The old joke about Malayalis is that when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, he met a Malayali tea seller. The Sunday Express only had to go as far as Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh to find four villages, where the natives of Kerala set foot in 1955 as part of a Central government scheme.

February 10,1955. Gopalan sat huddled on the platform at Kochi Harbour Station, waiting for the train to New Delhi to pull in. As the 22-year-old waited, he held on to a clutch of marachini kambu (tapioca). An unexpected call of destiny in the form of a newspaper advertisement had intertwined his life with the tapioca he held on to—uprooted from his home in Thonnakal, about 24 km from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and about to be transplanted in a village called Intkheri, 90 km from Bhopal.
Fifty-three years later, Gopalan doesn’t remember what he did with that bunch of tapioca but as he talks about “Jawaharlal Nehru’s plan” that brought 200 families from Kerala and relocated them in Intkheri and three other villages, he realises his memory hasn’t failed him through these difficult years. “How can we forget? It wasn’t easy. About 19 families went back soon after and others left over the years. Now there are about 100 families left in these four villages,” says Gopalan (now Gopalan ‘Patel’), laying out yellowing pieces of official documents and newspaper reports that put together a curious story—of human grit, of migration and a beautiful chronicle of social transformation that brought a piece of Kerala to the heart of Madhya Pradesh.
Intkheri, the biggest Malayali settlement in the region, announces itself much after you turn right from National Highway-86, along a dirt track with spiky boulders for a road. When it rains, the spikes jut out menacingly and the nearby Chamarsal river, a tributary of the Narmada, threatens to breach its embankment and cut off Intkhedi and its sister villages. It’s almost as if the rains conspire to make this part of an India that is forced to move at a different pace. The other villages—Imilia, Uradmao and Majoos Kalan—fall in a line, separated by rows of soyabean fields and joined by a history that goes back 53 years.
In 1955, a number of landless families—mainly Ezhavas and Nairs (two of the biggest Hindu communities of Kerala) and Christians—were brought from Travancore-Cochin state (before it became Kerala) and given land in then Bhopal state under a Central Mechanised Farming project. The biggest lure for these poor families from places like Kuttanad, Aluva and Trissur in Kerala was the 12 acres that each of them would get in four villages—Intkheri, Imilia, Urudmao and Majoos Kalan—in Raisen district. They also got, among other things, a pair of bulls, a plough, seeds for sowing and an igloo-shaped, tin-roof barrack, the money for which they had to pay in easy installments. According to the initial terms of agreement, the selected people would be employed on daily wages to work on the farm for two years, during which they would be trained to sow and harvest wheat and soyabean and they in turn would teach the native tribals paddy cultivation. The land would be transferred to them at the end of the 10th year after they paid the prescribed premium.
But things didn’t quite work according to plan. After the reorganisation of states on November 1, 1956, Bhopal state became part of a greater Madhya Pradesh and the project wound up in 1957—eight years ahead of schedule. According to the settlers, the pending installments were calculated as dues and thrust on them.
O.N. Shrivastava, former Governor of Nagaland and Manipur and an IPS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre, says the project was probably stopped because the new state had an entirely different set of administrators and several old projects were stopped. The farming project at Intkhedi probably ended that way, he says.
“That came as a shock. We were suddenly branded as debtors and could no longer avail of loans. We struggled for years on this alien land and all those people who were supposed to implement the project vanished. We have worked on paddy fields back home but wheat was entirely new. So each time we tried, we failed,” says Gopalan, whose family owns 14 acres in Intkheri.
All this while, the debts kept mounting and a lot of settlers went back to Kerala, putting up their land for distress sales. In 1970, after several requests to ministers and officials of the state government went unheeded, Gopalan and others wrote to then prime minister Indira Gandhi. That worked. In 1984, the Centre waived their loans—close to Rs 5 lakh—and the Malayalis won their first battle.
But while they were battling loans and writing memorandums, Intkheri and the other three villages witnessed a quiet social transformation. When the first set of 71 Malayali families came on May 1, 1955, the locals—mostly Gond tribals and other OBCs like Naees and Kushwahas—resisted. “We would run away from them. We didn’t know where they had come from. They looked different, spoke a strange tongue and ate huge mounds of rice. Our parents were convinced they were barbarians. But that was then. Now the joke is that we wear lungis and they wear pyjamas. We look like each other now,” says Hari Ram Kushwaha, the sarpanch of Intkheri, which has a population of 1,150 and 50 per cent of them are Malayalis.

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