Image: File Photo/REUTERS/Sivaram V

A library was set aflame in Palakkad in true fascist tradition; CPM offices are being attacked. Small public meetings called by independent feminists and human rights activists in major cities were attacked. In Calicut, activists suffered serious injuries while in Kochi, brave dalit feminists fought back three Hindutva women who sought to disrupt their meetings with Jai-Bhim slogans. The government announced its determination to hold firm against this unspeakable violence against the Malayali people as a whole — by this horde inspired by Indo-Gangetic barbarians who attack their neighbors for the sake of one among the lakhs and lakhs of Hindu deities.

The Sangh finally got the Balidaani they had sought so fervently — in Chandran Unnithan who died yesterday after being allegedly attacked by left supporters when he was participating in a protest against the entry of the two women.  This is no doubt unjustifiable, but several doubts are being raised about the circumstances of his death, especially about why he was not taken to the nearest medical institution equipped to handle his injury, the Pusphagiri Medical college. But the point really is that the responsibility for the situation lies partly with the Sangh, which instigated the violence, and that too, violence against the implementation of the Supreme Court judgment.

Reports from north Kerala suggest that while people are ready to defy this atrocious disruption of public life, the police seem reluctant and even complicit. In Calicut shop-keepers had vowed to open their shops in defiance; however, they now complain that the police seem to be reluctant not only to offer serious protection, but also to take action against miscreants who were caught by local people and handed over to them. Buses of the already-enervated KSRTC are being attacked by these goons. Of course, that was never new, and certainly those incidents, too, are unjustifiable. But what galls me is that these attacks are for a deity’s alleged celibacy, it has nothing to do with any issue that is currently of significance to Kerala’s people. In fact, such irresponsible and brainless protests render significant issues — issues on which we need to take the government to task, for example, the neglect of ecology in the planned post-flood reconstruction — invisible. Which only proves the point that these Indo-Gangetic barbarian-inspired fascists who lead the protests are no friends of Kerala in any sense. I do not see why the UAPA has not been used yet against these Hindutva terrorists? Is it reserved only for Muslims?

Today the need is to stand by the elements within the mainstream left that are committed to implementing the SC judgment even as the criticism of the hidden Hindutva elements in it — especially the Nair-Hindu male patriarchy represented by the Devaswam Minister Kadakampally Surendran — remains valid. The Chief Minister of Kerala is now widely and shamelessly defamed with casteist insults and threats to his life. Citizens need to rise up and fight this rot — in courts, homes, social media, and public spaces of all kinds.

I just walked about my part of town, just to prove a point. Life had clearly been disrupted. Thiruvananthapuram is infected particularly by the Sangh pestilence given the high concentration of sudras here. People there, clearly Sangh supporters, stared. Barely two days back, the streets were agog with preparations for the Women’s Wall organized by the CPM leadership in collaboration with the male leaders of  majorcaste- community organizations.  I could not help thinking: if only the CPM male leadership were less insecure, if only they had acknowledged the freedom – the Renaissance value that they now claim to be ready to hold aloft – of women in their fold and as a gesture of that shift, entrusted the women’s mass organization with the task of campaigning for the wall and bringing all of Kerala’s women, and the AIDWA took up that responsibility with verve, vigour, and democratic sensibilities towards others, then we would have probably seen them coming out in large numbers to celebrate the entry of Bindu and Kanaka into Sabarimala. Indeed, we do see them celebrating widely on Facebook, acknowledging this to be the critical act.

But no, what we saw as the Woman’s Wall was actually an affirmation of the modern patriarchy that shaped up in the early twentieth century social awakening, and what continues to be accepted as the unquestionable, normal horizon of gendered life within the mainstream left. And so I am not surprised that the spontaneous public celebrations of the entry were by the small groups of feminists and human rights activists. The Sangh found them easy targets to vent their ire.

If the AIDWA, which has an immense presence in Kerala had, instead, come out yesterday evening or today in large numbers, I am quite certain, no Sangh thug would have dared to raise a finger. That is really the reason why I keep saying, despite the fact that mine is a very lone voice today, that we should interpret the task of reclaiming ‘Renaissance’ values as not affirming once again the modern patriarchy that was shaped in those times (even if we pit it against the far-more barbarous traditional order, which is what the Sangh wants to reimpose). Rather, we need to acknowledge the inability of modern patriarchy which casts the man as the agent of reform, and the woman as the passive object of reform, to confront the Sangh’s intrusions effectively. And we need to draw on streams of anti-caste struggle of the 19th and 20th centuries that are not easily reducible to the terms of the modern patriarchy of the Navoddhana mainstream: specifically what I call stree-vaashi — she-intent- or resolve.

If the Woman’s Wall, however exciting it looked or felt, rested on the command of Reformer-Man, the entry of the two women was no doubt a manifestation of streevaashi – evidence that it runs in society still, like an underground stream that breaks out through the rocks at opportune moments.

There can be no doubt that the mainstream left needs to refurbish its hegemony desperately. At present, the refurbishment achieved in the 1990s through women’s entry into decentralization is in tatters. On the one hand, forces unleashed by precisely such refurbishment have eaten into the left’s foundations. The self-help culture fostered among poor women have kept them closely with the left at many crucial moments, but it has proved to be highly individualising; moreover, this culture is not immune to right-wing sensibilities at all, private and public.  The large passive-beneficiary-oriented welfare system is also not beyond replication or at least close imitation by the right-wing if it secures power. On the other, the rise of Hindutva majoritarianism in the national horizon makes it attractive to a great many men, especially subaltern men, whose masculine insecurities have been on the rise for many reasons. And so we have seen men move too easily between the CPM and the BJP, and indeed, share positions, especially on gender – especially on the right to command women in public space.

The way to renew the mainstream left’s hegemony, perhaps, is to open itself up to a critique of patriarchy in its structure and functioning and to bring in all women, subaltern men, and people of all other genders,  in large numbers — share power with them, defend their freedom, voice, equal rights, and agency. It is clear that only the left can take this path. In contrast, what the right cannot do is take the lead in establishing gender democracy given its deep embeddedness in regressive brahmanism. Again, the left can well acknowledge the force of the dalit and muslim critiques with no real loss to its self-understanding as left if it abandons short-sighted and dogmatic conceptions of itself. In short, the left could rebuild itself precisely by abandoning what it shares with the right.And this looks even more convincing to me in the wake of the relentless stream of casteist insults against the Chief Minister.

Comrade Vijayan, it is this streevaashi that we need to reclaim if we are to realize the dream of a Sangh-free and caste-free society in which women can claim equality and freedom. If in the 1990s the CPM bolstered its hegemony by inducting lakhs of women, however partially, into development, maybe now is the time to extend it further by acknowledging their freedom and independent agency, and more importantly, their critical abilities to expand the political imagination of the mainstream left?

You have been brave to support the women who entered the shrine. That is remarkable — as the proverb goes luck favours not the timid, but the brave. And extending the proverb, some have pointed out, only the prepared can really seize a chance. Prepare yourself by opening up to a critique of patriarchy and casteist exclusion, prepare yourself by acknowledging women’s inborn right to be free and equal.

Courtesy: Kafila.online

The post Hindutva Terror and Left Hegemony: After Women’s Entry into Sabarimala appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The past months have been times of terrible despair for all , with women who attempted the pilgrimage being turned back again and again, hounded and harassed by both the police and the brahmanical hindu patriarchs of the left and the right alike. Rehana Fatima was arrested for hurting ‘religious sentiments’ for the flimsiest reasons, thrown in jail, denied bail, defamed mercilessly online by both the CPM cyber warriors and the BJY thugs, her home attacked, her relatives humiliated, and subjected to discrimination at her workplace. Bindu Thankam Kalyani, Libi, Manju, and others underwent similar horrors; women of the organization Manithi now face an NIA investigation apparently. Trupthi Desai could not even come out of the Kochi airport.

These two brave women were perhaps more adamant that their sisters.  They refused to be cowed down by the mob frenzy; they refused the counsel of the police to return and refused rumours of being ill and hospitalized. Meanwhile, they were also under massive pressure from the right and also from parts of the left, to not disturb the “peace” at Sabarimala.

Clearly, they planned well. The build-up to the CPM-sponsored ‘women’s wall’ was the perfect cover, since the completely irresponsible mass media and the right wing were busy trying to  either celebrate it or find holes in it. The women trekked at the dead of night, accompanied by police in mufti, and entered the temple to worship.

For feminists with a sense of history, this moment is hard to describe. For me, it is akin to the success of the resistance of the Channar women to Nair supremacy in south Travancore in the 19th century. Despite horrendous violence by the Nairs against the lower-caste Channar women wearing the upper-cloth, a symbol of caste eminence, women doggedly wore it again and again when they went out. They were attacked repeatedly, brutalized, their homes violated, relatives injured — but they persisted, for almost four long decades. They refused to be satisfied by the demands of respectability which would have been fulfilled by merely wearing a blouse — they were determined to win for themselves the symbol of caste eminence.

