The Saga of Muziris

by A. Sethumadhavan

  Bezalel remembered that incident, the fact that he carried the white flag with its blue borders, and the yellow star of David, remained a wonderful memory after all these years.

  When the Agency insisted that the householders sell their land and possessions to get money for the passage, Bezalel’s family could not go with the first lot. In those hard days of shortage and recession, the two thousand rupees they wanted would have been a huge amount. No one could raise that much easily. The agency was not willing to reduce in the price either. Finally Bezalel, who had been running around for the passage since the beginning, became determined. He fixed the property deal at a low price, took an advance of one thousand rupees. Handing over the one thousand rupees to the agency, he bargained with them until they agreed to wait till the family reached Israel for the rest of the money. In 1955 Bezalel, with his family consisting of his father and his sister left for Israel. His younger brothers had gone earlier. Though it was difficult at first, in later days, Bezalel could say with pride that his family had not depended on the government’s largesse to reach Israel. Bezalel had kept the receipts carefully and showed them proudly to David Ben Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, later.

  The first job he got was that of grazing the sheep. Everyone had to work irrespective of gender or age. A world of harsh reality was opening out before a young man who had grown up in comfortable surroundings, had acquired a college education. Long battles with that world continued. But, they had all gone there prepared to accept those challenges. Even in the worst of days, Bezalel remembered that they had no thought of returning. They were very conscious of the great destiny that they had chosen.

  After a while, he got used to feeding the sheep and even milking them. Though the sheep did not need to be spoken to in any language, communication with the people around required Hebrew. This meant that it was essential to master the language. The settlers made friends with the school children who came to graze sheep in their free time. And so, they sat like obedient children, in turn, around the children who came during school intervals to look after their sheep.

  The rules of the kibbutz were very strict. Since all property was commonly held, everyone had to work hard. Food and conveniences were shared equally. There were even ministers from the cabinet, who ruled the country, who chose such a life by preference. By the time a year had passed, some of the elders who had emigrated from India found themselves dissatisfied, though the comforts were not bad. The reasons were many. One was that even old people were expected to work. They did not have the freedom to make any decisions. Working harder did not mean better rewards.

  When they decided to shift to the farming land, they chose a mosha(a cooperative association of Israeli smallholders), called Shahar, which had people from all over the world. The majority were from North Africa. The Negev Desert, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob minded the goats, did not even boast of proper homes. The families of six and seven members stayed in barracks that did not possess separate rooms. It took more than two years for running water and electricity to reach those places.

  Though they had moved to farmlands, there was no water still and they stuck to grazing sheep. In the meantime they worked in the neighbouring farmlands at small jobs and learnt a little about cultivation. After a year, they received water. When they received an allotment of a thousand acres, they made a small house and started cultivation on a small scale.

  When some settlers who did not know anything about cultivation, who did not have a feel for the soil, stepped on it, the soil first protested. The first attempt was to tame the soil. Finally, it yielded before the sweat of the hardworking man and became merciful. The government provided the seeds and fertilizers, free of cost. So, they first planted some vegetables in the field. When another thousand acres were added the crops planted included tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and chillies. Soon came sugarcane and cotton.

  Bezalel still did not know how he had got involved in cultivation. He had never touched a spade or worked as a farmer in Kerala. He wanted to study, study more and more, understand the world; so was his dreams. But this was destiny. One who was born to the soil could not end up anywhere else. And there, he found not just work but fulfilment.

  In two years, the land allotted became five thousand acres and the enthusiasm of the six who worked together increased. None of them had time to rest. When there was no work in the fields they would join the labour gangs that broke rocks or repaired roads. This would give them five lira with which they could buy two loaves of bread and two packets of soup powder. In between, there would be work on the cotton fields and the groundnut fields. It was a time when there was not a moment to spare, when they worked eighteen hours a day.

  With the passing of three or four years, the officials in the agriculture ministry realised that the immigrants from Kochi could be trusted with new experiments. And so they were asked to consider the cultivation of flowers. As far as Bezalel and his friends were concerned, flowers were just like vegetables. They were first given gladioli bulbs to plant. Though they knew nothing about flowers, the virgin soil responded and the cultivation was a big success, inspiring them to further their efforts. But the market for flowers was limited in Israel. It was when the prospect to export those to Netherlands came up that a new window of opportunity opened out before them. Within a short period, Bezalel became the most successful gladioli exporter in Israel. It was hardly nine years after he reached Israel that he received the award for the best exporter of gladioli from the then prime minister, Levi Eshkol.

  To Aravindan’s natural question of how he managed all this, Bezalel’s reply was a simple one: an ability to dream. A belief that there would be better methods and better ways of doing things somewhere beyond imagination. And that great recognition that the sprouts of life exist anywhere in nature. Only a person who recognises the life in vegetation as in other creatures and human beings can become a good cultivator. As he started speaking about cultivation, Aravindan realised that Bezalel’s eyes opened wider and his voice held the coolness and green of plants.

