The Keezhvenmani massacre

On 25 December 2018, fifty years to the day, thousands of women, men and children walked to Venmani, a village some 30 km from Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu. They queued in the heat to reach a memorial that stands where a hut once stood.⁶

The hut stood in Keezhvenmani, a hamlet of Venmani. On the night of 25 December 1968, the landlords and their men locked in the people who had run into it for shelter, and burnt them to death: 44 of them, by the count PARI gave in 2021.¹ They were Dalits, from the communities once branded "untouchable", and they were the families of landless farm labourers who had asked to be paid more.^1,6 The killings are remembered as the first massacre of Dalits in independent India.^2,9

Half a measure of paddy

In the rice country of eastern Thanjavur, Dalit labourers worked land they did not own, for landlords known as mirasdars, and were paid in paddy rather than money.^3,8 A late start or a small mistake, Shalin Maria Lawrence writes, could bring saanipaal, cow dung mixed in water that labourers were forced to drink, and the whip.^3,8

From the 1940s the labourers organised. Communist leaders built unions across the region, and red flags went up over Dalit homes.^6,8 When prices rose in 1966, the labourers asked for higher wages in paddy. Their demand, The News Minute reported, was half a marakkal, a traditional measure of grain, of extra paddy in their wages.³ By December 1968 the labourers of Keezhvenmani were on strike for higher wages, a say over the land they worked, and an end to feudal oppression.¹

The landowners answered with an association of their own, the Paddy Producers Association, formed to counter the Communists, and brought in labourers from other villages to reap the harvest.^1,3 The association's leader fined labourers who belonged to the union. Muthusamy, who ran a tea shop, refused to pay and was kidnapped. "That was the starting point," the activist Thyagu, then a college student, told The Wire.⁶ In November 1968, Shalin Maria Lawrence writes in an opinion piece, the landowners' association met and resolved to kill anyone who rebelled. That is her account, not a court's finding.⁸

Thyagu remembers two killings before the fire: a labourer called Pakkiri, shot by police days earlier, and a second man called Pakkiri, murdered by a gang that mistook him for a Left leader the landlords had threatened.⁶ Then, on the evening of 25 December itself, Pakkirisamy Pillai, one of the labourers brought in from Irukkai to harvest, was attacked in the street and killed. In a separate case, eight of the 22 men accused of his killing were convicted, and the Supreme Court upheld their convictions in its 1986 judgment.^3,5

The night of 25 December

This section describes people, among them children, being burnt to death.

That night the hamlet's Dalit men were away, seeking legal help after Pakkiri's killing, Shalin Maria Lawrence writes; the women, the children and the old were at home.⁸ Landlords and their men surrounded the hamlet and cut off every way out.¹ Madhyamam reported that the landlords' men, some 200 of them, came in police lorries and fired on the labourers and their families.⁷

People ran. Women, children and elders took refuge in one hut, The Wire reported; 44 people went in, Shalin Maria Lawrence writes.^6,8 The attackers locked them in and set the hut on fire.¹ According to an eyewitness account reported by Madhyamam, two children thrown out of the burning hut, in the hope that they would live, were thrown back into the flames.⁷

By PARI's count, half of the 44 were children under 16, eleven girls and eleven boys. Two were over 70. Twenty-nine were women and girls, and 15 were men and boys. All were Dalits, and all were supporters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).¹ They came from the Devendra Kula Vellalar and Paraiyar communities.⁸

The count is not settled. P. Srinivasan, the village functionary who cremated the dead, counted 42, as SabrangIndia reported in 2018.⁹ Manoj Mitta, in his 2023 book Caste Pride, also counts 42.² PARI, The News Minute and Outlook each give 44, and they differ on how many were women, men and children.^1,3,4 None of them says how its count was made, so we give both: at least 42 died, and by most counts 44.^1,2

Acquitted on appeal

The police, said K. P. S. Mani, a Dalit member of the state Assembly, "were aware of the conspiracy of the landowners to kill the Dalits but remained mere spectators".⁸ Fifty years later, the writer Subhash Gatade argued that the police went on to file flimsy cases and water down every testimony.⁹

