C. Kesavan

C. Kesavan (23 May 1891 – 7 July 1969) was the Chief Minister of Travancore-Cochin during 1950–1952.^[1]

He was born in an Ezhava family in 1891 in the village of Mayyanad, near Kollam in the then princely state of Travancore.^[1]

Kesavan was influenced by the work of Padmanabhan Palpu, the social reform campaigner who was a member of the backward Ezhava community and a founder of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana association.^[2] He became an activist for the Ezhava caste, seeking an improved socio-economic position for them, and in the 1930s he suggested that they should abandon Hinduism. Thus he was an atheist.^[1]

Kesavan wrote an incomplete autobiography, consisting of two volumes that described his life up to the time of his political prominence. A third volume was planned to cover that later period but was unwritten at the time of his death. The work combined the story of his own life with a wider narrative concerning the plight of the Ezhava caste of which he was a member. Udaya Kumar says that his "early memories are tinged with two lines of injustice: the discrimination he suffered as an Ezhava boy on the streets and other public places, where he was forced to defer to upper-caste people, and the unjust exercise of authority by the elders and the upper sub-divisions within the Ezhava caste".^[1]

The Kollam Corporation Town Hall was named the C. Kesavan Memorial Municipal Town Hall in Kesavan's memory. It is a decades-old building situated on the National Highway passing through the Cantonment.^[3][1] The building is now one of the main venues for several cultural events and meetings.^[4][5]

References