This is Onam week in Kerala — a festival that recalls the days of Maveli, the wise asura king dethroned and exiled by Vamana, the avtar of Vishnu, at the behest of jealous gods. It is also an intensely-family time for most people, given that upper caste ‘family’ values are pervasive. Amidst high voltage commercialised Onam, the people at Chengara starve. The trade union blockade has been renewed, and the CITU has brought in women and has extended the blockade 24 hours. And CPM cadre have now started ‘occupying’ the houses of the Sadhujana Vimochana Munnani activists — ostensibly to reveal the ‘truth’ — that some of them indeed possess some land and a house! Strange, indeed. By this logic, the women who the trade unions have deployed in the blockade shouldn’t be ‘workers’ at all, in the light of their middle class dress codes, body language, gold ornaments and apparent reluctance to squat on the road (they sit primly on rows of chairs)!
The idea that activists should be activists should necessarily embrace poverty, or that people should become activists only if they are near starvation, stems from new-elite hubris; but is it also not the case that the communist party has no right to preach what it does not practice? As far as I know, this idea was jettisoned as early as the 1940s, and by none less than EMS Nambutiripad, who is of course the reigning deity of the CPM! In response to widespread discontent over the communist party’s decision to reduce the number of full time activists in 1944, EMS remarked :“As far as comrades from the landowning and capitalist classes are concerned, it may be better that they work to create a group within their class who will work for the country’s economic planning and to improve the people’s standards of living, and to devote their wealth and labour in ways that enhance national pride, rather than sell their assets and hand over the sum received to the party.”
(‘Acchadakkattode Pravarttikkuka’ (Be Disciplined Workers), in P. Govinda Pillai (ed.), EMS Sampoorna Kritikal [Collected Works of EMS] vol.5, 1944-45, Thiruvananthapuram: Chinta Publishers, pp. 234-54).
But it is really the silence of the government that it most criminal. The ‘package’ seems indefinitely delayed; the CPM is apparently ‘helpless’ to curb the CITU; the Congress which made supportive noises and said pious things about resolving the issue seems powerless to persuade the INTUC.We hear that the issue is provoking some response among many CPM-identified intellectuals but by the time they get over their terrible moral dilemmas, it may be too late.
I suppose this is the ‘onam spirit’, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy and falsehood. At Onam we are all supposed to eat well, dress well, and pretend that everything is just right so that the exiled Maveli, who is allowed to visit his erstwhile subjects once a year, will be fooled. For that purpose, we are told that ‘sell your lease,if you need to,to dine well on onam’. So, we pretend that Chengara does not exist and go about our onam dining and dressing. Not just the CPM, all of us, of the Malayalee new-elite,are equally complicit.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Is jdevika real??
Please put your quesrions to Neelakantan Namboodiri who was a CPM member till two years ago.
The Communist parties have only one goal – that of raising the living standards of the working class. They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels. Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs , thanks to their unions. College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions.
Our intellectuals should not ignore such achievments of the working classes under the Left or ridicule them out of envy.
Chegara people have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each. The might not starve at Onam!
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rsajan is a mixed bag indeed! He seems at times to be the typical upper middle-class cynic who shares the typical elite wisdom that since all politicians are crooked let us have no politics at all, and since the poor are poor because they are unfit for anything else, any improvement in their standards of living must be undeserved, irrespective of whether these gains are through politics or otherwise! And of course his cheerful clubbing of headload workers with college lecturers! At times, he seems to be the typical middle class Hindu upper caste person envious of the church. And of course predominantly the morally-frozen consumer-citizen who’d readily volunteer to spread slander about political struggles, who’d agree to user fees in everything else including public services for the poorest! Only the utterly elitist would claim that people at Chengara are so foolish that they would pay a fairly large sum to buy insecurity and violence inflicted by both the left and the unfeeling consumer citizens of Kerala.
