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Not many people know that there was a time when Malayalees preferred not to leave Kerala. Now there are an estimated 43.7 non-resident Malayalis to every 100 households, making Keralites one of the most migratory groups in Asia. Non-resident Keralites (NRK) numbered 3.43 million in 2011.

The image of the itinerant Malayali is firmly planted in the Indian (and global) popular consciousness. Indeed, in 2011, there were an estimated 43.7 non-resident Malayalis to every 100 households, making Keralites one of the most migratory groups in Asia. Non-resident Keralites (NRK) numbered 3.43 million in 2011. But little more than a century ago, Keralites showed few signs of this migratory instinct despite two millennia of trade and cultural relations with Europe and the Middle East. To an observer of the 19th century Malayali, the contemporary stereotype of the cold, calculated, venture-migrant “Mallu” would come as something of a surprise. This shift in Malayali attitudes towards migration is the result of a century’s worth of complex social, economic and cultural changes.

THE MIGRATION-RESISTANT MALAYALI
From the 3rd century BC onwards, the spice trade brought foreign peoples and cultures to Kerala’s shores - Greeks, Romans, and Arabs. Recent archaeological excavations confirm that Calicut (by the 13th century) and Cochin (by the 15th Century) had become undisputed centres of trade power. Vasco da Gama’s arrival in 1498 commenced a period of intense trade with Portugal, Netherlands, Denmark and France. But despite these international comings and goings, Malayalis were uninterested in travel or migration. While enjoying the material benefits of these cosmopolitan interactions, they appeared keen to insulate themselves culturally until the mid-19th century.

Not only were Keralites resistant to crossing the seas to the West; they were equally unwilling to cross the Sahyadri Mountains to the East into the regions occupied by their Tamil and Kannada-speaking neighbors. Between 1834 and the 1910s, Tamil and Telugu-speaking populations eagerly migrated as indentured laborers to distant British, Dutch and French colonial territories. But the colonials found few recruits amongst Keralites. The 1911 Census of India described Malayalis as one of the least prone to migration. But by the 1970s, a paradigmatic shift seems to have occurred and with the Gulf migration boom, Keralites had become one of the most boundary-breaking communities in India, third only to Punjabis and Rajasthanis. This transformation has its roots in the mid-19th century, sparked by trends in an unlikely section of Kerala society.

TRANSITION TO A MIGRATORY CULTURE (1850 - 1910)
Dalits: The Pilgrim Parents of Migration
It was none other than the weak and the “wretched of the [Kerala] earth” who dared to make the first migratory forays into far-flung areas of Kerala. In Kerala’s system of serfdom, Pulayas, Parayas and other Dalits were tied to a village (“desam”) and a landlord (“tampuran”) in perpetuity. Any attempts to leave a desam were punished severely. But in defiance of these rules, aided by Christian missionaries and the anti-slavery legislations enacted by Travancore State, these Dalits escaped, mostly to begin working for colonial plantations. Many of these escapees were Christian converts, educated and armed with letters of introduction from missionaries to the plantation owners of the eastern and southern hills. These movements, primarily by able-bodied males and a few families marked the beginnings of Malayali migration in the mid-19th century.

The rapid growth of colonial plantations ushered in a host of economic and social shifts. By the middle of the 19th century, the British colonial economy had reached its peak, and it dramatically restructured Kerala’s agricultural sector. Coffee plantations, which started in the hilly areas east of Quilon in the 1830s, began to expand by the 1860s, with the chief planting areas being concentrated in the Peermade and Ashambu hills of Travancore, and later in Wyanad.

In 1878, the acquisition of land for coffee and tea plantation by Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company further expanded the plantation land area, and by 1945, it was a 100,000 acre holding. Colonial agents, missionaries, and local kings were all invested in this expansion. Lt. Gen. Cullen, the British Resident, introduced coffee plantations to the Ashambu Hills in South Travancore in the 1850s, and King Vishakam Thirunal and Dewan Madava Rao soon became owners of coffee estates as well.

By the 1860s, Rev. J. Cox of the London Missionary Society (LMS), Rev. Caldwell of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and Rev. H. Baker of Church Missionary Society (CMS) also held coffee plantations. By the 1870s, the LMS missionary organization itself tried its hand at the coffee estate business. 

With the increased need for labour in Kerala’s huge plantations, as well is in neighbouring Coorg and the Nilgiri hills, Kerala’s old patron-client system proved difficult to sustain. Pulayas and Parayas began to respond to this demand, providing them access to a cash economy and better socio-economic status -distinct improvements over the subsistence-level existence they eked out under the Thampuran families. Wages also increased rapidly; a coolie’s wage increased from one anna per day in the 1850s to four annas by the 1870s. The coffee boom of 1890s only further increased the demand for labour and the readiness of Kerala’s Dalits to migrate.

Their initial numbers were relatively small, especially compared to Tamil migrants, but they signalled a significant shift in Kerala’s attitudes and experience with migration. By the beginning of the 20th century, these numbers had climbed significantly. According to Menon, most of the emigrants from the Malabar region of Kerala were from the Dalit groups. Between 1900 and 1921, around 10,000 Parayas had emigrated from the Malabar area alone to these new plantations. Kooiman estimates that 10% of the more than 1.5 million Indian emigrants who had moved to Ceylon’s plantations by 1867 had originated in Travancore. Thus, the plantation economy and the need for cheap labour set in motion an unprecedented internal migration process, signifying fundamental attitudinal shifts to migration by the mid-19th century.

