Outside and Inside the Nation: Migrant Narratives and the Making of a Productive Citizen in Kerala

Abstract

The advent of modernity in Kerala through the mediation of colonialism, among other things, allowed the local population to see their own landscape in altogether new ways. It is true that the British, as the carriers of western modernity, came to South Asia with a deep ideological animosity towards forests and ‘unused’ landscapes (Rangarajan 1996: 16-18). The forests were seen as signs of human indolence, abodes of the lawless and uncivilized and mysterious, threatening and irrational space (Thompson 1975). The cultural baggage of hostility towards forests and untamed spaces that the British carried to their colonies was coincided by a larger political imperative of consolidating their position by reformulat- ing the production system of the colony and extending cultivation to heterodox areas to produce exotic crops for the global market (Varghese 2009). The British interventions on the native landscape of Travancore through plantation enterprises were underwritten by such ideological and material preoccupations. The plantation making was preceded by a systematic hollowing of the Travancore crown, which ensured the support of the princely state in the creation of a new agro-economy in tune with the global demands (Baak 1997: 43-60). Through a ‘scientific’ survey undertaken by Ward and Conner during 1816-1820, the British not only categorized the topography of the princely state into intelligible types but also identified untapped areas for expropriation, i.e., areas ‘lost to human industry’ to be reclaimed with ‘imperial’ agriculture (Ward and Conner 1863).2 The Ashambu hills of southern Travancore and the hills and hillsides in the northeastern part of the princely state came under mostly British-run plantations, first that of coffee and then tea, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Owing to a feeble political maneuverability, the princely state backed the plantations as desired by the British (Lovatt 1972; Baak 1997: 73-123; Devi 1989: 110-12). The initial lack of local interest, coupled with attempts to exclude indigenous planters, ensured a complete dominance of British planters in the plantation scenario of Travancore through the latter half of the nineteenth century, making it nothing less than a ‘British Planters’ Raj’ (Baak 1997: 61-137).