The despair was such that even their friends, the missionaries, found them too stubborn. “Stree-vaashi“, said Rev. Mead, and he called it the root of “unnecessary provocation”.  Stree-vaashi is a concept we need to acknowledge in Indian feminism, the contribution of subaltern women’s challenge to the brahmanical caste order. It could be translated as ‘she-intent’ in English — the kind of inner empowerment that leads women to perform critical acts, rather than just be part of critical mass, and to perform them doggedly, ignoring all sorts of patriarchal violence and advice, until the power gives way.

I proudly claim it to be the legacy of Kerala’s social awakening that predates the consolidation of modern patriarchy since the late 19th century under the leadership of the newly-educated elite that formed the core of the emergent modern caste-communities. It is stree-vaashi that these patriarchs sought to contain, re-channel, and remould in the so-called ‘Renaissance’, with only unintended consequences denting the patriarchal fortress.

Indeed, such determined resistance was always controlled by male authorities, and we saw that happen all over again in the planning of and run-up to the ‘Women’s Wall’ organized by the CPM. Indeed, one despaired —  the way the women who attempted the pilgrimage were punished precisely by a government that has used women’s empowerment (in however watered-down a way) to project itself as ‘left’ was appalling. It seemed that the brahmanical-Nair elements in CPM were determined this time, not to remould streevaashi but to actually stamp it out of existence even as tame compliance to spectacle-building plans laid out by CPM and community-patriarchs was being heavily rewarded. Those of us who were ardently on the Kerala Chief Minister’s side were shocked and saddened but perhaps not surprised, given that the will to control stree-vaashi is a historical inheritance of all kinds of patriarchy in Kerala.

It is important not to play down the bravery of these women; the Hindutva thugs are already enraged beyond belief and the lives of these women are probably in danger. The fact that the police did accompany them does not reduce their heroism; that they persisted despite all odds is what matters. They could have well-waited for the effects of the Woman’s Wall as  show of strength to have sunk in, but they chose to use the moment well. The police did help them and the government has not yet abandoned them (the great relief is that the arch-Hindu bigots in the CPM, Kadakampally Surendran and Padma Kumar probably did not get to know) — but the support of the government is NOT a favour, it is a right, and it should have been delivered long back. And it is quite undeniable that this could have been done earlier.

I do not take seriously any account that delivers all the credit for this to the police and the Kerala government. No way — the situation at Sabarimala was hugely exaggerated mainly to placate the savarna elements in the CPM and the traditionalists among the avarna caste-community leadership. The Kerala police could well have dealt strongly with the trouble-makers at the temple premises, and their leaders — who, thanks to the laxity of the police and the silent sanction of savarna CPM patriarchs, appeared there again and again to lead the thugs. The police could have well done exactly what they did to the women who were suspected to be planning a pilgrimage — they could have called in local RSS elements and especially the parents of the young men and teenagers despatched there by the Sangh and educated them on the gravity of the crime and its legal consequences. Instead, they chose to terrorize and defame the women. The government could have admitted its difficulties in less misogynist ways, but instead chose to admit it indirectly, and through assembling on the roads the simulated critical mass of women under the command and supervision of the patriarchs.  In sum, the police , the CPM, and the government, could have acted in less misogynistic ways.

What is truly interesting is that once again, it seems that critical mass-making has anti-patriarchal effects that are unintended! The CPM’s Woman Wall drew away the attention of the terribly irresponsible mass media and the right wing, providing a small window of time for the two women to attempt entry. Indeed, the social, cultural, and political mainstream in Kerala is so used to the idea that only critical mass matters, that they do not even anticipate critical acts!

We have of course to brace for the reaction. Right now, the ‘purity rituals’ undertaken by the brahmin priest at Sabarimala only confirm the observation of the Supreme Court, that the denial of entry to women of menstruating ages to the temple is a form of pollution — that is, a manifestation of untouchability — and so it must be removed.

We will deal with that later. For now, we dance in joy.

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

The post The Triumph of Streevaashi! Women break the wall of caste at Sabarimala appeared first on SabrangIndia.

I write to you as a citizen, so unlike the many eulogies and appeals you have received recently, this will not be sugar-coated. You have received much praise, which is indeed well-deserved. But most of us have done, and are still doing, our duty well, but there is no need to indulge in any more self-praise.

I write to express my misgivings about how we are now dealing with this crisis collectively. First,  let me point out that the disaster has hardly receded, except in a narrow way: the waters have receded, but not wholly everywhere even today. And the terrible deluge of waste — emerging from our clogged drains, from the roadside heaps, household piles, dumping yards, the horrendous pollutants from the factories in Eloor, all carried by the waters and admixed in them, and now from homes that are being cleaned — is upon us now, and we do not know where to go. Much of this waste is not perceptible to the naked eye: they will erode us slowly.  Thirdly, the return monsoon will arrive in October and there is no guarantee at all that the Bay of Bengal will be free of cyclonic formations then. So, yes, the disaster is not over.

I read your interview in The Hindu. It displays exactly the same sort of denial, of environmental destruction, that environment psychologists talk about discussing responses to climate change, of people continuing to be in denial even though they agree with its reality in their rational minds.  You agree that ecological issues exist and they must be addressed, and also quote the familiar phrase associated with reconstruction, about building back better, not just building back. But then you go back a few paragraphs later to assert that it had to do primarily with the heavy rains! This is not your personal fault, nor is it any individual’s Malayali’s failing. But I fear that however unintentionally, your commitment to ecological wisdom in development is shallow. If we are really committed to ecologically- secure futures, then we must begin by becoming aware, once again, of the rhythms of the natural world we live in and acknowledging that they need to figure in our planning.

Slowness may be a virtue for other reasons too. Is it not more important now to deal with the terrible psychological shock that people have endured? There is a terrible blankness one encounters in the eyes of people whose future — even the immediate future — has all of sudden turned invisible. Should we not pause to heal that? Not for a moment would I say that mobilizing finances is unimportant. Yet can we afford to accord less attention to the task of healing searing psychological wounds that may have the most terrible consequences in the long term? Shouldn’t we slow down now to pay attention to our wounded people and indeed wait for the return monsoon to pass before we start the search for finances full-swing? This is not merely about using the services of counsellors, as many of us tend to think. That is a terribly individualized solution. This is about providing immediate material comforts and facilities in the affected areas — which many are working on, but which is also failing in key respects. Was it necessary to end the relief camps so soon? Was it necessary to refuse relief claiming that a surplus was available when even basic relief continues to elude many of the relatively remote areas? Was it necessary to reinstate party control over many camps when civil society was playing a stellar role? Should we not pay attention to re-directing the energies of civil society towards the new deluge, of waste, and not reducing that challenge to the immediate one, of cleaning affected houses? So much of Kerala’s visible ‘prosperity’ rested on credit, and people with loans are now sick with worry about why and how they should pay back loans for now-non-existent things. About how they can never get back to normal life without becoming a debtor of some sort or the other. There are youngsters planning to get out of school because they cannot see their secure futures anymore, with parents — often single mothers — losing everything they had. We need our anganwadis restored and functioning again, immediately so that our children can have normal lives again. So that women’s burdens do not triple. We need comfort and assurance for our men who may plunge deeper into alcoholism unable to deal with the psychological trauma.

Slowness is not tardiness. It is the willingness to accept that it takes time and patience for planning anything long-term.

Among your colleagues, especially among bureaucrats, one cannot help noticing the exact opposite: a terrible hurry to get back to the road we were travelling on earlier. So much so that we refuse to be circumspect about accepting an invitation from an organization like KPMG. Please do see that right now, slowness is a virtue. Such hurry, Comrade, that it appears that you really don’t care anymore even for that mere fig-leaf of the claim of being on the global political left! Your deputy here the other day proclaimed that the KPMG was ‘quite alright’ as though childish insistence on being right all the time was important, and not his leftist credentials.

I agree that many figures in the Opposition are quite unsavoury, but the manner in which your deputy proceeds, as though the Opposition can be summarily ignored seems to be a huge deviation from the maturity you displayed when the waters were still pounding us. Please do remind him that the days of the disaster are not yet gone — and anyway, democracy needs an Opposition. Please also remember the Constitutional obligation to start the new planning processes from the Grama Sabhas. Let us not be blinded by our speed, so that we end up sacrificing our well-embedded institutions of local democracy to the most tedious labours and denying them the centrality they deserve in our planning. Please call for mobilizing our panchayats, renew our collectivities. In times of danger, only collectivity works, and we have seen it.

And there is no harm in admitting one’s mistakes. It is very hard to believe that dam management was not flawed, and it is really now time for us to introspect truthfully — taking time — if we are not to be wiped off by the waters again.  Indeed, we can no longer treat truthfulness as an avoidable quality — self-deception, we all have been warned, is the road to self-destruction. It is not enough to oppose the BJP and Modi; you have to show that you are different from them.

