Kalliasseri, in the Kannur district of north Kerala, has a political reputation out of all proportion to its size. It was one of the crucibles of the peasant and workers' movement in Malabar in the 1930s and 1940s, and it produced a remarkable number of the men who would later run the state. Erambala Krishnan Nayanar was born there on 9 December 1919, into a landowning Nair family whose elders were firmly on the side of the existing order, and he spent his life on the other side of it.

A Landlord's Son Who Went the Other Way

His father, Govindan Nambiar, held to the feudal conventions of the region. Nayanar was pulled away from them early, largely through the influence of his cousin K. P. R. Gopalan, a leading figure in the Malabar communist movement. The politics of the period in north Kerala mixed anti-colonial nationalism, agrarian revolt against janmi landlordism, and a fierce campaign against caste exclusion, and Nayanar was drawn into all three strands as a teenager.

He joined the Communist Party of India in 1939, when he was twenty. The following year he was involved in organising mill workers at Aaron, and in the political rally at Morazha in September 1940 that ended in violence and a police death, one of the defining confrontations of the Malabar movement. He was also associated with the peasant agitation at Kayyur in 1941, another of the events that entered communist memory in Kerala as a founding sacrifice; four of the Kayyur accused were eventually hanged.

Nayanar himself became a wanted man and went underground for a long stretch, moving south into Travancore where nobody knew his face. He supported himself there partly by working as a journalist, a trade he never entirely abandoned. He later became a correspondent for the party newspaper Deshabhimani and eventually its editor, and for decades he wrote a weekly column called Munnottu, meaning forward.

Party, Split and Office

He rose steadily through the party structure, serving as secretary of the Kozhikode district committee from 1956 to 1964. When the Communist Party of India split in 1964, he went with the faction that became the Communist Party of India (Marxist), of which he was a founding member. He served twice as secretary of the CPI(M)'s Kerala state committee, from 1972 to 1980 and again from 1992 to 1996, and sat on the party's national politburo from 1992 until his death.

His electoral career began at the national level. He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Palakkad in 1967 and served until 1971, losing a subsequent contest at Kasaragod. He entered the Kerala legislative assembly in 1974 from Irikkur, and afterwards represented Malampuzha, Thrikkarippur and finally Thalassery, moving constituency as the party required.

Three Terms in Power

Nayanar became Chief Minister of Kerala three times at the head of the Left Democratic Front: from January 1980 to October 1981, from March 1987 to June 1991, and from May 1996 to May 2001. Taken together his tenure ran to close to eleven years, making him the longest-serving Chief Minister in the state's history. Between those terms he served as Leader of the Opposition.

His second and third governments are associated with several of the programmes that shaped modern Kerala. The total literacy campaign of the late 1980s, which made Kerala the first Indian state to be declared fully literate, was driven under his administration. His third government presided over the People's Plan Campaign, an ambitious devolution of planning powers and a substantial share of the state budget to village panchayats and municipalities, which became one of the most studied decentralisation experiments in India. Group farming initiatives and the expansion of local self-government structures also belong to this period.

The Politician People Quoted

What made Nayanar unusual among Indian chief ministers was his manner. He spoke in the broad dialect of north Malabar, refused to adopt an official register, and had a gift for the deflating one-line remark that made him endlessly quotable and occasionally landed him in trouble. Cartoonists loved him. Opponents found him extremely difficult to attack because he simply would not perform the dignity they wanted to puncture.

He married Sarada in 1958, a teacher and a niece of his cousin K. P. R. Gopalan, and they had four children. He remained personally austere throughout his time in office, a point his political opponents did not seriously contest.

E. K. Nayanar died in Delhi on 19 May 2004, aged eighty-four, of heart and kidney failure. His funeral in Kannur drew enormous crowds. In Kerala's political memory he occupies a specific place: not the intellectual architect of the movement, which was a role others filled, but the organiser and administrator who kept it electorally viable for half a century, and who never stopped sounding like a man from Kalliasseri.