Jagathamma’s Story | Sreejith K

on the arrest of a fifteen-year-old girl who got caught in the crossfire during the first phase of the Naxalite movement in Kerala.

When the time came to put her memories on paper, from the myriad faces she must have come across during her eventful life up to that point in time, Ajitha recollects in a few lines the one of Jagathamma, a young girl, whom she saw just once at the Manantavady police station accompanying Mandakini, her own mother, after both were arrested following the Pulpally action. Jagathamma herself would not go on to write her memoirs, but it is not difficult to imagine the impact the event must have had on her otherwise ordinary life in the Wynad countryside.

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The attack on the Tellicherry police station on 22nd November, 1968, with which the Naxalite movement in the state began, ominously for the revolution in these parts, turned out to be a damp squib when the bomb thrown did not explode. Much to the chagrin of the other rebels, their leader, Kunnikkal Narayanan, soon surrendered at the Trichur police station, and within days, most of the others who had participated in the action would be rounded up. The subsequent attack on Pulpally station led by Varghese and Kunnikkal’s daughter, Ajitha, two days later did not fare much better. The bombs did explode killing in the process a wireless operator and seriously injuring a Sub-Inspector, but later at their hideout in Tirunelly where the rebels from Tellicherry were expected to join them, they had the misfortune of having to put out of misery one of their own who was severely injured when the bombs he was carrying fell and blew up. On hearing of the fiasco at Tellicherry, the rebels then decided to disperse but while doing that, would be caught and handed over to the police by peasants and other villagers for whom, ironically, they had taken up arms. Ajitha would spend the next few years in and out of jail, and once finally released, focus on the untold battles against patriarchy. Meanwhile, Mandakini, after taking ill on arrival in Wynad could not participate in the Pulpally action, and instead, was staying at the house of Gopalan Vaidyar, a sympathiser of the movement. When, after the action at Pulpally, the police began their search operations, Jagathamma, the daughter of Vaidyar had taken her to the house of her uncle where both would be arrested.

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In the Regional Archives at Kozhikode, amidst its vast collection of documents, lies one file pertaining to Case No. M.C. 15/68 of Vellamunda P.S. Here, in those pages yellowing with the years passing by, one gets an idea of the State version in the case registered against Jagathamma and her co-accused – her uncle and nephew. In a damning report, the Sub-Inspector who investigated the case, notes that the accused gave shelter to Ajitha and Mandakini, took training from Kunnikkal Narayanan and K.P. Narayanan, the prime accused in the Tellicherry action, and were planning similar actions elsewhere. He also claims to have confiscated from their home some belongings of Ajitha and Mandakini including a couple of saris and a watch. The accused were charged with unlawful assembly, for not informing authorities of an illegal assembly at their premises and, more seriously, for abetting and being part of the conspiracy that led to the violent Naxalite action.

The courts, though, were not convinced either with the police narrative nor the evidence furnished to back it up. While granting bail to the accused on 5th December, 1968, the Munsif Magistrate at Manantavady observed that the accused were not “party to any design or plan for the commission of any illegal act”. Later, on 6th May, 1969, the Sessions Court Judge at Tellicherry would discharge the accused when the Investigating Officer failed to turn up with the evidence or witnesses during the trial. Though released, the beatings in custody and the trauma of being imprisoned for a crime they did not commit would scar them for life.

The police response to the Tellicherry-Pulpally action was thus both swift and brutal, but the sophistication in dealing with the Naxalites - whether it is implanting malwares inside the desktops of activists or using Israeli-imported drones in Abujhmarh where the Maoists are making their last stand – would come much later. So too, much of the vocabulary of anti-Naxalite discourse. No one dubbed the lawyers who defended the accused or the judge who discharged them in this particular case as ‘Urban Naxals’. In fact, it appears as if the police were yet to fathom whom and what they were dealing with. In the reports the Investigating Officer submitted, there are instances where the accused are described as ‘Naxalbaris’ instead of Naxalites.

While going through the case file, we realise with a shock that Jagathamma’s age was only fifteen when the incident took place, but at a time when there was a lack of will, awareness and the infrastructure in dealing differently with juveniles when they ended up on the wrong side of the law, she was treated as an adult alongside her quinquagenarian uncle and his son-in-law in his early thirties. At the bottom of those pages where she had to sign, unlike her co-accused, Jagathamma gives her fingerprint which is not surprising considering her age and the fact that she was a school drop-out. While the other two mention cultivation as their profession, Jagathamma discloses hers as housework, the only work she would do in the decades to follow as well except for the few years when, following a break-up with her husband, she would take up the job of a cook at a restaurant to raise her children as a single mother.

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While the men along with Ajitha and Mandakini had those meetings at their home prior to the Pulpally action, Jagathamma was in the kitchen working alongside her mother, not having an inkling of what they were up to. Her mother would never forgive those whom she believed wrecked their lives, but, Jagathamma, in an interview she gave to Madhyamam Weekly some fifty years after the action, would express her wish to see Ajitha whom she had just seen once at the Manantavady police station soon after her arrest. Who knows, in those fiery eyes with which Ajitha unflinchingly stared back at those jeering men when the police exhibited her atop a stool one late evening in Wynad all those years ago, she, perhaps, saw belatedly the woman she herself had wanted to become, but never could.

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(Author: Sreejith K teaches History at Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Government College, Kolkata)