BLACK HOLE OF PODANUR : THE WAGON MASSACRE OF 1921

On 19 November 1921, one hundred prisoners, ninety-seven Mappilas and three Hindus arrested for offenses relating to the Malabar Rebellion, were loaded into a goods wagon and were being transported to Podanur. When the train arrived at Podanur, the wagon was opened to find all prisoners collapsed, several lying on top of each other. When they were pulled out, fifty-six of them were dead already. The next morning the remaining forty-four were taken by another train to Coimbatore, and several died on the way or on reaching the hospital. In Coimbatore the total number of casualties rose to a total of seventy. All seventy died by asphyxiation, suffocated in a sealed goods wagon with no ventilation, transported over a hundred miles through the night. This incident popularly came to be known as the Wagon Tragedy of 192.

In historical records, the Wagon Massacre has been treated in passing as a tragedy, as an unfortunate mishap, while documentation and narration reveal that the Wagon Massacre was not an unforeseen tragedy but a calculated extension of suppression, torture, and humiliation of the peasants resisting against the jenmi-koodiyan system that reached its most exploitative state during colonial rule. Sumit Sarkar, in his work Modern India, describes this event as the black hole of Podanur, comparing it to the Black Hole tragedy in William Fort. The events of the Wagon Massacre point towards an informed, calculated plan that the British state carried out to stop expanding networks of resistance. To understand the Wagon Massacre, it must be situated within the broader apparatus of colonial violence deployed in Malabar. Martial law, the militarized police, mass imprisonment, and the systemic use of force and violence were used to break the rebellion.

Several historians consider the Malabar Rebellion to be the most serious rebellion against British rule in India since the mutiny of 1857. While colonial writing has categorized it as religious fanaticism, historians have argued that while religion played a central role in the idiom through which resistance was expressed and in the mobilization of the peasants, the root of the uprising was the grievances of the Mappila peasants, who suffered exploitation and dispossession under the Jenmi Kudiyan system of land tenure. Under this arrangement, the Namboothiri and Nair landlords (jenmis) held absolute right over land, while Mappila and Tiyya tenants held no security of tenure, permanently vulnerable to rackrenting and eviction. Religious symbols, ideas, and the promise of martyrdom served as the vehicle for the agrarian insurgency.

The brutal suppression of the rebels was of utmost priority to the British as they saw in it a huge threat because of the large-scale participation of the Mappilas under strong and organized leadership like Ali Musliyar, Varimakunnath Kunjahamed Haji, etc. Martial law was brought to Malabar in the later phase of the rebellion in 1921. The issue of martial law was a point of contention for the government of India due to the scandal that had followed the implementation of martial law in Punjab two years earlier under General Dyer at Jallianwala Bagh. As operations in Malabar intensified in September, the Madras government had telegraphed the government of India requesting permission to enforce martial law in three taluks where the rebellion was active: Ernad, Valluvanad, and Ponnani. It was under General Burnett Stuart, the general officer commanding the Madras district, that martial law was implemented in Malabar. Because of the controversy that arose in Punjab, the martial law ordinance was carried out with considerable caution, as Burnett Stuart had made it clear to all officials that the military could fight the rebels on the field or hand them over to civil authority. He had asked for the rebels to be treated with the same consideration as any ordinary prisoner. But as the rebellion escalated, the suppression grew brutal, and Burnett Stuart found himself requesting more troops, particularly Gurkha and Burmese battalions, to be brought into the battle. Martial law was withdrawn from Malabar in 1922.

In his study of the Madras police, David Arnold examines extensively how the police were employed in Malabar and in the Agency areas during periods of unrest. As agents of riot control and counterinsurgency, the police had several functions like surveillance, deterrence, coercion, punishment, and detection. Arnold points out that in the mid-19th century it had been the intention that the army, and not the police, would be responsible for the suppression of armed rebellion and serious rioting. But in practice this was not the case due to limited availability of troops in southern India and the reluctance to use military force after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the creation of paramilitary units to replace troops in internal security duties. In addition to their active role, the government of Madras found it necessary to maintain a permanent military garrison close to the Mappila zone to deter further outbreaks. From 1851 to 1919 and again from 1921 to 1941, British troops were stationed at Malappuram, with further British or Indian troops at Calicut, Cannanore, or Wellington in the Nilgiris. The withdrawal of the Malappuram garrison in 1919 to meet British requirements elsewhere was seen in retrospect by the Madras government as one of the factors behind the rebellion in 1921. When a similar pullout was contemplated in 1940-41, the district magistrate of Malabar insisted that the troops should remain, less for their actual military value than for their moral value against the possibility of trouble ever starting. Arnold argues that expressions like "moral value" and "morale effect" were frequently used to describe what were seen to be positive benefits of periodic displays of military might.

The jails of the Malabar district were overwhelmed by the mass imprisonment carried out during the suppression of the rebellion. One hundred convicted prisoners were hence being transported to Podanur. British officials asked the South Indian Railway authorities to provide goods wagons to carry prisoners from Tirur. Yasser Arafat drew parallels between this choice of goods wagon and that of the Nazi wagons used to transport prisoners to their deaths that felt like the precursor of an impending catastrophe that would take place in a more cruel fashion. Accordingly, the railway authorities sent goods wagon no. 1711 attached to train no. 77. Although these wagons had small vents, they were gauzed and painted over, practically pushing a hundred people into a sealed box to be transported over a hundred miles away.

