It was the peasants’ fight for dignity and their claim to autonomous political organisation, reflected in their stubborn insistence that they would ‘fly the red flag’ in their village, that had rankled the landlords and provoked such a bloody retaliation. Indeed, the wage demands were secondary, and the landlords may have even been willing to concede these, Mythily argues.
The issue at stake was not the demand for wage increase by the agricultural labourers but their fight for unionization. She urged her readers to see the core of the conflict. Mythily’s essay was an eviscerating takedown of the Madras High Court judgement (1973) that acquitted all the 25 accused in the murder case. The heartrending cries heard far, far away the bolted door the burning hut surrounded by bloodthirsty murderers with lethal weapons two children thrown out from the hut, but thrown back into the fire by the arsonists six people who managed to come out through the burning hut, two of whom were caught, hacked to death and thrown into the fire and the fire systematically stoked with hay and dry wood. Mythily engaged with the survivors and eyewitnesses who described the massacre in these words: Mythily’s essay provides a chilling account of the events that culminated in the massacre on the night of 25 December 1968. In her essay - ‘Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani’ (published in Economic and Political Weekly, 1973) - Mythily recounted the events that had unfolded in the villages of Thanjavur, most notably the creation of Paddy Producers Association of landowners that countered the organized strength of the peasants and unleashed deliberate acts of terror such as the murders of leading peasant activists in the months preceding the massacre.Ĭhildren of Vanavil School (Nagai) listening to the story of Keezhvenmani massacre (Image: Kalpana Karunakaran)
The author of the essay Mythily Sivaraman, then a young woman of twenty-nine years, visited the Keezhvenmani village in early January 1969, a week after the massacre, along with the veteran Gandhian activist Krishnammal Jagannathan. These were the opening lines of an essay on the Keezhvenmani massacre where forty-four Dalit agricultural labourers, members of the kisan union of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), were trapped inside a small hut and burnt alive in a village in the former Thanjavur district, the ‘rice bowl’ of Tamil Nadu.
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