4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
such numbers and solidarity that the princely government would have to reckon with it. Issues of temples and religion were capable of arousing the interest of people from diverse educational and economic backgrounds, and in Travancore, moreover, even the poor tended to be literate. There were large numbers capable of being rallied. The princely government, caught between its trusteeship of Hindu orthodoxy and its desire to consolidate all its Hindus against the threat of Christian proselytizing, sharpened the issues first, by resisting low-caste piessures and then seeking to defuse them. By the time the definitive accommodation, the Temple Entry Proclamation of November 1936, had come about, thousands of literate, low-caste peasants and workers had acquired a keen political consciousness. This in turn was increasingly responsive to the rhetoric not merely of caste, but of class.
State and Society at a Glance
In discussing society in Travancore in the twentieth century, one encounters a problem of categories. Literacy in Travancore was higher than in any other state or province in India. Male literacy in 1931 was 41 per cent and in 1941, 68 per cent. In 1931, more than 70,000 Travan-coreans were literate in English out of a population of five million. Most of these 70,000 could probably be categorized as ^middle class'*5 in that at least part of their livelihood came from government service, teaching, law or clerical work. However, there were cash-crop farmers, merchants and small bankers who were not literate in English but who would fall into a "middle class" category. Moreover, of the more than two million Travan-coreans who were literate in 1931, large numbers were small landholders, tenants, landless labourers or factory workers. To be literate did not mean to be "middle class."" Among Ezhavas, male literacy was 43 per cent in 1931, though Ezhavas were low caste and mainly poor labourers and tenants.l
I have tried to deal with this problem of useful categories by generally referring in the pre-1920 period to an "educated elite" which can be measured through the English-literacy statistics in the censuses. I begin to use the expression ^middle class" only from the 1920s when the admittedly unsatisfactory economic data permit some tentative statements about class formation, and when Travancore politicians and labour leaders begin to use the rhetoric of class consciousness.
Travancore covered an area of 7600 square miles, and among the princely states was exceeded in population only by Hyderabad and Mysore. It was the most literate state or province in India; by 1941 its male literacy rate had reached 68 per cent. It was also one of the most densely populated areas. Its population grew from 2,952,000 in 1901 to 6,070,000 in 1941, an increase of 106 per cent. The all-India population increased by 32 per cent in the same period.2
Much of the cultivable land in the state was, by the 1920s, given over to cash crops—coconut, pepper, cashew, cardamom, rubber, sugar