I’m glad this person continues to respond — for other readers, here is evidence to the brand of elitism that Sunny Kapikad talks of in his speech posted here — the sort that denies the poor any real political agency, and sees them as helpless pawns of some kind of unscruplous element or the other. And worse, hints that they can be nothing more than that. At least other readers will see what the poor in Kerala are up against!
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Kerala is a place where you cannot get agriculture labourers. The minimum wages that you have to pay to any manual labourer is Rs. 250/- a day – for 6 hours of what they deem to be ‘work’. The carpenter gets Rs. 300/- to Rs. 500/- a day. A live-in maid comes at not less than Rs. 4500/- plus food and clothes, a month. If you use her for other things, you pay extra.
Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states. There is practically no unemployment there after 2000, if you are ready to work. The greediest of young men work in ‘quotation gangs’ that recover money for banks like ICICI, HSBC, HDFC etc, or beat up people for politicians or similar others. They quote in 10000s to lakhs.
If the ‘poor’ of Chengara would go out and work, they would get a minimum of Rs. 200/- a day. Why do they not go, then?
As for the Rs. 6000/-, I suggest that you ask Com. Neelakantan himself. If you actually do not know about the Rs. 6000/-, it is most unfortunate about the awareness levels of the intellectual tribe of Kerala.
Anyway, why do you not calculate the per capita availability of land in Kerala? Government land is yours and mine also.
By the by, do you have gold ornaments? I am gold-less. Would it be okay if I squat on your gold because you have it, and I do not?
The ways of the lazy and hypocritical tribe of Kerala’s professional intellectuals are to be seen to be believed…….
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Devika,
I dont know how wealthy you are.But Onething I can tell you that,u just try to find out the financial set up of chengara leaders(Forget about poor farmers,they are all just a some tools to implement ur agenda>).
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Interesting questions. Why is it that the ‘financial set up’ only of movement leaders is under question? Always? Sometime ago we had discussed an Indian Express report that did the same with regard to Singur and the activists involved in it. Suppose you are right, what is it supposed to ‘prove’? That people with money or wealth should only be doing what you want them to? Make more money? That they should not be part of movements? Unable to understand. Yes, ‘the poor’ are the banner for everybody to flaunt rejimon, except the Sajans of this world. You flaunt it as much as others you accuse of ‘misleading’ them. Why others, more capable and wealthy people, cannot mislead them, of course remains a mystery.
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Great going, sajan! Let people see what you and the rest of the Great Malayalee Elite are like. The tribe has swelled, and how! I distinctly remember as a child during the days of the Emergency, how a prominent cashew industrialist spoke about it in glowing terms on our school day. The same cribbing about Kerala’s workers who weren’t apparently willing to pick up his shit and tend his plants (or crops) for a pittance… Wow, what a bunch.. they want people to slog for them, feel awful about paying a decent wage, and worse, want people to keep shut as they slog…and feel no shame in spewing all this in the fashion of morally outraged innocents! Sajan’s comments make excellent primary sources for anyone researching Kerala’s apolitical consumerist middle class.
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And you might add, Devika, that this is the new, shifting social base of Kerala’s Old Left. While the old TUs gradually move to entrench new interests, some of them at least, will be in a mortal conflict with these new Malayali elites – and both will find their best bet in the CPI-M. It is not a situation that can last very long, as West Bengal also shows. It will have to be this way or that for the ‘Left’.
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Dr.Devika
Branding dissent with labels and then attacking the labels is usual when one cannot argue specific points. Senile Communist theoreticians often do this. Labels like reactionary, revisionist, Bourgeois nationalist, feudalist, anarchist etc are examples. The labels that our intellectuals use are cynical, pessimistic, communal, retrograde, bigoted, elitist etc. I cannot beat a Sociologist in the art of branding, labelling or in quaternio terminorum.
The following labels have so far been used on me here: Old Left, elitist, apolitical, consumerist, middle class, cynic, Hindu upper caste, morally-frozen etc. Thanks for the tags. Nevertheless, I really wish someone would enlighten me on my points:
• Chegara people have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each.
• Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states.
• If the ‘poor’ of Chengara would go out and work, they would get a minimum of Rs. 200/- a day. Why do they not go, then?
• Anyway, why do you not calculate the per capita availability of land in Kerala?
• I am gold-less. Would it be okay if I squat on your gold because you have it, and I do not?
AK Balan has already called Chengara a ‘state-sponsored agitation’. It is like Private Bus operators’ agitating and stopping services to make the public agree in agony to fare hikes by the ministry. In the name of settlement of Chengara orphans, government land elsewhere would soon be allotted. The rehabilitation initiative would be used more as a ploy to allot land to LDF cadres. Each party would have quotas, as had been with the Plus 2 allotment. Anyone that would pay the leaders would get choice real estate free. By 2010, the plots thus allotted would be consolidated to build resorts, amusement parks or professional colleges. Either the Party leaders themselves or Comrades like Farris Aboobacker would be the entrepreneurs on the land. Chengara would thus be revealed as a Total4 U, in a few more months.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/world/India/10242380.html
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Good. ‘Dr.Devika’, finally!
Here is my response to your burning questions.
(1) CR Neelakantan categorically denies having said or written anything you attribute to him — he said he was shocked about your claim about 6000 rupee fee, and challenges you to provide evidence beyond what some slanderous newspaper may have said. I take this as evidence for your slanderous intent. Not even those those associated with Harrisons Malayalam would make such a concerted effort at slander.
(2) and (3) I would like to correct your ignorance on Kerala as ‘Gulf’ — typical of the Malayala Manorama kind of political imagination. Kerala is no longer ‘Gulf’ to workers from Tamil Nadu or other parts of south India given the steep rise in everyday expenses. Yes it is still ‘Gulf’ for the miserably poor from Orissa, W bengal and other places. The inflow is welcomed here by hirers precisely because they have to pay only a fraction and don’t have to bother about welfare benefits. Well, so what? Does that mean that workers in Kerala should start working for miserably low wages and in abysmal conditions? If so, this contradicts your next point, about high wages in Kerala!
And a fine question to ask, indeed — why don’t the poor opt to stay landless labourers? And when the educated middle-class are even reluctant to let their children choose professions that lack ‘social status’! Manual labour is universally devalued in Kerala, and to say that the poor, who have been subjected to it for generations in history should stay continue to regard it as their mainstay reeks of elitism. Of course your understanding of the difference between escaping poverty and poverty management are decidedly poor, and so you’d go on flogging the same dead horse.
(4) Ah, the availability of land! Malayala Manorama-style ignorance, again, I am afraid. It in fact is strongly redolent of the screeching right-wing texts of the 1950s which spoke of ‘teeming millions’ of Kerala who were occupying every inch of the land and ate up all the resources, so that nothing was left for ‘development’! Proved later to be totally off the mark, common sense masquerading as science, with the demise of the Coale-Hoover thesis — there were many things wrong with Kerala but high population didn’t have the kind of economic effect that was attributed to it. Then too people were told to act ‘responsibly’ and cooperate with state family planning to help ‘development’. Now of course once again, land is found scarce. There is of course enough land for real-estate builders, for non-resident Malayali capital is pouring into Kerala filling up paddy land and destroying cultivable area. There is also enough land for more than 20 SEZs. As for the massive plantations, they are semi-private land and indeed, how awful the public should protest when the leaseholders try to snap up profit by selling it! Since it is the wealthy and the neo-wealthy who are the inheritors of the earth, how can we let the scum in, right, Sajan? Ata boy!
But we must go further. There are too many people around (I mean the scum) in plum areas in Kerala. We must rightfully wage a war to throw them out. Recently, the government identified 800 acres of prime land in the highly populous Thrissur district for a new university, some of which is notified land — remember, only when the adivasis squat on reserved areas is firing etc permitted! And for Vizhinjam, thickly populated coastal areas with immense tourism potential have been identified for acquisition. Where will all these people go? Oh, that isn’t our concern — that is what the government is for — eliminate or rehabilitate, keep the scum away from our eyeshot! The bottom line is there is no land available; they should be confined to some colonies.
Seriously, the sort of individualism implied in the use of ‘per capita’ land availability as the fundamental condition for implementing social justice is interesting. It will take several stock market crashes to remedy such hubris.
(5) Gold-less! Indeed! Who are you fooling? This is like Bill Gates saying that he doesn’t possess gold and therefore he is a saint. To treat that as a hypothetical query, yes, if I possess wealth (not ‘gold’) and if another does not, I think it is my moral duty to share it. I don’t think you or I who are likely to be social equals have any monopoly over gold; nor do I need to share it with you, since you are clearly my equal. The least we could do however, is to root for conditions under which those who have no wealth may escape such want and become our social equals. And the Manorama-logic, I fear, surfaces again — ‘if the deprivation suffered by x should be remedied, then y, who does not suffer deprivation now, should be reduced to deprivation’. That makes ‘equals’ of widowed and destitute Kunhipeennu of Chengara and Harrisons Malayalam!
(6) The last bit of counterfactual nonsense deserves no response. Again this impoverished soul has no sense of the status of counterfactuals in inductivist logic and no knowledge of the history, even recent history, of land struggles in Kerala.
And no more of this. The story rsajan fabricated and attributed to Neelakantan is bad enough.
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Dear Devika and teaam,
Its you people denied maveli for poor people.The Govt of kerala never supported Harison malayalam.Aquring land and its distribution is not an immediaite process.Govt hv to overcome lots of leagal bottlenecks.you can look into the high court verdict in this regard.Here in kerala now,there is a US sponsered shadow war is going by the leadership of you people.By consolidating people aginst the govt ,USA will ensure that thier enemies wont come to power agin in kerala.
Even if you look into Singur,same thing is happening.There is no doubt that TATAs are one of the very few socially comitted industrial gruop in the country.Even in kerala,if you go to munnar the entire area is survived by TATAS(They are taking care about health,education and other infrastructre needs of that place).If you ask anyone from Munnar,they will tell u that they are happy with that group.
In singur,TATA gave much much superior remuneration to farmers compared to any other SEZ’s in the country.Moreover they guaranteed employment also.Still the forces with vested interests are trying to sabotage the project.Infact this is not an agitation aginst TATA,but aginst CPIM and Bengal Govt.
SO I AM CHALLENGING YOU TO PUBLISH”THE SOURCE OF INCOME ,U PEOPLE AMASSED”
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“CR Neelakantan categorically denies having said or written anything you attribute to him”
I did not attribute anything to him. Please go through my posts again and enlighten me about this. I am not an intellectual. I am unaware how CR Neelakantan is important enough for attributions, fabricating stories etc. Media-created professional intellectuals is not a new thing in Kerala.
Dr.Devika said, “We hear that the issue is provoking some response among many CPM-identified intellectuals but by the time they get over their terrible moral dilemmas, it may be too late.” And I suggested her asking Mr.Neelakantan (about it), he being a CPM man. Ditto about the Rs 6000/-. Surely, he might know its truth or otherwise? I trust that no obsessive sense of doubt or guilt caused the jump to an attribution-identification.
Thanks to Dr.Devika’s post, I now know that there have also been newspaper reports about the Earnest money/Caution Deposit at Chengara, though. When a lawyer has no point to argue, he bangs on the table. Dr. Devika harps on imaginary slander.
As per the Vedi’s claims, as many as 24,000 people belonging to 7,282 families are occupying about 14,000 acres of land at the Kumbazha Estate. The number of makeshift huts pitched at the estate will be around 7,800. The money collected might thus come to crores of Rupees exclusive of financial assistance received from the Agencies.
Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and similar mega-stars’ going to Chengara is only like Henry Kissinger’s having come to New Delhi in November 2007 on behalf of the NSG corporates to sort out the Left’s misgivings about the reciprocal arrangements for their agreeing to the Nuclear Deal. Such initiatives need spending.
Chengara might be either Harrisons’ playing to continue their enjoyment of the land, or it might be some other group that wants the land for themselves after Harrisons. The Estate might also be divided and allotted to different employees’ co-operatives, to benefit all the political parties. I refer again here to AK Balan’s statement. On 17.9.2008, Laha Gopalan categorically said on Doordarshan that they would not accept land at Chengara, even if no other land were given.
I am sure that Dr. Devika and the others would be open about the Chengara financial resources once “they get over their terrible moral dilemmas”
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“I would like to correct your ignorance on Kerala as ‘Gulf’”
I should admit that I might not perhaps, know as much as Dr..Devika does about the immigrant labour situation. I was born in a Government Hospital in Kerala more than half a century ago and have lived here all my life. However, I cannot claim infallibility of awareness or omniscience of experience. That right rests with professional intellectuals.
However, Malayali workers including head loaders, and employees including college teachers are, within Kerala, a disgrace to world labour. To them, work is worship of selfish indolence, and exercising of the tongue. Chaathans, created by the great VKN is the best possible presentation of our poor farm labourer.
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“And a fine question to ask, indeed — why don’t the poor opt to stay landless labourers?”
I heard Laha Gopalan say many times on TV that the Chengara camp has people of all castes, and that it is only an agitation of people who do not have as much land as their birthright [they having only 4 to 10 cents] and the landless. This might mean that it is not an agitation of landless Dalits; or at least, not any longer. Laha Gopalan himself has only one hectare or 247 cents.
I am not competent to say whether anybody [Kerala labourer, Kerala intellectual, CPM, the Church, Harrisons or Harris] should be landless, though I would like to believe that all material possessions are logically stupid.
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“Ah, the availability of land! Malayala Manorama-style ignorance, again, I am afraid”.
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Kerala has a population of about 4 % of the country. Projected population for 1st March 2008 is 3, 42, 32,000. We have land of 1.18% of India. The quantum of land 38863 sq. kms or 9 603 00000 cents cannot change.
Of this geographical area, 48% is mountainous or hilly. 12% is the coastal lowlands. The remaining 40% of midlands alone is suitable for human dwelling. That is to say, for 4% percent of the country’s population, only about 0. 45% of its land is available for living and surviving.
The pressure on land is our greatest weakness. Our earlier planners did not give this matter honest consideration. We should have planned for development without disturbing or destroying the highlands and lowlands. You meddle with mother Earth and you suffer – our planners ignored this old rule.
Institutional support by the Church to encroachments is responsible for the destruction of our hills. Muthanga was the zenith of their achievement under a Catholic ruler. Sex tourism is responsible for the vandalisation of our coasts.
Land belongs to all of us equally; Laha Gopalan, Devika and me have equal [only equal] rights on it. We also have responsibility to it. Calculating on 960300000 cents and 34232000 humans, individual share comes to 28 cents each. Permissible human usage-share is 40% of that total. Thus, each of us has a birthright to only 11 cents. If you allow a further deduction of 30% to man-made infrastructure like roads, public grounds and buildings, other public utilities etc, a Keralite can claim or own to himself only 7 cents or so.
It is against this ground reality that Chengara orphans demand five acres of land suitable for agriculture and Rs.50,000 in cash for each landless family among them [The Hindu 04.06.2008]. The demands are typically Malayali – similar to demanding that you shut your thattu-kada, stop plying your autorikshaw or not take your ill child to the hospital, for ‘their’ Bandh. It is mere bullying. And we would not dare to do it outside Kerala borders.
I have no objection to Dr.Devika’s giving 5 acres to any Chengara orphan. Meeting the demand would need only about 40000 acres of land. Please give me my 7 cents also simultaneously.
