Malabar History journal

In its final form, the Tenancy Act was initiated by the government after vetoing the draft placed by Krishnan Nair. It constituted a committee in 1927 which placed a draft bill that was discussed in a meeting with jenmis and tenants, being presided over by the government. The bill was finally passed by the Council in October 1929.

Interestingly it was a section of the Nair community that constituted the backbone that was behind the formulation, lobbying and struggles for land rights. The middle-class intellectuals within the Nair community- lawyers, and teachers became the architects of the bill, and they also had the backing of the nationalist movement. A section of the Tiyyas were also articulate. Even though themselves kanakudiyans, since large section of the Tiyya community were verumpattakkudiyans, they overwhelmingly supported the tenurial rights of poor tenants.

Background

The land holding patterns were such that it can be argued that there remained many complexities between how the colonial government codified it and the actually existing land ownership patterns in Malabar. In fact, a lot of the times, even while revenues were being extracted, there was no actual documentation of land ownership patterns and records under the zamorin. In fact, it the record keeping under the Zamorin estate was even described to be in a ‘highly mythical form’.
The landownership pattern in Malabar was very different from the rest of the Madras Presidency. While the rest of the presidency followed a ryotwari system, the jenmi centric pattern continued to follow here. The jenmis, predominantly upper caste nambudiris and some nairs rented or leased their land to kanakars (tenants). The section that was most ambiguous to define was the Kanakars- sections of whom who were extremely rich and extremely poor. This is owing to the multiple networks through which land was further leased out, or rented or mortgaged even. Similarly, a lot of the times pattas were issued by the government to the tenants, owing to many legal complications, including sale of land owing to non-payment of taxes by the tenant. Tenants suffered from the worst form of arbitrary evictions from the jenmis, especially the varampattomkars, who were poorer.

With the tenancy movements of 20th century, the name Kudiyan gained prominence to refer to the tenants. The movement’s bedrock was the mapila muslim community, whose condition was akin to that of agricultural labourers. They brought the need for intervention into the relation between jenmi and kudiyan through the ‘rural outbreaks’, in the end of 19th century and early 20th century. This categorized the early phase of the tenant movement. Later on, it was dominated by the Kanakars, and in the decades following, agricultural labourers and varampattakudiyans rallied behind the peasant movement led by the left. The issues and rights of tenants were also a separate session during the Manjeri Conference.

References

Toshie Awaya. “Situating the Malabar Tenancy Act, 1930.” In Peter Robb et al. (eds), Agrarian Societies in Colonial India — Japanese Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2013.

Sreevidhya Vattarambath. “Growth of Tenancy Movement in Malabar in the Post 1921 Rebellion Period.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 68, Part 1 (2007): 654–659.