Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

growth of coir processing might have improved the condition of laborers working in the
area. But, as pointed out earlier, coir processing rarely progressed beyond a household
enterprise, and hence, the social mobility of the coir workers was not sufficient to bring
about the change that took place in, for example, in the Alappuzha region.
Other calamities
Other handicaps also emerged during the post-rebellion period. About ten years after the
rebellion, the area was hit by a cyclone, one of the few to hit the Kerala Coast during
recent times. The cyclone was sufficiently ferocious, as it destroyed considerable
property, but according to memory of people, claimed no lives. People remember being
woken up in the night by the thundering hiss of the cyclone, which uprooted a number of
trees in the parambas; destroyed buildings and the sea lashed up and devoured a
substantial part of the coastal area. Although no lives were lost, it took quite a while for
the people to recover the losses sustained during the cyclone. The cyclone seems to have
reinforced the belief patterns among the people, as some of them sincerely believed that
they were protected from the cyclone by divine intervention, and the loss of property was
the punishment they received for their sins.
During 1940s there was a major bout of cholera. Cholera and other epidemics were not
new to the area, as there were other attacks of the epidemic during 19 th century. But the
cholera was the most ferocious in the memory and traditions of the people of the region.
People remembered entire areas in Tirurangadi, Parappanangadi and Nannambra filled
with corpses, and the impact of the attack on other parts also was equally severe. In many
areas corpses were lying about with no one to attend to them and people dreaded coming
anywhere near them. In many places people evacuated en masse to interior parts.
However, there were bold people in several areas who undertook to bury the corpses
single handedly. In Palathinkal, there was a grameena yuvasangham who undertook the