Remarks beginning “Recently, the government identified 800 acres of prime land in the……..”etc do not concern me. All administrations do such things for bribes. From Sir CP, who brought his Mylapore friends here to start FACT and the Aluminum Company, to the Fronts who bring the various Cities, they are all the same. Environmentalists that take money from one bidder and agitate against the other are also equally great. I feel that squatting and allotment are both immoral as long as land is not equally shared.
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“Gold-less! Indeed! Who are you fooling?”
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I only asked /meant if anyone’s trespassing and squatting on land that is not his, is okay. Dr.Devika said that we should share. I agree. I shall share once I get more than my 7 cents. In 3 years, 30% of the active population in Kerala would be non-Malayali. The Chengara model would serve them well. I am all for the Chengara culture. TRESPASS,, SQUAT, GRAB! We need not stop with land alone.
Dr.Devika has mistaken me for someone else. I am not her equal in any aspect. We do not have any gold either. She is welcome to squat here a la Chengara, if she wants our gold.
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“And no more of this. The story rsajan fabricated and attributed to Neelakantan is bad enough”
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I now regret being stupid and not being an intellectual. I re-read my posts. Did I ‘fabricate and attribute’ any story about Neelakanthan?? Why does a person like Dr.Devika feel so? Obviously, she must be right and I am wrong. I must go back to my Govt UP School and learn my English again. I fail to see how Neelakantan could be important enough to merit slander.
Dr.Devika has added one more tag on me – slanderer. Though I am reminded of The Church’s calling Sr. Abhaya reports slanderous, I thank her again for her beautiful tags.
I do not know what Malayala Manorama ignorance is. My family have been traditional “Mathrubhumi” readers for generations. I suppose the area of land, population etc are the same whether we read Manorama or Mathrubhumi. And about immigrant labour that one sees all around and at times hires, one observes and learns.
But one does not argue with professional Kerala intellectuals…….one ‘cannot’.
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Amazing! Sajan’s posture of injured innocence. He seems to be suffering from some complex. How else does one understand the fact that he continues to complain about ‘labels’ being attached to him, while being completely oblivious of his own mode of argument. Just for the sake of pleasure and entertainment, let me cite from his own first comment, which he keeps harking back to:
1. “Is jdevika real??”
I am not sure what this means. That Sajan has not heard or read any such thing before? This is Neelakantan Namboodiri masquerading as Devika?
2. “They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels.”
Presumably ‘they’ refers to communists. ‘EVEN coolies’, S tells us, live lifestyles that are ‘Star level’ (five-star?). Now this is clearly not an aspersion on coolies in Mr S’ view! And the implication of course should not be missed: EVEN COOLIES are living lives that are not meant for them, the scum of the earth! And this is not a label or an accusation. He is simply stating a fact??
3. “Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs , thanks to their unions.”
After coolies, it is the turn of ‘clerks and peons’ – How dare they earn more than MNC CEOs (really? do they? Mr Sajan?). And this is a poor government school educated boy who is being unjustly attacked by some apparition called Devika!
4. “College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions.”
Now, did we leave out somebody? Ah, yes, the Chengara lot:
5. “who have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each.”
Thus proved: All you people are goons holding innocent Sajans of Kerala to ransom.
And none of this is either invective or labelling. It is labelling only when Mr S is called names.
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Dear Devika and Mr.Nigam(Who is totally ignorant abt kerala).
Sajan Raised a valid argument .Being professional intellectuals you are supposed to answer them .
My family comprises of Six members having only 27 cents of land(This is not in cochin city,but in a small village in alappuzha dist. We dosent have direct road access and hv to cover 300 mts to enter the panchayath road).So if Everybosy in kerala requires this 5 acres of land.What we will do Devika?.
Devika and Mr.Nigam Might hv read/reserched/written Plenty about poverty.But as a person who born and brought in working class family,i know what is poverty.Many times I tasted that.
