Potpourri
of thoughts
By V. Geetha
Sunday, August 6, 2006
Sunday New Indian Express
The Blindness of Insight
By Dilip M Menon
Navayana, Rs 200
The
Blindness of Insight is an elegantly argued
book. It offers a provocative thesis: that
communal violence, especially in northern
India, represents a unique resolution of the
caste question. Dilip Menon investigates this
hypothesis in four essays: the first is an
insightful one on “why communalism in
India is about caste.” The second offers
a close reading of the cardinal writings of
the late EMS Namboodiripad. The last two essays
present Menon’s readings of Malayalam
fiction from the late nineteenth century,
especially those that “explore a subaltern
imaginary that is excluded from the novels
written by the dominant caste of nairs at
this historical moment” (a moment that
Menon reluctantly characterises as one marked
by colonial modernity).
The introductory essay asserts
that it is impossible to understand communal
violence or the emergence of polar religious
identities in the modern period outside the
context of the caste order. Menon argues that
efforts at self-assertion by the subordinated
castes and their resistance to the caste order
forced a closing of ranks amongst powerful
and socially dominant castes. These latter
united in the name of a putative Hinduism,
which involved, among other things, violence
against Muslims. Menon identifies three moments
as crucial in this context: the debates and
violence provoked by the cow protection movement;
Non-cooperation and finally Partition.
Subordinate castes, both
in northern and southern India, reaped the
benefits of the colonial marketplace and legislation:
not only did they become economically vibrant,
but also socially articulate. Their attempts
at social expression were mediated by the
cultures within which they developed. In northern
India, the lower shudra castes found the militant
Hindu rhetoric of the Arya Samaj appealing,
since it combined notions of patriotic duty,
masculine valour and self-assertion; the dalit
castes on the other hand, turned away from
what they considered caste Hindu life worlds
and instead were drawn into those charismatic
devotional traditions that recalled an earlier
bhakthi egalitarianism. Both castes though
were persuaded to view Muslims as implacable
enemies and enlisted in the violence and abuse
heaped on Muslims. Menon suggests that this
relationship between caste and faith has remained
in place in northern and north-western India:
it defined the Mandal-Masjid conjuncture and
haunted the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat
in 2002.
In southern India, subordinated
castes acquired visibility and voice through
other ideological means: colonial economic
practices and conversion to Christianity and
the distinctive access this afforded —
at least some of them — to the colonial
public sphere produced a new civic morality.
In some instances, this meant doing away with
the sacred, as with the self-respect and Dravidian
movements; or a re-invention of it, as happened
in Kerala where both Christianity as well
as the reformed spiritual practices initiated
by Narayana Guru both helped mutate notions
of the spiritual and the civic. Southern geography
too proved decisive, allowing as it did for
migration to south-east Asia and thereby helped
break down and re-make of caste worlds.
Menon further argues that
the polarisation of religious identities which
happened in the north ought to be viewed in
the context of a public sphere that scrupulously
separated religious life from all other forms
of the civic: leaving the world of faith and
its ideologues to battle it out in areas that
devolved upon faith itself. Colonial policy
was instrumental in this eventual disalignment
of the secular and the sacred. But it was
the textual and ideological practices that
Hindu and Muslim elites produced in response
to this policy — articulating lofty,
textual and pure identities that did not allow
for composite or plural forms of self-experience
and expression — which rendered it impossible
for Hindus and Muslims to negotiate their
respective faiths, as they perhaps did earlier,
in the market place, in common festivities
and performative civic rituals. Even subordinated
Hindu castes were not entirely free of this
desire to construct an overarching “Hinduness”:
though they refused to engage with the unscrupulous
niceties of orthodoxy, they drew upon the
abstractions of Hindu monism to claim the
freedom and equality that was denied to them
in everyday life.
Menon’s second essay
glosses EMS’s reading of Kerala history.
He examines two well-known monographs on the
subject, and demonstrates how EMS deploys
the dialectic to expound his vision of change
and progress. In carrying out his theoretical
labour, EMS, Menon suggests, wrestled with
two sorts of challenges. The socialist imperative
required him to explain the possibilities
of revolution and so earlier inequalities
had to be accounted for within a given mechanical
narrative of progress. The Dravidian movement’s
criticisms of Brahmins and Brahminism had
to be answered, since they interrogated both
his evolution into a communist and his existential
sense of that evolution. Thus EMS went on
to produce a history in which Brahmins appeared
a historically necessary class, in their roles
as civilisers and organisers of progress.
This of course meant that the violence central
to the caste order as well as the manner in
which social and economic oppression combined
to produce and extract surplus was left largely
unexamined. Menon is at his most perceptive
here, especially when he suggests that in
the peculiar historiography of Marxists such
as EMS and K Damodaran, we are witness to
a forgetting and simultaneous transcending
of a problematic past: it becomes a necessary
“stage of history” that is easily
left behind as modernist progress hurtles
towards its revolutionary future. Caste, we
realise, is well and truly repressed in the
construction of the revolutionary moment and
subject.
In his last two essays, Menon
demonstrates the making of a different historiography.
He reads the novels of Potheri Kunhambu (Sarasvathivijayam),
Joseph Muliyil (Sukumari) and Mrs Collins
(Ghatakavadham) to glean from them the complex
and intricate manner in which the experience
of Christianity, as faith and as a guarantor
of new universal moral values, helped subordinate
castes criticise as well as transcend the
oppressions of caste. Menon’s reading
offers a fascinating account of how fiction
by the subordinated castes, both as genre
and as social history re-drew the map of colonial
modernity. The lower caste protagonists of
these novels act against injustice, suffer
and die, only to be re-born, both metaphorically
and literally into a transformed world order.
The new morality they expound not only redeems
their oppressors — who, unlike EMS actually
learn to denounce the past — but also
allows the reader to critically engage with
oppression and the texts that mandate it.
It is here that Menon's analysis is most interesting,
as he shows how the unique rhetoric of lower
caste fiction, in its search for a new morality,
achieves an amazing mix of the sacred and
profane. Importantly, transformed gender roles
are central to the emergence of the new world
in these novels: a nurturing yet socially
decisive femininity enables love, forgiveness
and redemption.
There are two questions
that I would like to raise about the analysis
that informs the essays in this book. While
Menon skillfully deploys gender as a category
of analysis in his readings of fiction, he
does not quite achieve this in his seminal
introductory essay on the emergence of hostile
communal identities in northern India. Charu
Gupta's work, which Menon cites, has demonstrated
how it was not merely the cow but the sexualized
body of the so-called Muslim public woman
that was central to the idea, so assiduously
expressed by Hindu ideologues, about Hinduism
and Hindu manhood being in danger. Likewise,
partition narratives are haunted by images
of sexually vulnerable women and men that
fear emasculation. In Gujarat too we witnessed
how the agents of violence brutally underscored
their claims to Hindu manhood. In a society
that sets great store by and carefully polices
who shall touch whom and to what purpose,
desire appears intrinsically “perverse”:
its violent resolution in troubled times is
a playing-out of the sad pathologies of love
in caste society. Secondly, Menon gestures
towards the work of Talal Asad as important
in helping us re-think notions of the civic
and the sacred in our historical contexts
— one wishes he had pushed this argument
to the fore in his descriptions of the experience
of conversion and Christianity.
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