Chitralekha, a dalit woman from Payyanur, Kannur, has been in the news since 2005, for her open challenge to the CITU in that left bastion. An autorickshaw driver, she had protested at the CITU’s constant interference at work and the intensely male hostility against her presence in an almost exclusively male line of work. Braving ‘character-assault’ from the CITU which called her a ‘loose woman’, a ‘regular drunk’ and so on, she continued working until,in December 2005, her autorickshaw was burned down. She fought, however, and was supported by various Dalit, Feminists and Citizen’s initiatives. In June 2008, she procured a new autorickshaw with their support. This did not mean that she was now acceptable to the CITU . Now recently, she complained that the CITU had seized a chance encounter to beat her and her husband, and the police, who arrived on the scene, took them to the police station and unleashed even worse violence. Her complaints have been ignored or treated with hostility by the mainstream media in Kerala. Activists and concerned persons in and outside Kerala, however, have rallied to her support. Continue reading The Many ‘Vices’ of Chitralekha
All posts by J Devika
Inaugurated: The Malabar Moral Police!
The dastardly attack on the eminent writer Paul Zachariah by the DYFI in the CPM fortress of Payyanur in north Kerala on 10 January has been roundly condemned across the political spectrum in Kerala. Zacharia was heckled and abused at a literary seminar organized by a publisher for criticizing the moral policing practiced by the official left in Kerala. He condemned the recent DYFI-PDP joint ‘moral action’ against the Congress leader Rajmohan Unnithan and a Sewa Dal leader which, according to the the DYFI leadership, were ‘provocative’. Zacharia was accosted by a gang of men when he was about to leave Payyanur and openly threatened. He was told that such talk was not permitted in the left bastion of Payyanur; when the threat did not produce the desired reaction, they resorted to physical intimidation, and relented only after the intervention of the organizers who are CPM sympathizers, and other writers present there. The day after, prominent leaders in the CPM, including the Chief Minister and the Minister for Education, condemned the action. Continue reading Inaugurated: The Malabar Moral Police!
Protest and Terrorism, Is there a Difference?
Sufiya Madani of the PDP has been granted conditional bail by the Ernakulam Sessions Court Judge after a tense wait following her arrest on 17 December. She was remanded to judicial custody by the first class magistrate court at Aluva which had refused her bail. Meanwhile, the mainstream media went on a speculation-spree, even publishing ‘evidence’ that she had abetted terrorism and violence — the burning of a bus owned by the Tamil Nadu Road Transport Corporation at Kalamassery in 2005 during protests against the PDP leader Abdul Nasser Madani’s (Sufiya’s husband) continued detention in the Coimbatore jail . Continue reading Protest and Terrorism, Is there a Difference?
Savarna Terror Erupts in Kerala
(with inputs from Mythri Prasad Aleyamma)
I admit, this title sounds sensationalist. But one can hardly avoid resorting to it when confronted with utterly stupefying news of attacks on dalit colonies almost next door to Kerala’s capital city and nerve centre of Malayalee politics, and that too, by a minor anti-political force that has a legacy of anti-South Indian hatred — the Siva Sena. And of course when one is confronted with the hard, stony silence of almost all sections of the media about this. The mystery of the murder of an elderly, innocent morning-walker in Varkala, a town close to Thiruvananthapuram (of which I wrote in an earlier post) still remains a mystery; the police story is so full of holes that it looks like a sieve. But the Guardians of our Free Press are still lapping police versions and not conducting independent investigation. Activists who have dared to do so have been heckled and hounded, even senior and respected human rights activists like B.R.P.Bhaskar, by the Siva Sena, and their protests have been ignored. Meanwhile violence continues to be unleashed against the supporters of the group that has been accused of murder, the Dalit Human Rights Movement (DHRM).
Who’s at ‘Jihad’? : ‘Love Jihad’ and the Judge in Kerala
It looked as if the controversy over ‘Love Jihad’ ( ‘jihad defined as ‘war by other means’) had blown over with state authorities in Kerala and Karnatake denying that such a threat ever existed.The Central Government informed the Kerala High Court early this month that there was no such thing and that the term ‘love jihad’ was being used by the media.However, today, the Kerala High Court openly voiced its scepticism of police reports, claiming that the reports were inconsistent and citing various technical flaws.The Court claims that it is abiding by the secular spirit of the Indian Constitution: it agrees that the freedoms to choose one’s faith and one’s partner in marriage are fundamental rights. However, it feels that the present instances of marriage and conversions that have been brought to its attention are not the exercise of freedom by individuals — specifically, by young women, though the Court does not say it that way. It is difficult to imagine a more anti-Muslim and anti-woman position; and it is a serious matter that the muddle-headed reasoning of the judge has been uncritically circulated in the dominant media.
