Will toddy tappers movement get betrayed a third time?

By K Vijayachandran

A professional toddy tapper is the product of traditional learning through generations, and several years of rigorous practical training. Life span of coconut trees, like the humans, is around a century and its flowering rhythm follows the moon. Every moon month, a bunch of leaves and a spathe sprout out from the crown and perched on the heights, the toddy tapper performs his operations on the nectar bearing female flowers, with robotic precision. He carries on his body a set of tools: a sharp bladed knife for slicing away the spathe by microns, a tiny jar of clayey paste for smearing on the cut, a wooden rod or animal bone for beating up the spathe, and a jar of two liter capacity to collect and carry down the day's yield. A tree has to be climbed thrice a day: two times for preparations and once for collecting the yield toward the evening. A healthy tapper tends to eight to ten trees depending on the heights to be scaled: on the average he climbs some 200 meters every day.

The healthy well built body of a toddy tapper cycling from from one tree to the other, spaced a kilometer apart on the average, is a usual pleasant site in our toddy producing suburbs. No schools, schemes or syllabuses are prescribed for the bringing up of professional toddy tappers and teaching them the biochemistry of toddy and the physiognomy of coconut palms. Toddy tappers have no books of reference or technical journals in their mother tongue for self learning. Nevertheless, their employers depend on their expertise, to choose the best of trees for lease out from farmers. The profession continues to be caste based and knowledge is acquired by the new generation by feel, by touch and by rigorous instructions from the elders in the family.

Under the good old feudal regime, toddy tappers were well compensated for their hard-earned skills and expertise. They were the backbone of a slowly emerging hospitality industry in the land of coconuts, patronized even by foreigners. Arrack, sugar, yeast and vinegar were side products from palm toddy and local brewing and distilling industries using its as the main feedstock developed using imported technology from Sri Lanka which considers Arrack as its national drink. Toddy tapping families developed into powerful business houses in the slowly transforming feudal economy of the region and young toddy tappers were much sought after bridegrooms for the daughters of Ezhava Chieftains and landlords of medieval Kerala.

Untold story under the British

Developments in toddy industry after the arrival of the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and the British find no place in the recorded history of Kerala. It must have suffered the same fate as most other local industries or handicraft. Toddy and its byproducts had to compete with beer, whiskey and brandy as well as the products of sugarcane plantations. These products had enjoyed big technological advantages and economy of scale over toddy and byproducts which were suffering from social as well as cultural handicaps. These, no doubt, were extremely hostile factors, however the major role in the downfall of toddy industry was played by the regulation and taxation policies of the state under the British hegemony.

The right to make, process and sell toddy was auctioned off by the Government on an annual basis. This assured maximum benefit for the state exchequer and the industry was compelled to squeeze maximum prices from customers on annual basis. The system of annual auction effectively prevented reinvestment of profits in the industry and blocked investments in R&D and technology improvements. Sri Lanka, from where the toddy technology had migrated, moved to the technology of large scale toddy plantations with special high yielding varieties of palm trees, in the meanwhile. Such well planned plantations substantially improved worker productivity as well: a worker need to climb up only a single tree and then move over to scores of other trees through a rope network.

Well planned toddy plantations were a technological leap forward that moved toddy and associated industries in Sri Lanka, closer to large scale production, as in the case of sugarcane plantations, which supply the molasses stock for the IMFL industry in India. The social and political forces that blocked the natural development of toddy industry in India, especially in Kerala, could be a subject for historical research. However, it is safe to conclude that as in the case of all other local brews and drinks, toddy and toddy industry in Kerala was also looked down by the elite classes of India during British days and their natural growth and development was effectively stalled by a system of state regulation and taxation.

Impact of the Guru and the Mahatma

Toddy tapping and processing was the monopoly vocation of Ezhava caste and it may look an irony of fate that, Narayana Guru, despite his deep commitment to the economic, cultural and spiritual uplift of the downtrodden Ezhava community, was a staunch campaigner against alcohol. He had reportedly extolled his disciples: alcohol is poison, don’t make it sell it or drink it! Members of Ezhava community have literally accepted almost all his calls: to get themselves organized, to get educated, to take to modern industry, to stop evil practices like child marriage and several other calls relevant to the period of communal and religious renaissance. However, the one on alcohol stands virtually rejected by his fellowmen. During his campaign through the breadth and width of Kerala, he had stayed with and enjoyed the hospitality of a large number of elite families, whose main source of income and affluence was toddy industry. Guru had never pleaded with them or advised them to abandon this industry of their sustenance. All these to a very fundamental question: was the Guru really against the toddy industry as made out by a section of his followers?

