‘Keezhvenmani changed me’: 96-yr-old TN activist recalls a brutal massacre of Dalits

Krishnammal Jagannathan who understood the travails of landless Dalit women, spearheaded a movement to register land in their names after the Keezhvenmani massacre on December 25, 1968.

Nithya Pandian

The voice of 96-year-old Krishnammal Jagannathan is steady, determined, empathic and displays the will to continue to work for the welfare of the Dalit women in Tamil Nadu. Her name may not ring a bell outside the Delta region but contributions by Krishnammal to ensure land ownership for Dalit families has a special place in the history of the social justice movement in Tamil Nadu. On December 25, when Tamil Nadu remembers the 53rd anniversary of one of the most violent crimes meted out on the Dalit members in Keezhvenmani village, TNM spoke to Krishnammal, a Dalit leader, land rights activist, and follower of Gandhian philosophy about her journey to discover Land for Tillers’ Freedom (LAFTI), a non-governmental organisation, to distribute land to the Dalit families in and around Nagapattinam. The incident happened in 1968.   

“Keezhvenmani Dalit massacre shattered my inner peace forever,” says Krishnammal recalling the morning when she read the news about 44 Dalits burned to death in a locked hut by the privileged land-owning men and their henchmen in Keezhvenmani. Born to a landless Dalit household in Pattiveeranpatti of Dindigul district, Krishnammal who witnessed the hard labour of Dalit women in the field couldn’t withstand the news and the crime that happened the previous night in Thanjavur. On December 26, she asked Kundrakudi Adigalar, a Saivite sage, to accompany her to Keezhvenmani to meet the people who lost their loved ones. “I was stopped at Keezhvelur (Keevalur) by the land owners from entering Keezhvenmani and was asked to return back. But I persisted,” says Krishnammal. The event led her to start one of the significant land reform movements in Tamil Nadu. “Every step I took on the soil of Keezhvenmani was filled with ashes of burnt huts and the tears of people,” says Krishnammal.  

Due to unfamiliarity with the political situation on the ground and the resistance from land owners, Krishnammal had to return back to Dindigul the next day. But she brought four more women who worked for the Bhoodan movement to Keezhvenmani. The initial days of her stay in Keezhvenmani were hard as no one was willing to talk to her. Every time she approached the Dalit women who worked in the fields they turned their backs because of the looming fear of losing jobs and the unwanted troubles from land owners. The main accused in the massacre, Gopalakrishna Naidu, was a Congress follower and the Gandhian principles Krishnammal followed made people think she was linked to the party. These factors didn’t earn her good social connection with communists, who were influential in the region. “I couldn’t even step out in the streets with a handful of books. Police officials used to detain me in Yathrigar Madam (Inn for pilgrims) in Nagapattinam,” says Krishnammal. 

Dalits who worked as labourers in farms of Mirasdars were poorly treated in Keezhvenmani, an obscure village located in Nagapattinam taluk of erstwhile, undivided Thanjavur district. Dalit agricultural labourers in Eastern Thanjavur were subjected to “Saanipaalum Savukkadiyum” (forcibly making them drink cow dung mixed in water and flogging with whips) by Mirasdars for even small mistakes. Keezhvenmani massacre shed light on the caste-based discrimination and gruesome treatment of Dalit labourers in post-independence India. The victims of the massacre were 20 women, five men, and 19 children who had taken refuge in a hut. Their crime:  demanding half marakkal (a traditional measure for grains) of extra paddy as a wage for their hard labour with the help of Left parties.

Krishnammal and her husband, Sankaralingam Jagannathan, who were part of the Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement, committed themselves to create Gandhian society by redistributing land to the landless poor people in rural India. Sankaralingam, who had joined Vinoba Bhave in Northern India for the Bhoodan (gifting land) movement and a Padayatra (foot march), to appeal to the land owners to give one-sixth of their land to the landless people, returned to Tamil Nadu in 1953. In Tamil Nadu, the couple started a similar movement and worked for land redistribution in socio-economically poor regions. Krishnammal’s work till 1968 revolved around Gandhigram, Batlagundu, and neighbourhood areas in her hometown.