Money is important, I agree. But if we think of that as primary, too much will be lost. In sum, I beg you, please make the future visible again to people who grope in the dark, between the terrible sea of loss and the gaping abyss of debt. Please light it with hope and not with increasingly-hollow paeans to human triumph.

First published on kafile.online
 

The post Restore Our Vision of the Future: A Letter to the Kerala Chief Minister appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: AP

Nevertheless, many of us have been scrambling to assemble and transport relief supplies; young people in local areas have banded together to rescue their neighbours and others from the surging waters; others have been assisting the rescue teams by identifying exact locations of the marooned and attending distress calls; school children have gathered in large numbers as volunteers in collection centres; IT professionals and students have set up communication networks; housewives have prepared thousands of packets of food and clothing for the affected; merchants and service-providers have been rising to the occasion with exemplary alacrity; local governments, health department personnel and revenue officials have been available round the clock. In other words, Kerala’s citizens have come together in an extraordinary way to deal with this great leveller of a flood.

Yet the greatest danger, it seems to me, is not the flood but the dirty human maggots that try to fatten on it: the minions of Hindutva in Kerala.

There is much that this calamity has revealed. First of all, the reality of Kerala’s post-1990s ‘new’ capitalism lies bare before us for all to see. It seems clear that what was sold to consumers by the construction sector was hardly use-value — it was, well, ‘disaster value’. The manner in which construction proceeded without sparing a single thought for nature, a tendency shared by all players, big and small, producer and consumer, in construction has exacted an impossibly high price: clearly, it will be impossible to go back to the older ways of life, we have to really change, we have to realize that this land and these waters cannot be taken for granted. This is of course what the environment movement in Kerala has always been saying but all they got for their concern was the tag of being unrealistic/cynical/’anti-development’. Even I, who has been with the environment movement all through, truly and fully understand only now a phrase which I heard as a child, used by a  working-class woman to refer to the massing of monsoon clouds to the east: kizhakkottu mudi azhicchittu nilkkunnu. Roughly translated, it means ‘there she stands, tresses flying wild and ready for battle’. The monsoon wreaks havoc like never before, and  my utterly humbled eye sees only now its full fearsome might, the way it obliterates at the mere flick of a wrist the many mistakes that we committed, often fully intentionally, which we hypocritically referred to as ‘development’.

Yet this is not the time really to begin our analysis and apportion the blame. Compassion demands that all our resources be now devoted to alleviating the enormous suffering and the danger. In all fronts, people of all faiths and castes, of all genders and ages are working together in the face of the common tragedy. Many realize how shallow, how hollow, the belligerent calls of religious bigotry sound. Surely, the waters did not discriminate — this time, they did not spare the rich.

But in social media, there is vermin who have set out to ‘analyse’. Their evil imagination connects these events to the recent decision of the Supreme Court permitting women of menstruating ages to worship at Sabarimala. Or it spreads the lie that the waters were deliberately released by the Kerala government to submerge Hindu temples. What is worrying is that the first superstition often strikes a chord with many of the sufferers who still cannot see how the truths and commonsense of Kerala’s new capitalism of the post-1990s have led to this calamity.  Given that the deluge was totally unexpected and frighteningly sudden to many, the divine hand might seem like a plausible explanation. Then there are the cunning Whatsapp messages that tell you that the Christians who live in the highland districts are responsible for the rejection of the Gadgil Committee Report and that this is the price for ignoring Hindu ecological wisdom. Many of us see through this evil. Where is the ‘Hindu ecological consciousness’, I wonder, in the BJP’s systematic destruction of environmental governance in this country, and in their open dalliance with crony capitalists?

Let us guard ourselves from these maggots who thrive on the fear that the catastrophe has ignited among people. These scum who claim to be of this land but have no real sense of belonging, have to be exposed, isolated, and condemned. Just like we must guard against virulent infectious germs as the waters recede, so must we stay vigilant against the Hindutva rabble who hate everything that democratic Kerala stands for.

Courtesy: Kafila.online

The post Beware of Poisoning-Eating Maggots in Flood-Hit Kerala appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The sense of triumph that many CPM cyber warriors displayed vulgarly was such that they even claimed to have been right about the Hadiya case too: that the CPM’s planned indifference to the plight of Hadiya detained forcefully by her father who cited the High Court’s order was morally defensible because it was the PFI which supported her; and therefore that the CPM’s implicit support for Hindutva positions on ‘love jihad’ in the Hadiya case are justified. Those of us who took her side and defended her right to choice of faith and partner were pilloried as irresponsible intellectuals who feed extremists in the name of fighting Islamophobia. Some leftist cyberwarriors even said that we were probably paid to do so, a claim that the Sangh has never stopped making.

I refrained from responding immediately to these. First, I no longer consider these elements to be leftist for the most. There are still individuals in the CPM who try to forge alliances against crony capital at the national level, but sadly enough, the larger share of the regional leadership does not display such commitment. Their commitment to democracy was never strong and now it has weakened even more. Indeed, in Kerala, the war is between Sanghis and Pracchanna Sanghis, and the latter is the smarter and the more powerful. I find it pointless to respond to either, since they share the common end, ultimately, of pleasing the majority and disciplining minorities. The CPM now fights on the cultural terrain laid out by the Sangh — and so now organizes Ramayana seminars during the month of Karkatakam, when high- and many middle-caste Hindus used to read the Ramayana. Secularizing the Ramayana can hardly address the range of critiques of it raised by non-Brahmin, Dalit, and women’s perspectives, and the CPM will inevitably be caught in the contradictions of celebrating the Ramayana month with critical discussions on the Ramayana. Besides, the cultural poverty of the CPM which cannot produce an alternate discourse of family, community, love, and loyalty that could challenge the exclusions and silences of the Ramayana is too apparent. And it appears that the CPM has no discourse at all to address the educated upper caste Hindu middle-class except a B-team version of Hindutva and Moditva’s cultivation of infinite growth-anticipation.

But watching the discussion on issues raised by this truly shocking murder from a distance, there are questions that I believe no one is asking — or no one wants to ask.  The shrieking tone of the CPM participants probably disorients others or worse, creates some sort of psychological urgency to join the shrieking chorus, blend in, so to say. That is another reason why one may want to keep a distance, of course.  I was watching a very specific conversation, between some of Kerala’s most prominent public intellectuals and activists, about the editorial of the journal Patabhedam, This is a group least likely to bow to the pressure to blend in and stop thinking, but what I saw, especially in the responses of CPM- supporters in it, looks especially worrying to me.

First, I am forced to raise a question I have been raising since the Hadiya Case overtook us in 2017: it may be true that the PFI is religiously and socially conservative — but where is the concrete evidence for all the claims that are being brandished in its face? Of association with the ISIS, of planning terrorist attacks and violently disrupting Hindu-Muslim marriages? I cannot see how many of the intellectuals in the aforementioned groups who normally call for  evidence-based policy formulation, do not demand solid evidence for this? I am yet to read theological justifications of violent dissociation with others in the PFI’s writing and public statements. During the Hadiya Case when Brinda Karat, a person I deeply respect, made the allegation that the PFI was disrupting Hindu-Muslim unions in Malabar, I publicly demanded information on such cases — say, police complaints, at least the name of the police station, details of people who have been harassed thus etc.  In these times in which the demonisation of young Muslim men has reached its crescendo, it is surely easy to file a complaint. Brinda Karat’s office apparently responded to the PFI’s own request that they were collecting information and that she would be writing about it soon. Till date, I have seen no such article. If we are all for rational thinking, surely we ought to condemn or condone organizations based on evidence? It galls me why the concern about the ISIS links of the PFI have not been thoroughly investigated by now by responsible authorities or the all-powerful CPM itself? Discussions published in their newspaper merely repeats a series of allegations and provides no proof that will stand in a court of law. And even more importantly, why does the CPM pause this hunt periodically and wait till the next round of CPM-SDPI conflict? If the latter is the greatest threat to Kerala, should it not be exposed thoroughly and pursued consistently?

