C. Kesavan

Who was C. Kesavan?

C. Kesavan was the Chief Minister of Travancore-Cochin during 1950–1952.

He was born in an Ezhava family in 1891 in the village of Mayyanad, near to Kollam in the then princely state of Travancore.

Kesavan was influenced by the work of Padmanabhan Palpu, the social reform campaigner who was a member of the low-caste Ezhava community and a founder of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana association. He became an activist for the Ezhava caste, seeking an improved socio-economic position for them, and in the 1930s he suggested that they should abandon Hinduism. He was an atheist.

Kesavan wrote an incomplete autobiography, consisting of two volumes that described his life up to the time of his political prominence. A third volume was planned to cover that later period but was unwritten at the time of his death. The work combined the story of his own life with a wider narrative concerning the plight of the Ezhava caste of which he was a member. Udaya Kumar says that his "early memories are tinged with two lines of injustice: the discrimination he suffered as an Ezhava boy on the streets and other public places, where he was forced to defer to upper-caste people, and the unjust exercise of authority by the elders and the upper sub-divisions within the Ezhava caste".