How Kerala Was Made: The Aikya Kerala Movement

Kerala is younger than a great many of the people living in it. It was created on 1 November 1956, and before that date there was no such political unit — only Malabar and the Kasaragod taluk under direct British rule from Madras, and the princely states of Cochin and Travancore governed separately under their own maharajas. Four administrations, one language, no common government. The campaign to change that ran for something over thirty years and is known as Aikya Kerala — literally, United Kerala.

One of the places it was argued out is now an ordinary city park. Subhash Park, on the Ernakulam waterfront beside the boat jetty, is remembered locally as a launching ground for the campaign to merge Cochin and Travancore, and in 1930 students from Maharaja’s College directly opposite demonstrated here against their own Kochi government and were violently put down. Nothing on the ground tells you either thing.

Four Keralas

The situation the movement set out to fix was genuinely strange. A Malayalam speaker in Kasaragod was a British subject administered from Madras. One in Thrissur was a subject of the Maharaja of Cochin. One in Kollam was a subject of the Maharaja of Travancore. They read the same literature, but they held different passports in every sense that mattered: different courts, different revenue systems, different police, different politics. The argument for union was that a shared language and literary culture already constituted a nation, and that the administrative map was an accident of conquest and treaty.

The early advocate usually named is Ramakrishna Pillai, editor of Swadeshabhimani, who argued for combining Travancore, Kochi and Malabar into one entity well before it was a mass movement. What turned the idea into organised politics was a decision taken far away: at its 1920 Nagpur session the Indian National Congress reorganised its own provincial units along linguistic rather than administrative lines. By 1921 the regional body had been renamed the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee — a Kerala that existed as a party structure thirty-five years before it existed as a state.

The conferences

The First All Kerala Political Conference met at Ottapalam in April 1921, inaugurated by the All India Congress Committee president Tanguturi Prakasam. It created an Aikya Kerala Committee and demanded a unified state taking in Malabar, Travancore, Cochin and the neighbouring Malayalam-speaking tracts. Seven years later a conference at Ernakulam — presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru — formally resolved on a united Kerala. That 1928 Ernakulam resolution is the point at which the demand stops being a proposal and becomes a programme.

The Cochin side produced the movement’s most unusual figure. Maharaja Kerala Varma of Cochin — a ruling prince arguing for the dissolution of his own state — wrote in July 1946 that a plan should be devised to establish a common government, and that Kerala’s cultural survival depended on unified administration. He is remembered as Aikya Keralam Thampuran, the unification maharaja. In April 1947 he inaugurated a convention at Thrissur that reaffirmed the goal.

The moment it nearly failed

Two things almost stopped it, and both are usually skipped. On 2 June 1947, weeks before Indian independence, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, Diwan of Travancore, announced with the royal family’s backing that Travancore would become an independent state. Had that held, the southern half of the future Kerala would have been a separate country rather than a component of one.

The second obstacle came from the other end. Some Malabar Congress leaders preferred to attach Travancore–Cochin to Madras province rather than build a new state, and a Congress conference at Palakkad in April 1953 formally backed a southern-state proposal before opinion swung back. Aikya Kerala is often narrated as an inevitability. It was contested from both directions and won on argument.

Merger, in two steps

The first step was the smaller one. On 1 July 1949 Travancore and Cochin merged into a single Part B State, Travancore–Cochin. This is the merger the Ernakulam park is associated with, and it created the territorial core of what followed — but it left Malabar and Kasaragod outside, still administered from Madras, so it satisfied nobody who had been arguing for a Malayalam-speaking whole.

The Communist Party pushed hard through the years that followed. E. M. S. Namboodiripad wrote Keralam Malayalikalude Mathrubhumi — Kerala, the Homeland of Malayalis — and the party plenum at Thrissur in April 1952 called for mass agitation for a united Kerala, producing conventions in cities across India, including one in Bombay that October reported at over fifteen thousand people. The demand was no longer regional; it followed Malayalis wherever they had gone to work.

The State Reorganisation Commission under Syed Fazal Ali recommended merging Travancore–Cochin with Malabar District and the Kasaragod taluk of South Canara, while leaving out the Laccadive and Minicoy islands. Under the States Reorganisation Act, Kerala came into existence on 1 November 1956. Its first elected ministry, formed the following year, was headed by Namboodiripad of the Communist Party of India — among the earliest elected communist governments anywhere.

Where to stand in Kochi and think about it

The mainland side of the city carries this history better than the heritage quarter does. Subhash Park is the obvious place to start — a park named for a viceroy and renamed for Subhash Chandra Bose, with a statue of Rama Varma XV of Cochin standing in it and Maharaja’s College across the road. A few minutes north, Marine Drive is entirely reclaimed land, a physical record of what the new state did with its waterfront.

Ten minutes inland, Broadway is the commercial city the princely state built and the new state inherited. And at Durbar Hall Art Centre the two eras are stacked in one compound: the hall where the Maharaja of Cochin held court, on the ground where the Cochin administrative reforms of January 1938 and the state’s new constitution of June 1938 were proclaimed — the princely state reforming itself, eleven years before it voted itself out of existence.