Some Thiyyas converted to
Islam from around the 9th century, due to the influence of Arab traders. These people, and other Muslim converts in the region, are now known as
Mappillas. The
Congregationalist
London Missionary Society and the
Anglican Church Mission Society were also prominent in the movement for religious conversion, having established presences in the Travancore region in the early 19th century. The lowly status of the Ezhava meant that, as
Thomas Nossiter has commented, they had "little to lose and much to gain by the economic and social changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries". They sought the right to be treated as worthy of an English education and for jobs in government administration to be open to them. In 1896, he organised a petition of 13,176 signatories that was submitted to the
Maharajah of the
princely state of Travancore, asking for government recognition of the Ezhavas' right to work in public administration and to have access to formal education. Around this time, nearly 93 per cent of the caste members were illiterate. The upper caste Hindus of the state prevailed upon the Maharajah not to concede the request. The outcome not looking to be promising, the Ezhava leadership threatened that they would convert from Hinduism en masse, rather than stay as
helots of Hindu society.
C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer, realising the imminent danger, prompted the Maharajah to issue the
Temple Entry Proclamation, which abolished the ban on lower-caste people from entering Hindu temples in the state. Steven Wilkinson says that the Proclamation was passed because the government was "frightened" by the Ezhava threat of conversion to Christianity. Eventually, in 1903, a small group of Ezhavas, led by Palpu, established
Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), the first caste association in the region. This was named after
Narayana Guru, who had established an
ashram from where he preached his message of "one caste, one religion, one god" and a Sanskritised version of the Victorian concept of self-help. His influence locally has been compared to that of
Swami Vivekananda. the Ezhavas showed little interest in such bodies because they did not suffer the educational and employment discrimination found elsewhere, nor indeed were the disadvantages that they did experience strictly a consequence of caste alone. The Ezhavas were not immune to being manipulated by other people for political purposes. The
Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924–1925 was a failed attempt to use the issue of
avarna access to roads around temples in order to revive the fortunes of
Congress, orchestrated by
T. K. Madhavan, a revolutionary and civil rights activist, and with a famous temple at
Vaikom as the focal point. Although it failed in its stated aim of achieving access, the
satyagraha (movement) did succeed in voicing a "radical rhetoric", according to Nossiter. Between the Travancore census of 1875 and 1891, the literacy of Ezhava men had been increased from 3.15 percent to 12.1 percent. The 1891 census showed that there were at least 25000 educated Ezhavas in Travancore Dr. Palpu had support from Parameswaran Pillai who was editing the Madras Standard. He raised the issue of the rights of Ezhavas in a speech at the National Conference in Pune in 1885, which was also editorialized in the Madras Standard. Pillai and Dr. Palpu also raised their questions regarding Ezhavas in the House of Commons in England in 1897. Palpu met with Swamy Vivekanda in Mysore and discussed the conditions of Ezhavas. Vivekanda has advised him to unite the Ezhava community under the leadership of a spiritual leader. He embraced this advice and associated with Sree Narayana Guru and formed the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (S.N.D.P), registered in March 1903. By mid 1904, the emerging S.N.D.P Yogam, operating a few schools, temples, and a monthly magazine announced that it would hold an industrial exhibition with its second annual general meeting in Quilon in January 1905. The exhibition was skillful and successful and was a sign of the awakening Ezhava community. The success of the SNDP in improving the lot of Ezhavas has been questioned. Membership had reached 50,000 by 1928 and 60,000 by 1974, but Nossiter notes that, "From the Vaikom
satyagraha onwards the SNDP had stirred the ordinary Ezhava without materially improving his position." The division in the 1920s of of properties previously held by substantial landowners saw the majority of Ezhava beneficiaries receive less than one acre each, although 2% of them took at least 40% of the available land. There was subsequently a radicalisation and much political infighting within the leadership as a consequence of the effects of the
Great Depression on the
coir industry but the general notion of self-help was not easy to achieve in a primarily agricultural environment; the Victorian concept presumed an industrialised economy. The organisation lost members to various other groups, including the Communist movement, and it was not until the 1950s that it reinvented itself as a pressure group and provider of educational opportunities along the lines of the
Nair Service Society (NSS), Just as the NSS briefly formed the National Democratic Party in the 1970s in an attempt directly to enter the political arena, so too in 1972 the SNDP formed the Social Revolutionary Party. ==Position in society==