p. sanal mohan
The modern social space in Kerala was created through mobilizations in which Dalit movements played a crucial role. However, this story is unknown out-side Kerala. The anonymity of Dalit movements is directly linked to an elitist historiography that emphasized the roles of the Ezhava movement, the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (sndp) movement, the movements of other upper castes such as the Nairs or Namboodiri Brahmans, and later the com-munist movement as the harbingers of modernity in Kerala society. Such elitist histories and historiographies have dominated the intellectual and po-liti cal sphere, circulating several myths about contemporary Kerala. Yet no Dalit intellectual endeavors have emerged to challenge these ideas. This essay attempts to analyze some of the crucial issues problematized by the Dalit movements of the early twentieth century that made Dalit engagements with modern social space and civil society in Kerala pos si ble. Modern civil so-ciety could emerge in Kerala only because of the relentless struggles waged against caste domination and oppression. It is necessary to identify here the most significant moments in the struggles that are crucial to the formation of modern civil society in Kerala.
From the perspective of Dalit history it is difficult to think of civil soci-ety without referring to the mobilization against caste slavery in the mid- nineteenth century. The social space and civil society in Kerala was caste
determined. The modern middle class that became decisive in the forma-tion of civil society was almost exclusively constituted of the upper castes—
including the Ezhavas, although they are referred to as a backward caste. A close examination of the mid- nineteenth- century developments in vari ous regions of Kerala shows that in spite of regional diferences there were certain vis i ble trends that vouchsafed a colonial transformation. We may identify several aspects of colonial modernity that began to evolve during this phase.
The ideas of missionary Chris tian ity, such as the notions of salvation and improvement or the agenda of social transformation were beginning to reach the Dalit communities in the native states of Kerala.1 As the Anglican mis-sionaries were trying to work among the slave castes from the late 1840s on, the possibility of an alternative public also began to evolve. This alternative public was exemplified in what the missionaries termed slave schools and chapels, where slave- caste men, women, and children were taught the word of the Lord. In addition to this, basic literacy was imparted to them.
A close reading of missionary writings of the mid- nineteenth century in the Travancore region of Kerala shows how much missionaries were con-cerned with the changes in the habits of Dalits who joined the missions.
Following John Comarof and Jean Comarof, one may call it a “revolution in habits.”2 Changes in habits were impor tant for the evolution of Dalits as modern citizens. Moreover, in the prevailing situation of distance pollution and untouchability, slave- caste men and women had to evolve as socially pre-sentable bodies by adopting new social practices. This would be pos si ble only if they abandoned habits that the upper castes abhorred. It appears that such a change of habits had been considered as fundamental for claiming social space and becoming part of the evolving civil society that was always inimi-cal to them. Sometimes the missionaries asked their congregations to refrain from eating carcasses. This, they said, would raise the Dalits in the eyes of the upper castes as well as of the Syrian Christians in the Anglican congregation.
This disciplining assumes significance when combined with the fact that even as late as the early de cades of the twentieth century the Syrian Christians would invoke health sciences and notions of hygiene to support the segrega-tion of Dalit Christians in the churches.3
Beginning with the example of the liberation of the slaves of the Mun-roe island whom the missionaries purchased along with the land and later liberated as free individuals ascribing them the new status of laborers to be hired, we witness the coming of the notion of wage labor instead of slave labor which was a significant matter considering the fact that such a notion was alien to the native society.4 As far as the slaves were concerned, this was
an impor tant moment as the new experiment ofered them the possibility of evolving into free laborers, which would liberate their bodies and minds from the control of the masters. However, this evolution did not occur, as the abolition of slavery did not mean the abolition of its condition of existence—
that is, the caste system that determined the social power relations in which the slaves had to live even after their formal liberation in 1885. As a result, the social hierarchy continued to exist largely unchallenged even after the aboli-tion of slavery. Aboliaboli-tion was an integral part of Dalit po liti cal agency in the late nineteenth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, with the coming of the anticaste movements, the po liti cal agency of Dalits under-went significant changes. It may be pointed out here that modern civil soci-ety emerged in Kerala in the first half of the twentieth century through the struggles against the caste- determined social and public sphere.
