of the property. Usually such tenant holdings exceeded ten acres and the large size of holdings made the ryots very powerful. Large scale reclamations of kayal lands carried out by the wealthy and influential farmers of North Travancore during the second and third phases of redamation led to the emergence of anew class of landed gentry called
kayal rajakkanmar (kayal kings) who possessed thousands of acres of paddy lands in Kuttanad. Some of the ryots used to sublease small portions of their lands to Ezhavas. From its early days the Communist Party of India had clamoured for the transfer of ownership rights of land from feudal landlords to the tillers of the soil. Through systematically
organized study classes, the Party upheld the need of a working class revolution as a panacea for the prevalent social and economic inequalities. Eventhough the concepts of
dialectical materialism and
materialistic interpretation of history were not comprehensible to avast majority of the ignorant farm labourers who used
to attend such study classes, the literary works of the leftist writers which invariably depicted industrialists and landlords as exploitors and class enemies, had inculcated among them the prospects of establishing an egalitarian society through class struggles. The popular verses of the sands like “Nammalu koyyum vayalellam, nammudethakum painkiliye” (
All the fields that we reap, o’parrot, will be ours) inspired thousands of farm labourers allover the state. Naturally when the party came to power in Kerala sincere efforts were made to introduce radical land reforms in the state. Accordingly,
the Agrarian Relations Bill, which is often described as the most comprehensive land reforms in the Indian States, was introduced in the State Assembly in 1959. The Congress government that came to power after the dismissal of the Communist ministry in 1960 enacted the Bill. The Kerala Land Reforms Act (KLRA) of 1964 that superseded
the Agrarian Relations Act, granted hutment dwellers the right to own their dwelling houses and a few cents of land around it. Most of the beneficiaries of this Act were either the agrestic slaves of the feudal days or agricultural labourers. With the implementation of the Act nearly 3 lakh hutment dwellers became owners of small plots up to the extent of 10 cents. Due to the persistent increase in the inequality of land distribution in Travancore, the proportion of households cultivating less than one acre rose from 38 percent to 52
percent 33
Alex George (1987): Op.cit. p.A -141 34
Oommen MA
Land Reforms and Economic change Experience and Lesson from Kerala, in BA
Prakash (ed,
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