Glimpses of the Colonial Times

Whenever there is a discussion, conference, seminars or any kind of speeches on the Indian independence, there are always mentions about the freedom fighters and how the war had affected adversely the people’s lives. Unfortunately, throughout these, the influence of and on South India during the British era is rarely mentioned which is disappointing because there were remarkable amount of freedom fighters from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and so on. Regardless, there were a number of common people whose daily lives were affected with the hardships of the war. The other day, I was talking to my Grandmother on telephone and I was asking her about the colonial times and what did she remember of them. She said she couldn’t remember much for she was barely 8 years old or so at the time. The place where she lived was the southern regions of Kerala where most of the aftereffects of the war were poverty and hunger. She recollected her mother talking about how they did not have enough food to feed the family and how they had to depend on tapioca, during those days, for food.

Then she recollected about the sense of fear and hopelessness which blinded in the people’s minds as everyone used to inquire about the situation in the North where the fight mostly had its effects. She also mentioned the caste system that prevailed in the state during those times, called ‘Ayitham’. It was a form of caste system which had the main feature of ‘untouchability’ which was imposed by the Brahmins, who considered themselves as the superior caste, on the lower castes of the society like, Ezhavas, Nairs, etc. These created social tensions among the people of the state as a whole as the lower caste people were not allowed to visit the temples, attend the same schools with the higher caste population and such restrictions were fought by a number of leaders like Sahodaran Ayyappan, T.K. Madhavan, Mannathu Padmanabhan, E.M.S Namboodiripad, C.V Raman Pillai, etc; and movements were held like the Vaikom Satyagraha where held to protest against such social injustice. The Vaikom Satyagraha was the first systematically organized agitation in Kerala against orthodoxy to secure the rights of the depressed classes. For the first time in history, the agitation brought forward the question of civil rights of the low caste people into the forefront of Indian politics. No mass agitation in Kerala acquired so much all-India attention and significance in the twentieth century as the Vaikom Satyagraha. (Source: Wikipedia) 

Thus, there may not be any direct impact on the southern regions of India, mainly in Kerala, during the British rule but the people were indirectly affected with the hardships of the war in a number of ways and social barriers were at its highest. Whereas, after the Indian independence, the situation has improved to be so much better as the war had ended and so did the brutal injustice which was based on the caste system. “Maybe,” my Grandmother said, “our leaders were too busy fighting the villains inside their own state to fight the ones from the foreign country.”