Sugathakumari
For a state, Kerala, funded almost exclusively by the capital its expatriates bring in to be claiming cultural exceptionalism is a contradiction in terms.
A quote by the noted Malayalam writer, Sugathakumari, in the Malayalam newspaper Mathrubhumi’s column for quotable quotes (September 24), has created a lot of stir in Kerala. A verbatim translation could read as:
“The biggest problem Kerala is going to face is the uncontrolled migration of people from other states (to Kerala). This will take Kerala to a terrible cultural calamity. Those who are coming here to our state for jobs are people who we can never get along with culturally. Not only are they low in education, but most of them also have criminal backgrounds. They will (eventually) become locals by building houses and marrying (women) from here.”*
There is much that’s intriguing about Sugathakumari’s prediction: one, a Malayali, when Malayalis are the famous diasporic lot of India with a whopping 4 million for numbers, is saying this — sentences which could have been mistaken for Donald Trump’s, using the Ctrl+H key to search and replace United States with Kerala. Two, Sugathakumari, the champion of feudal nostalgia for a golden period of upper caste dominance who always found problems with the foreign money that was “ruining of Kerala” has now decided to shift the focus of attack on to the non-Malayalis. Three, an ardent supporter of the hyper-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is so dismissive against the people of “other states of India”. The intrigue, alongside the mutual incompatability, can provide some insights into the nature of majoritarianism.
The relative affluence of Kerala is earned by the Malayalis who are working in other states of India and in other countries. This is a fact well known and adequately illustrated. If labourers from other states find the state alluring, it is the consumerist economy and its construction boom, funded initially by the money earned by unskilled labourers in Gulf countries and by nurses in America and Europe starting in the 1960s, who were later (post-1990s), joined by the IT-Corporate officials in cities of other Indian states that make it so.
For a state funded almost exclusively by the capital its expatriates bring in to be claiming cultural exceptionalism is a contradiction in terms. That the Emiratis, Qataris, Americans, Germans, Bangalorians or Mumbaikars could say exactly the same about Malayalis is forgotten rather quickly in an exercise that negates recent history completely. This convenient and false suppression of the fact is fundamental to feeling superior — a basic need of majoritarianism.
One fundamental aspect of anti-migrant narratives is its amnesia about a basic issue: there will be no migrant coming over to any region unless there is work to be done. The migrant is a labourer who is doing the work for you. The Mexican comes to America and the American employs him/her because the work has to be done and mostly they come at a lesser cost. Britain invited Africans offering citizenship to the people from the commonwealth in 1948 because they needed people to reconstruct their war-ravaged country.
It is a feudal idea of nationalism to think that “they” are coming to “our” country/state and hence we are helping them. The labourers are doing you more of a service by getting your work done. There is an ethical flaw in understanding the owner as the “job-giver” and the labourer as the “job-taker”.
Any study of the treatment of migrant labourers will reveal how inhuman the “labour-camps” that have sprung up all over Kerala are. A quick illustration: two-bed room houses in interior villages of Kerala where the monthly rent cannot be more than Rs 3,000-4,000 are given out to a minimum of 10 Bengali or Bihari or Assamese labourers at a rate of Rs 50 per night per bed. The monthly income for the landlord then is Rs 15, 000; five times what he would otherwise make and the conditions are for anybody to guess!
The fact that these people who work for Malayalis are treated with contempt as “impure bodies” on the “pure land” of Kerala is a strategy to make their labour invisible and to keep them defensive by invoking Keralite cultural exceptionalism. To adapt Walter Benjamin, “majoritarianism is the aestheticisation of politics”.
Sugathakumari has always been a champion of sentimentalised environmental romanticism, which creates a golden past and advocates a return to it as the destination for the future. As that is the only template of environmentalism available, for a long time she had been called “environmentalist” in the state. The social contradictions we live through are simplistically and unrealistically dismissed in this “going back to the origins” project, invoking feudal nostalgia. Hence she has been allergic to ‘foreign funds’ and ‘foreign religions’ which to her are responsible for the deforestation of the sacred groves and for the ruining of the state’s ‘golden” ethos.
It is noteworthy that she has given up on this narrative for the sake of “Malayali cultural supremacism” now, keeping aside her own earlier views. Majoritarianism works only with what is immediately available (“in the air”) and easy notions around which people can be mobilised, replacing history with myth.
It sees the current state as a trans-historical given, cancels out the experience by drowning in a mythical past. Her nothing-short-of-racist fear of miscegenation (not to forget the inhuman assumption of migrants as people with criminal backgrounds), which thrives on appealing to the pride of the clan and the egos of its “protective” male members, furthers this aspect: majoritarianism can never question male chauvinism. When a community is created solely against its “others” who it economically and physically enslaves and exploits while alienating culturally, it can’t even think of the socio-economic content of exploitation.
Sugathakumari’s faith in the BJP is in direct conflict with her Malayali chauvinism: the pan-national cultural Hindutvaisation hopes to devour regional, linguistic differences for the sake of a concocted religious identity. The Siva Sena sort of territorialism will emerge totally incompatible with this project in the long run. The European ideals of nationalism as a homo-regional, mono-religious and mono-lingual sabotage the Indian constitutional and historical reality of union of nationalisms.
Her statement comes immediately after Amit Shah’s widely condemned dubbing of Onam as Vamanajayanthi rejecting the Malayalis cherishing of their asura king, Mahabali and before the well-publicised BJP national council meeting in Kozhikode doesn’t only point to the contradictions embedded in the very project but also to yet another exigency of majoritarianism: it works in clearly territorial, local terms. It refuses to leave these geographical, temporal units they get to be outspoken in the most sensationalist sense.
It has no other go. It is in the DNA of majoritarianism. Pushed further, it can only cause disintegration of the Republic. That’s a reality best reckoned with but Sugathakumari-like people wouldn’t for they don’t care about issues of Constitution or Republic; what they care about is the dominance here and now, as and when what is convenient: be that Malayali, Hindu or feudal.
It would be erroneous for the pluralist, socialist and constitutional side to exploit these contradictions to troll Sugathakumari, for fascism can always make contradictions invisible through a spectacle of power, be that a war or a communal riot. The route is to bring in the concrete, the material, the historical and the ethical to counter these narratives and create a counter-ethos of inclusivism and egalitarianism based on our constitutional nationalism.
* Sugathakumari has issued a statement (Mathrubhumi, September 25) claiming she had been misquoted by Mathrubhumi. I am not taking that into account as she hasn’t yet distanced herself from her interview published in the Janmabhumi, Onam Special edition (2016). The words she used in the interview are exactly those quoted by Mathrubhumi. Even if her clarification is taken at face value, it does not help much for she goes on to express the same concerns in slightly round-about ways, or by bringing in “better” arguments for why “we” need to be scared of “them” in “solely practical and experiential terms”.
(Social commentator and dramaturg, NP Ashley teaches English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi).