I vividly remember reading Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's classic Malayalam novel Randidangazhi in high school. Set in 1940s Kuttanad, Alappuzha—Kerala's rice bowl—it depicts the brutal socio-economic conditions of Dalit agricultural workers and impoverished tenant peasants, alongside communist-led resistance against imperialism and landlords.
For my generation, the novel's portrayal of extreme exploitation and violence—like normalized sexual abuse of peasants—was unimaginable. Yet by 1999, when I read it, Kerala's class relations had transformed so significantly through communists' "agrarian revolution," that those events seem foreign to us.
This shift echoed the strategy in the Communist International's Fourth Congress resolution on 5 December 1922, "Theses on the Eastern Question," overseen by Lenin:
“The communist workers’ parties of the colonial and semi-colonial countries have a double task: both to fight for the most radical possible resolution of the tasks of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, aimed at winning political independence, and also to organise the worker peasant masses in struggle for their particular class interests, profiting from all the contradictions in the nationalist bourgeois democratic camp”.
With the passing of VS Achuthanandan —popularly known as VS—Kerala's toiling masses have lost a battle-hardened comrade. Joining the undivided Communist Party of India in 1940, he embodied that "double task". He recalled how his generation had been inspired by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist International, while facing the hardships of the 1929 Great Depression.
Born in 1923 into a backward caste tenant family, he endured colonial brutality, feudal exploitation, repression, and caste discrimination. Over his 102 years—from humble roots to Kerala's Chief Minister and senior leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), India's largest communist party—he stayed steadfast in anti-imperialism and revolutionary transformation.
The Spark in Kuttanad: From Coir Workers to Agrarian Revolution
My communist grandfather often spoke of VS Achuthanandan's role in ending landlord violence in Kuttanad, as depicted in Randidangazhi. Newspapers like Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi, backed by the Syrian Christian bourgeoisie and upper-caste Hindu landlords, branded VS an obstructionist for opposing their neoliberal development model. Yet for VS, protecting peasants, agricultural workers, and the environment was more important than becoming a poster boy of neoliberalism.
The CPI's decision to recruit and send VS to Kuttanad transformed Kerala's rural proletariat. Initially organizing coir factory workers, VS won over agricultural laborers. Arriving in Kuttanad in the early 1940s, where landlords like Joseph Murickan used "attached labour" to perpetuate feudal subjugation, VS found capitalist farming reinforcing caste oppression, akin to the British textile boom intensifying American slavery.
Most attached laborers, from Dalit Pulaya and Paraya castes, faced meager wages, eviction threats, violence, and caste-based subjugation. VS documented their belief that landlords had a natural right to torture or kill them. He tirelessly organized them, igniting a fighting spirit and exposing landlord exploitation. This birthed a robust agricultural workers' movement in Kuttanad, spreading across Alappuzha and Kerala, culminating in the heroic Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt.
Resistance and Repression: The Long March to Land Reform
When the Communist Party was banned in 1948, Alappuzha landlords formed the Sannadha Sena to attack agricultural workers and tenants. A custom forced newly married women from worker households to live with landlords like “Kocha” for three months. The radicalized rural proletariat resisted, as seen in the case of communist worker “Gopalan”, narrated by NK Kamalsan, whose family was brutally targeted by landlord lieutenant Nalukettungal Raman, with police and goons stripping Gopalan and his mother and raping his wife in his presence. Workers retaliated, killing Raman. Resistance to sexual violence was centroal to early communist self-defense.
Despite brutal anti-communist violence during the “Calcutta Thesis” years, the rural proletariat’s movement persisted. The Travancore Karshaka Thozhilali Union (TKTU), founded by VS in Kuttanad, was banned after the 1946 Punnapra-Vayalar uprising but thrived underground, growing more militant. In 1951, VS convened a historic agricultural workers’ convention in Kavalam, presenting a Charter of Demands that led to a tripartite labor agreement. Big landlords refused to comply, sparking 4,279 labor disputes between 1950 and 1957.
