Two Reds, Two Roads: How Kerala and Bengal Found Their Way to Communism
I have been reading Shashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to Millennium, and one passage suddenly made me stop and think.
Tharoor recalls his childhood at his maternal home in a village deep in Kerala. He was born into an upper-caste family and, as a child, discovered a rather strange village rule: he simply could not play with children belonging to lower castes.
Now imagine being a child and being told:
“You can play with him—but not with him.”
Naturally, the child asks, “Why?”
And the answer is, “Because he belongs to that caste.”
The child might reasonably ask the next question: “What is a caste?”
That, I suspect, was the beginning of many Indians' lifelong education in the subject!
What struck me was that I could not remember anything quite like that from my own childhood visits to remote villages in Bengal. I certainly knew that caste existed, but I don't remember those invisible walls, prescribed distances or the sense that one human being had to physically keep away from another because of birth.
That difference stayed in my head.
Both Kerala and Bengal became great strongholds of communism. Both produced powerful Communist movements and long periods of Left political rule. Yet the social worlds from which their communism emerged were remarkably different.
So I started digging around—with a little help from AI research, which nowadays is always ready to join an old man's argument—and discovered that the two stories are almost mirror images.
Same red flag. Different road to the red flag.
Kerala: When Caste and Class Sat Down Together
Pre-independence Kerala had one of the most rigid caste systems in India.
And this was not merely the familiar Indian arrangement of “You sit there, I'll sit here.”
Kerala had something much more elaborate.
Swami Vivekananda, travelling through Kerala in the 1890s, was so struck by the extraordinary rigidity of the caste system that he famously described the region as a “lunatic asylum” of caste.
It was a deliberately shocking expression, but he was reacting to a society where caste governed not merely marriage, occupation and social status, but even everyday physical movement and human contact.
Distance itself could become a caste rule.
A Pulaya, for example, was traditionally required to remain at a considerable physical distance from a Namboodiri Brahmin. The often-cited figure is 72 steps.
Seventy-two steps!
Today, if somebody tells me to maintain a distance of 72 steps, I assume either he is very angry with me or he has discovered a new Covid variant.
But in traditional Kerala, this was part of the social order.
Lower-caste people could be prevented from entering temples, using certain roads or observing ordinary social customs that upper castes took for granted. In some communities, even covering the upper body was restricted.
And here the story becomes important.
The social hierarchy was closely connected with the ownership and control of land.
The jenmi system gave enormous power to large landholders, particularly Namboodiri Brahmins, with Nairs and other groups also occupying important positions in the landholding structure. Below them were tenants and agricultural labourers, including Ezhavas, Thiyyas, Pulayas, Cherumas and others.
So if you were born at the wrong end of the social ladder, life could deliver a double punch.
You were poor.
And you were considered socially inferior.
The person who owned the land could also belong to the social group that considered you untouchable.
That is a rather combustible combination.
And perhaps this is what makes Tharoor's childhood recollection so striking. He was not describing some dusty historical chapter from a school textbook. He was remembering, as a child, being told that certain children were simply not his playmates because of caste.
A child naturally asks:
“But why?”
And society answers:
“Because that is the way things are.”
Which is precisely when society should become nervous.
Because sooner or later somebody is going to ask:
“But who decided that?”
Then Came the Social Reformers
Kerala did not suddenly wake up one morning and discover Karl Marx hiding behind a coconut tree.
The groundwork had already been laid by powerful social reformers.
Sree Narayana Guru challenged caste hierarchy and preached the dignity and equality of human beings. Ayyankali organised among oppressed agricultural communities and fought for education and social rights. Chattampi Swamikal questioned the intellectual foundations of Brahminical dominance.
So before Kerala became politically red, it had already begun questioning why society was arranged in such a peculiar fashion.
Then came the Communists.
Leaders such as P. Krishna Pillai, A. K. Gopalan and E. M. S. Namboodiripad found a society in which grievances were already deep, organised and increasingly political.
The Communist movement did not have to manufacture the anger.
The raw material was already lying around in abundance.
The Kayyur uprising of 1940, the Punnapra–Vayalar uprising of 1946 and the numerous agrarian struggles in Malabar reflected an explosive mixture of land, tenancy, caste and political mobilisation.
And this is where Kerala's story becomes distinctive.
Communism could present itself not merely as an economic argument about wages and land.
It could also be understood by many of its supporters as the next stage of a much older struggle for dignity.
The red flag arrived at a door where people had already been asking why the door was closed in the first place.
And Then I Come to Bengal
Now Bengal.
Here the story becomes rather different.
When I think of my own childhood visits to villages in Bengal, I certainly cannot claim that caste did not exist. Of course it did. Bengal had—and has—its own complicated caste hierarchy and discrimination.
But the atmosphere was different.
I don't remember that strange Kerala-style combination where caste identity and control over land appeared to sit on the same chair.
And there is a historical reason.
