? Was the
period of the ‘ancient democracy’ of the Nambudiris the era of
primitive communism? If the Nambudiris introduced caste into Kerala
(as argued in KMM), how does this square with the idea of primitive
communism? There are curious formulations of the nature of Malayali
society. EMS argued that in medieval Kerala, the ‘basis’ was
European feudal while the superstructure was ‘brahmin i.e. Asiatic’,
and it was this brahminical superstructure that was responsible for
the ‘further development of productive forces’.86 However, we would
be off on a tangent if we read this text as an exposition of Marxist
historical method. EMS’s was a purposive history which
‘misunderstood’ Marxism for the political programme of the Malayali
region of Kerala. It was necessary to counter the Dravidian critique to
imagine a unity within the region of individuals constructed as
Malayalis rather than as Brahmin or non-brahmin. And, in this
parallels with the nationalist discourse are evident.

86
NQK, pp. 30-1.

36
The question really is: what did Marxism allow EMS to do; why was
Marxism good to think? To answer this, one has to understand the
particular nature of Marxism’s relationship with the past. The version
of historical materialism that EMS, Damodaran and other Malayali
Marxists espoused advocated evolutionism and ‘progress’ as the
watchwords of history. The past was merely a stage that would be
transcended in the inexorable forward movement of change. Caste
and other phenomenon were embarrassments located in a particular
stage of society that had had its day.

As Damodran listed at random; ‘caste pollution, purdah, magic,

superstition and matrilineal households’ and the privilege of power
were now matters of the past.87Marxism expounded a linear
conception of progress and of inevitable modernization which at times
could pose a problem for the anti-colonial sentiments of the Malayali
communists. EMS, writing his descending Minute in the Malabar
Tenancy Committee Reportof 1940 observed of the role of the British,
that, ‘here is a higher and more advanced form of society and its
perfected machinery and state culture acting as the tool of history in
destroying the decadent social system and a dying culture’. 88 This
desire to jettison the past and embrace the blandishments of
‘progress’ generated conflicts within Marxists in the colonies and
elsewhere in Asia. As Dirlik shows, Chinese Communist Party writers
offered tortuous arguments in accepting capitalism and imperialism
as historically progressive, while trying to reconcile this with their
resentment of the effects of these forces.89

The evolutionist paradigm had more insidious effects in the attitude

towards the past. Historical materialism consigned traditional values

87
K.Damodaran, Charitraparamaya Bhoutikavadam (Historical Materialism), Trichur, 1948, pp. 13-14.
88
Malabar Tenancy Committee Report, 1940, p.73.
89
A. Dirlik, Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937, Berkeley,
1978, pp.80-81.

37
and institutions to the superstructure of society and predicted their
‘natural’ extinction. Therefore, at one level, there was no need to
struggle against an old and dying culture. As David Marr observes,
remarking on the work of the Vietnamese Marxist Tran Huu Do, the
dialectic could be used to explain the progressive demise of the
extended family system, superseding of kings and popes of oil
magnates and the victory of revolution. 90
Determinism allowed
detachment. The idea of the inevitable supersession of traditional
moribund forms released EMS and other Marxists from what Levinson
calls, in his classic work on the fate of Confucian ideology in China,
the ‘compulsion to denounce’. They could move away from indictment
to explanation.91 The past could truly become a foreign country to be
examined dispassionately. Ultimately, it was this neutering of the past
which vitiated much Marxist history and EMS’s own Marxixante foray.
For, in not looking back in anger, EMS and others denied the long
shadow of the past in the present. Dravidian rhetoric about Brahmin
immigration and the origins of caste was as such about the past as
inequality in the present. EMS’s attempt to leap away from history y
asserting the pastness of caste and matriliny denied their tangibility
in the present and their continuing legacy.

The classics, traditions, and the usages could now be scrutinized from
the vantage point of a world which had consigned them to the past. As
Dange wrote,

It is my firm opinion of the vast storehouse of Hindu mythology

and religion, social laws and practices, if read and sifted on the
basis of Historical Materialism would yield a consistent and
rational picture of India’s ancient history.92

90
Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, p. 274.
91
J. R. Levinson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate: the Problem of Historical Significance, Vol. 3,
London, 1965, p. 70.
92
Dange, From Primitive Communism, p. 21

38
The past could be used once it has been transcended and the Marxist
method allowed for the creation of a usable past.

39