26 SOCIAL SCIENTIST produce. Ku^hikanam was the lease characteristic of garden lands, with the land being leased out for a period of 12 years to the tenants. At the end of the period the lease could be renewed. No advance was made to the landlord. The bottom rung in the tenurial ladder was the verumpattam tenure. Kanam was often an intermediary tenure and usually the kanakkaran sublet their lands to subtenants known as verumpattakkarans. The verumpattam tenure was a simple lease usually of one year duration ; most verum" pattakkarans were mere tenants-at-will. They were the actual cultivators constituting the bulk of the peasantry. Though most of the verum-pattakkarans were under intermediary tenants, there were quite a few who held land directly under jenmis. These lease holders held land for a period of twelve years and were found in South Malabar. In North Malabar most of the verumpattakkarans held land under the ko^hu lease, a longer tenure than ordinary verumpattam of the south, normally of 5 to 12 years9 duration. There was also a tenure called otti, a usufructuary mortgage, in which the landlord merely retained the property title and the right to redeem. There were other minor tenures which need not be brought into the study. Local tenure patterns and even the terms used for them differed greatly, but for the present purpose the above description should suffice. Withint his framework of jenmi I kanakkaran I verumpatfakkaran, there were further subcategories, such as svib-kanakkarans and sub-verumpattak-karans. In many cases there were two or three intermediaries between the direct producer and the landlord. An important distinction has also to be drawn between South and North Malabar so far as the kanam tenure is concerned. The three-tier relationship was characteristic of the southern taluks of Palghat, Walluvanad, Ernad, Ponnani and Calicut. In the northern taluks of Kurumbranad, Kottayam and Chirakkal the kanam tenure was more of a mortgage; the ko^hu tenants here usually held land directly under the jenmi (in the case of wet lands) and the ku^hikanakkaran (in the case of garden lands). In studying the essence of agrarian relations in Malabar, we have tried to avoid the trap of formalism : that is, acceptance of the formal categories of jenmi, kanakkaran and verumpattakkaran. While these formal categories of jenmis (landlords) ; kanakkarans (intermediaries) and verumpattakkarans or other subtenure holders (direct producers) are not entirely useless, they are nonetheless misleading for the purpose of a rigorous class analysis. A study based on these categories is bound to obscure the unusual complexity of agrarian relations in Malabar and vitiate any attempt to understand the actual relations of production as to who appropriated the surplus and in what forms ? What were the relations between the landlord and the direct producer and among various classes of the peasantry ? In short, a serious study must be concerned with the sum total of the relations of production that existed in Malabar upto the time of independence. That is why following Lenin "we are indifferent to the question of the form of peasant land tenure".5 The form of tenure—