Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

job of burying the corpses. The informants testified that no official help reached
anywhere, no preventive care facilities were instituted anywhere. People appeared to
have sought the help of magical healers. One magical device was the hoisting of flags
that were offered and blessed in the jarum of Mamburam Thangal in different localities.
It was believed that the flags had the capacity to stop Cholera from spreading into their
regions. Whether the flags had any such capacity, is another matter, but some of the
informants did insist that spread of Cholera indeed stopped after the hoisting of the flags.
The flags did not end the misery of the people in the area. Together with Cholera, the
region became a victim of famine conditions. Partly the conditions were part of the
overall conditions of shortage experienced during the Second World War. In the case of
the people of Tirurangadi, they had already been impoverished in the circumstances
discussed above, and their misery was exacerbated during the war. Studies on the
economic trends of the thirties show that the money income of the cultivator had reduced
by half, and many of them were reduced to indebtedness in their efforts to meet their
livelihood and to pay their taxes to the Government and rent to the landlords. The
Malabar tenancy committee was appointed in 1939 to look into the problem of the rural
indebtedness and the problems of the tenants. The Tenancy Committee Report could not
take effect and there was the complaint that the report gave no serious recommendation to
solve the problems of the Verumpattakkar. During the Second World War, the prices
again soared, and the cultivators and small farmers were being rendered destitute.
People remembered a time when they had nothing to eat other then roots and grass,
nothing to drink except water. They lived a semi-nomadic kind of existence in which
every day people left their homes searching for articles which would satisfy their hunger
and come back with the barest needs. Even the prices of the normally available
commodities in the market soared. Normally people procured such commodities through
a kind of barter exchange, by exchanging the products from the parambas with