The escort party responsible for the prisoners consisted of reserved police sergeant A.H. Andrews, head constable Gopalan Nair, and five other constables. The constables and head constables occupied the rear portion of the adjacent wagon while Sergeant Andrews traveled in a second-class passenger compartment in the same train. This detail noted in Retnaraj's account of the inquiry is in itself revealing. The very arrangement of the escort could not escape the hierarchy of the colonial system. The British sergeant rode in the passenger compartment, Indian subordinates in the adjacent goods wagon, and the prisoners in a sealed, airtight wagon.

Witness accounts reveal that at Shoranur station, where the train halted for thirty minutes, and later at Olavakkot for fifteen minutes, voices calling out ‘vellam, vellam’ (water, water) and cries of being choked could be heard. The police escort on duty could hear the prisoners cry and could have opened it to give water, but they said that they would not open the doors or give water till the train reached Podanur. On this, the following is what the deputy superintendent of police, crime investigation department, had to say:

"We have to take into consideration that providing prisoners with water is not enjoined by law, though it may be considered a strong moral obligation ... If the sergeant had taken pity and opened the doors of the van either at Shoranur or Olavakot, the prisoners would, in all probability, have rushed to the railway station, looted it, and massacred innocent persons. If this had taken place, I am sure that the policemen would not escape punishment for their gross neglect of duty." 

One could easily argue that it is highly unlikely that one hundred people stuffed into a sealed van, heard crying for water and air at several halts, pose a threat for a massacre waiting to happen. The neglect of the safety of the prisoners and ignoring their cries for life cannot be seen as anything but colonial violence through dismissal of the lives of resisting bodies.

The government of Madras had appointed an inquiry committee under A. R. Knapp to look into the incident. It had also ordered the prosecution of Sergeant Andrews and the police constables who were on escort duty for their offense under Section 304A of the Indian Penal Code and Section 128 of the Indian Railways Act IX of 1890. Leading barristers for Sergeant Andrews and other accused argued that Sergeant Andrews escorted prisoners on nine previous occasions in a goods van and nothing unusual had occurred in any of these instances. The inquiry found that the small air vents being sealed were the cause of the ‘tragedy’ and attributed the deaths primarily to a railway defect. All the accused were acquitted.

David Arnold's analysis of the colonial police sheds light on this outcome. He argues that police power was often used to circumvent or supplement the legal process because the latter was too dilatory or too scrupulous to satisfy the colonial need for prompt retribution and collective punishment. He refutes others who try to differentiate between the political and crime control functions of the colonial police and argues that to the colonial regime, crime and politics were almost inseparable; serious crime was an implicit defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion, and political resistance was either a crime or the likely occasion for it. In this context the Wagon Massacre can be argued to be a deliberate ‘mishap’ to expedite suppression of hundreds of resisting peasants that would otherwise be a long and tedious imprisonment, trial, and execution. 

Even as the wagon massacre was officially relegated to a mishap that could not have been predicted, the British officials responsible for transportation must have considered the possibility of death as a consequence of sealing one hundred people into an unventilated goods wagon. Evidence from witnesses makes clear that prisoners were crying out for water and air. If one were to argue that these cries could not be heard from inside a moving train, the fact remains that the train halted at two stations for fifteen to thirty minutes, where even the police escort heard the cries. As the deputy superintendent's own statement makes clear, it was a deliberate decision to not open doors, their justification being that they might break free and loot and massacre the railway station. The Wagon Massacre must be looked at in the broader context of state repression and violence against peasant insurgencies in colonial India. It was an extension of a system of violence that killed thousands, deported tens of thousands to the Andaman Islands, and employed systematic torture against rebel prisoners. 

REFERENCES

1. Arafath, P.K. Yasser. '100 Years of Wagon Massacre: The Penal Spectacle in Colonial Malabar.' The Federal, 19 November 2021.

2. Arnold, David. Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859–1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986.

3. Dale, Stephen Frederic. Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498–1922. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

4. Dhanagare, D.N. 'Agrarian Conflict, Religion and Politics: The Moplah Rebellions in Malabar in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.' Past and Present, Vol. 74 (1977), pp. 112–141.

5. Hardgrave, Robert L. Jr. 'The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar.' Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1977), pp. 57–99. 

6. Hitchcock, R.H. A History of the Malabar Rebellion, 1921 (Confidential). Madras: Government Press, 1925. Reprinted as Peasant Revolt in Malabar: A History of the Malabar Rebellion, 1921. With an Introduction by Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. New Delhi: Usha Publications, 1983.

7. Nair, G. Gopalan. The Moplah Rebellion, 1921. Calicut: Norman Printing Bureau, 1923. 

8. Panikkar, K.N. Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.

9. Retnaraj, G. Hudson. 'The Wagon Tragedy of 1921.' Proceedings of the South Indian History Congress, Annual Conference, 1981. 

10. Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India 1885–1947. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983

11. Wood, Conrad. The Mappila Rebellion and Its Genesis. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1987.