Born on October 20, 1923, VS Achuthanandan joined the Communist Party in 1940 when he was just 17 years old.
Abject poverty and deprivation were the only things
that flourished in Punnapra, Kerala, in those days. My father had a grocery
shop close to our house so we did not suffer too badly when we were young. He
was a social activist and a SNDP Yogam leader and respected by all. He had leased some land from the landlords in
Vendhalathara and cultivated it. He built a house there too. In this way, along
with the grocery store, we could make ends meet.
Punnapra school had only up to class three, so I
joined Kalarkode school to do class four. It was in an area where the upper
caste lived and one had to walk past the temple to go to school. The elite
would ridicule the less fortunate, beat and chase them away. Many children
discontinued their studies. I was once attacked by the well-to-do students and
they asked me. “Who are you to walk this way to school?” I tried to stand up to
them and return their abuses but finally ran away. I didn’t go to school but
returned home and told my father all this. My father was a person who did not
put up with any form of caste or religious intolerances. He made a big waist chain
for me and told me to use it if attacked. Just as we expected, I was attacked
the very next day. I took out my waist chain and whirled it at my attackers and
they ran away.
When I was six or seven years old, my mother died of
smallpox and my father passed away when I was eleven. I gave up my school education
and started to assist my elder brother in his cloth shop. I soon got acquainted
with the socio-political issues of the place. The workers from Aspinwall
Company and other coir factories used to frequent the shop and discussed union
work and politics with us. I decided to work in a factory and joined Aspinwall.
The Second World War had broken out and Aspinwall received a slew of orders to
make tents for the soldiers. I joined the coir factory workers’ union and
became involved in its activities and was soon noticed. Kuttanad Ramakrishna
Pillai and K S Joseph were State Congress leaders then and they made me a member
of the State Congress in 1939. The company’s union workers started giving me
Communist party pamphlets in secret.
The communist party’s taluk secretary was
Simon Asan. To organise the fish workers’ union Asan used to visit my hometown
and he used to ask me to assist him. In 1940, Simon Asan offered me the
Communist party membership. He did not check whether one should be above 18 to
be a member. The reason he gave me a party card was because of my impressive
speeches and my union activities.
Trade unionism was buoyant in Alappuzha and the coir
workers’ union had successfully boycotted work. Their most important demand was
an increase in wages by one Anna. Some of our demands went unmet, so the union
was divided about discontinuing the strike. However, Krishna Pillai taught us
that we should withdraw the strike, strengthen the efforts of the union and
then take up the unmet demands at a later period. He taught us how to deal with
situations. After this event, classes were held for two months in Alappuzha.
The workers’ union president, P N Krishna Pillai, a lawyer and later the state
labour commissioner, took the trade union classes for us and others like
Comrade Krishna Pillai, R Sugathan and Govindan took classes. In my political
life, these classes were a turning point.
In 1943, at the Communist party’s first state
meeting, ten of us attended it representing ten union branches of Aspinwall. I
met for the first time Comrade Sundaraiya, SV Ghate and others. EMS and AKG
already knew me. I had first heard EMS speak at a public meeting on the Alappuzha
beach in 1938. When AKG was hiding in Muhamma, it was my responsibilty to reach
secret letters and newspapers to his hideout. I knew him well. In 1940, as a
party member, it was my duty to organise the many unions like toddy tappers’
union, coconut tree climbers’ union, etc., and work among them as a leader. In
the 40s, when I was the president of the toddy tappers’ union, during a strike,
I was arrested and put in jail for three months. That was my first jail experience.
One day, in 1943, Comrade Krishna Pillai came to
Alappuzha. He called a few of us to the party office and began to discuss how
to make the trade unions grow. “Is it enough to do some company work and some
union work? Don’t you want to give all your time and effort to the party? Don’t
you want to organize the poor paddy field workers? Comrade you can do that. So
resign from your job, go and live in Kuttanad and work there. What do you say?”
Krishna Pillai asked me. I told him my difficulties- my family needed my
support. After a few days of contemplation, I sent a message to Krishna Pillai
that I would do as he bid. So M D Chandrasenan, R Thankappan, Ramakrishnan, few
of us went to Kuttanand. There we established the communist party wing and I
became the secretary. We would eat what was given to us, bathe in the temple
ponds and sleep where ever we could. In the mornings we would set out for the
paddy fields and speak to the workers there. We would go to their homes and
understand their problems and invite them to the party meetings. Many workers
became cadres and I resigned as secretary and made Comrade Thomas the
secretary. A strong paddy field workers’ union was created and we made similar
unions in other areas too. For three years I was totally dedicated to this
area. We worked towards eradicating caste intolerance and because of the presence
of the unions it declined. The news spread all over Travancore and in 1945, at
Ramankary, near Muttar, the Travancore paddy field workers’ union meeting took
place.
The paddy workers’ union was very active in the Mangalam
wetlands. The land owners employed permanent and temporary workers. The permanent
workers were like slaves and were given only half the wages of what the
temporary workers earned. During the harvest season, the permanent workers got
a bundle of grain as the day’s wages, and at the end of the harvest after some
phony calculations about 10 to 15 measures of rice grains were given to each of
them. But this time, the permanent workers at Mangalam demanded 100 measures of
rice. And they began to strike- the harvested sheaves of grain were left
without threshing for 12 days. The strikers withstood all kinds of threats and
beatings. In the end, the landowners came down on their knees and agreed to give
100 measures of rice as wages. I stayed near Kavalam and engineered the strike
from there. This strike created huge tremors both in Kuttanad and outside it
and was pivotal in building the paddy field workers’ unions. Only after I had
successfully finished the work that Comrade Krishna Pillai assigned me did I
return to Alappuzha in 1945. I then started work in Punnapra-Vayalar, which
later turned into an uprising.
-As told to Minu Ittyipe
-As told to Minu Ittyipe
The edited version was first published by Outlook Magazine: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?282721
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