What Did Literary Histories Say to You?

-- Pradeepan Pampirikunnu

Main Argument: Traditional literary histories should be revisited and rewritten. History should be
democratized.

The author wrote the essay at a time when all over the world the oppressed social groups, considered inferior
‘others’, are at present engaged in serious exploration of history and interrogations of culture.

This is part of an attempt to retrieve lost pride and honour with the intention of redefining their sense of self.

One of the lessons from history is that only people who initiate a politics of self-representation and maintain
records of their discursive practices will find a place in history and culture.

Dalit studies is therefore a political mode of enquiry and explanation generating discourses on the past,
present and future of Dalit’s in order to help them find a place in history and culture and shape their future.

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Knowledge production and distribution goes through various procedures of rigorous social control.

This process is called the politics of knowledge: to choose from a large body of information available, leave
the rest out, subject the select knowledge to editing and interpreting, confer on it scientificity and
objectivity, reduce its availability and limit its accessibility.

What is left out in the ideological apparatus of the state is the history and knowledge of the oppressed. It is
the voice of the broken, which is always silenced. It is the truth of the oppressed, which is always excluded.

The task of dalit studies is to release the counter-hegemonic forces of critique in order to facilitate the
eruption of dalit voice and truth, breaking the silence and darkness in the midst of prevailing politics of
knowledge.

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Caste and Casteism

Every society offers an explanation for its structure. The explanation given by Indian society is that of the
caste system.

The famous historian Kosambi said the most important distinguishing feature of Indian society is jati or
caste.

Caste becomes casteism when these social divisions are arranged in hierarchical order and one’s position in
the hierarchy is used as justification for preferential treatment in inter-group relations.

Those higher in the hierarchy grab the monopoly of purity, ownership and control over the means of
production and political power.

Those in the lower strata become subservient to the upper classes.

For example even now, most of those doing manual labour in the agricultural sector are drawn from certain
castes customarily forced to the fields for centuries.

Casteism has played an important role in devising the grammar of our language and designing the inflections
of our behavior.
Examples

Saraswativijayam (1892): Potheri Kunjambu

Kunhambu came from the caste of Tiyyas, then practising the lowly occuapation of toddy tapping. He
received an English education at the Cannanore Government High School, started work as a postmaster in
Malappuram and then became a copy clerk in the Magistrate's court in Taliparamba. After passing the vakil
examination, he moved to Cannanore and finally became a lawyer known for his probity. He established the
Edward Press in Cannanore and brought out a series of books reflecting his anguished engagement with
Hinduism, leading to his pamphlet of 1908 - Tiyyar - in which he advocated conversion as a means of
escape from the degradation of caste inequality. Kunhambu was much taken up with the idea of colonial
modernity which seemed to allow for education, mobility and equality for lower castes. Saraswativijayam
begins with the attempted killing of a Pulayan for daring to sing in the vicinity of a proud Nambudiri
landlord.
Although believed to be dead, the Pulayan survives, and the rest of the novel follows the two protagonists -
the master and the slave - as each of them seeks out his particular salvation. The Brahmin goes to Kashi and
cleanses himself of pride and ignorance, the Pulayan, through the space opened up by colonial education and
Christianity, becomes a judge. At the end of the novel, the Pulayan presides over the trial of the Nambudiri
and also marries his granddaughter Saraswati. The novel has the epigraph: Education is the greatest of all
wealth.

Chandu Menon’s Indulekha (1889), the celebrated first Malayalam novel, stages a conflict between a
feudal, Nair project of modernity and western modernity. We find no dalit interaction in the novel. By
contrast Kunjambu’s novel treats conversion as a means to overcome caste, is far less discussed. It is the
first non-Brahmin, non-Nair novels in Malayalam. This obscurity of secularism is one reason why Dalit
creative writing emerged so late in Kerala. Caste is a hidden identity for Dalit’s in Kerala. Few people will
openly declare their caste.

Everything holds a note of caste for the Keralite. An internal fear exists that if one is dark-skinned, even if a
savarna, one may be mistaken for an SC.
Consummables identified with different castes and their tastes such as marar pickles, Brahmins wheat flour,
marar papadam, namboothiri tooth powder are widely marketed all over kerala.
The absence of such market possibility for other communities is also a consequence of the savarna
constructions of ‘lower-caste’ identities.
There is also the use of ‘universal’ categories such as servants, sweepers, agricultural slaves and folk singers

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Proverbs around savarna ideas

 “If the lowly acquire wealth, they will carry umbrellas even at midnight.’ [Alpan artham kittiyal
ardha rathriyilum kuda pidikum.’]
 Can the accouterment of caste be simply peeled off?
 Can a crow turn into crane by taking a bath?
 You might catch a leech and put it on the mattress, but will it stay there?

Examples of how the bodies and social status of avarna people are depicted in savarna discourse.
Such figures are shaped by contempt as well as pity.

While savarna bodies and lives are conceived of as respectable and national, the local or indigenous takes
forms of leech, lowly idiot and crow.
The so –called secular language we use today is the language of the upper caste

You in Malayalam literature a rejection of regional identities and pan-Indian savarna subjectivity.

Most important of this is treatment of savarna life and transactions and symbols as secular.

MT works is a case in point.

His novels are about the anger of those dismissed from nair tharavad- in his work society is pushed to the
rear and the tharavad assumes primary importance – the language of nairs was accepted as secular-
valluvanadan dialect

Consider the word veedu (home). William Logan in his Malabar says veedu or bhavanam is a place where
nairs usually live. Within the nair caste, the powerful live in idam. It was not illam or mana (namboothiri
houses) or pura (thiya house) or chala/ madam or cheri (dalit dwellings) that became a secular word in
Kerala- it was the nair word ‘veedu’

The dominant voice in all such narratives is caste-identified

This transformed the kerala tharavadu from a being a system of inheritance to the cultural foundation of
Kerala.

This is why despite the decline of matrilineal system, there exists a an anxiety regarding the decline of
tharavadu