This militancy shone in struggles against landlords like Joseph Murikkan and KM Kora, a Congress leader and agriculture minister in 1956. Kora’s police-goonda violence failed against striking workers, who forced concessions. Reflecting shifting class dynamics, Kora later complained to communist leader PT Punnoose about workers’ newfound confidence, lamenting their “swagger” and defiant style: “Just look at them—strutting about with moustaches, dhotis folded high up their knees, and towels twirled into turbans”.
A Unique Proletarian Trajectory
Kora’s words revealed a new agrarian capitalism emerging from feudalism, exploiting labor with feudal brutalities for profit. VS and the undivided CPI transformed Kuttanad’s agricultural proletariat into a politically conscious “class for itself,” as militant as industrial workers. Similar struggles occurred in Thanjavur, Worli, and Tripura, but Kuttanad’s resistance to this amphibious form of agrarian exploitation was unique.
VS’s militant rural proletariat movement was pivotal in forming the Unified State of Kerala and the 1957 EMS Namboodiripad-led communist ministry. The 1959 Agrarian Relations Bill granted hutment dwellers’ rights, while the EMS government extended the 1948 Minimum Wages Act to agriculture in 1958 and adopted a non-interference police policy in labor disputes, boosting workers’ confidence.
The communists’ push to end landlordism faced a counterrevolutionary backlash from bourgeois-landlord groups, backed by American and British imperialists. The Anti-Communist Front (ACF), tied to the CIA’s Committee for Cultural Freedom, collaborated with the Indian National Congress (INC) and RSS in the Vimochana Samaram against the EMS ministry. Vigilante groups like Christopher terrorized workers in CPI strongholds, using casteist slurs and violence against Dalit agricultural workers. Landlords’ private armies vowed to restore feudal dominance, chanting slogans to subjugate workers: “We will make you call us lords; we will make you drink porridge from a leaf; Chathan (Dalit worker) can go till the field, Chacko (upper caste Congress leader) will rule the land”.
After the unconstitutional dismissal of the EMS government in 1959, attacks on Dalit workers intensified for supporting the CPI. Communist leader BT Ranadive noted the ministry empowered Kerala’s downtrodden to “develop their personality and rise to their full stature as human beings”, angering upper classes. Despite the 1959 AICC Nagpur resolution supporting agrarian reforms, Kerala’s INC unit organized as a counterrevolutionary force against them.
Toward a New Agrarian Revolution
VS's dedicated organizational and ideological work among Kerala's rural proletariat was crucial in forming the second EMS ministry in 1967 and founding the Kerala State Karshaka Thozhilali Union (KSKTU) in 1968, affiliated with the All India Agricultural Workers’ Union. After the EMS government's fall in 1969, KSKTU and AIKS launched the Micha Bhoomi Samaram, occupying surplus lands, accelerating land reforms. This agitation, decided at a historic convention where VS was a pivotal organizer, in Alappuzha (December 1969), was inaugurated by Hare Krishna Konar and launched on January 1, 1970, with AK Gopalan declaring it the end of landlordism in Kerala.
The struggle secured homestead rights for 1.5 lakh workers in three days but faced severe repression from the state and landlord vigilante groups like the anticommunist Niranam Pada. During the 1975-77 Emergency, attacks on unions and libraries intensified, with RSS replacing traditional landlord groups in anti-communist violence.
VS's leadership built a worker-peasant alliance, strengthening Kerala's democratic fabric.VS also critiqued global finance's impact on agriculture, opposing neoliberal policies and Free Trade Agreements while advocating for wetland conservation and cooperative-based land reforms to advance the agrarian revolution.
Red salute, comrade VS!
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. Nidheesh J Villatt is a Central Kisan Committee member of All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), an Indian farmer and rural worker organization. He is also Research Coordinator at P Sundarayya Memorial Trust, New Delhi
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