The Middle Class in Colonial Malabar

A Social History

Sreejith K.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032116358
• eBook ISBN: 9781000464191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Members of the middle class in colonial Malabar left behind a copious amount of writings. These are to be found, among other places, in magazines, autobiographies and diaries. This book explores the social history of the middle class in the region during the British period on the basis of these writings in combination with archival sources. It delves into how they conceptualized domesticity, forged new friendships cutting across caste, and sometimes, even racial lines, and the new forms of leisure they envisaged. The author also analyses the dilemmas the group faced as it responded to the changes unleashed by colonial modernity at their work places, in the public sphere, and inside homes, where they desperately clung on to tradition even while accepting much of what the West had to offer.

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CHAPTER 1

The World of the Middle Class

By the turn of the twentieth century, new towns were emerging while the older ones expanded further in Malabar. So did transport, especially railways, which was to have a huge impact on the lives of the people in the region. As caste restrictions lost their earlier potency and people became more mobile with the advancement in transport, barriers, both spatially as well as at the level of the individual, began to fade. Friendships arose between members belonging to different castes and even races.¹ Meanwhile, a public sphere along with a vibrant print culture developed in which the middle class would come into its own.

The Cities

By the late nineteenth century, Malabar had its share of towns, though, compared to the metros, they were small ones. In fact, as late as the 1930s, it was observed that, in Malabar, ‘there are, to all intents and purposes, no real towns. Such few towns as there are being merely collections of bazaars or trading stations; and even these towns consist very largely of isolated houses in more or less extensive grounds of their own.’² Traditionally, Kerala did not have big cities. This is partly explained by the absence of a strong central political power structure and technological development. Urban forms did develop during the colonial period through a well developed transport network, but due to the absence of a central node which link all towns and contributes to a major share of urban population and urban economic activity, no big cities emerged. As a result, decentralized small towns became the feature of the Kerala landscape with little difference between urban and rural cultural pattern. The emerging social forms have been characterized as ‘rurban’ or semi-urban.³

Of the small towns then that existed in Malabar, the significant ones were Tellicherry and Calicut. The former, now Thalassery, is 21 km south from the present district headquarters, Kannur [formerly, Canannore]. It was established in 1663 by the British for the pepper and cardamom trade and was their first settlement on the Malabar coast, buttressed by a fort built in 1708. With the end of Mysore rule, and later the defeat and death of Pazzashi, Tellicherry rose into prominence possessing, among other things, the earliest light house in the state, port facilities, and a bridge on to the sea. It soon became a British centre with courts and government offices. Under the circumstances, the town soon acquired a cosmopolitan character with Arab, Gujarati, European, and Konkan traders selling their wares. C.H. Kunhappa, who studied in the BEMP School started by the Basel Mission with the help of the Parsees, refers to a ‘Satram’ near it, where every year ‘the Chinese used to come with birds, coloured paper fans, etc., and in their amusing way eat with their small sticks’.⁴ Writing in the late nineteenth century, F. Dunsterville found Tellicherry to be a ‘healthy and pretty town built upon a group of well-wooded hills running down to the sea and protected by a natural rocky breakwater with suburbs 5 sq. miles … trade consisting largely of the export of coffee, cardamoms and other spices.’⁵ But Calicut, the former capital of the Zamorins later became the British headquarters in the district and the prinicipal town with a population in 1891 of 66,000, and a density of 4,000 per sq. mile.⁶

In the intellectual history of Tellicherry in the colonial period, names of a few natives stand out, O. Chandu Menon, in particular, who with his novel, Indulekha inaugurated a new era in Malayalam literature. Chandu Menon used a Malayalam, shorn of its Sanskritic trappings, and which was used by the common people, a trend that continued in the years to come through the works of authors like Sanjayan who too hailed from Tellicherry. As did Murkoth Kumaran, one of the earliest and most prominent short story writers in Malayalam. Then, there were a couple of foreigners who too contributed to the cultural well-being of the town – Hermann Gundert and Edward Brennen. It was sometime in early 1839 that Gundert, a native of Stuttgart in Germany set sail on a ship heading to the south western coast of India. After several weeks at sea, he reached Tellicherry, and there, at his house given to him by the judge, T.L. Strange, on the slopes of a small hill overlooking the Arabian Sea, he spent the next twenty years with his French wife and children, engaging himself in missionary work. An indirect result of Gundert’s work was the impetus he gave to the development of the Malayalam language. In 1847, he started the first Malayalam magazine, Rajyasamacharam, and a few years later, prepared the first lexicon in the Malayalam language. An elder contemporary of Gundert was the Englishman Edward Brennen, who after being shipwrecked on the coast of Tellicherry, spent years as an official at the town’s port, and on retirement, before sailing back to England, left behind a small fortune for the native population to build a school which later developed into a college and survives to this day in his name.

Apart from the enormous cultural clout Tellicherry possessed during this time, the town also had considerable economic significance. Consequent to the development of Tellicherry as an important centre of English trade, a few native families, notably the Keyis, allying with the foreigners, made considerable wealth. Kozhikode would later on become the capital of the Malabar district, but all along, the cultural impact of the English rule would be most felt in Tellicherry reflected in the earliest cricket Association of the state, and the numerous bakeries which sprang up during the colonial period. Tellicherry had the most and best bakeries – Mambally bakery set up in 1880 being the earliest, and for long, at least until Independence, the most popular. The legend has it that an Englishman once, on Christmas eve, came to Mambally Bappu and ordered a Christmas cake. The cake was a hit, and the bakery never had to look back with long queues consisting of white women outside it a common occurrence in the years to follow.