Secondly, why do so many of us who otherwise are firmly on the side of rigorous scientific methodology in coming to conclusions about most matters of vital significance to society, ditch that attitude when it comes to dealing with so-called ‘ Islamic extremists’? If you take the data of violent conflicts between student organizations on college and university campuses (such conflict may be relatively rare on campuses where one organization dominates, and such domination is usually held through brutal means — that indicates not ‘peace’ as some claim, but a permanent, normalized, state of conflict), it is quite likely that the fights are much more over bids to control space and influence on campus, and less over theological and religious  differences. There is further evidence for this if one considers the fact that the SFI and Campus Front have entered into opportunistic alliances during elections in colleges and it is common for students to move between the SFI and the Campus Front and ABVP as well. In the Abhimanyu murder case, the conflict was sparked by a dispute about mounting posters on the college walls. The high frequency of violent incidents between student organizations over space and resources on campuses should lead us to think that the incident at Maharaja’s was also most probably one such — and not about theological differences. In that case, it would fall into the history of the irresponsible and shoddy conduct of democracy on our campuses, and not be singled out as the eruption of religious fanaticism on a college campus.  Yet many CPM commentators, themselves intellectuals with social science credentials do not place this incident within the data on student conflicts but connect it with the infamous hand-chopping case, in which religious fanatics attacked a professor in a Kerala college for blasphemy. I am sure that we do not connect the violence that the SFI inflicts on its political rivals in college campuses, however chilling it may be, with. say, the truly gruesome Jayakrishnan Master murder case in which a BJP leader was hacked to death mercilessly by CPM supporters in front of a class full of sixth standard students. Also, however similar the CPM’s violence may be, we rarely connect it to, say, the terrible forms of torture practiced under the Soviet regime or in China. Nor do we connect the moral policing that many SFI units routinely practice on their campuses (especially on women, their clothes) with control exercised by the Stalinist regime over women’s bodies in the Soviet Union.

Thirdly, I cannot fathom why so many of us who swear by class analysis as the ultimate tool for making sense of social change and political possibility, refuse to deploy it when it comes to the Muslims and the PFI.  Secular Muslim intellectuals on the left, particularly, are often blind to their own histories and more commonly, to their middle and upper-class status. They seem to imagine the Muslim community as untouched by class differentiation, not to mention social hierarchies. Surely, one of the most apparent social processes in Kerala during the past three decades has been the intense social differentiation within the Muslim community which has left a large number of people outside the gains garnered through the Gulf migration.  The young male activists of the PFI and Campus Front, like Abhimanyu himself, mostly hail from the disadvantaged social and economic circumstances. It is these young people who do not see any future for themselves in Hindutva India who are most likely to turn to desperate measures. Projecting them as merely lumpen is a way of rendering invisible their working-class status.  To say that secular Muslims are in danger because of the so-called radicalized Muslims, then, in class terms, means the educated Muslim middle class is endangered because the working-class, socially disempowered Muslim poor are trying to obtain a voice in whichever way they can. Why is it that the CPM is unable to gain the trust of the Muslim poor? And instead of acknowledging this failure and acting on it, why are CPM intellectuals pushing them further towards the brink where they may actually get radicalized?

Fifthly, why are we not asking the question why the Campus Front is acting the way it should? If radicalization and the spread of conservative social ideologies are all that the PFI and Campus Front aim at, all they need to do is lie totally low, stay away from campus politics, aim for small prayer groups, and so on. Right now, if this is indeed their goal, they are playing the wrong strategy. There are many other religious student organizations on campus that actually choose to lie really low because their goals are truly long-term, since what they aim for is conservative social transformation outside the sphere of public politics.  If radicalization of Muslim students is indeed the aim of the Campus Front, why are they exposing themselves to the public and the arms of the state so frequently?

Finally — and for me, this is the most troubling question of all — how is it that we, as a society, have become incapable of recognizing the insights that can emerge only from tragedy and mourning? Death — irrespective of whether it is physical death (in Abhimanyu’s case) or social death (in Hadiya’s case) — and mourning are occasions in which we turn back into our own selves, reflect on our lives, with a certain distance, detachment, and we see the ugliness we have allowed to grow till then. In the distance that allows us to set aside our vested interests, we are often able to discern what the world and life are truly all about. That did not happen  in the Hadiya case, nor is it happening in the present tragedy. In each, the effort rather has been to project the CPM-SDPI difference as the core of the conflict with the CPM’s position upheld as the right, moral, secular response. In the Hadiya case, some of us did not let that succeed. Despite heavy attacks on our characters, professional competences, commitment to democracy, integrity, and threats of many sorts, we insisted that the core issue was not this but that of the destruction of a young woman’s citizenship, her social death.  And despite the best combined efforts of the CPM’s cyber warriors, official CPM feminists, and the CPM-‘manned’  State Women’s Commission, as well as the Hindutva chorus, we prevailed when the Supreme Court agreed with us. Indeed, the Hadiya case has continued to reverberate, contributing to the progressive expansion of social democracy in the daunting darkness of our present: since then, several cases to do with young people’s rights to live with chosen partners, and the present hearing on Section 377 have cited it. The credit for that does not go to the CPM’s cyber brigade which claims the monopoly of progressive thinking in Kerala but to those who insisted that the core issue is not what the CPM made it out to be.

In the present incident too, if we were truly capable of mourning and perceiving loss, we would have seen that the core issue is not the CPM-SDPI conflict and the CPM’s moral superiority; rather it is about the ways in which young men are being used by various political and social organizations in Kerala at present.  A participant in this debate reminded me that Abhimanyu was a very progressive young tribal man with an interest in protecting the environment and committed to the inclusion of the transgender community. Yes, I agree, but cannot help noticing that while such young men build ground support for the CPM on campuses, the senior leaders in power systematically break down environmental safeguards, disempower local governments, and continue to hang on to gender and sexual conservatisms of the worst sort – in other words, they use these young men while keeping them largely powerless. As for the PFI, it is clear that giving back to the SFI in the same coin is actually intensifying their younger activists’ experience of adversity, something that may well be expected in a situation in which both Hindutva and non-Hindutva political forces are essentially committed to the religious majority and the middle classes. That the leadership seems unable to  plan a strategy that would empower this youth without exposing them to terrible risks even as more and more young activists pay a terrible price (and data on past conflicts confirms this), seems unforgivable to me.  If what happened at Maharaja’s was an accident or self-defense,  then those who were involved should have come out, whatever the consequences, and admitted guilt. Only that way would they have affirmed their moral superiority. By playing the dominant game of violent student politics on the terms of the dominant, these young people only stand to lose and it is unconscionable that the leadership should assert the difference between cadre and supporter and claim that the Campus Front was not under the SDPI, and so on. If we are to address the core issue that surfaces in this murder, then we must refuse to treat it as mainly a CPM-SDPI confrontation and insist on ending the unpardonable instrumentalization of young men by these forces in student politics.

But I am no longer sure that I am addressing even the Malayali public anymore.  Since morning I have been sitting at my desk petrified by a piece of information given to me by an honest and concerned education activist: in the past one year, sixty teenagers, students of Classes Eleven and Twelve in Kerala’s schools, have committed suicide  mostly unable to suffer the moral policing and torture by teachers at school. Even more devastating was the fact that not a single case was registered in any of these deaths. I cannot see these deaths as suicides, they are murders, and that too, prompted by teachers and other authorities, even parents in some cases, who should have been their protectors and refuge,. They are every bit as searing as that of the murder of Abhimanyu. In a society in which young people are pushed over the brink by fanatic adherents of Victorian prudery and these murders are considered normal and swept under the carpet, the murder of a youngster by other youngsters alone evokes horror and shrill screaming. especially when it looks like a great chance to entrench the vested interests of the dominant left!! I do not know whether to cry or laugh.

Courtesy: kafila.online
 

The post Who feeds who? Reflections on the Left responses to the Abhimanyu murder case appeared first on SabrangIndia.

And now this unspeakable murder. It comes in the wake of the Sangh Parivar’s push to stomp out whatever gains women have made in this country through decades of struggle and consecrate in its place, Brahmanical dandaneethi, to discipline women. Hadiya’s case demonstrated how the Brahmanical idea of daughters being subject to fathers, and by extension, male members of their communities, is being pushed heavily by the Sangh. Yet another tragic case, that of Athira, who was butchered in cold blood by her father to prevent her from marrying her chosen partner, a dalit man – and more importantly, the fact that these two vile men have received much support on and outside social media – warn us of how normalized this idea may have become. We have also seen the rising tide of violence against women of marginalized communities of all sorts, and the lesser value attributed to those bodies and selves is all the more apparent today. In an unprecedented way, women are being made to bear the burdens of the faith, the community, as objects to establish their honour and dishonour. In the present crime, this appears to be all the more present — settlers against nomads, and it is a little girl who is made to pay, drowned in infinite pain.

Let us remain vigilant about the lies of power. There are whatsapp messages going around claiming that all Hindus have been insulted, when clearly, most critics have pointed fingers at Hindutva. Yesterday, I was in a TV show with a senior BJP leader from Kerala who reeled out lie after lie — he looked as though he was drugged with fake news. While he accused us of communalizing the issue –it is his party which took to the streets first for ‘Hindus’, in order to defend the accused – he did not have the slightest compunction to communalize the murder of a young woman, a Dalit law student in Kerala, making it into a murder by a Muslim man! But most terrifying of all was his readiness to sacrifice the 15-year-old boy accused, so that the adults may be saved, just what the conspirators allegedly wished! He took pains to establish this teenager’s depravity — he failed in Class VIII, he troubled girls, and the school threw him out, and further, he was a vattan, so his family sent him away to his uncle’s. Now, in Malayalam, vattan means ‘crazed’ or ‘loony’ — it is a very derogatory way to refer to a mentally-challenged person. In this case, a 15-year-old child. Failing in Class 8 and ‘troubling; girls at the age of 13, were presented as though they were shocking crimes, and the school’s (completely unacceptable) decision, as well as the family’s decision to banish their son who they claim, was unwell were presented as entirely acceptable!

