THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The wave of Gandhian ideals that swept over the young minds of India in the early 1900s had a context that is best learned from oral histories than text books of history. K Madhavan’s autobiography, 'Oru Gandhian Communistinte Ormakal’, can fit into both categories - as a valuable oral history that puts on record the torrential succession of events that shaped a distinct sensibility that defined the times and also as a text book of history that speaks of the tumultuous age in which Gandhian moral codes had wedded Communist ideals to produce a new breed of revolutionaries.
Madhavan, born into the landed ‘Patelar’ family of Aechikkanam in Kanhangad, Kasargode, and brought up to be a proverbial wastrel, found his moment of awakening at the Vijnanadayini National School started in 1926 at Vallikkoth under the agies of the Congress Party. Under the tutelage of right-wing activists like Vidwan P Kelu Nair, K T Kunjiraman Nambiar and V M Krishnan Nair, and partaking of the spirit handed down by his room mate and role model A C Kannan Nair, a young Madhavan found the nationalist movement beckoning him. Enlightened by the exhortations in Gandhiji’s ‘Young India’, and the practical lessons of the Swadeshi movement, Madhavan turned to look at the sufferings of the oppressed classes, which his own family had remorselessly inflicted, through the perspective of a social reformer.
About the same time as the refrains of the Salt Satyagraha took the country by storm, activities on the lines of the Civil Disobedience Movement took place in Kanhangad also. Madhavan describes the brutal suppression of the movement and his subsequent jail sentence. The spread of Communist ideology through party workers and the strengthening of ‘Karshaka Sanghom’ in his village coincided with the closing down of the KPCC office in Kanhangad, and Madhavan was one among the many Congress men who shifted loyalties to support the tide of Communism. What follows is a first hand narrative of milestones like Kayyur Samaram and the hanging of its leaders, India’s achievement of independence from the colonial rule, the formation of the first Communist government in Kerala and so on. It is also one of the many unofficial histories that testify to the existence of people who do not make it to the power corridors because they insist on the importance of the margins. In retrospective, the transformation of the haughty heir of Aechikkanam into a political activist, Gandhian ideologist, and a Communist leader, offers a microcosmic view of the social transformation of the period.
The book, written when Madhavan was 86 and had retired from politics, was first published in 1987 under the title, 'Payaswiniyude Teerathu'. Two more editions were brought out subsequently, in 2002 by Creative Arts and Cultural Cooperative Society and in 2010 by K Madhavan Foundation. In both instances, the publishers were responding to public appeal to preserve an important documentation of a complicated period in modern history. It is imperative that the book be preserved and translated to occasion readings and more importantly, re-readings of history.
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