  ‘I’ve been sitting for a long time now. Let me walk for a while,’ Bezalel got up and started pacing in the room.

  ‘How’s the treatment going?’

  ‘One can’t really call it treatment. It is more a relief, these short visits. There’s a lot of work waiting for me there.’

  Aravindan could not help being surprised. A mind that refused to yield before age. A body that is not reluctant to obey that mind. His mind was filled with unfinished tasks still.

  Bezalel was speaking again.

  It was when he realised that plants too had times when they slept and when they opened their mouths that the farmer in Bezalel was born. They needed to be fed and put to sleep according to this natural rhythm. The roots should not be allowed to wander deep into the soil in search of water and nourishment. They had other heavy responsibilities. If you pay attention to their needs and see that they get what they need in time, they will concentrate on the growth of the plant.

  Bezalel had not studied farming from books, but from the soil he had laid his hands on. As he felt the nature of the soil by his sense of touch, he was able to change the way of planting and caring. These were new methods that no books spoke about. They discovered that the exocarp, the non-fibrous outer layer of the coconut husk, made the dampness stay better and allowed the roots to move in quickly. For this they imported coconut fibre from India and Sri Lanka. After this his attempt was to improve the method of ‘fertigation’ that was prevalent in Israel. Fertigation was a combination of irrigation and feeding of fertilisers. High tanks with a mixture of water and fertilizer were set up and this mixture automatically fed to the plants at fixed intervals through small tubes. This was a big success and there was a bumper crop that year.

  Later, he gave shape to an air-conditioned greenhouse for growing flowers and this became a sight to behold in Israel. As a person who had found his own path in cultivation he was given a seat on all governmen
t committees and organisations that dealt with agriculture.

  When Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Israel as part of some study group and expressed a desire to see an authentic immigrant village, they had been taken to visit Bezalel. Sartre was very interested in finding out whether the immigrants from Asia faced any racial discrimination. The belief was that any child born to a Jewish woman was a Jew. Though there was not much discrimination at the policy level, the ground reality was that the whites were always treated better. The immigrants, though, had become used to all this. They also knew that things were not likely to change any time soon.

  What Bezalel had to tell Sartre was about the discrimination in the field of education. As long as the white settlers had only one or two children, Israel would need the black and brown settlers to provide the manpower that she needed. Therefore the educational facilities at the villages of these settlers had to be improved. When compared with the schools in Tel Aviv and other big cities, the state of the schools in the villages was pathetic in all matters, from the provision of basic amenities to the qualification of the teachers. Though they had listened with great interest, the report met the usual fate of most reports.

  Slowly greenhouses, big and small, owned by Jews from Kochi, started coming up in various parts of Israel. With this, the voice of those who had emigrated from here came to be heard.

  The challenge faced by the country, whose land was two-thirds desert, was taming that inhospitable terrain. That was the dream of Ben Gurion, the first prime minister. He heard about and paid attention to the achievements of Bezalel and his friends, who had greened the Negev Desert. Though he had been very keen on seeing it with his own eyes, he managed to do it only after his health was in decline. And within another six months, he had died.

  Bezalel’s voice faltered as he spoke on, reliving a mixture of bitter-sweet memories. He paused with the relief of having said a lot he had wanted to say and wiped his face with a handkerchief. He said, ‘That was another time. I wonder if this generation will understand any of it.’

  Aravindan just bent his head without saying anything.

  ‘So, when do we meet again?’ Bezalel asked when Aravindan got up to go.

  ‘We’ll meet again, definitely.’

  ‘Is it possible? We live in different worlds.’

  ‘No, but I’ll definitely come down when you come here the next time,’ Aravindan assured him.

  As they said their goodbyes and parted Aravindan continued to think about the two-hundred-pages notebook that Bezalel had spoken about, the notebook with jottings prepared for the next generation. And about the small house that Bezalel planned to build in the land of his birth. For this, he had bought a piece of land at a high price in the compound where his ancestral home stood.

  Why do you need a house here, at this age? Bezalel had a ready answer. ‘It is for the coming generations. They should realise that this is the earth in which my ancestors sleep.’

  As Bezalel had spoken repeatedly about the new generation that was seeking its roots, Aravindan thought he was indeed best qualified to speak of roots. Those who had managed to put down strong roots in the inhospitable desert knew the value of roots. And the rightness of roots.

  It was an odd combination—that of the Kodungallur palace and communism. Especially when it had taken roots there through the female members of the royal household.