My head spins when I think this: here is a bunch of people who can shameless weaponize their own faith so that local elites all over the country — UP, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Rajasthan, Kerala , for starters — can deploy it against those who defy their will or stand in their way, or irritate them in whatever way, and these people are most often Dalits and Muslim. Here is a beastly horde which would not hesitate to defend members of their community accused of using an eight-year-old girl heinously, turning her into an object to be violated so that her community could be taught a ‘lesson’. Here is a ghastly pack that would use and then sacrifice their underage boys to secure their vile ends. In these three ways, the purveyors of Hindutva stand stripped naked, displaying their ugly power unabashedly. Some have described this, rightly, as India’s darkest hour.

In a recent discussion on television, I declared that I will do my utmost to stem the spread of hate through Hindutva around me. I referred to how the so-called Angry Hanuman stickers are finding space in hired vehicles around me and said that I will not use these vehicles which project this symbol of hate. Charmy Harikrishnan, a journalist, and a certain Padma Pillai, clearly a Sangh supporter, took umbrage. The journalist seems to be living in her own little fairyland of free speech and has probably never heard of hate speech. Since the sun that shines down in this enchanted world is a certain vapid secularism, I am not all surprised that she remains oblivious to the difference between benign religious symbols and aggressive ones, and of course, the fairy couch does not allow anyone to even dream of the possibility that there may indeed be a politics of cultural symbols. Yes, slumbering in the green woods also wouldn’t let anyone notice that this is already by now taken over by the most bellicose of Sanghi groups. But we Malayalis have known the Hanuman in other forms, and not just as Bhaktha, but also as a grand old ape, taming the noxious ego of the fully-armed Bheema with the flick of a tail — the wonderful meeting of the two in the Mahabharatha, retold by Kunjan Nambiar is known to most of us, at least in my generation.

That is really the Hanuman the BJP needs, to tame its endless hubris. The Roudra Hanuman is a favourite of the horribly aggressive gangs that roam the streets of North Indian cities armed with all kinds of truculent symbols and weapons, aimed quite openly and directly at Muslims and Dalits. And of course, he appeared in a city meant to be burned and desecrated, taken by force, Lanka. Kerala is NOT Lanka, Madam. We are not letting anyone burn it. Padma Pillai said that she will pay an extra tip of Rs 50 to drivers who had the menacing image on their vehicles. Ah, how nicely her mind matches that of the BJP leader! This is how perhaps all the contributions that party receives are spent — to bribe people to be supporters and brag about it too? There is a saying in Malayalam that if a banyan tree grows out of a shameless fellow, he will take it to be a shade. Ms Pillai feels proud to hint that she would not hesitate to bribe!!

Padma Pillai and Charmy Harikrishnan are two different ways in which Kerala would close its eyes to the rising tide of communal hate rising from the weaponising of faith. My own socialization as a Hindu was very different. It had to do with reading the Halasya Mahatmyam, the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, and the idea that God is everywhere and could take any form and at any time. The good believer, according to my grandmother, waited for God’s test — by appearing before you in human or animal form. And therefore one could not treat the other disrespectfully in any way, under any circumstance. This faith was surely naive, and definitely, and much deeper and profound interventions as those of Sree Narayana Guru’s were a stronger presence then, besides other ways of doing the faith. The plurality of faith is what the Hindutva brigade wishes to exterminate. I am also told by yet another group that one should just look away from these violent, aggressive symbols of Hindutva in public space, and join more worthwhile struggles, especially the Dalit uprising in India. I couldn’t agree more with the latter part of the suggestion, but do not think that the former is contrary to the latter.

On April 23, women are gathering in front of the Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram for a day-long fast from 10 to 5 to protest against the tsunami of hatred submerging the country and to beg forgiveness of the community wronged so grievously, and from the little one tortured and killed by vile men for their petty ends. I am going too. Please do join us if you are in the city.

Courtesy: Kafila.online

The post Against the Yawning Jaws of Hell: Protest Against Hate on 23 April appeared first on SabrangIndia.

If you ask me, this cover is not of a woman breastfeeding, but of one who is declaring her determination to be comfortable while breastfeeding, thereby reinforcing her commitment to breastfeed her baby. I think this difference is important. Breastfeeding is a very intimate act; it is highly physical. If the mother and child are well, happy, and don’t have issues that may make this feel like a chore or hard to do, then it is very highly pleasurable too. As a woman who has breastfed continuously for 9 years with just a short break of a few months during my second pregnancy, I can say this: breastfeeding is also ‘breastfeeling’, so your attention is on the act, and you really don’t want to focus on anything else, especially irritating stares. It is as pleasurable as lovemaking. Many years later (my daughters are 25 and 20 this year), when I remember the act, my nipples rise, tingling. Breastfeeding was also play time, when the little one played with her mum’s breast with her tiny fingers feeling and squeezing it; and my younger one was especially playful, twisting her tiny body in sheer pleasure, and sometimes, remaining still and then naughtily sinking her little tooth into the nipple, rolling her eyes up to check the reaction from her mum! So when we traveled, I always carried a big, opaque duppatta with which I made a ‘tent’ over our heads that covered us completely. We would be sitting in a corner seat in the train, and having fun, she sitting on my lap (and later the tent would be big enough for the three of us, myself, my six-year-old, and one-year-old, the former listening to a story, and the latter happily suckling). We would sing, tickle, do what not. Demanding the freedom to breastfeed without being too bothered about modesty and in public without anyone staring, for me, then, is demanding the right to such intimate pleasure in public. In that sense, this should have been one of the afterlives of Kerala’s Kiss of Love protests.

I don’t have the image of me breastfeeling happily, but here is the picture of my little one after one of our sessions. Does anyone doubt anymore, that it is indeed breastfeeling, not just breatfeeding. Here is she, looking ecstatic, the milk still in her little mouth!
 

The post Breastfeeling, not Breastfeeding appeared first on SabrangIndia.

I can only say: I am tired. I am hoarse of writing about the emerging order in which coercion, not consent, becomes the state’s instrument of producing subordination, about the emerging security state overshadowing the welfarist state, about the inadequacies of the rhetoric of Malayali cosmopolitanism in the wake of resurgent caste-community power, about the deterioration of early twentieth century caste-community organizations into caste-corporates managing community assets for the community elite, about the persistent efforts of the state to push the dalit people into a state of abjection.

Am I surprised by this ‘division of labour’ between the NSS and the RSS? No! I have written about it in the wake of the Hadiya case – of how the NSS and SNDP manage economic interests of the twentieth century new elite (by this term I mean caste-communities which managed to secure their interests in twentieth century Kerala, and this includes certain elite sections of the Ezhavas, who were an avarna jati in the traditional order), while they outsource the business of keeping people, especially young people, in submission to family and community to the RSS. Am I surprised that Ananthu A R was dubbed Maoist and carted off? No, not at all.  Did I not write about how young people siding with justice were attacked precisely this way? And now, according to the police authorities’ logic, the best minds in Kerala’s civil society – BRP Bhaskar, K Satchidanandan, B Rajeevan, T T Sreekumar – the list is long – are all Maoist by implication as they protest the police’s vile attacks on the dalit activists at Vadayambady and horror of horrors, even side with the transgender people who the Kochi police consider fair game! We meet bizarre representatives of the state:  District Collectors hallucinate that they live in the Raja of Kochi’s — the Ponnutampuran’s — times before Indian independence and protect Brahmanadharmam the Raja upheld; police chiefs who coolly state that their job is to protect the respectability of the genteel middle class and not the rights of all; left political leaders who kiss the feet of NRI capital and remain permanently indebted to them; and of course, the slimy intellectuals of the CPM who run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.

Much has been written on the Vadayambady struggle, and indeed we need to keep the issue from being despatched to darkness, which was what the craven mainstream media would happily do. I however, want to think about the future. For that is where hope lies, and it is important to break free from the fossilizing stare the state now holds us in, preventing us from thinking of how to survive, stay alive, be human — in other words, how to craft a politics adequate to today’s challenges.

And therefore I want to think of feminism in Kerala, post-Hadiya’s struggle, post-Vadayambady. Both events reveal to us some of the challenges that we can no more deny – I mean, no one who has any political spine left can deny: one, that the new elite caste-communities of the twentieth century (the SNDP, NSS, the Syrian Christian community organizations) are ready and eager to outsource the business of policing community boundaries, and the violence that it entails, to the RSS/other Hindutva organizations; two,  the mainstream left is very much part of this game and will not seriously interfere – unless the anti-caste struggle seems to be winning, at which point they may enter and carry off the honours.

