Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

In the case of Tirurangadi, even the rise in prices was marginal and it never reached the
levels during the beginning of the century. The price situation, along with the expansion
of small holdings mentioned earlier made the plight of the cultivator difficult. One should
also remember that there was very little effort to implement measures to improve
productivity, except or the physical expansion of cultivable areas. As we have seen, this
was indeed attempted but there were inbuilt limitations for the process as the undulating
rocky terrain prevented major expansion.
All these meant that livelihood was becoming a major point of concern, a problem that
the people of Tirurangadi were required to solve during the decades after the rebellion.
Out-migrations
These solutions have not been documented anywhere, but they lay scattered in the
memories of the people, and they can be used as leads for further investigations. Another
solution seems to have been migrations. Old people remember people who traveled to far
away places in search of a livelihood. The earliest generation, as indicated before, went to
Rangoon, Penang and other places. People who made a livelihood never returned, and the
others returned with whatever money they were able to make there. After the rebellion
and the deportation of the rebels to Andamans, Andaman Island was a major attraction
for a number of people, and the relatives of the Andaman settlers left to build Malayali
settlements in the Andamans, some of them bearing malayali names, such as Tirurangadi.
Some of them returned, but a number of them continue to live there and visit their
homeland only occasionally. The establishment of estates at Nilambur resulted in the
recruitment of a number of people as plantation laborers. They left their households to do
wage labor in the estates, and some of them became teashop owners and small traders in
the estate areas. When the migration to Waynad gathered strength from the thirties,
Mappilas in the region appear to have gone there as laborers and this migration continued