A much larger tirade against the local toddy industry in Kerala came in later with Mahatma Gandhi’s call for total prohibition and boycott of foreign goods as part of the independence struggle. Mahatma had supported the cause of non-alcoholic Neera and Neera products as part of his village industry strategy. Whatever were the ideals and intentions of the Guru and the Mahatma, the elitist interpretations of their reservations and objections regarding alcohol have not stopped or slowed down the consumption of foreign liquor and India Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL): Real losers were palm toddy and other local brews which were relatively less harmful to human health and more beneficial to the local economy.

Hypocrisy of Kerala elite

Total prohibition was considered an integral part of the Swadeshi movement during the days independence struggle, because of the domination of imported foreign liquor and its destructive effect on our intelligentsia and elite classes. State governments as well as the Union Government in Delhi swung into the act of total prohibition as soon as India became independent. However, foreign liquor and its Swadeshi avatar, the IMFL, were allowed to survive through all sorts special permits and licenses, in the interest of the elite classes and big business. Soon after independence, scope of the prohibition movement led by the elite classes degenerated into campaigns against local drinks and products of cottage industry, like toddy and arrack and the low-end molasses spirit targeted at the poorer sections of the population.

Net effect of this distorted agenda was disastrous: Widespread production and sale of illicit liquor, massive hooch tragedies, inhuman harassment of local brewers and distillers, destruction of local liquor industry, and rapid expansion of IMFL industry, unprecedented growth of corruption at all levels and the rise of liquor barons in state as well as federal politics!! Hypocrisy in all these is conveniently overlooked by the media as well as the general public. Toddy shops are taboo for the middle class, fit to be operated only in dilapidated sheds and under unhygienic conditions. Imported drinks and IMFL are sold in bars and star restaurants that belong to upper class culture. Brewers and distillers of IMFL receive all sorts of investment support and subsidies from Government where as smalltime local brewers and distillers are hunted down and harassed by excise policemen in virtual rolls of Abkari mafia. It is undeclared apartheid of the worst kind against local drinks: cultural, political and economic.

Betrayal of toddy tappers movement?

Economic, political and cultural ill-effects of the perverted prohibition policy in Travancore-Cochin and Malabar areas were apparent right from the very beginning. These were resisted by the trade union movement in toddy industry, led by the militant toddy tappers, whose hard earned skills and expertise continue to be the backbone of toddy industry even today. Toddy tappers movement enjoyed the full support of Left parties and in turn made significant contributions to working class politics. Apart from fighting for better wages and social security in this traditional industry, the toddy tappers were demanding recast of the Abkari policy inherited from British days, and also for structural changes in the age old industry.

This traditional industry could survive decades of policy offensives and vacillations by successive governments, mainly on the strength of the workers movement. Toddy tapping continues to be an honorable profession, and toddy workers numbering around 50,000 enjoy job security, earn their minimum wages and enjoy minimal social security benefits, even though ownership of toddy shops were auctioned off every year till recently: Kerala Toddy Workers Welfare Fund, with a membership of over 35000, has an accumulated fund of over Rs.150 Crore as on now. The last LDF government made a half hearted beginning toward worker cooperative, during its last year in power (2000-01) which was immediately reversed, when UDF came to power. Election manifesto of LDF has once again promised in 2006, to implement the two decades old recommendations of Udayabhanu commission.

Dreaming for a new era in toddy industry:

On the strength of these recommendations, trade unions in toddy sector are now demanding a state-wide network of toddy worker cooperatives, to be promoted by Kerala Government, jointly with the Toddy Workers' Welfare Fund Board. The network would consist of:

* A thousand primary cooperative toddy farms, each two hectares on the average, with 350 high yielding variety trees, 300 liter per day of toddy output and engaging about fifty workers and other employees. These will be similar to the ones, that have already come up in some areas of Palghat district, but equipped with modern facilities for the cleaning, treating, testing, bottling and refrigerated storing of palm toddy.

* Each cooperative farm may operate two or three restaurants or toddy parlors as part of the hospitality in the neighborhood, selling clean wholesome toddy and serving the best of Kerala foods. Bottled toddy supplied by these primary cooperatives could be sold through other restaurants in the locality as well.

* Fifty or sixty primary cooperatives could jointly establish regional centers in each district, for organizing support services as well as for the manufacture and marketing of byproducts like arrack, treacle, vinegar, jaggery, nira, fruit syrup and other food items.

* A state level apex society will serve as the top level policy making body and will organize training schools for toddy tappers, attend to other HRD requirements of the industry, and set up and manage an appropriate R&D institution.

The cooperative network will have a strength of around sixty thousand and an annual turnover of Rs.750 Crore. Toddy workers have the organizational discipline, skills, financial resources to promote such cooperative ventures, and have also the capacity to dream. The archaic Abkari laws inherited from British days should go lock, stock and barrel, and a revolutionary transformation of toddy industry is within the reach of Kerala politics: Will LDF keep up its election promise or repeat its act of betrayal of toddy workers for a third time?

08.12.2006