They Burned the School Rather Than Teach Her

In 1893, a man in Travancore bought a bullock cart.

That is the whole of the act, and it was an act. Ayyankali was a Pulaya, a community which in the Travancore of that year could not use the public roads, could not enter the markets, could not go to school, and whose members were expected to call out as they moved so that people of higher caste would not be polluted by coming on them unexpectedly.

He bought a villuvandi, a decorated ox-cart of the sort a man of standing rode in. He dressed in the clothes of an upper-caste man. And he drove it down the public road at Venganoor, and then into the market at Nedumangad.

Scholars describe what he was doing as laying claim to public space, which is exactly right. It is worth saying what it cost. There was violence; the confrontations that followed are remembered as the Chaliyar riots. By about 1900, Pulayas could use most roads in Travancore, though not the ones that led to Hindu temples.

He had started with a cart.

Where he came from

Ayyankali was born on the 28th of August, 1863, at Venganoor near Thiruvananthapuram, eldest of the eight children of Ayyan and Mala. His father worked as bonded labour for a landlord.

He had no schooling. He could not have had any. That was the point of the arrangement.