[This is the third of the “Reflection on the Kafila Journey” series. The first post in this series by Subhash Gatade can be read here and the second by Aditya Nigam can be read here.]

I started writing on Kafila in 2007. I met Nivedita at a conference in Delhi where she listened to my research on sexuality and development in Kerala; she took me by the arm gently, persuaded me to start writing in a non-academic but rigorous style, and showed me the possibilities of the new medium.

I was quite alone those days, being barely out of a very abusive marriage and just finding my feet in the world of academics and public politics which I had exited some thirteen years ago. So the invitation sounded rather daunting to me. But more importantly, I had decided that I will focus on a regional space, Kerala, as a researcher. I may not fit, I told Nivi — ‘India’ is almost unreal space for me. She assured me that Kafila was, after all, a caravan. I could write there about Kerala and comment on ‘India’ from that space, if I wanted to.

Kerala was the place I loved and I wanted to be part of building it up anew against the political challenges of the post-liberalisation years. But it was also a place that denied me full belonging. I was (and still am) like a wild plant which cannot grow and thrive except under our astonishingly-blue skies, amidst an abundance of green that survives despite our neglect. Like the plants in that verdure — which we call weeds — which continue to survive despite being sprayed with toxic chemicals, I continue to survive here. I do believe that Kafila was important for my survival.

In Kafila, I found a community of equals which did not rely upon the kind of political monoculture that the mainstream Left in Kerala promoted actively. I met leftist men who did not need to flaunt their scholarship and employ petty domestic violence to hide their fears, and fearless feminist women who did not use ‘activism’ to hide their intellectual fears. Back home, I had seen such fears among feminists often manifest as plain intellectual laziness. I met feminists who could engage with the state and governments without falling to their knees before these institutions. I met journalists, students and activists who were serious about their work. In other words, I found another way of doing politics without masculinist hubris, of doing feminism without pettiness, and imagining another world collectively in a way that every voice counted. It was also a place that convinced me that near-‘zero-budget’ intellectual activism was possible. There was no funding, of any kind. We split the expenses. But the community was never a homogenous one, and debates could be quite heated as well. Yet the commitment to justice within the collective was never ignored. No one whose actions deserved punishment was spared. For me, coming from a space where anyone with strong connections with ruling powers could (and can, all the more so, nowadays) get away with anything — continue to don the garb of their ‘progressiveness’ — this was valuable indeed. This does not mean that no mistakes were ever made; not all disagreements could be resolved effectively. Yet I do believe that the community suffered simply because it is so easy to project the criticism of a member of the community to the community as a whole — to issue calls to break it down as a whole for a mistake of a member.

This community has helped democratic struggles in Kerala in ways that few progressives here have realised. From 2008, when the mainstream media went out of its way to blackout news from the struggle-site at Chengara (where the major dalit land struggle in Kerala in the new century was going on), Kafila published reports and reflections on/ from the struggle. The impact was felt even in the JNU student-body elections of that year. Looking back, Kafila served as a platform for every single such struggle that the mainstream tried to smother. For example, the Kiss of Love protests of 2015. I wrote in Malayalam on Kafila for the first time that year, I think — trying to engage with Muslim and Dalit patriarchs through Kafila. Despite their best efforts, the Kiss of Love grew into an all-India phenomenon and Kafila did play a key role in it. I was branded a ‘secularist left-liberal’, with the taint immediately falling on Kafila, which was condemned as the breeding ground of this parasitical species. Those were simpler times, I guess. You were either sexually-depraved or a disciplined believer/community member. The writing on Kafila had contested this. Times have turned more complex now, and that simple distinction looks so obviously mistaken.

