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Introduction
This paper analyses the role of print media in responding to specific struggles and debates related to the livelihood of people in the state of Kerala in India between 1923 and 1965. It employs an analysis of newspaper reports in this period to understand how print media editorialised and reported on specific struggles and debates that laid the basis for the development achievements in Kerala.
Kerala's achievements in the sphere of social development are worldfamous (see United Nations 1975; Ramachandran 1996; Ramakumar 2006). Public action has the credit of transforming the Kerala society into a modern society (Ramachandran 1996). Mass actions of the public and progressive policy initiatives of governments were the main reasons behind the transformation. Dreze and Sen (1989: 225) argue that:
The success of Kerala in achieving support-led security adds force to the plausibility of following this route even when the economy is very poor. The fact that Kerala has achieved such success through careful and wide-coverage public support shows how much can be achieved even at a low level of income if public action is aimed at promoting people's basic entitlements and capabilities.
Additionally, the state is also credited with a lively and socially committed press. Scholars of media and politics position Kerala as a classic model of politicisation spreading to large sections of the population and creating a newspaper-reading culture (Jeffrey 1987; Nair 1997; Ram 2011). The influence and spread of the media, often regarded for its role in moulding public opinion, places the Malayalam press in a distinctive position among the press in the developing world. As Robin Jeffrey (2009: 467) wrote about Kerala, 'newspapers are an essential ingredient of public action'. Ramachandran (1996) argues that owing to the high levels of literacy, dissemination of information by means of the written word goes much deeper in Kerala than elsewhere in India; this has important implications for the quality and depth of public opinion and of participatory democracy in the state. It is thus evident that the press plays a significant and varied role in the socio-political life of the people of Kerala.
This paper attempts to evaluate the role that the Malayalam print media played in selected aspects of Kerala's history of public action between 1923 and...