The Strike That Demanded a School

Most histories of labour begin with wages. This one begins with a school bench.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, when caste rules barred Dalit children from Travancore’s schools, Ayyankali responded with a weapon nobody expected agricultural workers to hold: they stopped working the fields. The harvest could wait, the strikers said, until the classroom opened.

It is worth pausing on how radical that inversion was. The landlords’ argument was that labouring castes did not need letters; the strike replied that the fields would not need labourers until they got them. Education — the thing denied as useless — was priced, precisely, at the season’s harvest.

The strike is remembered today as one of the earliest organized labour actions in Kerala’s history, and perhaps the only one anywhere whose central demand was a school admission. When readers ask why this publication keeps returning to education as a theme, this is the answer: in the Bahujan story, the school bench has never been furniture. It is territory.