Continue reading Who’s at ‘Jihad’? : ‘Love Jihad’ and the Judge in Kerala
Violence in Consumerism’s Own Country
As the stories of the DHRM and those of the successful negotiations with which the Chengara land struggle has ended continue to unfurl in the Malayalee media, contradictory messages about Dalit political struggle continue to reverberate in Kerala. Dalits have been markedly reserved about the outcome of the talks with which the land struggle at Chengara has ended. Laha Gopalan, the leader and chief negotiator, has openly declared that the settlement was a hurried one, and that he agreed to it mainly out of fear of violence, given that the divisions have been created among the landless people at Chengara, whose patience has worn thin. Meanwhile, the DHRM’s violence continues to offer opportunities for potshots at Dalit politics. The Kerala Chief Minister, for instance, issued ‘warnings’ against ‘identity politics’ on Gandhi Jayanti, as if ‘identity politics’ were the same as ‘violence’.
More on Murder from Kerala
These are happy days in which everyone in Kerala wants too settle the land dispute at Chengara. A happy consensus between the Left and the Right seems to be growing there, after the Congress leader of the Opposition, Oommen Chandy, decided to take on Godfathership of the land struggle. The very language of the struggle had changed – interestingly, from ‘we are landless squatters’ to ‘we are settlers’! Now, it is well-known in Kerala that these terms have had different sorts of political associations – ‘squatter’ with the Left, and ‘settler’ with (largely) the Right. Indeed, this was inevitable perhaps, given the fact that the New Left didn’t look very keen on ‘squatters’. However, it is clear that neither dalit or tribal organisations are going to be part of the negotiations towards the final package –today’s newspapers report that prominent tribal and dalit leaders have protested against the state’s reluctance to negotiate with them. It would be very convenient for both the Left and the Right to delegitimize – indeed criminalize – tribal and dalit organizations. And what luck that precisely that boon has been granted to them by the sudden eruption of a ‘lower-caste terrorist group’ (according to the police), the ‘Dalit Human Rights Movement’!
The (‘Quotation’) Gangs of Kerala
The media in Kerala is in a tizzy these days over ‘quotation’ gangs and their influence on everyday life. Like evil spirits dancing upon the bodies of fallen heroes in abandoned epic battle-fields, ‘quotation gangs’, it seems, now dance upon the dead political heroism of the Malayalees. Suddenly, the media finds, they are everywhere, settling every kind of dispute. The institutions of law and order are turning, slowly, into adjuncts or versions of ‘quotation gangs’. The recent murder of the real-estate businessman Paul Muthoot, who was apparently traveling with two of the most notorious ‘quotation gang’ leaders in Kerala, has brought matters to a head. The papers are clogged these days with advertisements feeding Onam-time consumer-frenzy and news of the Paul Muthoot murder and they don’t see any connections between the two.
“Two friends who have but one life”: Hope from the 19th century
I came across this delightful piece of information in the historian K P Padmanabha Menon’s History of Kerala (vol.3, AES reprint,2001, pp.498-500) which was written in the early 20th century. He quotes from “a paper published in the Madras Review (vol.2, p.250)”; we do not know which year this was published, but there is good reason to think that it was in the early 20th century. The paper is about a truly exciting institution – ‘marriage’ which produced not a heterosexual conjugal couple, but a same-sex (male) couple bound by ‘friendship’! Continue reading “Two friends who have but one life”: Hope from the 19th century
Beauty, More Beauty: A Tribute to Madhavikkutty
Losing Madhavikutty is not easy to bear. I like to rephrase the loss, hoping that it will make the void bearable: something flowery, perhaps, like ‘Kerala’s Ever-beautiful One has escaped captivity in an unkind world’. I like to think that she has become what she wanted to be, described to me many times in our short but intense friendship — a butterfly-princess, blessed with eternal youth, flitting painlessly from one beautiful body to another. The distance that the social scientific eye allows evades me now; and maybe admitting that would be necessary to bid good-bye. All of Kerala is getting ready for a grand funeral; even the middle class which once recoiled with horror from her, is celebrating. But how can one forget what Malayalees did to her? How they hated her because she refused to trivialise the body? How they insisted on reading her subtle defence of aesthetic womanhood as a crass expression of masculinised desire? How they could not see her kinship with Mahadevi Akka and Meera? How they rubbished her as useless to women because she was sceptic of rationalistic feminism? How they heaped insults, calling her a ‘dainty little madam with literary talent’? How her amazing range in short stories was reduced to a tailpiece of modernism in Malayalam literature?
Leave the Malayalees to their fate. They celebrate perhaps because only death could domesticate this woman.
Below is the translation of chapter 16 from Madhavikutty’s autobiography in Malayalam, Ente Katha.
