As for us children, none of this mattered in the least. The traditional-minded in our parish frowned upon this because the plantation church followed the Latin rite, not the Syrian rite, although both are Catholic. We got to know Father Lawrence because attending his ramshackle chapel near our family farm was far easier than enduring the hilly, one-hour walk to our parish church. “An ethic of work and an ethic of drink went hand in hand.This article is a selection from our Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly India IssueĮxplore India’s vibrant history, picturesque locales and delicious eats Buy “Drinking was seen within the context of work and lubricated enthusiasm for work,” according to Menon. Landlords also raised small armies to deal with rivals when it came to land disputes and access to wetlands. Around harvest time, the promise of toddy was enough to mobilise labour. Toddy had other uses in northern Kerala at that time. It is clear from the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov that this would have been impossible in Tsarist Russia. It was unimaginable in Japan, Europe or Russia at that time. Such camaraderie and socialising had few parallels in any feudal society. “This mix of uneasy intimacy and formal hierarchy was transcended only within the community of drink,” Menon wrote. Historians clearly state, for the record, though that such an event did not end social prejudices. “There was no inherent, unvarying connection between caste and landholding or labour… At the same time, it gave rise to what may be termed a community of labour involving landowners and cultivators.” Essentially the younger male members of a landholding family would work in the fields with those employed to cultivate the land, creating a sense of fraternity.Īfter a hard day’s work on the fields, cultivators and landowners, upper and lower caste residents would get together for several glasses of toddy, a drink that contains around eight per cent alcohol. “Even more significant was the fact that an upper caste man would, at times, work the land of a man belonging to a lower caste,” Dilip Menon wrote in the 1995 summer-monsoon edition of the India International Centre’s quarterly publication. Sheer economics created a necessity for people from different castes to cultivate the land together. A large part of this cultivation was undertaken to meet the insatiable global appetite for pepper and coconuts from Malabar. The arrival of the East India Company and Tipu Sultan to Kerala led to a considerable degree of deforestation and the subsequent cultivating of virgin land.

Liquor, in the form of toddy, was something that became a unifying force in a complex social structure in northern Kerala in the 18th century.

There is absolutely no denying the fact that alcoholism is a major problem in Kerala in the 21st century, but few can agree on how to deal with this issue at the moment.

Major caste in kerala