With the ongoing investigation into the “black sands diaries”, the infamous saga of Kerala’s beach sands that contain highly explosive radioactive elements and their no less explosive political and financial linkages are making headlines again.

The century-long history of Kerala’s black sand mining has been marked by the forces that shaped the 20th century. They range from global advances in science and technology to colonialism, capitalism, nazism, communism, nationalism, World Wars, the nuclear bomb, the Cold War and also the native royalty’s foiled ambitions to create an independent Thiruvithamkoor state.

The invaluable natural wealth, embedded in the black sands of the coastal stretch from Kanyakumari to Alappuzha, was among the world’s best rare earths, in quantity and quality. The monazite and ilmenite-rich sands’ industrial and strategic potential made rich Western nations compete against each other to court Thiruvithamkoor from the early 20th Century. Had they been used with greater vision and intelligence, these sands would have catapulted Kerala as one of the world’s richest regions, just as oil made the Gulf countries prosperous. Instead, they became a murky battleground of vested interests driven by narrow political and economic ambitions that left Kerala and its people benefit far less than what was potentially possible.

Sir C P Ramaswami Iyer, the visionary but autocratic dewan of Thiruvithamkoor, was the first indigenous administrator to identify the sands' economic, industrial and strategic utility and their consequent political significance. However, to be fair to him, even while obstinate whims and excessive political ambitions drove him, Thiruvithamkoor’s economic interests were CP’s priority. He believed the region's spices and minerals would ensure prosperity for an independent Thiruvithamkoor. When thorium, an element of monazite, became a much sought-after nuclear fuel globally in the mid-1940s, CP found a golden opportunity for Thiruvithamkoor, which held its world’s largest deposits in its beach sands. The demand for thorium sky-rocketed as the nuclear race heated up between global powers with the onset of World War II. CP thought there could be no better bargaining chip to realise his dream of an independent Thiruvithamkoor.

Thiruvithamkoor’s mineral sands have been mined since the beginning of the 20th century. The region’s famed coir products have been in high demand in the West since the 19th century. Their weight assessed the value of........

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