Continue reading Beauty, More Beauty: A Tribute to Madhavikkutty
Vaikom Viswan and Little Bo-Peep
If I weren’t aware of Kerala’s more vibrant political past,I’d have died laughing this elections. The election campaign in Kerala was impossibly funny. Just to give you an example — in Thiruvananthapuram, in the middle of the campaign, we were treated to the spectacle of all the three major contenders — of the CPI, the Congress, and BJP — don the costume of the chivalrous knight — indeed, pushing and shoving each other quite unchivalrously– determined to rescue the damsel in distress. However, there was no damsel waiting to be rescued! Continue reading Vaikom Viswan and Little Bo-Peep
Apocalyse Now: A Swamp Rises to Swallow the Rock of the Faith
From the outside it is hard to tell. The glory of Kerala’s mighty Catholic Church, it appears, has weathered many a tsunami. The communists tried in 1958; they tried in 2006-07 too. Each time, the Church brushed off the challenge, transmogrifying itself, almost miraculously, into a murderous majoritarian tsunami in defense of theism that swept away the Unbelievers into the depths of hell. Again, the Church proved that the malicious schemes of Syrian Christian dissenters, puny individuals, Education Ministers in communist-led ministries — Joseph Mundassery then, M.A.Baby now — shall be foiled by the hand of God. Thus in 2006-07 too, the power of Faith burgeoned, once again, into a tremendous cyclone which swept the Unbelievers’ dastardly designs off the face of our Fair and Promised Land, Kerala. Continue reading Apocalyse Now: A Swamp Rises to Swallow the Rock of the Faith
A Hundred Years to Valentine’s Day
The Manglore-style of violence against women is clearly not the style of the politically powerful guardians of sexual morality in Kerala. But maybe the style is more or less redundant over here: there are very few pub-going local (or local-looking) women over here. How convenient for us women of Kerala that we Malayalees live in social arrangements that insist on sexual segregation in public spaces and institutions.
This is of course related to the particular history of gender and spatiality that unfolded between the mid-19th and 20th centuries in Kerala.Spatial categories have always underwritten caste and gender exclusion in Malayalee society. Take for instance, the derogatory term chanthapennungal (‘market women’) that refers to women who get their way through loud and vociferous argument – who work for their livelihood in market-space and reject feminine modesty. The chanthapennu is the very antithesis of taravattil pirannaval (‘she who was born in an aristocratic homestead’). Thus the woman whose daily life and labours involves traversing spaces outside the domestic and the familial is forever poised at the brink — she is who may, at any instant, collapse into being chantappennu.In traditional Malayalee society, family spaces were named by caste and constructed through caste practices and gender norms. For instance, the Brahmin home was referred to as Illam or Mana; the Nair homestead as Taravadu or Idam.In other words, a generalized notion of domestic space housing the family was absent. Indeed, the observance of spatial regulations was often taken to be crucial in shaping feminine moral qualities found characteristic of the aristocracy — and hardly vice-versa.
Welcome to Kerala’s Haven of Ease and Vice — Chengara
Make no mistake — this is not my assessment. I’ve just borrowed it from our Chief Minister, the redoubtable V.S. Achuthananadan, the foremost of (official) revolutionaries in Kerala, whose memories of struggle stretch back right up to the workers’ uprising of the 1940s in south Kerala, the Punnapra-Vayalar, celebrated in communist myth and legend. In September this year it appeared as if the CPM was ready to negotiate with the protestors, but nothing has really moved. The latter have hung firm in their resolve, it requires a rather strange imagination to read that as evidence for ‘peace and prosperity’ at Chengara. The Congress has now emerged, after much slumber, with support for the struggle, and V.M. Sudheeran, one of the most popular and respected leaders of the Congress, has sharply condemned the CM’s statement (below).
Continue reading Welcome to Kerala’s Haven of Ease and Vice — Chengara
Mother Kerala
Do gods and saints weep?
The star of fortune has risen for Malayali women, not in this world but in the next. Catholics in Kerala celebrated the canonization of Sr. Alphonsa, a young nun from Kudamaloor in Kottayam district, who passed away after a life of intense bodily suffering and prayer in 1946, as a ray of hope in hard times. Becoming a nun and leading a life of asceticism were never easy choices. That too, for a eligible, beautiful young woman in early 20th century Kerala, born in a small village, whose guardians were determined to see her respectably married. Given to excruciatingly difficult forms of prayer even as a child, Alphonsa resisted her maternal aunt’s plans dramatically by trying to disfigure herself. She jumped into a smouldering ash-pit; badly burned, she climbed out. The family was so taken aback that they gave in to her desire to become a nun. Continue reading Do gods and saints weep?
