I remember, as a young child, going with my father one Onam in our ancestral home to watch the local Onam sports-and-games.My admittedly-fuzzy memory is of a large crowd of men gathered in an open paddy field or ground (I remember a lovely cloud of dragon-flies hovering above doing some sort of crazy-excited dance), getting ready for Onathallu — physical combat between
two men.

The two combatants were ushered into the middle of the ground by their supporters with very belligerent cries — the aarpu– and I, barely four or five, nearly shivered with fear. The two men then attacked each other, and the crowd went into a veritable frenzy. I remember pressing my face hard on my father’s shoulder and closing my eyes tight, scared by the din of the crowd around me. When I looked up, all I could see was the maddened crowd, now gathered even on the coconut-tree tops, shouting and screaming and even though I didn’t turn to look at the fighting men, the wild expression of the people I could see was frightening enough. My father kept comforting me, saying that it wasn’t a ‘real fight’ — there were referees besides. But I cried to go home, and when I turned to take one single look before we left, the combat had ended and one of the combatants had retreated with a bloodied face.

There were famous Muslim Ona-thallu champions in our village. My parents were doctors working in town and my father’s country-cousins would often stay with us when they came seeking medical treatment. I remember how a senior Muslim gentleman once visited our home.My father wouldn’t sit down in front of him and kept answering him with the respectful ‘aane’ whenever he asked something; my brother and I were sternly warned against hooting in the afternoons when he was taking a nap. When he left, I asked my father who it was, and he said that this was a very famous Onathallu fighter from our village — the hero of my father’s generation. He was the champion for very many decades, unmatched in skill and agility. ‘Not in an single combat could anyone even touch his body’ — I recall how father’s eyes lit up in awe when he said that. As a child I was always a loner who spent more time with wild plants and flowers than with other children and so I loved Onam, for it was a time when we could roam free all over the neighborhood among the wild bushes– I knew where wildflowers grew. But perhaps
because of the memory of the Onathallu, I have never been able to swallow the image of ‘traditional’ Onam — the one which sends many people into fits of nostalgia — as benign and non-violent. Somewhere in it lurked the militarism of not just the Nairs, but of all castes that have traditionally borne arms for feudatories here. And that was not merely the Nairs — they included the upper-crust of the Ezhavas, the Syrian Christians, and the Muslims too.

Onam has of course changed totally in the course of just a few decades — and there are now variants and variants of Onam celebrated not just in Kerala but all over the world. Importantly, in the campuses around the country where young Malayali people have migrated seeking better education, it has now become an occasion on which we critically interrogate Malayali identity itself. For those of us swamped by the utterly marketized Onam in Kerala which by itself has provided the space for a powerful come-back of upper caste values and tastes, this is precisely the silver-lining in the thunder cloud.

However, it appears to me that at least some of these debates, especially those happening in major university campuses in India, could well-qualify to be Onathallu of another sort. Largely verbal perhaps, but no less violent, and sadly enough, not ‘real fights’, as my father once reassured me. Not ‘real fights’ because both sides seem to be equally accusative and bent on anti-political guilt production — in other words, the two sides, at least in some instances, do not seem to represent much difference in the ways they function even as the political goals and interests defended are different. I have myself been critical of Onam and its symbols in present-day Kerala but find myself feeling very worried by this. In some instances at least the debate seems utterly polarized between the Onam-lovers and the Onam-trashers and anyone who does not hurry to be cleared by one of these passport-authorities or the other will find herself thumped by both. Worse, it may lead to a situation where all those who are not Onam-lovers but are sceptic about Onam-trashing may be treated as Onam-lovers-in-effect and transferred to the Onam-Lovers’ Passport Control — and vice-versa of course. I believe that there are a very large number who occupy this wretched middle-ground, and who do not enjoy being fodder for what sometimes seems nothing other than pure hate. What I say, however, is for myself though there may be others who agree.

First, I do not see eye to eye with what appears often as an obsession with origins. It may indeed be a fact that Onam was a part of Malayala Brahmin self-indulgence — but of course one does not know where its ‘true’ origins lie, they are lost in the hoary past. Even so, what makes us think that the origin continues to determine Onam in some entirety? Whatever the media and the advertising may project, I do not believe that there was anything singular called Onam in the past or the present, or anything of that name that defied human efforts to modify and change. It is indeed true that the Onam of the present is laden with reformist-high-Hindu symbolism but that itself was the result of modification which cast away many overtly caste-Hindu religious rituals and practices associated with Onam. In fact, it was thoroughly rationalized, with the Nair organizations decreeing that the flower-carpet decoration may well be limited to one day instead of all nine. Also, agreed that this process was implicated in newer forms of caste and community power that shaped the Malayalee national-popular of the mid-1950s, but the point here is that this is evidence for the fluid character of Onam.

And even when it came to be informally acknowledged as the ‘national festival’ in the 1940s — Onam somehow never got fixed into a tight little nationalist corner. For example, this is evident in the way in which it came to be celebrated outside Kerala in the 1930s, 40, and 50s, in the south-east Asian countries, Ceylon, Burma, in African countries — wherever Malayalees had migrated. In many of these places,Onam did not always celebrate Malayali [sub]nationhood — after decolonization, Malayalees in these countries either returned or merged into the national mainstream as national identities there became more rigid and not inclusive of difference. In these places, Onam stood for a memory, mainly, of a season, an ecology, a geography even as it high-Hindu connotations remained.

Today, Onam in practice is definitely not an occasion to venerate high-Hindu Kerala in some universal sense — to different people it is different — it can well be the Shopoholic’s Orgy, the Bacchanal of the tipplers, travel-week for holiday-seekers, Public Onam in Kerala’s cities and so on. Caterers in Thiruvananthapuram tell me that unlike in earlier times, they receive an increasing number of orders during Onam now — which surely is a change. Onam was supposed to be family occasion when people always cooked at home; apparently it is less so these days. And they also say that people often design their own Onasadya-lunch, asking for items such as Gobi Manchurian, Paneer dishes, Mysorepak and so on. True, the Onasadya is perhaps predominantly vegetarian still, but it is worth pointing out that non-vegetarian food was very much part of Onam lunch in parts of Kerala but that did not relieve the oppressiveness of upper-caste dominance during Onam even a little. And these changes clearly indicate that there is a lot of room for us to present a non-vegetarian Onasadya.

I totally agree that all these changes taking place on the ground need not indicate that Onam is changing for the better — that can happen only when we seize these changes consciously as an opportunity and project — and reconstruct Onam as an explicitly political act. What is important is that such a possibility exists with Onam and so it may be wiser not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It may be important to recognize that the other major festivals that we Malayalees celebrate are all still firmly moored in their religious settings quite perspicuously. Why not dump Onam and celebrate Keralapiravi (State-formation Day) as our national festival, asked a friend recently. Ah, I sighed, I prefer old Maveli and Mavelian utopia, whatever their faults may be, to Sardar Patel and the ugly reality of the Indian state. Besides, the formation of linguistic states was precisely what led to the massive disempowerment of tribal communities in south India and Kerala is no exception at all. At least the non-Brahmin myth of Maveli (the Vamana-centred myth was thrown out by the poets — Balamani Amma, Vyloppily, Edassery — and replaced with the Maveli-centric one by the end of the 1950s or even earlier) may be interpreted, perhaps (sort of stretched, I’d say) to evoke the vision of a welfare state committed to social equality and justice?

In other words, I do think we should get cracking on the business of reshaping Onam in creative and political ways rather than fight unproductively over Onam celebrations on campus. One such celebration, the Asura week, was a delightful idea — and it is no surprise that it has got some people’s goats! I think, and we should have more of them — not just on campuses outside Kerala but inside too. I mean we ought to turn our attention to such creative work instead of wasting our energy in unproductive and vicious fights with people who want to celebrate Onam in whatever conservative way they prefer. Having several Onams on campus is a good thing, I’d say, not bad, as long as they are not fueled by mutual hate. Perhaps an Onam we all can share will emerge through our different Onams ; building consensus over national symbols is not easy and requires patience, mutual respect, and imagination.