In spite of the histories of social movements such as the Sadhu Jana Pari-palana Sangham (sjps, Society for the Protection of the Poor), led by Ayyank-ali; the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (prds, Church of God of Revealed Salvation) of Poyikayil Yohannan (known after his death as Sree Kumara Guru Devan); and Pampady John Joseph’s Cheramar Mahajana Sabha (As-sociation of Cheramar Dalits), the reigning paradigms of historiography re-main unchallenged.5 It is pertinent at this point to analyze how Dalits figured in historiographical discourses. Prominent events of the nationalist move-ment have been the staple of historians of modern Kerala. Many of these nar-ratives highlighted the events of the anticolonial mobilization in the Malabar region, which was under the Madras presidency. Although most histories of the Indian National Congress from the nationalist perspective emphasized its anticolonial character, it was in efect an elite movement based on the ini-tiatives of the middle- class legal professionals in Calicut.6 The native states of Cochin and Travancore, constituting the southern part of Kerala, were under the indirect rule of the British. The policy of the Indian National Con-gress was to work in the native states through its po liti cal affiliates. In both native states there developed nationalist politics, with distinct organizations such as the Travancore State Congress and Cochin Praja Mandalam (Cochin State Congress).7
Marxist historiography has emphasized the history of working- class mobilization under the communists in vari ous parts of Kerala that was in-strumental in the development of radical politics and the subsequent pol-icy interventions of the postcolonial phase, such as the land reforms of the 1970s.8 The Dalit movements in the early twentieth century had problema-tized the oppressive conditions that caste domination had produced. Dalit
movements had used all available means to press for Dalit demands such as access to public space, cultural and symbolic capital, human dignity, and civil rights. These issues never figured in the historiographical debates as they did not directly challenge the colonial powers; sometimes the colonial powers reacted favorably to the demands of Dalits and other “lower castes.” Most his-toriographies failed to reconsider colonialism from the multiple locations of the colonized as they had a one- dimensional view of colonialism. This refers to their understanding of colonialism as uniformly incapacitating the colonized, without taking into account forms of exploitation and oppression that preceded colonialism and that continued to exist even as colonialism succeeded in establishing its domination. In the case of Kerala, caste for-mation qualifies as such a form since the types of oppression that it created continued under colonialism. This obliges us to see how caste oppression was dealt with in historiography.
The most eloquent repre sen ta tion of caste oppression is available in the nineteenth- century accounts of missionaries that were printed and circu-lated in publications that had an international reach.9 It is in the course of such writings that the missionaries problematized the historical caste slav-ery of Dalits in nineteenth- century Kerala. This should be considered as the moment of Dalits’ entry into historical rec ords in a spectacular manner. We shall consider the missionary writings as a distinct historiographic genre.
Most studies on slavery in Kerala had referred to the existence of slave castes, and there is a historiography of slavery that refers to the origins of caste slav-ery in the precolonial social formations, sometimes stretching back to an-cient times.10 The latter- day historians of the Eu ro pean Christian missions in Kerala depended a great deal on the historical information available on the slave- caste communities in missionary writings. Many of these scholars are dismissive of the spiritual dimensions of Dalit engagement with missionary Chris tian ity.11 However, the source materials of vari ous Dalit religious move-ments contradict those views.12
Religious Conversion to Modernity
Historically there have been two vis i ble trends in Dalit mobilization from the mid- nineteenth century. The first and most impor tant trend was the ac-cep tance of missionary Chris tian ity by Dalits from the 1850s onward. This experience was decisive in transforming their individual and social selves.
The abolition of caste slavery in 1855 took place a couple of years after the first Dalit “joined the way of Christ” in the Travancore region of Kerala as
part of a movement. By the early de cades of the twentieth century, thousands of Dalits, mostly from the Pulayar and Parayar communities, had joined the church. Contrary to an instrumentalist understanding of the Dalit interface with the missionaries, one could reconfigure these interactions as a “contact zone” that made it pos si ble for dif er ent trends to flourish si mul ta neously.
The notion of a “contact zone,” according to Mary Louise Pratt, “is an at-tempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect.” She also uses the term “contact” to “foreground the interac-tive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by difusionist accounts of conquest and domination.”13 This per-spective allows us to map the contested spaces that missionaries and Dalits occupied si mul ta neously. By the first de cade of the twentieth century, more than half of the Church Missionary Society (cms) members in the Travan-core region of Kerala was drawn from Dalit communities, in spite of the fact that they were discriminated against in the church.
The second trend, which had obvious connections with the first, was the genesis of power ful social and religious movements of Dalits from the first de cade of the twentieth century onward. These movements fall into two broad categories that are similar to movements in other parts of India. First, some of the movements were sociopo liti cal and po liti cal in character— they addressed mostly po liti cal, economic, and social problems of Dalit communi-ties. These problems included the continuing manifestations of caste slavery, access to social and public spaces, access to modern education, owner ship of land, access to modern institutions such as the judiciary, and rejection of demeaning social practices imposed on the community by the upper castes.
The second category of the movements was religious: through intervention in the religious sphere, they opened up another front of social praxis and created an alternative public that si mul ta neously engaged with the spiritual and material realms.
In the context of Kerala, religious movements evolved because of the dominance of caste within the churches, which forced Dalits to create their own churches and religious movements. This involved a problematization of the sacred realm of the church and a critique of the Bible, as accomplished by Poikayil Yohannan.14 While the sjps falls in the first category of movements, Yohannan’s movement, the prds, falls in the second. There were many other exclusively Dalit churches or congregations in the early twentieth century that were radical responses to the prevalence of caste discrimination within the mainstream churches due to the hegemony of upper- caste Syrian
Chris-tians. In addition, there were individual Dalits who had established small groups of followers through their new religious ideas derived from the Bible, which the Eu ro pean missionaries critiqued as heresies.15 For the present purpose, such movements can be thought of as another form of anticaste mobilization, although they functioned in the realm of religion. All these mobilizations were determined by the agency of Dalits, which reached a turning point in the early de cades of the twentieth century.
