Taxed to Death and Death to the Breast Tax: The Nangeli Saga

Death and taxes are inevitabilities which man cannot avoid. Great men and people of the intelligentsia have often stated this. Daniel Defoe first said it 1726 in The Political History of the Devil. Later, Benjamin Franklin echoed the same sentiment in his letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789.

However history has been witness to innumerable cases, where taxes have been the reason of death. Protests against oppressive and regressive taxes levied by tyrannical rulers have led to deaths and starvation. Since the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, taxes have been imposed. The tax history chronology points to the fact that the Greeks, the Romans, the British and Americans were among the first to have taxed people on some account.

Over the ages, many a kinds of taxes have been imposed on people. Some such taxes are pragmatic and have been aimed to reduce disparities between the rich and the poor but there are others that have been imposed for oppressing the socially and economically backward sections. There are still others, like the UrineTax imposed by the Roman emperors Nero and Vespasian in the 1^st century, the FartTax by the New Zealanders as recently as in 2003, The Beard Tax imposed by King Henry VIII of England in 1535 and the Window Tax in Great Britain in the 17^th and 18^th Century, to name just a few, which are downright bizarre.

However, the most regressive, socially demeaning and sexist tax ever imposed in any country has been perhaps the “Mulakkaram” (Breast Tax) in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore (modern-day central and southern Kerala, including Kanyakumari and Tamil Nadu) in India, about 200 years ago.

The Mulakkaram was imposed on the women of the lower caste for being awarded with the right to cover their breasts in public. This along with taxes for the right to wear jewelery and for men to grow moustaches, were specifically put into practice to enunciate untouchability and caste suppression. Women who defied this rule and did not pay the Mulakkaram, while venturing out onto the street, were harassed and heavy penalties were imposed on them. Ladies hesitated to step out of their dwellings without covering their chest. It was a curse to be a beautiful and elegant lady. The lives of many such ladies were relegated to the dark consigns of their dingy homes thanks to this deplorable law.

The upper caste rulers of Travancore imposed the tax with impunity and used it as a potent weapon to subjugate the people belonging to the lower strata of the society. The ever-increasing greed of the Brahmin rulers led to the imposition of some of the worst taxes that the world has ever known and the Mulakkaram was perhaps the most despicable of all. History perhaps would have consigned this tax to the archives had it not been for the courage of one woman who protested against this.

Nangeli or Nancheli ‘the beautiful one’ was a woman belonging to the Ezhava community who lived in the early 19th century at Cherthala in Travancore. Traditionally, the Ezhava community people earned their living as agricultural laborers, small cultivators, toddy tappers, weavers and Ayurveda practitioners.

Nangeli and her husband Kandappan were poor and were already wilting under the pressure of the various taxes imposed by the rulers. It was the year 1803, when Nangeli, who was around thirty-five years of age at that time, decided to defy the law. She ventured out into the open after covering her bosom, but without paying the mandatory Mulakkaram.

Such a defiant act immediately drew the attention of the locals and news about such disobedience spread around quickly. The tax collector, who was known as the Parvathiyar, soon came to know about the incident and he set out to visit Kandappan and Nangeli’s house to collect the tax as per the prevailing law. When he reached the house he found that Kandappan was not at home and thus demanded that Nangeli pay the tax immediately.

 Nangeli was a courageous woman and she immediately knew what she would do. In those days it was the custom of paying taxes by keeping them on a plantain leaf. Nangeli asked the parvathiyar to wait outside and went inside. After a few minutes she came and offered the plantain leaf to the parvathiyar. The leaf had two blood dripping bosoms of Nangeli. She had cut off her breasts and offered it as tax to the collector. The self-mutilation that Nangeli caused to herself resulted in an immense loss of blood, which consequently led to her collapse and almost immediate death. The tax collector fled in fear. On the same evening while Nangeli’s funeral pyre was being lit, Kandappan came and jumped into the burning pyre. He could not bear to live without his beloved wife.

The incident sparked a lot of anger among the people. As a result the breast tax was finally abolished. The exact date of such abolition can however not be confirmed. In fact, there are two versions as to when the tax was finally withdrawn. One account states that it was formally abolished in 1812. Another states that on the very next day of the incident, the King of Travancore Sreemolam Thirunal issued a royal proclamation banning breast tax and allowed all lower caste women to cover their chest.

Nangeli’s act was a bold statement against the relentless caste oppressions perpetrated by the ruling regimes during that time. The piece of land in which Nangeli lived came to be known as mulachiparambu – the plot where the woman of breasts lived.

The memory of Nangeli’s momentous sacrifice and legacy is all but forgotten. Whatever is known about the incident has been handed down as a legend through generations. No books and memorials have been published on this courageous lady. In fact the name mulachiparambu too has been covered up, perhaps due to embarrassment it causes for the current generation. The original plot has become fragmented as it has several owners now. It is situated near the SNDP office at Manorama Junction in Cherthala.

The area near Manorama Kavala, Cherthala, was once known as Mulachiparambu and was the site where Nangeli, in 1803, cut off her breasts to protests against the breast tax imposed on the lower caste women of Travancore. Photo: H. Vibhu

Nangeli is perhaps the only woman known to history, who became the cause for the death of a tax.