Shiver… down the spine: My tryst with the e-messengers of terror
Guest post by SHAHINA K K
[This is the fuller version of an article published today in the Hindustan Times. This longer version is crossposted from the e-discussion group, Greenyouth. The specific article referred to – ‘Bombs Defused in Newsrooms’ was crossposted in Kafila ]
Since 14th September 2008, writing has become a laborious exercise for me. It was all of a sudden that words turned heavy, staring at my own convictions, political thinking and journalistic vigor. It was on a gloomy Sunday (the day after the bloody Saturday on which the life of twenty odd people had been taken away by some body called Indian Mujahideen)that things turned upside down. It’s difficult to describe my terrible sense of shock when it came to my notice that a part of the email sent by perpetrators of the Delhi blasts laying claim to the deadly bombs on the day, had been written by me! It was lifted verbatim from a piece of mine (‘Bombs defused in News rooms’) which appeared in the media watchdog portal, The Hoot. Newspapers had given extensive quotes wondering at the ‘journalistic character’ and ‘impeccable English’ of those who prepared the mail. Even when everybody calls it plagiarism I was not spared because my name carries the identity of a community which is put in the dock for all that happens dreadfully around us. I wrote about what the media does, how it deals with the unending episodes of terror strikes juxtaposing with the violence by Hindu extremists and how flagrantly they fail in the ‘balancing’ act! Continue reading Shiver… down the spine: My tryst with the e-messengers of terror
Maveli won’t be let into Chengara
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)!
A New ‘Kerala Model’
The latest news from Chengara is alarming. As if in retaliation to the rally taken out by dalit and human rights activists on 30 August, the very next day, a group of people who were travelling to the struggle site were attacked by the goons who continue the blockade. The whole group — eight men and thirteen women, including Omana, six months pregnant,were beaten heavily, and Omana’s two-year-child was snatched and thrown down. The injured are in hospital and activists are trying to get a case registered with the police.Intimidating posters have appeared all over Pathanamthitta town, declaring that the estate will be ‘cleared’on 3 September by the unions. All this, while the police watches, and a spineless admininstration looks the other way. Apparently, the administration now takes its orders from the CPM district committee.Meanwhile, the leadership continues to talk of the package, which will apparently come only after the protestors have been thoroughly intimidated, physically and emotionally,and reduced to cowering, nervous wrecks.
Update from Kerala: Blockade continues at Chengara
Despite the talks held by Ministers with the leaders of the Chengara land struggle, the situation continues to be tense,and the blockade continues for all practical purposes. The workers’ unions are hell-bent on not allowing anyone with a ‘partisan attitude’ about the issue to visit the site of the struggle.On 26 August, P.V. Rajagopal, Member of the National Land Reforms Committee, was prevented from proceeding to Chengara by workers. Just the other day, K.R.Meera, one of Kerala’s leading fiction writers, was stopped from visiting the protest.
Continue reading Update from Kerala: Blockade continues at Chengara
Will the Left’s’Negative Hallucination’End in Kerala?
Today, perhaps for the first time after early August, the Chengara land struggle attained some front-page space in the newspapers. It was front-page news in the Thiruvananthapuram edition of The Hindu, which reported the ongoing efforts for negotiated settlement. The Revenue Minister, K.P.Rajendran, and the Minister for the Welfare of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, A.K. Balan, held talks with Laha Gopalan, and other solidarity council members, and “promised them that the government would do everything within its power to meet their demand for provision of land to the landless among the Scheduled Castes and other similarly placed sections and assured them that there was no question of the government resorting to repressive measures against the agitators”. However, the Ministers revealed that” the government could promise to give them only land that is already with it or that which could be taken over without the possibility of further litigations.”
So far so good, and obviously we are in here for a long haul. The leaders of the agitation apparently made it cleared that they were not demanding the immediate assignment of the estate land but a more comprehensive package. The government has also announced that medical camps will be conducted in the struggle point and that the road bloackade will end. Relief, indeed, after so many tense days.It is clear that the real hard work begins now. Pressure will have to be kept up until the package is announced; it will have to debated, and adequate monitoring of its implementation will have to be assured through, perhaps, a national monitoring committee.
But as a historian, I’d say that that this is indeed an opportunity to attain greater clarity on the political relevance of political decentralisation and local planning. In the mid-1990s, it was projected as a panacea to all possible ills — from Kerala’s fiscal crisis, to non-sovereign forms of power. The People’s Planning Campaign shifted the focus to local-level development, promising to transform welfare recipients into small producers. In itself this was an interesting proposition in some ways: one that focused on small capitalism rather than neoliberal extractive growth, and promised to make poor citizens independent of state welfare. Continue reading Will the Left’s’Negative Hallucination’End in Kerala?
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 