I do understand what Dalit intellectuals are trying to say when they assert that Onam is a ‘black day’ for dalits in Kerala as it marks the disappearance of the Mavelian world and the beginning of Brahmin dominance through Vishnu. In fact, it is the Dalit critique of Onam that is the strongest. At least those layers of the powerful communities of Kerala — the Nair, Syrian Christian, the Muslim — which were close to feudatories have all participated however minimally in Onam while it was the Dalit communities that carried its burden almost entirely. However, Dalit intellectuals in Kerala have not rejected all aspects of Kerala’s ‘Renaissance’ in total. For example, the reformist ideal of heteronormative gender difference and familial roles has been defended. It is one thing to say that Dalits have been excluded from the institutions and practices of upper-caste-inflected Malayalee modernity; it is yet another to claim that immediate inclusion in these is all that they need. I recently found a admiring author quote a dalit feminist from Kerala as saying that Dalit women have never enjoyed “a right to domesticity or the privacy of the family”, and so desire it. She asserts that Dalit women desire most the “security of the house, good clothes, an education, time to relax, the possibility of not having to work”. (I have not read the 2011 piece from which this is quoted and cannot vouch for the accuracy of translation. But since the author who quoted it is openly admiring, it is likely to be correct) Certainly, bourgeois domestic femininity was never advanced or claimed as a  ‘right’ anywhere, nor has it guaranteed either privacy nor security anywhere in the world. It has also not guaranteed the possibility of not having to work, paid or other. A home where one would really be secure, where privacy and the possibility of surviving without recourse to the exploitative capitalist-casteist market is a dream that all woman would share — and so it is not clear really what is specific to Dalit women here. But more importantly, in Kerala, these ideals were the central axioms of secularized high-caste, high-Hindu modernity — I can see no way in which these may be incised from their upper-caste correlates (maybe others can, but I am yet to come across a convincing exposition of such a position). The statements quoted seems to indicate that these ideals are not unpalatable to at least some dalit feminists. In that case it is not clear why Onam must necessarily be omitted: surely if inclusion in savarna-inflected domesticity is desirable, so can also be inclusion in savarna-inflected Onam?

I am also troubled by the fact that among young Malayali students in universities and other institutions of higher learning outside Kerala, the cultural aspects of the crisis of Malayali [sub]national identity seems to have gained a prominence that borders on the unhealthy. Living in Kerala, especially under the super-predatory rule of the present UDF government under which every aspect of life is being ruthlessly dragged towards the market, it surprises me that strong concern about these corrosive processes does not seem to be forthcoming among students outside Kerala. As the late Usha Zacharias once put it, the very body of Kerala is being subjected to radical surgery; plunder has become utterly respectable all the more; extractive plunder is readily conceded to be labour! One of the pivots of the cultural struggle against Onam has been the exclusion of minorities and dalits. However, if one were also concerned about the primitive accumulation that is gathering force on the ground in Kerala, it would be necessary to concede that all of these culturally-marginalized communities are not equally disadvantaged by them. Surely, there are important and politically powerful strata of these communities that are riding the high-tide of predatory capitalism and radical young people of these communities are often in conflict with these interests, like, for instance, the Solidarity Youth Movement (even if they are periodically reined in by seniors). Also, young people from dalit communities are forging creative, resistant, and strongly oppositional responses to their exclusion from consumption — like the young people of the Dalit Human Rights Movement who are crafting for themselves a new Ambedkarite self, new discourses of dignity, and practices of self-assertion in the public that offer radical resistance to the secularised casteism of Malayali society. Perhaps insisting on a more holistic sense of the crisis of Malayali [sub]national identity would make the debate over Onam less neatly polarized and acrimonious?

Whatever this may be, I do believe that dalit people will take the lead here. Thinking further on the dalit critical reworking of social institutions in Kerala, it is worth noting that some of the most powerful critiques of bourgeois domesticity I have ever come across in Kerala have been articulated by the Dalit leader Seleena Prakkanam of the Dalit Human Rights Movement. She mounts a sharp and exciting attack on the bourgeois family-form as individualizing and confining of both men and women, antithetical to the project of renewing and rejuvenating community beyond the liberal interest-group, and as an institution that cannot produce the resistant Dalit subject in postdevelopmentalist Kerala. I am hardly surprised by this; dalit women who have been excluded from middle-class, savarna-inflected domesticity are indeed better capable of thinking and devising practice beyond the given, hegemonic models.Likewise, precisely because dalit people have been excluded from this festival that they made possible in the first place, they are in a better position to not only pull it apart and put it together to produce an altogether different event.

My own response would be this : precisely because of the above, Onam should not be omitted from our calender. Rather, it should become a day in which the oppressed and the oppressors should collectively engage in critical reflection on the past and contemporary practices, in which the oppressed step up to publicly claim the creativity and the immense fortitude that have marked their history and the oppressors own up their shameful past and let go their despicable grasp over history. Needless to say, because this would be liberating to both, it must remain a day of celebration, of a radically new sense of ‘we-ness’.