The numerous class struggles that climaxed in the historic Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt of 1946 in Alappuzha are all set to come alive once again, albeit in the pages of a three-volume study that Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac is working on.
To be titled ‘Class Struggles in Alappuzha’, the three-volume study is expected to span over a thousand pages. The first volume is slated for a release this October, coinciding with the Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt commemoration programmes, Dr. Isaac, who was in Alappuzha on Thursday to collect judgement records and police crime records of the revolt from the District Collectorate, told The Hindu.
The first volume will trace formation of the bourgeois class and working class in Alappuzha and the various stages of the struggles between the two, the climax of which was the Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt.
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It will also explore in fair detail the political questions raised by the workers and how the Left forces had achieved hegemony over the bourgeois class through the struggles.
The second volume, to deal with the post-Independence period and to end with the 1970s and the Emergency, will examine the electoral victories of the Left in that period; the unprecedented mobilization in petty production sectors after the 1964 split of the Communist Party of India; and the rapid spread of the workers’ movements in the agriculture, coir and other unorganized sectors, said Dr. Isaac, who had collected a major part of the background material while doing his doctoral thesis nearly 30 years back on ‘Class struggles and the Industrial Structure: A Study of the Coir Weaving Industry in Kerala’.
The third volume will deal mostly with the post-Emergency period, he said, pointing out that a very important aspect of the entire work would be the analysis of the cultural aspects of the class struggle, caste influences on the struggle and how workers overcame caste affinities to unite for their own larger good.
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The work, which is expected to turn out to be an authentic reference to the Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt, is also expected to peg the number of martyrs in the revolt to around 200. An issue that has been debated for long, with some historians and even British records putting the number above 1,000, Dr. Isaac said the evidence he had collected pegged the number of martyrs around 200, or a maximum of 250.
Stating that this would be his biggest work so far, Dr. Isaac quipped that he would however, not want to court any controversies with the work.