But more importantly, the time has come when we need to realize that all of us who are opposed to caste and patriarchy, and to the gross inequalities of resources and power wrought by our late twentieth-century integration into the globalized world economy (and these cannot really be understood apart of each other) need to work on our differences and come together. I do believe that treating our differences as insurmountable and irreconcilable is not just childish and petulant, but also outright dangerous now. Now, whatever we may think about our differences, all of us, humanist and anti-humanist, are ‘Maoists’ and/or ISIS supporters in the eyes of the security-obsessed, Hindutva-inflected state, as many statements by the police now state quite baldly. We, then, need to rethink politics in ways that will help us work together, and this is my way of contributing to it.Though I say ‘ feminism after Hadiya’s struggle’, I want to highlight not just the learning from that specific struggle but from the entire set of resistances in recent times.
So how do we rethink feminism?

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Here are a few thoughts:

1. Get the fuck out. Refuse to reproduce our communities of birth if they are involved in reviving caste power and in alliance with the Sanghis.

To start from Hadiya, I want to say that it is she, more than anyone else, allowed us to see the crucial importance of destroying sajateeya marriage – marriage between members of the same caste—among the powerful new elite caste-communities in contemporary Kerala.

We need to carefully think of endogamy as it exists across the savarna/new elite- oppressed community divide – of its functions, form, impacts and consequences for us. I think savarna/new elite feminists  ought to break endogamy totally – and that ought to be one of the pillars of the feminism practised by feminists born in the savarna/new elite communities. By now, I am tired of the empty evocations of intersectionality and the self-restraining practiced by savarna feminists whose main mode of engagement with non-savarna politics seems to be through a careful avoidance of engagement and passive agreement – functioning as the Facebook-likes-providing brigade. Which is really easy, because your lack of engagement gets read as support, and of course, you don’t really need to think of your ‘own work’ in smashing the caste-patriarchy-class nexus. Those times, I feel are over. If savarna-born women are serious about feminism, they better start doing their own work: and I say, the most important task they need to take on is the breaking down of sajateeya marriage, and indeed, even marrying between the savarna/new elite communities. For this is the bolster that holds up these dominant communities now. Indeed, the massive violence against young women of these communities who choose to marry Muslims shows that the bolster is under strain, and that is generating great insecurities.

Put differently, I am saying that fighting for equal rights within savarna/ new elite communities might lighten patriarchy there but does not remove the caste privilege savarna/new elite- born women enjoy over their avarna sisters. So getting the fuck out may be necessary – and if we choose partners from our own castes, engage in radical self-critical concrete proposals on how to exit the community altogether. I mean, I think savarna feminists should not contribute to the reproduction of their regressive communities in any way, implicit or explicit.

Exiting through marriage – exogamy — is one way this may be done, but also maybe through conversion, coming out as queer, building queer families – we need to think more. Maybe we should think of marriage and relationship sites which will help people connect beyond their communities of birth! However, for avarna, muslim, and christian communities in India now endogamy may hold different  significance and so the thrust could be on democratising marital relationships fully as a condition for continuing endogamy.

So while the goal to democratising marital relationships remains important for all women, savarna/new elite-born women ought to strive beyond it by actually breaking the endogamy imposed by their communities.

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2. Learn a lesson from the struggles of the transgender communities
The transgender community in Kerala has made an active bid to enter the social and political mainstream, and this has now brought them much visibility here. But what has been truly moving and humbling for us has been the stern refusal of leading voices in the community to condemn those among them who may be relying on sex work for a living.  In their responses to the accusations raised by the Kerala police, these voices have stressed over and over that the transgender community, in order to be a truly empowered constituent of the mainstream, may need not just resources and government support, but also time – and convivial friendship – from others. They have asserted the right of members to form alternate families, and have refused to judge each other with patriarchal standards

This is a lesson that feminism in Kerala has taken too long to learn. To build a strong alternate community, one needs to first stop moralizing and refuse patriarchal explanations for our failures and success. We need to take seriously other women when they speak about state violence, especially when they belong to groups the state actively demonises. We saw the regrettable reluctance among leading feminists to listen to sex workers around a decade back; in Hadiya’s struggle, too many feminists were ready to dismiss Hadiya without even listening to her; too many sniggered, telling her to be grateful to the Indian Constitution, at a time when we were appalled by the Supreme Court’s treatment of her. This cannot build a feminist community, whatever else it may lead to. And sucking up to the social right-wing, or to the NIA, for that matter, is not going to save anyone from the heavy hand of Brahmanical dandaneethi that will surely fall on all women, and goody-goody feminists (except those who as clever as Madhu Kishwar) are not exempted.

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1. Accept that support for women’s labour struggles are not what feminists offer ‘for poor women’ but actually central to building feminist solidarity itself.

It is time that we began to take head-on the reality of the  oppressive relations that exist between savarna/new elite women and avarna women – that the genteel domesticity and mobility of the former are dependent on the later. Instead of focusing on how the order of caste permits men to oppress women, we need to focus on how it permits women to oppress other women. This demands that we focus on domestic labour especially, and all forms of women’s undervalued labour in the productive and other sectors historically, and the manner in which it shapes the relations between women and divides them. The struggle for justice and fair wages and practices, and rights and voice for domestic workers then needs to become central to all feminist politics. But we also need to develop radical theorising around domestic labour and emancipatory politics around paid domestic work. By the latter, one means going beyond the discussion of fair wages, but of building feminist work relationships between employers and employees, that does not reduce it to merely an exchange within the capitalist circuit – and indeed, builds solidarity in the full realization that the domestic worker’s struggle is not merely hers but integral to all anti-patriarchal struggles. And this needs to be extended to the struggles by all women workers — whether they work at home, in the municipality, hospital, or tea garden.

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1. Feminism needs to take sides unambiguously in the politics around bodies.

In Kerala now, the young are fighting for their bodies – for the right to dress their bodies as they deem fit, to define their sexuality, to free their bodies from being turned into instruments of reproduction of caste-communities and families, to resist the reduction of their bodies into labour power saleable in the global job market. Feminism cannot dither anymore in its decades-old habit of being wary of demands for sexual liberation, for in these times, that just cannot be feminism anymore. Feminism needs to be shameless, totally shameless, in insisting that sexual rights, inequalities, issues, and injustices have to be public concerns, and take an unambiguous position on this vis-à-vis the social right-wing. It cannot afford to be queasy about discussing questions of dangers and pleasures in sex, as well as rights and violations in intimate relationships.  Any talk of gender that refuses to do so, one may say, is immediately complicit with the massive apparatus that runs the length and breadth of the state, extending from the patriarchal family, through schools, tuition centres, coaching camps and so on, to technical institutes, finishing schools etc. into which our young people are being sucked in and turned, quite violently these days, into docile labour for the global labour market.
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1. Embrace, yet know the limits, of cyberfeminism.

For some time now, cyberspace is where feminism – arguably, third-wave feminism in Kerala — has found voice[s] and presence[s].  This is an exciting moment of defiance by Malayali women, who have, by default, all been made into ‘feminists’ there. Surely, it is not just the insecurity of the misogynist majority that is responsible for this, but also the very structure of the social media. In Kerala, judging from the past, it is women who have written autobiographies, or engaged in some kind of active self-construction, who have faced the offline equivalent of trolling here, from the 1930s at least. Kamala Surayya is a well-known example, but there are many others too.

The patriarchal unconscious here gets stirred up when a woman reveals that she does indeed possess a ‘private’, as opposed to just the domestic – and finds resources from it to construct herself. This ‘private’ exists by implication and signs of its presence provoke a great deal of patriarchal anxiety, especially of a sexual sort, since the ‘private’ is associated with the sexual. So, then, this chain of associations means that every woman who engages in self-construction is by default overstepping the family’s and community’s construction of her, and this means that she does indeed possess a ‘private’, which by association, is sexual – therefore, the woman who engages in self-construction is by implication likely to engage also in sexual transgression. And worse, any woman revealing herself in an autobiography or self-construction is also revealing her ‘private’, which indicates her propensity to be sexually transgressive – and is therefore ‘asking for it’.

Now, consider the enormous proportions of this ‘problem’ for patriarchal authorities in the time of the Internet: thousands of women are engaged in self-construction, of various degrees, through the social media and other cyber spaces. Indeed, each woman, however demure she may appear, is constructing a persona for herself in cyberspace, however minimally. That means that to the patriarchal unconscious, all these women are revealing their ‘privates’ and hence their tendency towards sexual transgression, and therefore pose a veritable tsunami that must be immediately put down. No doubt then, that the attacks on assertive women in cyberspace, especially sexually-coloured threats, have been particularly intense. But what is truly interesting is the way in which most of these women have refused to be cowed down and continue to take and guard spaces online.