One city to which a lot of Malayalis from Malabar were closely tied to during the colonial period was Madras. Ashis Nandy speaks of ‘the beckoning magic of the new colonial metropolis’.⁷ Until the middle of the twentieth century, Madras had remained the capital of a vast presidency comprising most of south India, and attracting multitudes of educated migrants from the distant parts of the region. Malayalis were no exception to this trend. In 1921, there were an estimated 8,000 Malayalis in the city.⁸ And, by 1931, the figures had crossed 18,000.⁹ A majority of the Malayali migrants were from Malabar which was part of the presidency. One important reason for this migration had been the economic stagnation Malabar experienced during the colonial period. An equally significant factor had been the demise of the Marumakkathayyam system, and the resultant partition of tarawad lands. As Susan Lewandowski observes, ‘as land changes hands, more people became candidates for the rural to urban migration’.¹⁰

Some like Sanjayan and C. Krishnan went to Madras for their higher education at institutions like Madras Christian College and Presidency College. Others like C. Sankaran Nair took up residence there while practising law. Still others like Kesava Menon went there for medical assistance for his ailing wife, after giving up a career in public life in Calicut. Some got very attached to the city, and when the time came to leave it, felt bad. P. Narayanan Nair, who made his mark as a journalist and then as a freedom fighter, for instance, wrote ‘while leaving Madras, naturally I felt sad…. There were some permanent lodges where law students, and government employees stayed. I was staying in one such lodge. I had been active in the functioning of Malayalee Club and the Kerala Samaj founded by Dr. C.R. Krishna Pillai and others.’¹¹ Madras offered a lot of avenues for a vibrant public life. For instance, Muliyil Krishnan used to go once a week to the Cosmopolitan club to have coffee, while he was at Madras working at the Presidency college.¹²

Those who studied in Madras came back to Malabar, and joined the government service as teachers, pleaders, clerks, revenue officials. Those who stayed back maintained close ties with their home and family in Malabar. Apart from the annual visits during vacations, occasions like birth, death and marriage also brought them home. Sometimes, relatives from Malabar came and stayed with their successful kinsmen in Madras.¹³

Madras, in spite of its many attractions to the educated middle classes, like other big cities, invariably had its vices which find a mention in one of Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar’s short stories, ‘Madirasi Pithalattam’ where one of the characters get cheated by an acquaintance after being lured into consuming a spurious drink.¹⁴ In fact, in an interesting article, A.R. Venkatachalapathy examines how in the popular imagination Chennai was perceived as a city of fraudsters out to cheat the gullible.¹⁵ Other cities too seemed to share its vices. S.K. Pottekkatt recounts how a fraudster who befriended him in Bombay cheated him of the little money he had while on his very first visit to the city in 1934.¹⁶ The towns in Malabar too had their pitfalls. The West Coast Spectator of 11 March 1916 reported that in Calicut ‘brothels are everywhere, while certain localities about town are infested with fallen women to such an extent that it is dangerous to pass through them after night fall’.¹⁷ But, still, for many amongst the lower castes, as Dilip M. Menon points out, modernity represented in the city was a liberating force. ‘If the village is the space of caste and inequality and marked by the static continuance of hierarchy’, writes Menon, ‘the city is the transformative space in which new individuals can be forged as subjects unmarked by subjection…. Sukumari, set entirely in the city of Canannore with its fort, army barracks, armoury and camp bazaar, celebrates commerce over the moribund spaces of agriculture … [and] clearly establishes the link between escape from slavery, travel and social mobility.’¹⁸

Cities and towns looked a lot different then. It is hard to imagine, living in the second decade of the twenty first century, what the nights would have been like a century earlier. Electricity, for instance, was introduced in Kozhikode only in the 1930s, and even after that, for many years, inside many homes and on the streets, lamps were lit with the aid of kerosene. There was also much less traffic than now. And, for another, public places were dirtier and smellier! Even as late as the 1970s, in the early mornings, in many parts of Malabar including towns, scavengers used to carry night soil from homes in their little trolleys before shifting it to lorries, creating in its wake, an awful stink which would last for quite a while long after the vehicles had left. Kaattumadam Narayanan mentions how this activity used to spoil his breakfast while staying at Lakshmi Vilas lodge in Tali not far from its famous temple during a visit to Calicut.¹⁹ Drainage system, meanwhile, was primitive, and the mosquitos played havoc with the health and lives of the people, a point repeatedly raised by Sanjayan in his writings.²⁰ The authorities were not too keen on the upkeep of sanitation. As filth accumulated around the Tali temple pond, and people complained, the colonial administration made it clear that this was not a public domain as the Zamorin, ex-raja of Calicut did not allow entry to the lower castes.²¹ A.M.V. Hesterlow, writing at the close of the nineteenth century, observed that there was a problem with hygiene and personal sanitation in Malabar as rubbish and waste accumulated in compounds, soil and water were polluted by faeces, and cases of hookworm, dysentery and diarrhoea were the highest in the Presidency.²² Health and sanitation, however, did improve over time. Mayer, writing a couple of decades later thought that the people of Malabar were cleaner than their counterparts on the eastern coast because of abundant water supply which allowed them to take a bath at least once a day.²³ Digging a well in Kerala which can provide potable water, as Joan Mencher points out, is not the problem that it is in other parts of India.²⁴

Cities became the centres in the region for a nascent public sphere, a realm in social life w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The Middle Class: The Context and the Contours
• 1. The World of the Middle Class
• 2. Domesticity: In Theory and Practice
• 3. Changing Forms of Leisure
• 4. Caste and the Middle Class
• 5. Negotiating Tradition and Modernity
• Conclusion
• Glosarry
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates