Land as the common cause: a study of the Chengara land struggle in Kerala

Kerala is known for its “Kerala Model” of development: high literacy, long lives and good public health on modest incomes. In this article the political scientist P.M. Joshy asks what that model left out. His answer is land. Dalits, he argues, were kept from owning land under slavery, passed over by the land reforms that made the Kerala Model famous, and are still fighting for it, most visibly at Chengara.

Joshy reads the Chengara land struggle beside the reform movements of Ayyankali and Poykayil Appachan a century earlier. All three, he argues, built a Dalit identity around land that cut across sub-castes, and all three were weakened when sub-caste divisions returned.

What the study argued

Land taken by caste. Joshy traces Dalit landlessness to the caste order that, on his reading, displaced earlier owners when Brahmin settlers arrived (p. 98). Under Travancore’s land system, the slave castes, among them Pulayas, Parayas and Kuravas, were “bought and sold like any other property” by their landlords (p. 100, citing Saradamoni). Slavery was abolished in Travancore in 1853, he notes, largely to supply cheap labour to the new plantations (p. 100).

Ayyankali and the first strike. Ayyankali, born into the Pulaya caste, founded the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (Servile People’s Welfare Organisation) in 1907, open to all the depressed servile castes (p. 101). In 1913 he led what Joshy calls the first strike by agricultural workers in Kerala, to open schools to untouchable children; it ran for a year (pp. 101–102). In the Travancore assembly he pressed for land, and some was granted to Dalits in a few areas (p. 102).

Poykayil Appachan. Poykayil Appachan, from the Paraya community, left the Marthoma Church over the caste segregation of converts and founded the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS) in 1910 (p. 102). He asked the government to survey landless families and give each 2 to 10 acres, and the PRDS bought land with its members’ money (pp. 102–103).

Unity lost. After Ayyankali left active politics, his organisation split along sub-caste lines; Joshy writes that Travancore’s decision to nominate members from each sub-caste to the assembly limited Dalit unity (p. 103). After Poykayil’s death the PRDS broke into at least ten groups (p. 104). Joshy argues that after independence many Dalits saw the Communist Party as “the messiah of liberating the slave castes”, but that the party treated caste as superstructure (p. 104).

“The land to the tenants.” The land reform passed by the first Communist ministry in 1957 and carried out by a CPI(M)-led ministry in 1969 gave land to tenants. Dalits were not tenants, and were left with house plots: ten cents in panchayats, five in municipal areas, three in corporation areas (p. 105). Later housing schemes created colonies that, Joshy writes, led to “the ghettoization of Dalits and Adivasis in three-cent colonies” (p. 105). The reforms did not touch plantations, and the ceiling on holdings was not enforced (p. 106).

Chengara. After the Adivasi land struggle at Muthanga in 2003 ended in armed conflict with the state, Laha Gopalan chose a non-violent path (p. 107). His Sadhujana Vimochana Samyukthavedi (Servile People’s Liberation Organisation, SVSV), registered in 2002, modelled itself on Ayyankali’s movement and organised the landless across caste lines (p. 107). After years of meetings and a satyagraha at Pathanamthitta in 2005–06, on 4 August 2007 over 5,000 families entered land held by Harrisons Malayalam Plantations at Chengara after its lease had lapsed (pp. 109–110). In 2008 trade unions led by the CPI(M)‘s union federation CITU blockaded the only road to the site (p. 110). One member from the Nair community recalled: “we, nearly ten to fifteen people, had food from a single plate” (p. 108).

The “Chengara Package”. The LDF government later announced a settlement without consulting the movement’s leaders. Laha Gopalan called it a betrayal of the landless poor. Most of the land allotted was fit for neither farming nor housing, and only sixty families got land they could cultivate (p. 110). Joshy writes that a few hundred families still live at the site without voter ID cards or house numbers (p. 111).

Why the CPI(M) opposed it. Joshy gives four reasons: the party’s paternalism towards new social movements; its shift towards serving corporate development; the influence of Harrisons workers through CITU; and the fear that a successful Dalit-led struggle would cause “a legitimacy crisis in the party” (p. 109). He adds that the party set up its own Dalit and Adivasi welfare organisations to keep these groups from leaving (p. 112).

Why it matters

Kerala is often held up as proof that a state can improve lives without great wealth. This study is a reminder that the gains were not shared on equal terms: the reforms that made the model gave land to tenants and house plots to the labourers who worked the land, many of them Dalits. Its land figures show how wide that gap still is.

It also links two moments that are usually told apart, the reform movements of the early twentieth century and the land occupation at Chengara, and shows the same pattern in both: unity across sub-castes, won around land, and lost when that unity broke.

What the study does not show

• The other side. No one from the government, the CPI(M), CITU or Harrisons is interviewed, so the party’s motives are the author’s reading.
• How many people. The study gives no exact count of the families still at Chengara, and does not follow what became of those who took the package.
• Recent figures. Its land statistics come from other studies; the landholding survey it cites dates from 2006.
• Women’s part. The study does not look at women’s roles in the struggle or how landlessness bears on Dalit women.

Talking points

• Joshy credits each movement’s success to a “charismatic leader” (p. 112). Does a movement built on one leader hold together once that leader is gone, as the SJPS and PRDS did not?
• The land reform gave Dalits house plots, not farmland. Was that a failure of design, or the result of whose interests the reform was built to serve?
• A question to weigh against the study: the author leans on the movement’s own accounts. How would the story change if told by the families who accepted the Chengara Package?

The work

P.M. Joshy, “Reimagining Resources: Analyzing the Politics of Dalit Land Struggles in Kerala, India with Special Reference to Chengara”, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 6, no. 1 (April 2025): 96–115. The article online (DOI)