She spent nearly three years in Nagapattinam to make the Dalit women understand the need for land by working in the field with them. In 1971, she redistributed 50 cents of land to each of the family members of the victims of the Keezhvenmani massacre. The idea behind LAFTI, the NGO founded by her, was to manage funds for the idea struck her when a trust headed by Muslims in Kula Manickam came forward to sell their land to them in 1968.

She would first approach the land owners and then negotiate to buy the land which is later distributed among the Dalits. The uniqueness of the land distribution facilitated by Krishnammal is the land patta was registered in the name of women. “When you give land to a man, he would sell it for no reason. But, when you give it to a woman it empowers her and the ownership of the land earns her respect and self-confidence. What did Dalit women have in return for the drudgery they did in the fields? Nothing. I want them to be empowered. So I facilitated the issuing of pattas in women’s names,” says Krishnammal.

Finding land for redistribution was not easy. The banks were not interested in giving her loans. She approached M Karunanidhi, who was the chief minister then, and demanded two acres of land for each of the Dalit women labourers. “People often worry about the dogs that die in the road-kills. But nobody cared about the Dalit women who got killed in the Keezhvenmani. State and Union governments are silent and I want this government to give two acres of land to these women, I told Karunanidhi. He asked me, from where will we get the land? I told him it is not hard for the government to identify such lands in the state where 1,000 acres of land were allocated to Thiruvarur temple to make Aval Payasam (Poha desert) for the presiding lord,” she says recalling the conversation she had with Karunanidhi. The meeting resulted in government support for the cause she espoused. LAFTI was registered in 1981. In 1985, Krishnammal again managed to provide one acre of land to each of the families of Keezhvenmani massacre victims. To date, through LAFTI, Krishnammal redistributed one acre of land to nearly 15,000 Dalit families in Nagapattinam and Thiruvarur districts.

LAFTI has also helped around 32,000 Dalit families in Bihar own land. The NGO also focuses on providing education and job training to Dalit communities and provides emergency support during distress. In 1999, Krishnammal Jagannathan was awarded the Summit Foundation Award (Switzerland). In 2008 she won the Opus Prize instituted by the University of Seattle. The same year she along with her husband was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for their lifetime commitment towards creating Gandhian society. The Indian government conferred her with the country’s third highest civilian award Padma Bhushan in 2020.    

The Keezhvenmani massacre was an instance of how Dalit people were treated when they found courage under the influence of Communists to question injustice. The Mirasdars did not take this kindly. To counter the Communists, land-owning communities formed Paddy Producers Association (PPA) to safeguard their own interest.

According to the reports, in 1966, prices of essential commodities had shot up due to a fall in the agricultural produce which led to demands by Dalit labourers to hike the wages given in the form of paddy. This was refused by Mirasdars.The labourers staged many protests but the PPA brought workers from outside to reap the harvest.  Dalit labourers affected by this tried to prevent outsiders from working in the fields. Pakkirisamy Pillai, a labourer from outside the village, was killed in the clash.

On the night of December 25, Mirasdars and their servants cut off all the routes in Keezhvenmani and began to shoot at people, and burnt the huts. A total of 44 persons including women and children sought refuge in a hut in Keezhvenmani. The henchmen locked the door of the hut and set them ablaze. Out of them 23 were under the age of 18. The Nagapattinam sessions court sentenced the accused to 10 years of imprisonment. The accused appealed to the Madras High Court and the case was quashed in 1973. Madras High Court’s decision was upheld by the Supreme Court too. Many years later after the land owners walked free of charges. Gopalakrishna Naidu, one of the landowners accused of setting fire to the hut was waylaid by a group of people and hacked to death in 1980. He was killed by a man called Nandan who was one of the residents of Keezhvenmani and witnessed the fateful night of December 25.

Courtesy : TNM

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