C. K. Janu

Who is C. K. Janu?

C. K. Janu is the leader of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha, a social movement that has been pushing for land to be redistributed to landless adivasis and that grew out of the Dalit-Adivasi Action Council in Kerala state, South India.

Janu's background is Ravula, one of the adivasi groups in Kerala who used to be indentured laborers and whose people are still mostly landless agricultural laborers. Janu had no formal education but learned to read and write through a literacy campaign that was conducted in Wayanad, the area in the north of Kerala, near the border with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, where Janu comes from. Her biography is quite typical of Adiya people: she used to be landless and used to work as an agricultural laborer. Actually, as she never gained much money with her political career—or even lost money on having to pay for her political activities—she still often does this kind of work to get by.

Janu was with the Communist Party of India for a while in her youth and gained some experience in politics there—but also soon learned that the CPI was not actually interested in the landless poor very much any more. She therefore left the party in 1982. She was an active social worker at the beginning of the 90s and was even, in November 1994, awarded a state award for her efforts in this field. She however returned the award as a critique of the government's lack of responsiveness to the demands of landless adivasis.