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The Kilvenmani massacre: When 44 Dalits were burned alive in one of India's earliest caste-based atrocities
During a field visit to Kilvenmani in 2020, a thirsty Deivendra Kumar A recalls asking an elderly woman for drinking water. Her response stayed with him. 'Neenga enna aalunga, neenga enga kitta thanni kudippeegala? (What caste are you? Will you take water from us?)' the woman asked. The question struck Kumar, then a Master's student at a nearby university, for multiple reasons, but mainly because this Tamil Nadu village was the site of one of independent India's earliest and most severe instances of caste-based violence.
More than half a century after that fateful day in 1968 when 44 Dalits were burned alive in Kilvenmani, Kumar A realised that little had changed in the remote village in the agriculturally rich Nagapattinam (earlier part of Thanjavur) district on the east coast of Tamil Nadu.
In his 2023 article in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, titled 'In Memory of a Charred Village', Kumar A evokes powerful imagery of a hut which has been turned into a memorial. Adjacent to it is a new memorial called Manimandapam, with 44 carved pillars and raised fists representing the martyrs, he notes.
But what happened in 1968? Who were the 44 victims of caste-based violence? Why was caste discrimination still prevalent in a newly independent India? And what was the aftermath of the violence?
In the 1960s, landlord oppression was prevalent in Thanjavur. Among most districts in Tamil Nadu, Thanjavur had the most skewed land ownership trend at the time. A 1973 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, titled the 'Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani', notes that since 1961, 3.8 per cent of cultivating households in the district held more than 25.88 per cent of the cultivated area while 76 per cent held only 37 per cent of the area. Thanjavur reportedly had a high number of landless labourers: for every 10 cultivators, there were at least nine labourers. Among the landless, Harijans formed the bulk. 'It was here that feudal serfdom had fully developed,' the article noted.
During the 1940s, the Communists became active in the village and associated themselves with the Dalits, as per the article. By the 1960s, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had successfully mobilised them, most of them agricultural labourers in Kilvenmani, to demand higher wages and resist the oppression of the feudal, upper-caste landlords.
Author and academic Elisabeth B Armstrong, in her 2014 book Gender and Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women's Association and Globalization Politics, highlights how women from Kilvenmani also joined the growing leftist women's movement. Together, Dalit men and women challenged what she calls 'established traditions of social oppression, labour exploitation, and sexual predation'.
However, in 1966, upper-caste landlords under the leadership of Gopala Krishna Naidu founded the Paddy Producers Association (PPA). Naidu was one of the most powerful landowners in the area and owned estates in Kilvenmani and several neighbouring villages. The PPA helped bring labourers from outside Kilvenmani, replacing local labourers who were demanding salaries above the minimum wage.
'The landlords' pent up anger, frustration and inability to reconcile themselves to the Harijans' new found identity found expression on December 25, 1968…,' notes the 1973 article.
On December 25, 1968, a landlord in Kilvenmani hired labour supplied by the PPA to punish local labourers, who had gone on strike multiple times demanding higher wages. The atmosphere was quite tense. Eyewitness accounts record that on the same evening, a tea-shop owner was kidnapped by the landlords and beaten up for refusing to advise the labourers to join the PPA. Enraged, the labourers forced the release of the man. In the conflict, an agent of one of the landlords was killed.
The mirasdars (large landowners), according to Armstrong, sought revenge. At 10 pm that night, the landlords and their men arrived in police lorries and surrounded the Dalit neighbourhood from three sides, cutting all escape routes, she says. 'They shot at the Harijans with guns, attacked them with sickles and sticks and set fire to their huts. Several Harijans were hurt, two very seriously. Some women, children and old men ran and took refuge in one of the huts. The murderers immediately surrounded the hut, and set fire to it,' she cites.
The next morning, 44 bodies were recovered.
In her 1999 book Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, UK historian Susan Bayly noted that all the Kilvenmani victims were rural labourers belonging to the Harijan community. In contrast, among the 200 attackers reportedly involved in the violence were some of the richest landowners of the area.
While mainstream media portrayed the incident as a wage dispute, according to Armstrong, locals suggested that the violence was fuelled by upper-caste anxiety over the growing militancy of the agricultural workers and their defiance of caste-based practices. 'The suggestion that it was simply the wage issue…was meant to cover up the underlying cause of the agrarian trouble that had attracted even judicial notice,' noted the 1973 article.
In his 2017 book, Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India, scholar and writer Anand Teltumbde notes: 'These atrocities were unleashed by collectives of the dominating castes on collectives of the Dalit in a celebratory mode, not as punishment for specific contraventions of the caste code…'
'The role of the left women's movement was as critical in Kilvenmani,' notes Armstrong. Women's committees in the Communist Party of India produced some powerful women leaders, as seen in the protests that followed the Kilvenmani massacre, she says.
'These same Dalit women active in the agricultural workers' union of the Thanjuvar district created the backbone for the Tamil Nadu Democratic Women's Association (DWA) when it formed in 1974,' says Armstrong. In the founding convention of the Tamil Nadu DWA in 1974, she further notes, Dalit women activists from Thanjavur constituted half of its membership of 27,000 women.
However, with the 25 accused in the murder case, including Naidu, being acquitted, the alleged role of the bureaucracy and local administration in refusing to act against the upper castes had become increasingly evident.
According to Teltumbde, the 'extreme caste-class prejudices of India's judges' had been apparent since the Kilvenmani massacre. According to the 1973 Economic and Political Weekly article, 'The evidence did not enable Their Lordships to identify and punish the guilty'.
The 'Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani' article notes how the (Madras) High Court ruled that it was beneath the dignity of the landlords to stain their hands with the blood of the lowly; such an act, they reasoned, was inconsistent with their social standing. A man who owned 'extensive lands,' and 'a car,' the court opined, could not possibly be so insensitive. 'In brief, gentlemen farmers will also be gentlemen killers,' the article reads.
Although relegated to the pages of history, the Kilvenmani massacre remains one of independent India's first and harshest caste-based violence. The memorial at the village honours the lives lost and also stands as testimony to how justice was denied to the victims.
Ironically, not much has changed in Kilvenmani even today. 'Kilvenmani is caught in a time capsule, where most of the villagers are landless,' Kumar A notes in his article.
Nikita writes for the Research Section of focusing on the intersections between colonial history and contemporary issues, especially in gender, culture, and sport.
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