The political awakening of the Malankara Orthodox community had its origin in a grievance of an entirely practical character. Government employment in the princely state of Travancore was, in practice, reserved almost exclusively for Brahmins from Madras. A community that had acquired English education with unusual rapidity found itself, in consequence, qualified for public offices it was nonetheless denied the opportunity of entering.
Metropolitan Pulikkottil Joseph Mar Dionysius II (MOSC) was the principal architect of the community's response, and an unusual one: a man who devoted the greater part of his energies to combating the Reform Movement from within his own Church, while simultaneously building that same Church's capacity to act effectively in the wider political sphere. He founded the schools still known as the M. D. Schools, established the journal Kerala Patrika at Cochin in 1870, and worked consistently through trusted laymen rather than through the clergy. When the King of Travancore visited Kottayam in 1880, the Orthodox community presented him with a Mangalapatram, a formal letter of good wishes which also requested that opportunities in government service be extended to the community. Mar Dionysius stood behind this initiative.
The underlying grievance was never confined to Christians, and the movement it eventually produced was never, at any stage, a confessional one. In 1891, under the leadership of a Hindu, G. K. Pillai, some 10,028 citizens signed the Malayalee Memorial and submitted it to Sri Moolam Thirunal, requesting equal opportunity for all Malayalis irrespective of community. Public meetings and mass demonstrations followed, constituting the first popular protests recorded in the history of modern Kerala. Mar Dionysius and Kandathil Varghese Mappilai (MOSC) numbered among the principal architects of this movement.
Organisation
Agitation of this kind gave rise, in time, to formal organisation. E. J. John Elanjickal (MOSC), a lawyer, founded the Travancore-Cochin Christava Mahajana Sabha in 1910 to press for government employment and political rights and to shape public opinion; K. C. Mammen Mappilai (MOSC) addressed its inaugural meeting on co-operative societies, while Justice Maret Philipose spoke on the legal rights of Christians. One of its secretaries was Fr P. T. Geevarghese Panicker, later Archbishop Mar Ivanios. This body was the direct ancestor of the Abstention Movement and of the State Congress that followed, and thus, ultimately, of the freedom movement in Travancore itself.
In 1920, a delegation of Christians, Hindus and Muslims submitted a mass petition of 27,000 signatures bound in seven volumes to the Diwan. The public service was consequently divided into the Devaswom department, administering the Hindu temples and reserved for high-caste Hindus, and the Revenue department, open to all irrespective of caste or religion. Certain accounts credit the British Governor of Madras with having pressed a reluctant government into this settlement.
Two confrontations
In 1922, the Diwan Raghavayya raised the fees payable for university degree courses. The resulting student protests were suppressed by his police with considerable brutality, and when the Diwan subsequently addressed the State Assembly its members walked out under the leadership of C. P. Mathen Chalakuzhy (MOSC). The Queen Regent, Sethu Lakshmi Bhai, thereupon removed the Diwan from office, the first occasion in Travancore's history on which a government had been compelled to yield before a popular movement.
The second confrontation proved more protracted. In the same year, Mar Coolaparampil, the Syro-Malabar Catholic bishop of Kottayam, met with K. C. Mammen Mappilai (MOSC) and C. J. Kurien (MOSC) to arrange a joint Christian contest of the general elections, a plan defeated by internal division within the Orthodox Church and by the coolness then prevailing between the Catholic and Orthodox communities. When the administrative reform of 1931 confirmed high-caste dominance and memoranda from Christians and Ezhavas alike were ignored, Christian, Ezhava and Muslim leaders met at Trivandrum in January 1933 and resolved upon a complete boycott of the Legislative Assembly, an episode remembered as the Abstention Movement. Diwan C. P. Rama Swami Iyer sought to discredit it by presenting the boycott, in advance of the British Viceroy's official visit in December 1933, as a component of the wider anti-British non-cooperation campaign. Barrister George Joseph (MOSC), a lawyer then practising at Madurai, explained the movement's actual objectives to the Viceroy with sufficient effect that the latter publicly declared it justified. In 1938 the government conceded elections apportioned by community population, and the Diwan responded by proclaiming temple entry for all Hindus, a genuine reform undertaken chiefly to detach the Ezhava community from its Christian allies.
George Joseph and his brother
George Joseph (MOSC; d. 1938) was the first Malankara Orthodox Christian to become closely associated with the Indian National Congress and the independence struggle. He joined the Home Rule Movement in 1917, became a personal friend of Mahatma Gandhi in 1919, and was entrusted with the publication of Young India during Gandhi's imprisonment; as a member of the All India Congress Committee he relinquished his legal practice for the non-cooperation movement and was imprisoned by the British authorities. His brother, Pothen Joseph (MOSC), edited in succession The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, and The Deccan Herald; his political satire, "Over a Cup of Tea", was for many years the leading feature of the Indian Express, and from Trivandrum, as that paper's correspondent, he laid bare the manoeuvring of the Diwan for readers across British India.
The State Congress
The final phase of this political struggle was the campaign of the State Congress for adult franchise and a democratically elected government. Its leadership was drawn substantially from the Malankara Orthodox community, among them T. M. Varghese, E. John Philipose, and K. T. Thomas. The repression that followed was systematic: the movement was banned, its leaders arrested, its meetings disrupted by hired gangs, its journalists assaulted, Manorama silenced, and the National Quilon Bank, owned by that paper's editor, liquidated, extinguishing the savings of a great many middle-class Orthodox families. When A. Narayana Pillai, a Hindu lawyer, was arrested for hosting a State Congress meeting and charged with treason, it was an Orthodox judge, K. K. Lukose Kannukuzhiyil (MOSC), who granted him bail in the district court.
Mrs Elizabeth Kuruvilla (MOSC) was nominated the fifth president of the State Congress and became the first woman in Travancore arrested in its struggles. When the movement's leadership, released in October 1938, withdrew its charges against the Diwan on Gandhi's advice, the wider agitation lost momentum, although the Youth League continued independently; its leader, C. M. Stephen (MOSC), arrested in 1939, would later serve in the cabinet of Indira Gandhi and as Leader of the Opposition in New Delhi from 1977 to 1979. When the Communist movement subsequently took root in the state, the Punnapra-Vayalar agitation against the Diwan was led by another Orthodox Christian, K. C. George (MOSC).
This tradition of public service found later expression in Oommen Chandy (MOSC), who served twice as Chief Minister of Kerala, from 2004 to 2006 and again from 2011 to 2016, and who for over five decades, from 1970 until his death, represented the Puthuppally constituency in the state legislature, an unbroken tenure without parallel in Kerala politics. He remains, to date, the only practising Christian to have held the office of Chief Minister of Kerala. Widely regarded as a leader of exceptional accessibility to the ordinary citizen, he died on 18 July 2023, at the age of seventy-nine, and was laid to rest at Puthuppally, the constituency and parish he had represented throughout his political career.