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Abstract
This study engages with the Great Flood of 1924 occurred in the erstwhile native state of Travancore in colonial India, an important time marker in the popular memory of the people of India’s south-west coast. Time markers in popular memory may not conform to the time markers of historians, although certain political events like wars or national liberation could be common to both. The popular time markers often operate at micro and intense levels: a local communal riot, for instance, or great devastations seen and suffered like a great fire. The significance of the flood was such that many old people in Travancore used to anchor their memories in relation to the flood. Events were reckoned as having occurred before, during or after the Great Flood. Autobiographies are rich with description of the flood. The flood significantly figures in many a work of fiction. The Great Flood of Travancore, 1924 has also been written into the history of India’s national movement and the social history of Kerala. The flood coincided with a major social and political agitation in Travancore, the Vaikkom Satyagraha. The present study is inspired by the new mode of narrative history covering the larger scenes of flood in the Travancore using variety of archival sources.