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The recently released Malayalam film Narivetta has reignited public discussions in Kerala regarding the historic Muthanga land struggle of 2003. The film attempts to portray Adivasis’ fight for land rights and the subsequent brutal police crackdown on them.
However, Narivetta presents an incomplete picture. The film’s focus is primarily on its dominant caste hero, while diminishing Adivasi struggles. It also fails to pin accountability on the political parties responsible for the continued oppression of Adivasi communities in the state.
Further, RTI responses from the state government reveal that spending of special funds for Adivasis and a promised allocation of land are both distressingly meagre.
A historic struggle for land
The Muthanga struggle broke out in February 2003 after the United Democratic Front (UDF) government failed to keep its promise of ending Adivasi landlessness by the end of 2002.
Earlier, in 2001, a 48-day protest, called kudil kettal samaram, took place in front of the Secretariat of Kerala. Protestors occupied the space in front of the Secretariat and built sheds. The Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS), who led the protests, demanded allocation of cultivable land to Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities after 32 Adivasis died of starvation in Wayanad district. This marked the inception of AGMS.
At the time, the protestors were promised 1 to 5 acres of land under the Tribal Resettlement and Development Mission (TRDM) scheme.
In 2003, after the state government failed to keep its promise, AGMS coordinators CK Janu and K Geethanandan led hundreds of Adivasi people to the Muthanga forest in Wayanad district. They pitched tents here in another act of protest.
On February 19, police entered the settlement. They set fire to tents and brutally assaulted the protestors. Two people, an Adivasi man named Jogi and a Dalit police constable identified as Vinod, died during the ambush. Janu, Geethanandan and many others were arrested and allegedly tortured in police custody.
Narivetta’s incomplete picture
Like many recent politically charged Malayalam films such as Malik (2021) and Pada (2022), Narivetta shies away from references to political parties. The film hesitates to engage with the long history of land struggles that laid the groundwork for Muthanga or the concept of an Adivasi self-governed area that the protestors demanded.
Toeing the line of Malayalam cinema’s conventions, Adivasis are pushed to the background. Instead, the film is set largely from the perspective of a savarna Christian police officer Varghese Peter (Tovino Thomas). Narivetta tries hard to evoke empathy for Varghese who is shown to participate in the violence at Muthanga only due to his economic circumstances and his own ignorance.
Ultimately, Adivasis and their demands for land and self-determination are sidelined in the rush to set up Varghese as a hero as he goes from hot-headed constable to rebel.
Notwithstanding the fact that many of the Muthanga protesters have died of old age, endlessly visiting courtrooms and with no resolution in sight, Narivetta portrays the judiciary in a friendly role. Further, no proof is provided for the film’s claim that more than two people died on February 19.
Meanwhile, members of the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) have been using the film to attack the UDF. This glosses over the fact that many Adivasi leaders, including Janu, have repeatedly pointed out how both coalitions have sabotaged the Adivasi land question.
In 2016, Janu launched the Janadhipathya Rashtriya Party (JRP) and contested the Assembly elections. She was backed by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). She quit the NDA in 2018, but rejoined the alliance in 2021, ahead of Assembly elections in the state. Her choice to ally with the NDA can be directly attributed to the apathy of both the UDF and the LDF.
Her alliance with the NDA has struck a blow to the Adivasi land rights movement in Kerala. The disregard of the UDF and the LDF is also paving the way for the intrusion of Hindu fundamentalists in Adivasi settlements. Hindutva groups have attempted to co-opt Adivasi demands for land through rallies of their own. There has also been an observable shift towards Brahmanical rituals in place of traditional Adivasi rituals.
Land distribution today
The Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, also known as the KST Act, was passed in 1975. As the name suggests, the Act promised the total restoration of the lands Adivasis in the state had been evicted from. However, the move faced stiff opposition from dominant caste landowners.
The KST Act was repealed in 1999 and replaced with The Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Act. This 1999 Act is highly inadequate, but has become the only available legal framework for distributing land to Adivasis as the Forest Rights Act (FRA) does not have a provision for the distribution of new land.
For now, Adivasis demanding land are dependent on the 1999 Act and other agreements reached with the state government through protests such as the 2001 kudil kettal samaram and the 2014 nilpu samaram (standing agitation).
The Left has been in power for the last ten years in Kerala. Despite their mockery of the UDF in the wake of Narivetta’s release, data received through an RTI application shows that land distribution is barely moving forward. The RTI application asked the state’s Scheduled Tribe Development Department for the TRDM budgets from 2020 to 2025, with a breakdown of costs, the number of families allocated land, and the extent of land provided.
According to the data received from the Scheduled Tribe Development Department, a provision of Rs 45 crore was made in 2023-24 for implementing the TRDM scheme. However, only Rs 26 crore (57.84%) was spent. In 2024-25, Rs 37 crore was provisioned and only Rs 11.4 crore (30.94%) was spent.