Since I born in a state,which underwent a deep social movemment.I got access to free education and now am able to support family and my society.For me social service is not a profession.Its the part and parcel of one’s life.And I also want to see everything in actuality.Want everybody in the world to live in peace and harmony.I worked in three differnt state in the country.I urge Ms.Devika to leave kerala and Settle down some ther state at least for Six months.Then you will realise how better off keralites.All the intellectuals wants to concentrate only in kerala/weest bengal. for survival they wants to do the “pen pushing” .In Kerala people are there to read always(a culture planted by communists).
But if they write an article in a Marathi magazine,how many will read?
No.there wont be no takers.
Even “Genuine “journelists like P.Sainath got readers only in Kerala/West B(I meant common people like me and sajan).I dont think anybody in Vidhrbha/bomaby knows that there is person named P.Sainath working as The Hindu -Mumabi chief(In Mumbai people doesnt know,there is a peper named “The hindu”).Even then he prefered to be here and told the world about the story of Suffering mass.
So I reqest all intellectuals in kerala to come and do some thing for other state also.
Here I or Mr.Sajan was not attacking Mr.Neelakanatan or Mr.Devika personally.We wer asking some very genuine questions.
‘A PERSON WHO WAS AN ENGINEER WITH KELTRON,WHICH IS A PSU,LEFT THE JOB AND MIGRATED TO ‘USA”(Like a every malayalee,only to earn money and secure his futire-not a sin at all-).Earned enough ,came back and settled in Kerala.
Now he can question capitalist forces.He can lead land agitations(Let him distirbute his own land first).
Si we are qestioning this kind of hypocrical approach.
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It is quite iinteresting to notice the ideological angst of malayalee middle class’s casteist ethos coming out when Dalits and Adivasis asserted their right to land. such anxities were not demonstrated When Harrison encroached the land. The Chengara struggle is not only for land it is also a fight against such malayalee casteist ethos echoed by sajans and rejimons.
And while talking abt making the reading/educating publics in kerala, one can’t forget the struggles of Dalitbahujan leaders.. it was not nair/nambudiri communists but Ayyankali who led the struggle (violent struggle remember) for educational rights and dignity. The cultural/political/ challenge posed by Dalitbahujan thinkers and leaders like ayyankali, sreenarayana guru, poikayil appachan, sahodaran ayyappan, pandit karuppan shall not be forgotten at any cost. it cant be ignored /masked as cleverly did by poeple like EMS.
the struggle for land is aslo struggle for citizenship
it s also the struggle to live with dignity live as humanbeings
it s struggle to assert ones identity
it s not the kind of struggle that sajans can imagine. bz in order to understand Chengara, one needs to break away from the caste mindset of malayalee..
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Hi,
I came here seeing Maveli in the title.
Man, am I SURPRISED??!! I am so overwhelmed with the debate that it has left me speechless.
Cheers,
Salil
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dear ranju radha,
Pls try to read and understand what we are trying to convey here.you only dragged castism into this debate.
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dears
no need to drag caste into it
it s already there
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Devika’s invention about Maveli as a Asura has long back exposed by Kancha Iliiah.There is no novelty in it.Hail Plagiarism!
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Sorry to disappoint you, selvan, but the debate on Maveli’s status in Kerala is as old as the 1950s and heated up in 1960 when Onam was declared Kerala’s national festival. Of course the debate was ignited in many parts of the country long back — by Phule in Maharashtra long back. I’m certainly not a participant in that debate anyhow; my point was to use a myth now used ad nauseum to prop up frenzied consumerism at Onam. Thanks for the compliment anyway!
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Devika,
I am a student of Journalism from K C College, Mumbai. My classmates and I plan to film a documentary highlighting the issue of the land struggle at Chengara as part of our Contemporary Issues paper. We have read a couple of articles of Kafila and would like to directly contact you and Mr Sunny Kapikkad regarding the same.
Awaiting your reply,
Zeenat
zeenie.n@gmail.com
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