ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contextual growth of left practices in Kerala, seeking
to understand how the prevalence of lower caste protest, as discussed in the
previous chapter, played a role in generating these practices, and how, through
this link, the leftists created a proto-bourgeois revolution. The link between caste
and class movements has been assumed as obvious in the case of Kerala. Jeffrey
(1978: 82), for example, states that ‘because caste roughly coincided with class
in Kerala, agitation against caste disabilities was to lead the poor towards class
consciousness’ (my emphasis). The evidence, however, suggests that rather than
caste-class coincidence, it was the gradual class differentiation within castes that
was key to the lower caste movements that emerged in Kerala. Moreover, the
probability that lower caste movements would ‘translate’ into class-based
movements in the pre-1947 era, that is, raise class-specific demands regardless
of caste differences among classes, depended on the regional specificity of the
nationalist movement. We must bear in mind that class formation of the kind that
occurred in Kerala was unique, and with a few exceptions this remained the case
in post-independence India.