  The later history of Kodungallur, an important link in the history of Muchiri, seemed fascinating to Aravindan. He had heard stories in childhood of the adventures of Kunhikutty Thampuratty. It was the journalist Ravi who had told him the real story. The true stories did sound stranger than fiction. A young high-born woman of twenty and her friends, trying to create a revolution to free themselves from the chains of old and worn-out traditions, made for an enthralling tale.

  In those days, the princesses of the royal family studied only up to the fourth standard. They studied at the palace school, within the confines of the royal palace. The subject studied was mainly Sanskrit. The teachers were all people of higher caste. As soon as they grew a little, these young women, who grew up within the confines of a thorny fence, were married ritually in a ceremony called the kettukalyanam, to some Brahmin, who they did not even see. The selected Brahmin would tie a thali around the necks of a number of girls, of more or less the same age, and depart after accepting his reward. When the girls were around fifteen, they would be married again properly to some high-born Namboodiri. This marriage was consummated and children were born and brought up. The groom was often an old man and so the young princesses were usually widowed at a young age. Thereafter, they lived in the inner rooms of the palace, forced to forget their interest in studying, reading and finding out about the outside world.

  The winds of change entered the royal household when the nation went through a process of renaissance. The thoughts of modernisation and reformation that blew through the Namboodiri society had their echoes in the royal households as well. When the groups of men, sitting in the hall, moved away from poetry and chess and started discussing politics, the young women too imbibed those thoughts. The idea of women coming out of the kitchen to the outside world sounded very attractive to them. The young men, who sought English education, were also inspired by the ideas. When they came back from the outside world with knowledge and information and the fastened hooks of the windows started giving way.

  When their first attempt at a small rebellion worked, the young women were emboldened. They had demanded that they be allowed to study beyond the fourth standard. The king made arrangements for them to continue their studies in the palace school itself. Shelley and Keats entered the rooms of the royal household. The improved education, their eager reading and the ideas that the books brought broadened the minds of these young women. Independent thinking became a way of life and the courage to question things that they did not believe in, shook the walls of the palace. The communist way of thought seemed a way to freedom to these prisoners of customs and mores.

  ‘You know how girls read the love letters they receive. They hide it in the folds of their skirts and take it to some corner to read it again and again till they had enough. We used to read the communist writings with the same eagerness.’ Kunhikutty Thampuratty said.

  Kunhikutty Thampuratty whose interests had been confined to poetry, game and dances realised that there was a world outside the thick walls of the royal palace. Her elder brother who had left the confines of the palace in search of better education came back with stories about Gandhi and Nehru and others.

  The first book she got to read was The Mother by Maxim Gorky. She realised that beyond the mothers she was acquainted with in the Mahabharata, there was a mother whose feet were rooted in the soil. The history of the Soviet Union that she laid her hands on during this period, when she had started thinking for herself, was an eye-opener. She started hero-worshipping Comrade A.K. Gopalan whose stories she had heard from her brothers. In her mind, she compared him with the characters she had read about in the Russian stories. A relative, connected with the Communist Party, finally managed to fulfil her desire to see this hero in real life.

  One afternoon, AKG came to the Chirakkal palace with the Thampuran. For the first time in their lives they were seeing a leader who worked among the people. They presented him with a golden sickle and hammer they had had the goldsmith at the palace make for them.

  This visit brought a great awakening within the confines of the palace. Major developments in the country were now being discussed there. Though none of them had direct contact with the Communist Party, its thoughts and ideas became an influence. One day, instructions came from the Party that two princesses should take part in the Paliyam Satyagraha. The young women, Indira and Rema were selected for this.

  They were to get out of the palace grounds early in the morning and walk two miles to join the comrades who waited near the temple. This was a difficult task for the young women who had not seen the outside world at all.
But they were led by the flames of rebellion that had been lighted within the confines of the crumbling stones of the palace. The young royal women, who had longed for a change for generations, saw their only hope in the communist movement.

  The Police Inspector was shocked to see two young women from the royal household among the protestors and tried to persuade them to turn away. When they did not listen to him, but moved forward, the police arrested them, took them some distance and let them go.

  The incident created shock-waves in the palace and its surrounding area. Soon a Party cell was formed within the palace. Four van-loads of policemen appeared one day at the palace to break up the cell. Though they found nothing much, after a thorough search, four of the young women from the royal household were arrested.

  By the time they were released, their stories had spread all over and they were able to step out of the palace and work among the people. The government took its revenge by suspending the monthly allowance paid to the members of the royal household. They also tried to involve the members of the household in false cases, but that did not work.

  The young women stepped out into the world actively and worked among the people, writing a novel chapter in the history of democratic struggles.

  This is a solitary journey through different times, different generations, Aravindan reminded himself.

  As he tried to trace the imagined changes in Muchiri through the present day into the future, the metamorphosis the place went through had to find their space. In these jottings that were for Gayathri, his grand-daughter, for the generations to come, many such changes and states find their place.