Mithavadi

Overview

Mithavadi was a Malayalam-language newspaper that was published first from Tellicherry, now Thalassery, and later from Calicut, now Kozhikode, in Malabar in British India. T. Sivasankaran established it in 1907, and Moorkoth Kumaran edited it in its first phase. The paper aimed at the promotion of social reform and at the uplift of marginalised sections of society, and contemporaries and later historians described it as a voice for the rights of the depressed classes. Its name later attached itself permanently to its second proprietor, C. Krishnan, who was known for the rest of his life and in Kerala's historical memory as Mithavadi Krishnan.

The life of Mithavadi fell into two distinct periods. The first ran from its founding in 1907 under Kumaran's editorship at Tellicherry. The second began in 1913, when C. Krishnan purchased the paper on the advice of the reformer Rao Sahib Dr Ayyathan Gopalan and published it from his Empire Press at Calicut. In that second period it appeared as a monthly from 1913 to 1921 and then as a weekly until 1938. Across both periods it served the Thiyya community in particular, it carried literature of lasting value, and it pioneered tenant agitation in Malabar.

Founding at Tellicherry in 1907

Mithavadi began publication in 1907 at Tellicherry, a port town on the Malabar Coast with an established printing culture that stretched back to the missionary presses of the nineteenth century. The Government of Kerala's history of the press in the state treated its appearance as the next important milestone in Kerala journalism after the pioneering papers of the 1880s. A display on the history of the Kerala press at the Kochi metro also listed Mithavadi under 1907 and used the same description of a milestone, which showed how firmly the founding date entered the accepted chronology of Malayalam newspapers.

Sivasankaran founded the paper, but its public identity formed around its editor. Moorkoth Kumaran had already edited Kerala Sanchari, the Calicut paper that he had taken charge of in February 1897, and he brought that experience to the new venture. He merged Kerala Sanchari with Mithavadi, so that the older paper's readers and goodwill passed into the new title. The merger linked Mithavadi directly to the first generation of Malabar journalism and gave a young paper an inheritance that most new publications lacked.

Moorkoth Kumaran and the First Editorship

Kumaran was born on 23 May 1874 at Tellicherry and worked as a teacher and headmaster in Calicut before and alongside his editorial career. He was a disciple of Sree Narayana Guru, he wrote the Guru's first biography, and he stood among the pioneers of the Malayalam short story and among the language's early novelists. That combination of teaching, literary writing and reform commitment shaped the character of Mithavadi under his direction. The paper featured articles and writings on the socially depressed classes, and readers regarded it as a bible of the socially oppressed.

Kumaran's editorship also gave Mithavadi a literary distinction that outlived the paper itself. Kumaran Asan's celebrated poem Veena Poovu was first published in Mithavadi while Kumaran was its editor. The appearance of a poem that became a landmark of modern Malayalam poetry in the pages of a small reform paper from Tellicherry demonstrated the close connection that then existed between journalism and literature in Malayalam, where the same editors wrote fiction, published poetry and campaigned on social questions within a single career.

The Takeover by C. Krishnan in 1913

In 1913 the paper changed hands and changed cities. C. Krishnan, an advocate from a prosperous family who had been born on 11 June 1867 at Mullassery in Thrissur, purchased Mithavadi at the impetus and on the advice of Ayyathan Gopalan, the Brahmo Samaj leader and social reformer with whom both Kumaran and Krishnan had worked for the rights of the depressed classes of Malabar. Gopalan encouraged the purchase and helped Krishnan to establish the paper on its new footing, and the transfer therefore represented continuity of purpose under new ownership rather than a break in the paper's mission.

Krishnan published Mithavadi from his Empire Press at Calicut. From 1913 to 1921 it appeared as a monthly, and from 1921 it appeared as a weekly, a schedule that it maintained until its closure in 1938. The move to Calicut placed the paper in Malabar's principal commercial and publishing centre, where Kerala Sanchari and Kerala Pathrika had already established the traditions of Malayalam journalism to which Mithavadi belonged. Krishnan edited and sustained the paper for a quarter of a century, a span that made his name and the paper's name inseparable in public usage.