Then, in 2017, the struggle of a young Ezhava-born woman, Hadiya, who chose Islam and a life-partner who shared her chosen belief, burst upon us. She was hounded by the mainstream in a way that made the secular credentials of the ruling Left appear extremely suspect; the courts even annulled the marriage she had herself willingly entered into. I was immediately reclassified from ‘stupid privileged liberal feminist’ to ‘Sudaapini’ (or a female supporter of allegedly-fundamentalist, automatically-misogynist Islam). On Facebook, the CPM’s thugs and supporters vied with each other to condemn Hadiya’s supporters. This time, Kafila became a space that allowed us to directly contest the all-round efforts to hand over Hadiya and her partner to the NIA, for the ‘great crime’ of choosing her faith and her life-partner. A campaign that mobilized the voices of Indian public figures who saw the dangerous mistake that the Malayali political parties were making unfolded on Kafila. Many prominent intellectuals from India and abroad wrote open letters to the Kerala Chief Minister reminding him of his duty to support the young woman in her fight for her rights as an Indian citizen. This sustained effort did have an impact. I realised that the Left leadership in Kerala which stubbornly ignored leftist voices of dissent here (while readily giving in often to social right-wing whining) could be made to come to their senses minimally at least only by the pressure of the leftist community in the Indian metropolises. Kafila played a small but significant role in Hadiya’s successful defense of her rights.

That this was not just a fluke became apparent when we fought against the Kerala government in 2021 for the rights of an infant who was kidnapped by its grandparents and trafficked via the state’s child welfare machinery. Its parents, Anupama and Ajith Kumar, protested in public; Anupama’s father who played the lead role in the whole drama was a prominent local CPM leader. The couple failed in their efforts to get back their son because even the state-level leadership of the CPM apparently saw it as an ‘internal’ or ‘family affair’. To our great dismay, even leading feminists in Kerala seemed to be more interested in crafting pseudo-feminist arguments to justify this dastardly crime. This time, too, a campaign on Kafila in which leading Indian feminists wrote open letters to the Chief Minister of Kerala, urging him to return the infant to his parents and to mend the obviously-broken child welfare machinery, was crucial. The pressure was such that Anupama and Ajith got their baby back — though the culprits still strut around the state capital quite unashamed, promoted to higher positions in the CPM and the government. The aggrieved parents were supported by just eight of us — feminists marginal to mainstream Malayali feminism — and the cyber attacks on us by the Left and the Right alike were relentless. Anupama and Ajith were up against the biggest political force in Kerala, the ruling power. If they were able to make the government return their baby despite this, it was also because Kafila as a space allowed us to build an alternate feminist narrative that exposed pseudo-feminist justifications of the crime.

All this happened when Kafila continued to be the space on which many of us from here, including myself, continued to publish regular commentary on a very wide array of political, social, and cultural issues in Kerala in the early decades of the new century. It participate in documenting major political struggles and events in the region — the Sudra disturbances around the SC verdict on the Sabarimala temple, the massive floods of 2018, and so on. These essays, in other words, document a time in the regional space, quite closely. Kafila also became the space which allowed me a voice during full-blown cyber attacks which buried one under a mountain of misinformation, misinterpretation — for example, by CPM cyber-thugs during the so-called ‘Civic Chandran case’ of 2022.

What, then, about Kafila’s relevance to someone like me who the Malayali mainstream considers a nuisance, but one that can’t be ignored? I can only say this: Kafila permitted for a kind of belonging for the likes of me which can only be described as ‘beyonding’. The word ‘beyonding’ has been used (by Lauren Berlant, if I remember right), in quite another sense, but here I use it to mean a way of putting down roots in some ‘beyond-space’ which allows one to sustain a vibrantly-living presence in the space which rightfully belongs to one but remains hostile. For me, Kafila has been that beyond-space. It has nurtured me, a weird plant which gets cut down all the time, but cannot be pulled out — because its roots seem elsewhere.

But then weirdness is the normal in the world of plants; only human beings find it strange. From the above account it perhaps becomes apparent that Kafila was indeed a caravan and it has traveled — connecting the forces of democracy outside the region to struggles within it. For me, it has been a garden — the garden that I suppose the weird and the weedy always dream about.