Writings on Dalit life whether in the form of biographies or autobiographies have not been that much frequent and visible in Malayalam, as compared to the other major South Indian languages. Some people believe that Malayalam as the lingua franca of Kerala has been too much dominated by discourses of politics, privileging the terminologies of class and class struggle. There are some who hold the view that Malayalam as a language can only express dissent or protest mediated through the political vocabulary of the institutionalised left in Kerala. But there seems to be a general amnesia over the very fact that Malayalam in the nineteenth century had made people aware of the contestations between colonial modernity and those of the newly emerging identities influenced by gender, caste and community in British Malabar and the two princely states of Travancore and Cochin. In the last years of the nineteenth century, particularly after the presentation of the Malayali Memorial before the Travancore darbar, upwardly mobile caste groups, many of which had earlier been considered as “depressed communities” utilised the pages of the vernacular dailies to express their social aspirations. Within the space of a few years, autobiographies and novels in Malayalam depicted the uneasiness that lay in the adoption of new social modes associated with colonial modernity. Radhika P. Menon the translator of the book under review has interestingly stated that it is only in recent times with ethnography gaining a powerful voice in social sciences that the “remnants” of the past, whether tracts, volumes or in the form of missionary documents have found a place in Malayalam literature. The initiatives to recover these lost voices of the past have signalled the emergence of a new social consciousness revolving around caste and subalternity. Class based mobilization and protests are no more the only essential social determinants, because the attention has shifted more to issues of hierarchy, social location and those of social exclusion and discrimination. This has undoubtedly fashioned a new social history, where the quotidian practices of castes considered to be low in the social ladder have been given primacy over all other matters. A number of publications on Kerala’s “slave past” based largely on missionary documents and folk traditions of the socially ostracised communities have revived themes of counter/alternative modernity in contemporary Malayalam literature. K.K Kochu’s Dalithan: An Autobiography is a very noteworthy example of this cultural transformation that has taken place in Kerala since the last decades of the twentieth century.

This autobiographical work represents the cultural ruptures that have taken place in the lives of the Dalits particularly in the wake of the modernisation of the economy. Kerala which had witnessed grim political battles between the Congress and the Communists over the land question in the decades which immediately followed the Indian independence, rather strangely accepted the corporate logic of development, thereby denying the subaltern population of their rights and entitlements. The institutionalised left was no longer interested in radical political programmes but stood out with open arms to embrace corporate giants like Coca Cola. The subaltern resolve did not die down and time and again intellectuals from the lower strata of the society brought back issues of land, natural resources and that of identity. The popular movement involving the adivasis of Chengara inspired many social theorists to involve themselves in a more critical introspection of the ideas related to subaltern resistance.

Indeed, the life of a Dalit revolves around a range of social dynamics which are sometimes hard to interpret and define. The autobiography of Kochu takes us to a very complex terrain where an individual from a Dalit community, knowingly or unknowingly travels through three different phases of life. In the first place, the author like any other person born into a community(ies) denied of economic privileges and social honour has to accept the social realities which essentially conditioned the sensory experiences of the marginalised groups. But this should not be construed as a passive acceptance and this leads him to the second phase that of an activist, who stands to fight against injustice and all forms of discrimination, challenging the structure of cultural dominance and working towards the creation of a community identity. Last but not the least, as an educated person from the Pulaya community, he was drawn towards an aspiration that of being a literary-intellectual. In the end, more like an organic intellectual, he has tried to deconstruct entrenched beliefs, institutionalised traditions and grand narratives of privileged social groups. This entire intellectual exercise encourages the dismantling of the supposedly “Great Tradition” of the privileged upper-caste groups and replace it by the millions of Little Traditions, representing the anger, anxiety and expectations of the subalterns.

The author begins his narrative by referring to his affiliation to the Pulaya caste, which form a part of hundreds of castes who are known as Dalits in India. Politically, the Pulayas had either been active supporters of the Communist party or had shared some bit of interest in their cause. The author too began his life as a communist but began to lose faith in communism, once he was engaged in forays to comprehend the complexities which were tied to his own communitarian identity. He tried to reach the depths of the Pulaya past, not through books or written documents but by talking to one of his elderly relatives. His relative Valyaachan was then nearly eighty-five years old and answering to the queries of the author, he remembered the Namboodiri household which had once owned more than 1,000 acres of land where paddy was mainly grown. The Pulaya and the Ezhava families who resided in these lands were retained as the family which owned the lands sought them as manual labourers. The Nairs too were dependent on the Namboodirisand they also brought Pulaya and Ezhava families from different places. The Christians were generally evicted from these lands. But the reasons behind their eviction have not been mentioned, possibly it could be either on religious grounds or they possessed an enterprise which seemed to challenge the hierarchical and autocratic control of the Hindu landowners. The Pulayas and Ezhavas were mobilised for evicting the Christians through supplies of generous qualities of alcohol. The Christian settlements were torched indiscriminately and the inhabitants were driven out through senseless acts of mayhem.