A Voice for the Depressed Classes

Mithavadi aimed at social reform and at the uplift of marginalised sections, and under Krishnan it pursued that aim as the organ of a wider movement. Krishnan was a follower of Sree Narayana Guru and a leader of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, for which he organised meetings in northern Malabar, raised funds and chaired major gatherings. He had, with Kallingal Rarichan Moopan, invited the Guru to Malabar in 1907, and the Guru's visit that followed extended the reform movement's reach in the region that Mithavadi served.

The paper's editorials defended the weak against the powerful in concrete terms. When rulers and ruling classes enacted measures that bore oppressively on poor people, Mithavadi protested that such judgements worked against the poor. It argued that the true owners of the land were the people rather than kings or those who held power, and it warned the King of Travancore to treat the fate of Russia's overthrown rulers as an indication of where oppression could lead. Such writing explained why the paper earned its reputation as a fearless advocate for communities that had few other public defenders.

Tenant Agitation and the Thiyya Readership

Scholarly study of the early Malabar press singled out Mithavadi for its role in pioneering tenant agitations in Malabar. Tenancy was a central grievance in the region, where cultivating tenants held land under arrangements that left them insecure and exposed to eviction and enhanced demands. A newspaper that printed grievances, argued the tenants' case and connected scattered local disputes into a recognised public question gave the agitation a tool that it had previously lacked. Stella Joseph's doctoral study of print and the public sphere in Malabar treated tenancy as a much-debated issue in the early newspapers and documented the part that Mithavadi played in that debate.

The paper was particularly popular among the Thiyya community, one of the principal communities of Malabar that faced social disabilities under the caste order of the period. Its popularity rested on its consistent attention to education, temple access, land rights and social dignity, the questions that most affected its readers' daily lives. Kumaran himself later worked for the admission of Pulayas and other lower castes into the Jagannath Temple at Tellicherry and promoted the installation there in 1927 of a statue of Narayana Guru, and the same reforming impulse animated the columns that he and Krishnan published.

The First World War News Sheet

The Kerala press history displayed at the Kochi metro recorded a further distinction for Mithavadi during the First World War. The paper published a daily news sheet that carried the latest news from the war front, a notable undertaking for a Malayalam monthly based in Calicut. The experiment showed that the paper's ambitions extended beyond reform commentary to the timely supply of news, and that its proprietor understood readers' hunger for current information in wartime even when the resources of a small provincial press limited what it could attempt on a permanent basis.

Krishnan's Politics and the Question of Priorities

Krishnan's editorship rested on a distinctive political position that Mithavadi reflected. He did not support the Indian National Congress or Mahatma Gandhi, and he accepted British rule as preferable to a freedom that left social servitude intact, because he held that freedom from foreign rule without freedom from serfdom was meaningless. He blamed Gandhi for failures connected with the Malabar Rebellion, and he insisted that the liberation of the oppressed classes had to precede or accompany the achievement of national freedom rather than wait upon it. He nevertheless participated actively in the Vaikom Satyagraha, the temple-entry campaign that became a landmark of the reform era.

That position placed Mithavadi in a different camp from the Congress-aligned Malayalam papers of its time, and it gave the paper a polemical edge in debates with nationalist contemporaries. Its pages therefore documented an argument that ran through the whole reform period in Kerala, between those who subordinated social questions to the national struggle and those who, like Krishnan and the movement around Narayana Guru, treated caste oppression as the first enemy. Historians of communalism and of print in Travancore and Malabar used Mithavadi as evidence in reconstructing that argument.

Closure in 1938 and Legacy

Mithavadi ceased publication in 1938, the year of Krishnan's death on 29 November 1938. The weekly that he had sustained for twenty-five years did not outlive the proprietor whose energy, money and convictions had carried it, and its end closed a chapter that had begun with Kumaran at Tellicherry thirty-one years earlier. No successor paper took up the title, and Mithavadi survived instead in the surname that Kerala usage attached to Krishnan and in the records of the state's press history.

The paper's legacy rested on three achievements that later accounts consistently recorded. It gave the depressed classes of Malabar a printed voice that contemporaries called their bible. It published early work of enduring literary value, most famously Veena Poovu. And it pioneered the use of a Malayalam newspaper in tenant agitation, which connected print to agrarian politics in Malabar. Government histories of the Kerala press summarised that record in a single judgement, that Mithavadi stood in the forefront of the movement for social reform and for the uplift of the weaker sections of society, and subsequent scholarship on the Malabar public sphere preserved and documented that assessment.