Monthly Archives: January 2022

Commemorating Venmani: Flame of Resistance by Kalpana Karunakaran

‘Huts without roof.Huts without walls.Huts ground to dust.To ash.Huts with broken bangle pieces’. These were the opening lines of an essay on the Keezhvenmani massacre where forty-four Dalit agricultural labourers, members of the kisan union of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), were trapped inside a small hut and burnt alive in a village in the former Thanjavur district, the ‘rice bowl’ of Tamil Nadu. The author of the essay Mythily Sivaraman, then a young woman of twenty-nine yea[...]