Yet we need to ask ourselves the question if the very structure of the social media has also not worked to individualize resistance intensely, and indeed, cultivate the individual through what is often outright narcissism. Feminists need to see that cyberfeminism is not merely talking feminism in cyberspace, or using cyberspaces to feminist ends. Indeed, cyberfeminism is already distinct in that it did not share the positions of the early techno-enthusiasts uncritically; and now we need to also recast it in ways that allow it to shape empathetic communities and mutual learning. And this is not unique to Kerala; this has been widely discussed in the literature on third-wave feminism elsewhere too.

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I stop here, hoping to spark off a conversation.These are of course only a beginning – however shaky, one must begin somewhere, and beginnings are always risky. To me this is important precisely because I want to break the petrifying stare of the state, and fly off into the world of possibility. That is perhaps the only way to survive the state’s relentless draining of the energy of resistance.

Courtesy: kafila.online
 
 

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What is more disturbing however, is the mobilization of the anti-caste charge to the cause of this aangala-insecurity by some male commentators who seek to trivialize Rima’s observation of how the most savoured items of food, like fish, was always offered first and most to men and boys in her family, and how her perception of gender injustice began from the day she protested against that, as a child. The condescension with which such men address Rima and her female supporters is breathtaking. Quite reminiscent of CPM intellectuals of the late 1980s who insisted that (1) gender injustice can only be subordinate to class; (2) patriarchal relations were a bourgeois issue, (3) that it was not even a sociological feature of the working classes, (4) patriarchs are always bourgeois or feudal, (5) the only ‘real feminists’ were working class heroines of class struggle, these men now tell us that (1) gendered inequalities in families is an elite, not lower caste, issue,(2) it cannot be but subordinate to caste injustice, (3) patriarchy wasn’t a sociological feature of lower caste life, (4) patriarchy is always upper caste, (5) the only ‘real feminists’ are those who fight caste injustice or patriarchy perpetrated by caste injustice (which, according to them, is the only patriarchy in existence). For all our talk of intersectionality, we fail to avoid setting up caste, class, and gender and other axes of social power as mutually competing vectors that run parallel to each other and insist that all other vectors must necessarily be subordinate to what we think is the dominant one.
Even more egregiously, these anti-caste champions assume the aangala-tone in their advice that feminists better focus on minority and dalit women heroes instead of highlighting what in their view, is a trivial complaint, mere resentment, about the way food is distributed in families. It is an insult, really, because very many feminists have indeed been active in the campaigns raised by dalit and minority women and don’t need their sanctimonious advice. Through this disgusting gesture, these men try to erase feminists from these campaigns. More strikingly, the tactic is to point to distributional inequalities elsewhere, to draw attention away from the patriarchal family. That works in the case of one of the dalit women they mention, Chithralekha, the dalit working class heroine whose protests called out the immense anti-dalit orientation of the CPM in their strongholds, but also the gendered nature of that hostility. Her protests were about the distribution of resources by the state – of its casteist and gendered nature.

But the idea that one can sidestep the question of the distribution of power in families is belied by the other hero mentioned, Hadiya: but her struggle too was against the distribution of power within her family. As a daughter, she was denied the freedom to choose her faith and her partner. Hadiya had repeatedly told her father that she did not wish to severe relations with her family; she wanted acceptance of her faith in her family of birth. It was only her father’s refusal to accommodate her that prompted her to seek other spaces and relationships. She exited her natal family precisely when denied equal voice and space there.
The denial of voice and space comes in different ways, big and small – through discriminatory treatment, and not just through outright denial. In any case, there is no way one can avoid talking of gendered distributional inequalities. And to claim, like these aangala-males do, that they exist only in families or in families of particular communities/classes and so on, is to play the ostrich when it comes to the injustices of gender. Of course, those with a stake in the entrenched order will not consider evidence that goes contrary to their treasured beliefs. And so none of these men will take seriously the data on nutritional disparities readily available in large-scale datasets on Kerala.
 
II
However, what really rattled me was how a certain aangala, tried to use the myth of Nangeli  and her resistance against the oppressive caste elite order in the kingdom of Travancore, through the gesture of offering her cut breast to the tax-collectors who demanded the ‘breast-tax’ against ‘trivial feminists’. Rima Kallingal did not invent feminism, Nangeli did, he claims. Now there can be little dispute about the first part of this claim: it is his insecurity that makes him think so. About the second part too, there can be little dispute that the Nangeli is a foremother of all anti-patriarchal struggles in contemporary Kerala. But the irony of this being thrust in our faces by someone who would deny that patriarchal families deny women equal resources is truly intriguing. Also, if it were a feminist who tried to trace an unbroken legacy for feminism to the early 19^th century in this simplistic fashion, these men would have immediately cried foul, accusing feminists of appropriating anti-caste myth and history.

I want, therefore, to make an attempt to reflect on the Nangeli myth in a way that does not reduce it to the terms of contemporary politics and subordinate it to immediate ends, and yet tells us about the specificity and complexity of social hierarchies, power and resistance to it in pre-modern Malayali society. Also, I want to see if an intersectional understanding that does not project modern frameworks of sex/gender into the past is possible, of the significance of  Nangeli’s resistance. Attempts to reclaim it have too often projected present-day hierarchies and forms of power into the past. My attempt is of course utterly preliminary and what I want to present is just a set of hypotheses — but we all have to start somewhere and bear the risks of refutation – which can only lead to richer discussions.

The first step in this, I feel, is to turn critical towards the celebration of the claims about the seemingly-timeless presence of cosmopolitanism in Kerala, propagated, for instance, by scholars who see a non-western model of cosmopolitanism in the strategies of accommodation practiced by the Brahminical rulers of Kerala of the precolonial times. My scepticism about projecting Malayali society’s cosmopolitanism into the far past stems from the feeling that we would be making rather too much of the social contract between three internally-hierarchical social orders – the brahmanical, the elite christian, and the elite muslim.
Of these, the first held political power and created the political space expressed in the language of varna in which the other two were granted space. All three have settler myths, focused on leaders close to the respective master-figures in each faith — Parashurama, St Thomas and Malik Dinar – and they lay out the terms of association between the three. Correct me if I am wrong, the origin myth of the Jews was different. I am not sure if this is cosmopolitanism at all.

If we look at the periphery of this society, we may find three kinds of oppressed people. One, groups that are abjected for the most, but permitted occasional inclusion, such as the Arayas of the Coast and the Theyyam-performing communities. Secondly, the large section of Avarna labouring classes especially the Ezhava and Tiyya who were made to pay ‘body taxes’,  named after body parts — thala (head), mula (breast), and meesha (moustache). These groups were offered a ‘conditional recognition’ of their bodiliness, i.e. on the condition that they pay these taxes. Thirdly, there were the communities completely denied any such recognition, treated as infinitely usable and utterly disposable labour, in theory at least. This ordering was undergirded by the projection of the brahmanical order as the brahmanical swargam on earth, with brahmins as bhudevas and the sudras as their servants, essentially occupying the position of the say, the minions of heaven (thus sudra women sexually available to Brahmins were assigned the dharma of the apsaras in the brahminical terms). This is the social imagination of Brahmanical political power that assigned trading communities distinct and delimited spaces in the Brahmanical order and rendered abject those who sustained it by their labour.

Secondly, we need to ask new questions about sex/gender and power in the premodern order of Malayali brahminism. It appears that for the upper-most strata of Kshatriyas, women, particularly women senior by virtue of age and/or their position in the kinship order, could take over the same power as senior males and had the same designation that we now read as exclusively male (Tampuraan, for example, was a designation fully available to women in Kshatriya ruling households) and indeed, in the turmoil of the seventeenth century do see several women rulers asserting their right to rule like men – in the swaroopams in southern Kerala, in Kochi, and the north as well. It appears that reduced versions of such access could have been a feature of the more powerful sudra elite families as well. In the early records of disputes in tarawads in Malabar, several senior women appear as litigants claiming equal position and space, indicating that the modern division of labour in families – men in charge of material sustenance, and women in charge of moral and emotional labour – cannot be projected in it. In other words, women of the elite could, under certain circumstances, access power over the bodies placed lower in the order. Marthanda Varma’s subordination of Attingal in the mid-18^th century puts an end to these privileges and gradually, the very memory of these waned.

In other words, maybe one can hypothesize that in the premodern brahmanical order of Janma-bhedam while full power over the bodies of the oppressed was available to senior women in ruling houses, and lesser versions of such power were available to senior women in powerful sudra houses, for the most oppressed groups, the avarnas, bodiliness was either ‘conditional’ (through body-tax, and it is perhaps not coincidental that precisely those parts — the head, the moustache, and the breasts — that were less relevant to the labour that the oppressed performed for the elites figured in the tax-names) or actually denied. Those groups reduced to slavery were probably not even granted this: their bodies were abjected even more, regarded as mere generators of labour, of different kinds of labour for the reproduction of the elites (productive, sexual, reproductive – all equally extracted). The casual ease with which the slave people could be murdered and sacrificed by the elite – all such stories and myths we have heard of such killings –seem to confirm this. Of course this does not mean there was no resistance to this, rather the contrary: that resistance comes alive and is alive and well in myth and stories which the dalit and other anti-caste assertions in Kerala are reclaiming.

