Gail Omvedt
Arundhati Roy's prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, focuses on the most socially explosive of all relationships in India, a love affair between a dalit man and a high-caste woman. It ends with the brutal murder of the man by the police, "history's henchmen," and the woman's banishment -- punishments for breaking the caste-based "love laws" that have become so notorious in India today. The events would not be surprising if they were shown as taking place in backward Bihar. But the novel is set in Kerala, the single Indian state that has gained the greatest reputation for progressiveness.
Yet participants in a February 1998 seminar on dalit studies at the University of Calicut (in what is now known as Kozhikode) assured me that this situation was not so unusual. [1] Roy, they said, should be congratulated for "opening up the subject" of intercaste relations; instead, she was practically boycotted in Kerala itself.
(I have received newsclippings of similar incidents elsewhere.) To these seminar participants, Kerala, progressive Kerala, was still -- in spite of its history of social reform -- a region of "Nair-Nambudiri dominance." There was a fair amount of admiration for Tipu Sultan, the Muslim fighter against British rule, who had once conquered the Malabar region of Kerala and apparently opposed lower caste subservience to Nair warrior-rulers. The "Mappila revolt" was to them not simply a Muslim or even a regional ("Malabar") revolt, but one of dalits and others in the lower caste who had all been energized by their conversion to Islam. Buddhism was another religion that caught the imagination of some, and most viewed Shree Narayana Guru's movement as simply falling under the hegemony of Hindutva ideology, something that had served the interests of Ezhavas (a lower "backward caste") rather than the true dalits, Pulayas, Cherumans, and others. The seminar was striking to me for another fact, that there were no upper-caste Marxist intellectuals present as there would have been at similar events in Maharashtra, vigorously debating the "caste-class" issue. Instead, the one dalit characterized as a CPI(M)-oriented Marxist was bitterly attacked in a long Malayali dialogue.
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