It is useful to look at granular data from the tribal development offices (TDO) and the Integrated Tribal Development Project (ITDP) offices from across the state to understand the spending closely. Information was received from 14 of these 18 offices.
Wayanad, the district where the Muthanga struggle took place and where Narivetta is set, has two TDOs. One in Sulthan Bathery and the other in Mananthavady. The district’s ITDP office is in Kalpetta where only 14.21 acres of land have been newly distributed in the past five years.
Meanwhile, a lot of money is being spent under a ‘land bank survey’: Rs 63.72 lakh in 2024-25 alone. More than Rs 8 lakh go every year into the salary of a ‘site manager’, paid from the TRDM funds instead of from the state government.
Although the survey claims to identify land for distribution to Adivasis, such land is often found in locations that are isolated and away from sources of daily wage work.
Under the Sulthan Bathery TDO, 118 families received a total of 14.96 acres of land between 2021 and 2025. This is a mere 0.13 acre per family, against the promise of 1-5 acres of land. A total of Rs 5.74 crore was spent on this. Meanwhile, under Mananthavady TDO, 47 families were given a total of 4.27 acres, receiving just 0.09 acres per family, on average.
This reveals a peculiar trend of allocating paltry portions of land as charitable gestures instead of implementing true restorative justice. The original exclusion of Adivasis from land reform measures of the 1970s continues to be unresolved.
Chinnakkanal, under the Adimali TDO in Idukki district, is another resettlement site. In the past five years, no new land has been allotted. All budgetary allocations have gone into salaries of staff in TRDM project offices across the state and in some years, to the FRA. It is not clear what community forest rights were granted through the funds allocated to the FRA. In Velakku hamlet, under the same TDO, the RTI response reveals that only four of the 68 families have stayed on.
Such land abandonment, triggered by the absence of basic civic amenities and protection from wildlife attacks, is true of many resettlement sites. In the settlement called 301 in Chinnakkanal, those who stayed away from their plots faced the threat of encroachment by the land mafia. Landless Adivasis in the area, meanwhile, are planning to start a fresh struggle, demanding the allotment of the 822 acres that the state has been reluctant to distribute.
Aralam in Kannur district is yet another resettlement site where data shows that around Rs 30 lakh was spent in 2023-24 and Rs 24 lakh in 2024-25 on office expenses. In both years, the payments were made from the TRDM funds and not the government’s salary heads. A whopping Rs 1.5 crore was spent on wages at the adjacent Aralam Farming Corporation (Kerala) Limited in 2023-24.
However, it is unclear how many of these workers were the resettled Adivasis. Although Rs 5.31 lakh was spent in 2023-24 on ‘elephant walls’, there have been several elephant attacks even after these barriers were set up. Earlier this year an Adivasi couple were killed in one such attack.
Of the 3,000-odd families that were resettled in Aralam, with an acre of land to each family, close to half the families have abandoned the plots, unable to make a living while facing constant threats from elephants. However, there is pressure from officials to return to these lands. This is done through a ‘welfare fix’: a showering of benefits in the form of breakfasts, ration and allowances, though the Adivasis seek land that provides dignity.
Smokescreen tactics
To distract attention from the land question, the LDF government has devised new measures. The state government has sought to rename the segregationist practice of ‘colonies’, where Dalits and Adivasis live, and ‘oorus’ or the main town or village where the dominant communities live. Adivasi settlements are now to be referred to as ‘unnathi’ (peak), ‘nagar’ (town) or ‘prakrithi’ (nature). This has even been lauded as a “progressive” move by some.
Although the term ‘colony’ carries pejorative connotations, it has also served as a historical register of how savarna Malayali society made Adivasis landless, including through slavery in Wayanad. ‘Ooru’, meanwhile, has strong roots in Adivasis’ association with land, especially in Attappadi and in regions further south.
The state government’s tactics have a long history. The UDF government had initiated a land scheme under the catchy title ‘Aashikkum Bhoomi Adivasikku’ (land desired by Adivasis, for Adivasis). This was, in fact, a market-based scheme, matching a willing seller to a willing buyer. Meanwhile, the state’s crooked imagination of Adivasis was finally exposed by the inauguration of En Ooru in 2022—an ethno-tourism project that essentially functions as a living museum to showcase ‘Adivasi culture’.
The state must realise that resolving the Adivasi land question, with the care that it requires, is important to not only address a livelihood issue, but also newer threats from Hindutva infiltration and ecological disasters of the kind that hit Wayanad last year.
RC Sudheesh is an assistant professor of social sciences at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. He teaches courses in sociology and land politics. Views expressed here are the author’s own.