Rural disparity was the most visible expression of this entire system which reeked off exploitation and discrimination. The labouring castes hardly had the means of survival but the rich who owned the lands reclaimed from the backwaters had the entire alluvium to add to their own coffers. E.M.S Namboodiripad had often referred to this state of affairs and how this feudal system ruled the destinies of the rural economy in British Malabar and the princely states of Travancore and Cochin. The social structure at Madhuraveli which was the site of the imagined past represented this exploitative order associated with feudalism. Interestingly men like Valyaachan who usually referred to themselves as Adiyans of the Namboodiri landlords were not always landless labourers who sold their labour for mere subsistence. But they sometimes owned small plots of land as well, though institutionalised and traditional belief might have influenced them to display their servility before the members of the Namboodiri families. This sort of description of a rural hamlet in Kerala during colonial times is very much similar to the writings of social scientists like K. Saradamoni, Sanal Mohan, Yasushi Uchiyamada, K.C Alexander and so many others. However, what makes this part of the narrative interesting is the privileging of the personal over the academic, making it easier for any reader to comprehend the myriad nuances of the Pulaya past(s). 

Folklores, legends, myths and stories have defined the social existence of the socially ostracised communities. The local beliefs centering around the Robinhood image of Untaan, who had defied the hegemonic order of the Namboodiri, Nairs and the Syrian Christian landed groups continues to inspire the members of the community. Untaan’s story has also been a subject matter of a short film Vishamullukal (Poison Thorns) and was released by the Public Relations Department of the Government of Kerala to sensitise the people against caste violence . The state’s understanding of an “outcaste” rebel is often ridden with contradictions and it can create many unwarranted tensions and controversies. The Dalit perceptions which are essentially based on a recovery of the hidden history locates the radicalism that was not only associated with the fearlessness of Untaan but in the activities of men like Ayyankali, T.T Keshavan Shastri and Pampady John Joseph. The Dalit Christian theology which was propounded by Joseph helped in forging a link between the Pulayas and the Christian converts from the Pulaya and Paraya castes. Conversion to Christianity did not isolate the Pulaya converts from the non-Christianised Dalits and there was hardly any differentiation along religious and community lines.

The most interesting part in the life experiences of the Pulaya agricultural workers had been their  displacement from their ‘original’ homes and their forced residence in some other places. The past(s) did sometimes survive in their collective memory. There was always a reference to ancient times and to distant lands, but as transmission through the word of mouth failed to maintain its flow, the emotional connections with these lands became far more fragile, if not non-existent. Undoubtedly, the reasons for the lapse of memory could be located in slavery and oppression. The end of slavery, as it was publicised through the Travancore Royal Proclamation of 1855, did not radically alter the situation in the rural areas. The servitude of the Pulayas continued as before, since they had very little material resources to independently sustain themselves. Their extremely low wages and frugal entitlements, made them more dependent on their upper-caste landlords. They continued to reside on the fringes of the village, their dilapidated residences with roofs prepared through a haphazard arrangement of reeds and old leaves represented both their economic and cultural subordination. The author has candidly talked about the water-logged low-lying lands which were usually allotted for housing the Pulayas, where they were forced to make friends with mosquitoes, reptiles and fishes.

Kuttanad which has often been described as the rice-bowl of Kerala, was also the land of pathos and penury something which was related to the unsatiated greed of Hindu-landlords and Syrian Christian tenants. In these Kayal lands which had been reclaimed from the backwaters, the Pulaya agricultural labourers gave their sweats out to fulfil the demands of their employers. The situation did change, sometime from the early 1940s with the incursion of radical socialist politics in the countryside. In the aftermath of the bloodbath at Punnapra-Vayalar, the elite Congressmen did try to come up with piece meal measures to satisfy the rural hunger for land. But it was difficult to destroy the privileges that had been clandestinely acquired by the upper-caste landed elites. Land reforms have remained more on paper and whatever land had been assigned to the majority of the landless Pulaya labourers were more in the form of house-sites affording little space for a house-garden. The resentment against this state of affairs has been vividly described in the narrative, taking a convoluted route, integrating the past, present and future together through a dense presentation of innumerable episodes. In some places, the narrative dealing with the everyday life experiences of women reminds us of Viramma’s story in a village situated close to the borders of Pondicherry. Women had always symbolised resistance and they had also been the fulcrum of accommodation as mothers and wives especially when it came to preserving familial values and traditions.  It might have been a strange world of double discrimination, but certainly the popular radical movements of the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a greater deal of participation by women. They were soon visualised as the beacon of social transformation in South India.

