Concourse at Tirur station loses painting of historic Malabar event

Railways on Monday courted a controversy by erasing a painting of the Wagon Tragedy on the concourse of the Tirur station in the district. Railway officials said they had erased the painting following complaints from some persons belonging to the Sangh Parivar.

Railways paid tribute to the 70-odd Mapila rebels of Malabar who had died of suffocation in the Wagon Tragedy of 1921 by painting the historic event on a wall at Tirur station a few days ago as part of an ongoing beautification programme.

However, the painting was erased on Monday morning following an order from the Palakkad Divisional Manager. Public relations manager at the division M.K. Gopinath said the painting had been erased as it did not gel with the beautification theme.

The Palakkad Railway Division had chosen the Tirur, Kannur and Palakkad stations for beautification works with paintings of art, culture and historical events.

While art forms like Theyyam found pictorial expression at Kannur, Tipu’s Fort at Palakkad was the theme in the Palakkad station. Local railway officials had chosen Wagon Tragedy and Thunchath Ezhuthachan’s legacy as themes for painting at Tirur. Preman, an artist from Kuttippuram, had painted the Wagon Tragedy at Tirur.

Tirur and Podanur were the two stations directly linked to the Wagon Tragedy, one of the darkest events of the British Raj that spurred the Indian freedom movement.

In 1921

The wounds of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 had not yet healed when the Wagon Tragedy took place on November 21, 1921, evoking widespread condemnation against the British Raj. About 100 Mapila rebels arrested from different parts of Malappuram were herded into a windowless goods wagon. They were being transported from Tirur to Coimbatore. Seventy of them had died of suffocation by the time the goods wagon reached Podanur. It was Malabar Police Sergeant Richard Harvard Hitchcock who had ordered transporting of the Mapilas in the most inhuman manner. The ghastly incident came to be known as the Jallianwala Bagh of the South, until the State government called it Wagon Tragedy in 1972.