The Permanent Settlement of 1793 transformed Bengal's landholding structure. Zamindari rights became transferable and could effectively be bought and sold. Estates changed hands, sometimes quite dramatically.
As a result, Bengal's zamindars did not belong to one single caste.
There were Kayastha zamindars, Sadgop, Mahishya, Aguri and other Hindu landholders, Muslim landowners and merchant families who accumulated estates.
So the Bengali Brahmin was not automatically the great village landlord sitting on top of everybody else.
Quite often he was doing something much less glamorous.
He was the village tolpandit trying to keep a Sanskrit school alive.
Or the impoverished pujari waiting for his next handful of rice.
Or the schoolmaster who seemed to have been permanently appointed to poverty.
Sarat Chandra's world is full of such people.
So is Bibhutibhushan's.
The Bengali Brahmin could quite easily be poor.
Sometimes, I suspect, the poor Brahmin and the poor peasant had more in common economically than either would have liked to admit.
The Bengali Village Had Another Villain
If Kerala had its jenmi, Bengal had the jotedar.
The jotedar was often a substantial local cultivator or landholder. He could own considerable acreage, lend grain or money, and have land cultivated by bargadars, the sharecroppers.
And the interesting thing was that the jotedar did not have to belong to one particular caste.
He could be Muslim in Murshidabad.
Rajbanshi in North Bengal.
Mahishya in Midnapore.
Or belong to another local community altogether.
So the conflict increasingly became one of who owned the land and who worked it, rather than simply which caste you were born into.
That distinction matters.
The Bengali Communist movement therefore found an enormous political opening in the economic relationship between landlord, jotedar and sharecropper.
And then came Tebhaga.
Tebhaga: Two-Thirds, Please
In 1946–47, Bengal's sharecroppers demanded two-thirds of the crop instead of the traditional half.
The argument was wonderfully simple.
“If I am doing the cultivating, why shouldn't I get a larger share?”
It was not exactly a doctoral thesis in political philosophy.
It was the farmer looking at the harvested paddy and saying, essentially:
“Brother, let us discuss the arithmetic.”
The Tebhaga movement became one of the great agrarian struggles of Bengal, and Communist organisers played a major role in it.
Here the central question was not primarily whether one man could walk on a particular road because of his caste.
It was:
Who gets the crop?
And behind that:
Who owns the land?
Then History Threw Partition at Bengal
Just when Bengal was already dealing with enormous political and economic tensions, Partition arrived in 1947.
Millions of people were displaced from East Pakistan.
Many arrived in West Bengal with practically nothing.
If you have ever seen Sealdah station at a busy hour, imagine it with an entire population arriving without a house to go to.
Refugee colonies sprang up around places such as Jadavpur, Dum Dum, Sodepur and Howrah.
People occupied land.
They built huts.
They formed colony committees.
They demanded rehabilitation.
They searched for employment.
And gradually many entered the industrial workforce, including the jute mills and other factories.
Here again the Communist movement found fertile ground.
The party organised among refugees, workers and the urban poor. It became involved in the food movements of 1959 and 1966 and built powerful trade-union networks.
So Bengal's Left politics acquired another powerful memory.
Not the forbidden temple road.
Not the 72-step distance.
But the refugee train.
The crowded platform.
The squatter colony.
The struggle to find a piece of land and a way of earning a living.
Two Reds, Two Memories
And suddenly the difference I had noticed between Tharoor's Kerala childhood and my own Bengal memories began to make sense.
Kerala's journey to communism was deeply connected with a society where caste humiliation and economic exploitation could reinforce each other.
Bengal's journey was more strongly shaped by land relations, sharecropping, economic inequality, industrial labour and the enormous disruption of Partition.
Of course, neither story is completely pure.
Kerala had class conflicts that were not reducible to caste.
Bengal had caste discrimination that cannot simply be wished away.
And Bengal's Communist movement was certainly not only a refugee movement, just as Kerala's communism was not merely an anti-caste movement.
History is rarely polite enough to stay inside our neat little boxes.
But the difference in emphasis is important.
In Kerala, the memory of oppression could be something as intimate as being told:
“You cannot play with that child.”
In Bengal, the political memory could just as easily be:
“You have cultivated this land. Why are you getting only half the crop?”
Or, after Partition:
“We have arrived. Now where are we going to live?”
Same red flag.
Different childhood memories.
Different grievances.
Different roads.
And perhaps that is why two states that eventually became among India's strongest centres of Communist politics could nevertheless have such different social histories underneath that red colour.
In Kerala, the road to the red flag passed through the temple road that some were not allowed to walk on.
In Bengal, it passed through the paddy field, the jotedar's ledger, the sharecropper's demand—and eventually Sealdah station crowded with refugees who had lost almost everything.
In the end, both stories return to one deceptively simple question:
Who owns the land, who works it, and who gets to belong there?
Perhaps Marx would have approved.
And the Bengali grandmother, looking at the harvest, would probably have approved even more—provided somebody remembered to bring the fish curry to the table.