One of the significant results of Dalit interaction with Eu ro pean mission-ary Chris tian ity had been the articulation of a new and dif er ent conscious-ness by Dalits that was very complex. This consciousconscious-ness is not adequately encompassed within the instrumentalist analy sis of scholarship on missions, which interprets Dalits’ attraction to missionary Chris tian ity as merely an efort to improve their socioeconomic position. Dalit consciousness found expression in social movements that problematized all aspects of their sub-ordination. There was another closely related opinion held by some of the missionaries as well as the later scholars of missions: that Dalits did not un-derstand the high moral principles of religion.16 Some scholars went so far as to argue that even Dalits’ prayers were purely instrumentalist, meant only to get something from God.17 In the first half of the twentieth century there were several power ful movements in vari ous Dalit communities, such as the sjps of the foremost Dalit leader of Kerala, Ayyankali, which had members not just from the Pulayas; the prds of Yohannan; Cheramar Mahajana Sabha of Pampady John Joseph; and a host of other organizations that occupied almost the same social space although within dif er ent communities. It may be observed that theoretically Ayyankali’s and Yohannan’s movements were open to all Dalits, irrespective of their caste background. There were other organizations such as Brahma Prathyaksha Raksha Dharma Paripalana (Or-ganization of Parayars to Protect the Revealed Salvation of Social Order of Brahma), Parayar Mahajana Sangham of Kantan Kumaran and movements led by other popu lar leaders such as Paradi Abraham Issac and Vellikkara Chothi, who were named to the Pop u lar Legislature of Travancore. There existed spaces in which these movements could interact socially and po liti-cally. Of them, the sjps was the most widespread in the Travancore region of Kerala, having a thousand branches at the peak of its prominence.18 Similarly, in 1926 the prds had 10,000 followers in sixty- three parishes.19
Modern civil society emerged in Kerala in the first half of the twentieth century through the struggles against the caste- determined social and pub-lic sphere. The social movement of Ezhavas under the leadership of Sree Narayana Guru is generally considered to be a paradigmatic reformist
movement in Kerala. However, it would be wrong to reduce Dalit movements to ofshoots of this movement. Because of the economic development of the Ezhava community in the second half of the nineteenth century, a power ful upwardly mobile middle class evolved in the community that spearheaded the movement. Although the Ezhavas also sufered from caste disabilities such as untouchability, their situation was not as severe as those of the Dalit communities whose members were not allowed to use public roads and in-stitutions. Even by traditional standards of distance pollution, Ezhavas re-mained in a better position than Dalits, who had historically been agrarian slaves. In spite of the caste disabilities that the Ezhavas had experienced, by the late nineteenth century they were able to use the avenues opened up in the context of colonial modernity to come to the public domain along with the so- called Malayalis, or Nairs, and to submit a petition known as Malayali Memorial in 1891 to the native ruler of Travancore. The petition was signed by ten thousand people— mostly Nairs, with a smattering of Syrian Christians and Ezhavas— who voiced their concern over the monopolizing of the jobs under the Travancore government by what they referred to as foreigners, meaning not the British, but non- Malayali Brahmans.20
The memorial did not help the Ezhavas in any way, and the educated members of the community had to leave their native state of Travancore and seek employment elsewhere in British India. It was in this context that they submitted their own memorial, the Ezhava Memorial, raising their demands for employment in 1896. The memorial was signed by 13,176 Ezhavas.21 But in the last de cade of the nineteenth century the new middle- class Ezhavas formed the reformist movement sndp and started their forays into the evolv-ing civil society by establishevolv-ing modern institutions. The first institution was a temple in 1887 at Aruvippuram near Neyyattinkara, south of Trivandrum, in which Sree Narayana Guru consecrated the image of Siva, thus challenging the ritual privilege of Brahmans in consecrating a deity. In the traditional reading of the modernization of Kerala, this is considered the epitome of the anticaste moment, which led to social revolution in Kerala. In subsequent years, under the leadership of Sree Narayana Guru, there were several other temple consecrations. After a while, he suggested that what the people required most were temples of learning— modern educational institutions. His radical thinking was at its best when he consecrated in one of the temples a mirror as the presiding deity. Sree Narayana Guru’s interventions in the social and re-ligious realm of Kerala created an environment in which anticaste progressive thinking and action could thrive. From the Adviata Vedanta tradition rep-resented by him to the atheistic thinking and practice of Sahodaran Ayyappan,
multiple ideological positions flourished within the sndp. Another impor tant aspect of the movement is the critical use of the resources of the Sanskritic tradi-tion, which Ezhavas could access. What is notable here is the innovative use of the tradition by Sree Narayana Guru to establish a modern religious movement.
In contrast, the Dalit movements in Kerala in the early twentieth century could not draw on a high traditional culture as a resource for engagement
In contrast, the Dalit movements in Kerala in the early twentieth century could not draw on a high traditional culture as a resource for engagement