Peasant Farmers’ Internal Migration
The second group of pioneers of migration which were almost exclusively confined within Kerala’s boundaries, were small and mid-size peasants. These entrepreneurial farmers took advantage of the growing demand for spices and consequent government support for agricultural forays into forest lands, further demonstrating the effects of colonial priorities on the local economy.

In the 1870s, projects began to reclaim waste lands along the newly developed Kottayam-Peermade/Madura road, for example. These efforts created unparalleled change in the nature of land ownership in the region. In a radical departure from the perpetuation of land ownership within certain privileged castes and communities, Dewan Madava Rao of Travancore granted full private ownership rights to 200,000 acres of government land in 1865. The Travancore government’s monopoly on pepper ended in 1860, and the rise of pepper prices in the world market in 1880 brought more cash into the hands of farmers.

The matrilineal joint family system and tharavad property system changed rapidly from 1890s in Malabar, Travancore and Cochin, leading to the fragmentation of large land holdings, further aiding shifts in land ownership and migrations. Buying lands and migration now became more of a way of life for some Syrian Christian peasants and other middle income farmers. The Syrian Christian community was already commercially savvy due to their involvement in the spice trade, and by the 19th century, with the help of the colonial apparatus, they were also becoming cash savvy. 
Thousands of small farmers moved away to Peermade, Wynad, Malabar, Nilamboor, and Gudalloor, mainly to the eastern boundaries of Kerala’s mountainous regions. This movement which began by the end of 19th century reached its peak by the 1930s.

These migrations signalled more than just economic shifts for peasant families. They often involved painful changes – the uncertainty of migrant life, the disruptions in traditional family structures, the challenges of deforestation, the uprooting of large sections of Kerala’s society, and the weight of the disapprobation of the extended families they were leaving behind. Ultimately, these changes ushered in widespread shifts in societal values around migration and displacement, but the pioneers’ attitude at the time could only be portrayed as ambivalent, at best.

Individuated Migrations
Although in less significant numbers, the third group of 19th century migrants came from the lower-middle strata of Kerala society e.g. Shanars of South Travancore, Izhavas of North Travancore, Syrian Christians and a few higher castes, who were educated but ineligible for government jobs due to caste restrictions. They began to migrate to British-run plantations of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Ceylon during the second half of the 19th century as kankanies, clerks, managers, and bankers.

Missionary education created a mutually beneficial system: it gave the migrants economic mobility, and it provided plantation owners with reliable sources of mid-level labour. The cash gains of these individuals were handsome considering the economic context of the time.

These highly entrepreneurial individual migrants were products of Kerala’s unique educational context. Kerala had a strong pre-British tradition of literacy. The British system of education, especially the missionary effort to create a constituency of literate converts, reinforced this tradition. Both the British government and missionaries during the middle of 19th century emphasised the commercial value of the English language. The CMS College Kottayam and the Nagercoil Seminary of LMS were only the first symbols of the English language’s prestige as the language of the Raj and as a generator of high wages.

By 1891, 14% of the male population of Travancore was literate in English and a ‘widespread craving for higher English education’ in the region was recognised. Also from 1891 onwards, female children were encouraged to become literate.

The number of students rose from about 8,500 in 1872 to 50,000 in 1890 in Travancore. However, government jobs only increased from 14,700 in 1875 to 20,000 in 1891. Furthermore, government jobs were available only to Brahmins and Nayars by caste rule and tradition, further adding to the frustration of these highly motivated individuals from the middle and lower social hierarchy.

T.C. Poonen, the first Malayali to study in Britain and a product of CMS College Kottayam, lived in London from 1869 to 1872. He was called to the bar from the Inner Temple in 1872, but was refused a government job when he returned to Travancore and had to migrate to Cochin to find employment. His experience illustrates the rigidity of Travancore’s system of entitlements and employment on the basis of caste. Government jobs were inaccessible to lower ranks, even those with foreign education and missionary connections. Between 1875 and 1891, literacy among Ezhavas in Travancore had increased from 3.15% to 12.1%, and under the social reformer Dr. Palpu’s leadership, they began to demand government jobs. As a result of high literacy and knowledge of the English language, these groups increasingly sought jobs in cities and plantations outside Kerala, especially in Ceylon after 1847.

Thus, individuals and families, both middle-income job-seekers and lower-income labourers moved to Ceylon, though a substantial majority subsequently returned to Kerala. The colonial cash economy provided an excellent alternative for the frustrated English-educated youth struggling against a system of caste-based entitlement and religious orthodoxy. 

We will see later how these individual migrations proved to be a harbinger of a much larger and systematized migration to Ceylon, and subsequently to Malaya and Singapore. Although racial and caste hierarchies were still at work in these contexts, they also provided a space for inter-racial association, as well individual prestige and economic mobility. 
Whether these audacious migratory forays helped galvanize the whole Malayali community around migration is a matter of some debate. But there is no doubt that, encouraged by the changes associated with the colonial political economy, the Malayali resistance towards relocation for the sake of socio-economic gains was beginning to erode.

The modern desire for consumption and mobility was steadily overtaking the orthodoxies of class and caste rigidities, and as a result, the Malayali psyche began to embrace the risks (and the gains) of the migratory culture. The changes in land-ownership patterns, the decline of feudal peasant-landlord dependencies, and the breaking down of traditional joint-families, further accentuated this shift.

George Oommen, PhD received his doctorate at the University of Sydney. He was the professor and chairperson at the Department of History of Christianity at the United Theological College, Bangalore. He currently lives with his wife in Phoenix, Arizona