Kochu has very correctly pointed out that the CPI(M) in the 1967, when it roared back to power for the second time had the backing of the agricultural labourers. The party supported the struggles of the agricultural labourers to widen its base among the rural masses. The Christian and the Nair well-off families in certain parts of Kerala where they wielded absolute authority tried to suppress these strikes by the agricultural labourers. The Congress politicians were definitely on the side of the privileged rural groups and very often raised private armies to torch the houses of the Dalits and torture their women and children. In some places derogatory slogans were raised to force the Dalits to address the upper caste landlords as “lord” or else they would be fed with dirty gruel. The lives of the Dalits were free to be played with and there was not much of uproar when they were indiscriminately killed, for no reason really.

The faith on the official communists receded in the early 1970s, when Kochu and many of his friends were introduced to Mao Zedong’s philosophy or that of the Naxalbari agitation. There was a belief that there would soon be a revolution and the oppressive regime in Delhi would be thrown out and replaced by Communist rule. Very much like in Bengal, the youth in Kerala had a romantic fascination about the Naxalite uprisings. Kochu’s own narrative reveals that the emotion got better of them and there were many Dalit agricultural labouring families which were shifting their allegiance in favour of revolutionary political organisations. But this euphoria with revolution did not last long and even Kochu decided to join the CPI(M). This however did not mean that revolution had been given an untimely burial, rather it lived through an intellectualism, based on a critical reading of literature and films of the contemporary times. There were many who took recourse to journalism to express their sensitivities against the exploitative system.

The question remains whether this sort of situation really integrated the discriminations of the Adivasis and Dalits within the broader political struggles launched by the official Left and the Naxalites. The mere display of sympathy did not mean that the people who swore by Marx or Mao could understand the social and cultural ramifications of marginality. Kochu has candidly admitted that left radicalism of the CPI(M-L) with its counter ideological strain did open up the possibilities for cultural organisations, who mostly remained petit bourgeoisie in terms of their orientation. Nonetheless, there were a lot of popular expectations among the younger generations from the under-privileged groups that caste and class could be integrated to create platforms of resistance and rebellion. Disillusionment with the institutional left and their propaganda seemed to be obvious, more because the much-publicised land reform legislations had failed to transform the Dalits into independent peasants.

However, this element of materiality has not totally influenced the narrative. There are long discussions on personal relations and how as a young Dalit youth, Kochu travelled through the world of culture, which had no place for differences between the mind and the head. The exposure to painting and films made him aware that rather exclusively premising on ideology there had to be a deeper understanding of philosophy which influenced both social and political behaviour oof human beings. This involvement with the sublime did not continue for long. Social insensitivity of the mainstream political parties towards the Dalits and the Adivasis forced the author to think about the representation of marginality in a different parlance. However, the version on the sexual exploitation of marginalised communities by Naxalites seem to have been somewhat hurriedly presented and rather unexpectedly it has lent voice to the authoritarian, if not the repressive state structure. Such inconsistencies emanate from the very fact that ideology and power both act as double-edged weapons sometimes encouraging a radical transformation and on other occasions turning out to be repositories of conservatism, throwing aside all high-sounding phrases of freedom and equality.

Intellectual versions on Kerala’s past and present if not its modernity cannot remain indifferent to discussions on caste and inequality. The state of Kerala has had a long history of defying all discriminatory regulations based on the Hindu institution of caste. Long before, Sree Narayana Guru had given his call of “One caste, One religion and One God”, women from the so-called “lower castes” had cropped off their breasts to protest against the “breast cloth regulations” of the late 1850s. Caste as an institution was strongly ridiculed by many Malayalam writers in the late nineteenth century reaching its height in the 1930s and 1940s, coinciding with the emergence of left progressivism. The paradox lies somewhere else and this could possibly be found in the social location of the authors, who were mostly upper caste-men of the “gentoo” stock. While it is true that methods and practices of exclusion and discrimination were discussed in an intensive manner, the emotional evocation associated with caste were rarely presented.

Kochu has very candidly pointed out that political organisations like the CPI(M-L) were far more successful in winning over the allegiance of the Dalits. The rise of the CPI(M-L) definitely unnerved the CPI(M) leadership and there were fears that they would lose their strongholds in Kuttanad, bounded on all sides by backwaters. The CPI(M-L)’s Jaathi Viruddha, Mathettharavedi which came to spearhead the Dalit-Adivasi alliance was a logical outcome of CPI(M)’s revisionist politics. The revisionists of the institutionalised left had been more interested in maintaining a power balance among the different privileged social groups. It was natural that the CPI(M) would abandon any political programme which stood for a radical stance on both caste and class-based hierarchies. But the entire episode of Chathan Master’s exit from communist politics finds no mention in Kochu’s narrative. Perhaps the author does not find any reason to incorporate such developments, because he sees in them really no story of resistance and radicalism.

