ABSTRACT
Though the history of massive transnational migrations from Kerala cannot claim a longer history beyond the 1970s, the modern Malayalee world had been experiencing migrations within prior to this. These internal migrations in search of cultivable land and mobility were triggered by the characteristic economic problematic peculiar to Kerala’s modernity. Migration and the colonization of landscape through agriculture have been central to the economic modernity of Kerala, in which land and labour received absolute values. Significantly different from the emergent descriptions of agrarian capitalism in India, as conditioned by the hegemony of agrarian elites, the experience in Kerala places marginal cultivators and their engagement with wilderness at the heart of this historical transformation. It was made possible by the translated internalization of a development model dictated by the colonial planting enterprises, coupled with the failure of a state-centric biopolitics.