A first information report, the police record that opens a criminal case, named 23 people as accused, the leader of the landowners' association first among them, South First reported in 2022.⁸ In 1970 the district trial court, the sessions court at Nagapattinam, convicted some of the accused; South First reports a life sentence for the first accused, and The News Minute terms of ten years.^3,8 On appeal, the Madras High Court acquitted all of them, 25 by PARI's count in 2021. The sources date the acquittal to 1973 or 1975, and The News Minute reports that the Supreme Court let it stand.^1,3

The judges' reasoning is still quoted. As Shalin Maria Lawrence gives it in her opinion piece, they wrote that the accused came from wealthy families with much land and many people at their service, and that "it is hard to believe that men of such nobility would be able to burn down houses or kill people."⁸ Gatade recalls another of the courts' pleas: that the accused were upper-caste men, and it seemed unbelievable they would have walked to the village.⁹ We have not yet checked either passage against the judgment itself.^8,9

The convictions of 1970 did not stand: all the accused were acquitted on appeal, PARI and Madhyamam report.^1,7 In 1980 the man who had led the landowners' association was himself killed, by a man from Keezhvenmani who had seen the night of 25 December; the sources give him different names.^3,8

In their words

Testimony, as published by the outlets named. We did not interview anyone, and we have not contacted the families (our rule until an account is released).

Mariappan, 52, came from Virudhunagar for the fiftieth anniversary in 2018. To those complaining of the walk, he said: "Imagine, they were burnt in a small hut fighting for their rights, and we complain about walking a few kilometres." He told The Wire he had come every 25 December for twenty years.⁶

P. Srinivasan was 23 when he cremated the dead. Decades later he told an interviewer: "There were 42 corpses in all."⁹

Krishnammal Jagannathan, a Gandhian land campaigner born to a landless Dalit family, read the news the next morning. "Keezhvenmani Dalit massacre shattered my inner peace forever," she told The News Minute in 2022, at 96.³ On 26 December, she told The News Minute, she set out for the village, and landowners stopped her at Keevalur and told her to turn back. "But I persisted," she said. "Every step I took on the soil of Keezhvenmani was filled with ashes of burnt huts and the tears of people."³

S. Megala, Nagapattinam secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, pointed to the names on the memorial in 2018: "They instilled courage to stand up and fight for rights to generations that followed."⁶

Shalin Maria Lawrence, a Dalit writer who first read of the massacre in 2016, wrote in 2022: "Christmas now is a day of mourning for me and my Dalit brothers and sisters across the world."⁸

Land in women's names

Krishnammal Jagannathan, a Gandhian land campaigner born to a landless Dalit family, came to Keezhvenmani the day after the burning. At first no one would talk to her; the women feared for their work. She stayed nearly three years, working in the fields beside them. In 1971 she gave 50 cents of land, half an acre, to each victim's family, and in 1985, through Land for Tillers' Freedom, the organisation she registered in 1981, an acre to each. She had the pattas, the land deeds, written in women's names.³

The state's own words came from the Chief Minister, C. N. Annadurai, who visited the village: "People should forget this as they forget a feverish nightmare or a flash of lightning."⁹

Who remembers, and how

Keezhvenmani did not forget. A first memorial was built in 1969 and opened by Jyoti Basu, then deputy Chief Minister of West Bengal.⁹ Each year on 25 December people gather there under red flags; in 2018, the fiftieth year, thousands came, and a larger memorial was rising beside it, with burnt bodies and raised fists in concrete.⁶

Writers kept the night in view. Mythily Sivaraman's essay "Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani" appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly in May 1973, and her writing on the massacre is collected in Haunted by Fire.^1,9 Meena Kandasamy's novel The Gypsy Goddess retells it.^1,7

For many Dalits, though, the story came late. Shalin Maria Lawrence first read of it in 2016. She argues that later tellings made Keezhvenmani a class struggle and took the caste out of it, and that when the Dalit leader Thol. Thirumavalavan came to pay homage in 1999, the Communists turned him away.⁸ At the fiftieth anniversary his party, the VCK, stood among the crowds.⁶

What is still unknown

We have not yet read the court's judgment in the massacre case, so this account does not name the accused; it will, with each one's exact status, once their names are checked against the court record.^1,8 The names of the 44 are on the memorial at Venmani, but not yet in a source we can cite here.⁶ The sources still disagree on the count, on the sentences of 1970 and on the year of the acquittal.^1,2,3,8