The Kerala story is a very valid example of how the institutionalised left in its quest to be in power or to capture power has completely misread the political implications of the Uniform Civil Code. This undoubtedly has been a costly error, more because such legislation can emasculate the communitarian/identity movements of the marginalised communities. The CPI(M)’s top political leadership and its cultural ideologues have made a heavy weather of the Shariat issue, branding Muslims as an “uncultured community”, who refuse to accept social reforms. The party leadership had always believed that social reform and uplift can only be achieved through its own agency, oblivious of the fact that the people for whom the reforms were intended too had a voice as stakeholders. J. Devika had argued that the CPI(M) was more interested in proving that it alone had brought improvement in the lives of the marginalised sections of the society. This top-heavy approach of the CPI(M) which has been indirectly referred to by the author has been the main reason behind the general distrust towards all forms of radicalism and the alignment towards middle class revisionism. Such perceptions too had served as the ideological fulcrum for the upper and middle caste leadership. Despite talking about Mao and Ambedkar, Kochu has reposed a greater deal of faith on the ideas of community social reformers and politicians like Ayyankali. He feels that Ayyankali is very much relevant in overcoming the boundaries imposed by generic caste identities. The fragmentation among the Dalit communities along sub-caste formation has definitely impeded the voice of the exploited and under-privileged. Kochu very correctly points out that a deeper reading of Ayyankali would convince the Dalits about their entitlements and rights and possibly help them towards making their futures secure from all exploitation.

Finally, there are a few more poignant issues which have been raised in this narrative that bind the personal to the public. Kochu is certainly not the single person who has questioned the entire basis of class politics in Kerala, but there are many others as well. The grand narrative on contemporary Kerala as it emerges from this autobiographical work is certainly worth more than a praise. The readership would definitely admire the sincerity with which the author has presented his own story, which by all accounts is an honest and fearless presentation. There would be a lot of people who would cast aspersions on him for equating the communist party in Kerala with a farmer’s party, with a predominant presence of Christian and Nair communities. It was quite on the cards that when the entire idea of class was propounded it actually represented the material interests of the privileged sections of the peasantry. The agricultural labourers who were landless in most cases were ignored, if not side lined by the communist party leadership. The men who occupied the upper echelons in the communist party hierarchy displayed a total lack of understanding on the linkages between the social and the material which went far beyond the logic of economic determinism. The Pulayas, thus had to remain content with small strips of homestead plots, which kept them dependent as before on the well to do sections of the rural society. They could only feel that the entire propaganda on the agrarian legislations of the 1960s and the 1970s had only been an eyewash, because the faith had been reposed on an agrarian structure which epitomised the exploitation and subjugation of the economically disadvantaged and socially deprived groups. The dispossession of the poor and the loss of their house sites, all in the name of development initiated by both government and private agencies in Kerala in the last three decades or more, that too in a Marxist bastion has kept many law-abiding citizens bewildered. It has been an important part in the life journey of the Dalits in Kerala, who hardly enjoy any support from the leftist organisations. Kochu makes us rethink the so-called success story of the Kerala model of development. While in matters of health and certain other government sponsored welfare measures there had been appreciable success, the land question has remained unresolved. The glaring omission of the Dalits and Adivasis in the planning and implementation of the development schemes has been much too evident.

The situation despite being bleak, has not been a total dampener from the point of view of the Dalit communities in Kerala. Their articulation in favour of autonomous brand of politics and that of the need to organise new social movements, have brought them in confrontation with all organised political parties. Politics and society in the state continue to be guided by the whims and expectations of upper and middle-caste groups, thereby exposing the holes of a punctured social structure which had drawn sustenance from the entire debate on modernity.

Kochu has no clear-cut answer for the ending the discrimination and poverty of the Dalits, Adivasis and other communities considered to be “low” in the social hierarchy The only consolation being that of a hope which would usher in a situation where the under-privileged groups would be in a position to reiterate the logic of social equality. This expectation is certainly not a product of imagination and romanticism but is fore grounded in the contemporary Dalit discourse, where recovery of the past provides energies for recreating an entirely new theoretical discourse challenging the ubiquitous display of Savarna life experiences. It is clear that a revolution might not be in the offing, but there is enough to presume that a new cultural awareness will pose strong challenges to the existing caste system.

About the reviewer:

Raj Sekhar Basu, teaches at the Department of History, University of Calcutta. Previously, he had served as faculty in Rabindra Bharati University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is known for his research on contemporary South India and his publications essentially deal with issues of  poverty, subalternity, marginality and those of identity, protest and autonomous brand of politics.  He has been a Visiting Professor in  many well known universities of Europe and North America.