This reading also means that this society which was modeled on the Brahmanical swargam was perhaps one of the most oppressive social orders ever in human history, in which the laboring classes and slaves were not simply oppressed but actually abjected and denied even bodiliness.
Nangeli’s act of cutting off her breast rather than pay the breast tax that could have assured her conditional acceptance within the order is, therefore, not to be reduced to resistance to merely the objectification of the female body – since it is probable that even unconditional bodiliness was not conceded to the oppressed at that time . Rather, it could be read as the very founding moment of a history in and through which the abjected refused abjection and rose up to reclaim their bodiliness and full humanity. I do not need to pay tax to affirm my breasts, she seems to declare. Paradoxically, through cutting off her breasts, she affirms herself as a bodily being, not requiring confirmation of the brahmanical order. That act, then, could be revered as the founding moment of the rising up the abjected whose labour sustained the brahmanical swarga-on-earth.

Thanks to Nangeli and countless others after her who fought against the worst-known order of human oppression, that of Janma-bhedam (yes, it indeed has a local name, and so the argument that the oppression that came to be called ‘caste oppression’ was not a figment of anyone’s imagination as some are apt to claim nowadays), today we can debate hierarchy and power, demand their dismantling, claim voice, and protest injustice without such spectacular acts. Indeed, when feminists joined the campaigns for justice around questions raised by Chithralekha and Hadiya, the demand was precisely that they must not be forced to pay the huge price that those who revolted against the feudal order had to, to gain a voice. In other words, we were certain they must not be made to suffer like Nangeli to secure their rights, constitutional and natural.

Rima however already has a voice which she employs against deep-rooted family patriarchy, and how is that such a crime? Or is it these men’s case that the only women worth listening to are those who suffer and die resisting power and so can be considered ‘truly resistant’? If that is so, then one can only tell them to go fuck themselves.Nangeli’s legacy can be claimed by anyone who lays bare the workings of power and hierarchies, who takes the risk and the pain of doing so. That risk and pain may not be as big as Nangeli’s but still. It cannot be claimed by those who use her as a shield to deflect attention from hierarchies and power, and who use her name to silence inconvenient voices. So these men can all go to hell as far as I care, and frankly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see both pro- and ant- Hadiya fellows swelling the ranks of the Dickhead Brigade.

Courtesy: https://kafila.online/
 

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Image: Indian Express

I can hardly describe the joy and relief I felt reading your piece on the Hadiya case in the Hindu yesterday. By now I am nearly deaf from the cacophony of misogyny, islamophobia, and sheer short-sighted rage that CPM supporters on Facebook are unleashing against this young woman.

Your voice of sanity, Comrade, is therefore a great restorative. If not for your writing, one could have well thought that the CPM was nothing more than a bunch of short sighted, power hungry, strategisers, whose total lack of ethics and values is covered up by a vapid, outdated rationalism and an equally problematic liberalism. You refuse to condemn Hadiya for choosing Islam. You acknowledge that she is brave. You unequivocally reject the father and other minions of patriarchy. You rightly criticise state patriarchy evident in the Supreme Court. Unlike many CPM supporters here, you have no illusions about the times we live in; you are clearly aware that the NIA is not something which will spare us if we stay good. Importantly, you put paid to the idea that the High Court judgement that sanctioned her illegal custody was justified — an idea assiduously nurtured by certain public figures allied with the CPM against religious Muslims. Comrade, thank you again for being so forthright and in the face of snarling islamophobes in your own ranks actually gunning for the voice you raised against her illegal custody long back.

I write to you to also express my gnawing worry about the rising and totally unchecked respectability of islamophobia among vocal CPM supporters on Facebook. They ostensibly criticise one particular group, the SDPI, but inevitably, their venom falls on all practising and religious muslims.  A few weeks earlier, we saw them justify the father’s violence publicly, but now that he has been revealed to be a criminal by Hadiya’s own words, they have shifted to a kind of islamophobia reminiscent of that unleashed by US imperialist feminism in the wake of the bombing of Afghanistan.

There are many such instances, but what worries me especially is that many young women closely associated with the CPM are spreading it nonchalantly. For example, a young CPM supporter, an academic in a technical university outside Kerala, does not bat an eyelid as she spreads the idea that religious muslim groups are necessarily inimical to women’s education. This young woman is pretty pleased with her life choices, with her life as a non practicing muslim woman. She then glibly uses that to measure other muslim women. Noting that the Supreme Court ordered Hadiya to finish her education, she expresses surprise that the SDPI activists rejoice at it. According to her, they should not, because they like to keep their women wretchedly ill-educated. This is of course an absurd response since the SDPI has been supporting Hadiya’s education right from the beginning, and she had been quite fixed on acquiring her degree. Indeed, it was Asokan who had unlawfully taken away her certificates, which the court had to order to return. In another instance, another young AIDWA activist, a lawyer herself, from Thiruvananthapuram, insists that Hadiya’s choice is no choice at all because she chose a religious Islamic life. Today she moved up a notch asking whether Islam is a religion that taught believers to hate their parents!! A cartoon that CPM supporters have been sharing widely shows a niqabi woman holding up a placard saying Free Hadiya as if that were a contradiction in terms. I was reminded of the infamous public unveiling of Afghani women by American imperialist feminists justifying the war there.

We of course agree that all religions, including islam the world over, are deeply patriarchal and that we need to fight patriarchal authorities in majority and minority religions relentlessly. But we also do know that religious women are not brainless puppets and that they do struggle hard within their community. The Indian Women’s Movement as we know has debated this carefully. Surely, none of us there believe that Muslim women will be saved when they abandon their faith and join urban atheist circles. None of us non-Muslim feminists have the temerity to think that lack of self reflexivity is a shining virtue. Yet among many women supporters of the CPIM in Kerala today, blatant islamophobia and vulgar rationalism have become necessary components of what is projected as ‘progressive’ leftist identity. This is despite the fact that the AIDWA had complained early against Hadiya’s illegal custody. The Kerala government’s gender adviser had taken a humane and sensible stand early on. Yet these voices were sidelined and ignored. Even the recent essay by the Kerala Women’s Commission’s lawyer, PV Dinesh, is so utterly condescending and driven by motives other than justice for the wronged young woman.

I truly am concerned when I see that this is not a regional issue anymore. It is a national issue. Can the Left campaign among hijabi women in Lucknow or Kanpur or Hyderabad with such hostile ideas about women in religious dress? Is that done, even? I do hope you will be able to convince comrades in Kerala that the ethical stance towards muslims and muslim women cannot be hijacked by their calculation of short term political gain. In Kerala, the CPM is closely connected with the worst misogynists not just among the Muslims but perhaps among all Malayali communities, the Kanthapuram faction. They also often have a ground level understanding with other ultra conservatives among Muslims. The positions of the SDPI are often not as conservative, nor is the National Women’s Front led by dumb dolls. Clearly, the CPM has other reasons to fight it. Whatever those may be, this reckless use of islamophobia will only end up eroding the ethical core of the Left all the more. That it is already emaciated is evident from the manner in which left adherents are deploying an impoverished version of liberal feminism.

Lastly, may I please ask a clarification? In your essay, you mention that Muslim women in Kerala marrying Hindu men are being violently threatened by extremist Muslim groups like the Popular Front. I would like to know what sources you may be basing this claim on. Since this group has been the target of much attack from quite long, since we now know how wary the general public is of muslim extremism here, surely, many cases must have been filed against these alleged ruffians? I have been trying to trace these cases since yesterday and have found very few, but none in which the Popular Front is directly involved. If you have information – say case numbers, the police stations etc. – please do publicly share them? I am saying this because I have observed since 2008 that the Popular Front has been the target of consistent demonisation by both the left and right in the state.It is high time we start going by clearly identifiable acts. Otherwise, it will end up like the Sanghi complaint that the CPM is mercilessly butchering their people here – powerful claims which seem plausible to diehard CPM haters, but with no factual basis whatsoever. In this case, given the heavy climate of fear against religious Muslims, complaints must have been filed and pursued as well. But if no such evidence is available then maybe that remark should be withdrawn. There could of course be goons in every party. Moral policing by SFI activists is very common in Kerala. But that doesn’t mean that SFI as an organization approves of moral policing. The continuing demonisation of the SDPI may bring gains in that this may mobilize terrified Hindu voters for the CPM. But certainly, that is  a great wrong to do for minor electoral gain.

None of this takes anything away from your principled support for Hadiya. I hear that some CPM supporters have been fuming and calling you a ‘sudapini’, a derogatory term they coined to refer to those of us who did not succumb to the father’s right theory or buy the terrorist muslim discourse. Never mind, all of us in the Indian Women’s Movement should be ‘sudapinis’, by that reckoning.

With love and respect, as always,

Yours truly
J Devika

Courtesy: kafila.online
 

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