Contemporary dalit assertions in Kerala

Outlook India, 2023

Dalit politics in Kerala didn't arise during colonial modernity, rather it has been around for centuries. Since the medieval period, it has encountered and resisted Brahmanism. Dalit politics waged a war against Brahmanism and white colonialism in the last century and continues to do so. Though there aren't enough records about other Dalit movements before the nineteenth century, there are several literary works, including Pachalloor Pathikam and Chenganooraathi Paattu, which give us an explicit idea about cultural resistance against the Brahmanical societal system. However, in the long history of Dalit resistance and politics, it was the movements started during the last decades of the nineteenth century led by Mahatma Ayyankali and Poykayil Appachan that wreaked the most havoc on the Hindu system of social inequality. Unlike other contemporary social movements, these were fundamentally systematic, strong and concerted.

CASTE / A Global Journal on Social Exclusion

This article locates various historical discourses of anti-caste imaginaries and articulations that are imprinted in the historical past of Kerala society. Unravelling historical and social theoretical trends, it examines broadly an anti-caste imaginary articulating notions of equality and addressing various events, personnel interventions, policies and ideologies made discursive politics in Kerala. As ideologies and its consequent effects upon society are political, the article substantially makes comments and interprets the Dalit-Bahujan world grounded on the lived experiences of Dalits in Kerala. The article brings forth discourses of social movements, production of Dalit icons, critical narratives on untouchability and communist positions about caste. But, a new imagination, academic and aesthetical engagements of Dalit-Bahujans in the form of the production of Dalit art and literature informs new articulation of Dalit politics in Kerala.

The theorization of caste has transformed significantly after 1990s, especially after the presentation of Mandal Commission Report1 and the debates based on that. The debate on caste has taken many turns in rapid succession in this scenario. Before, the commonly held idea about caste was that it is a remnant of pre-modern, hierarchical, purity/pollution formation specific to Hinduism alone. But, today, this formulation is rejected and even criticized by many in the academe. Today, everyone considers caste as a live force in Indian culture, society and politics. The caste issue has resulted in the compartmentalization of the society into two sections such as dominating or submissive, based on the economic and social statuses of the individuals belonging to these sections.

This paper attempts to study the formation of a dalit community and identity in Kerala. Recent years have seen a spurt of dalit writings in Malayalam literature. Our interest in these writings arose with the publication of several writings in Malayalam periodicals. These writings advocated the existence of a dalit identity and community in Kerala. Here we approach this debate through a study of identity politics and community formation and in the emerging " dalit literature " of Kerala. We discuss the relationship of dalit identity formation, politicization in their representation in literature and my focus is on dalit and adivasi debates in Kerala. The debate on the dalit of Kerala has an important relationship with discussion on the Maharashtra dalit literature. We outline the debates on dalits and dalit writings in Kerala. Issues like identity formation, community formation and other issues have been taken for study. In his pioneering work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". 1 An imagined community is different from an actual community, because it is not (and cannot be) based on ordinary face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their likeness. A nation is an imagined community, Anderson says, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may succeed in each, the nation is always imagined as a deep, parallel comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings 2. In this chapter I see how the neo-dalit writers read the story on their own past to create a common identity which hides the differences within lower caste and class communities. We show that through a reinterpretation of history, these writers create an imagined dalit community in Kerala.

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2018

Politics & Society, 2023

A recent trend has confounded observers of India's political system. Dalits-a population that has historically been deprived of vital resources and socially ostracized by upper-caste Hindus-have increasingly given their vote to the Hindu nationalist movement led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Why have some members of India's most marginalized caste come to support a party that has preserved caste hierarchies and catered to the socially dominant sections of society? This article explores this question through the case of Kerala, where Dalit support for the BJP is additionally perplexing given the state's history of left-led governments that have implemented far-reaching redistributive reforms that greatly benefited Dalits. Nevertheless, in recent years the Hindu nationalists have made significant inroads among Kerala's Dalit population. Drawing on two hundred interviews and eight months of ethnography, this article identifies two major factors driving Dalits' defection to the BJP. The first is linked to the communist parties' (CPs') agricultural land redistribution program which, despite being the most ambitious of its kind in modern India, excluded the majority of Dalits and reinscribed caste hierarchies. The second factor is the cultural discrimination Dalits face while working in the CPs, including being grossly underrepresented in the party leadership. The BJP exploits these grievances by providing representation to Dalit cadres who are embedded in strategic majority-Dalit neighborhoods. These cadres win popular support through welfare brokering and also by constructing a new narrative that portrays the CPs as casteist and the BJP as a more socially just alternative for Kerala's Dalits. This article makes sense of these findings by drawing on Nancy Fraser's concept of bivalent oppression to advance a novel Gramscian theory of "bivalent hegemony."

Journal of South Asian Development, 2007

2012

This paper seeks to understand intricacies of civil society in the light of social capital that is well accounted in Kerala. The attempt here is not only to locate civil society in shaping modern society via radicalizing democratic practices, but also address multiple contexts of deprivations expressed in the form of protests. It is being argued that the quality of civil society is largely dependent upon the extent of social capital possessed by the diverse social spectrum of society unleashed through their constant protest and collective mobilisation. This would remind that because of these protests, spearheaded by the marginal groups of Kerala, that squarely challenge the hegemony of the state, its discriminatory policies and exclusionary tendencies. While juxtaposing the imaginative Kerala Model of Development by social sectoral development, the paper sees to examine the factors and forces of cumulative deprivation and systematic marginalization of the subaltern sections like Dalits and Adivasis in the state. The paper specifically investigates certain generic processes such as articulations of cultural identities, origins and implications of social protests, formation of civic organizations and groups, and networking of associations to unpack the emerging tendencies of exclusion.

2013