AGRARIAN RELATIONS IN MALABAR 31 of revenue coercive processes show an enormous increase in notices of demands issued and lands and movable property sold to meet these demands. To make matters worse, resettlement of land revenue in Malabar district during the period 1929-32 coincided with the depression. Revenue rates went up by 18| per cent for wet lands and rates for garden lands also steeply increased by changes in the classification of lands.30 During the years between 1930-31 and 1939-40 a total of 36,909 acres of dry lands and 7228 acres of wet lands were sold to meet revenue demands.81 In the year 1930-31, 37,988 acres of land were sold against the previous 5530 acres in 1929-30, by coercive processes under Act II of 1864.32 The ruin affected many landlord families, as Namboodiripad has pointed out, because many of them had got heavily indebted in order to buy up lands in the good years preceding the depression.33 But the majority of those affected were small peasants. A careful analysis of the statistics of revenue coercive processes reveals that, first, the extent of wet land attached or sold is less than the dry land. Secondly, in noting the number of defaulters and the total extent of lands sold, making allowance for some big holdings, we find that the average holding appears to be quite small. One concludes that, as a rule, it was the middle and poor peasantry who were primarily affected by the revenue coercive processes. It must be noted in this connection that the revenue officials used to attach the crops and movable properties of the tenants, if the landlord did not pay the assessment.34 Increasing alienation is also evident from the official data which show that land was being transferred through sales, gifts and mortgages, in a big way. In 1923 alone for example, there w.ere 191,590 registrations affecting immovable property. The aggregate value of land dealt with in that year amounted to Rs 429 lakhs.35 Similarly, statistics are available to show that sale transfers between 1921 and 1930 amounted to 19,100, and went up to 23,500 in 1931-194036. The number of sale transfers almost doubled between 1921-30 and 1941-50 helped along by the legislation passed in the early thirties legalising partition of family tarawads. EVICTIONS The threat of evictions and the execution of numerous eviction decrees was another instrument by which many peasant families were alienated from the land they had leased in. With juridical rights vested in the jenmis by the courts, evictions became a powerful weapon to extort more rent and to reduce the peasantry to a pauperised condition. Eviction was the immediate consequence of inability to meet the exorbitant demands. The whole legal process in Malabar became a complex maze of litigious proceedings dealing with disputes of jenmi kanam rights, and the interrelated issues of the mammakkathayam system, karnavan rights and so forth, all based on the precapitalist social relations. All the strains and stresses on these latter social relations found expression in the law courts.37