Jagathamma

on the arrest of a fifteen-year-old girl who got caught in the crossfire during the first phase of the Naxalite movement in Kerala.

When the time came to put her memories on paper, from the myriad faces she must have come across during her eventful life up to that point in time, Ajitha recollects in a few lines the one of Jagathamma, a young girl, whom she saw just once at the Manantavady police station accompanying Mandakini, her own mother, after both were arrested following the Pulpally action. Jagathamma herself would not go on to write her memoirs, but it is not difficult to imagine the impact the event must have had on her otherwise ordinary life in the Wynad countryside.

***

The attack on the Tellicherry police station on 22nd November, 1968, with which the Naxalite movement in the state began, ominously for the revolution in these parts, turned out to be a damp squib when the bomb thrown did not explode. Much to the chagrin of the other rebels, their leader, Kunnikkal Narayanan, soon surrendered at the Trichur police station, and within days, most of the others who had participated in the action would be rounded up. The subsequent attack on Pulpally station led by Varghese and Kunnikkal