Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory

COMMUNISM, SUBALTERN STUDIES AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

This book is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala’s communist history which include—the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers’ rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism’s incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies and South Asia Studies.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is Associate Professor in the International Development Studies Department at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is the author of the book The Rupture with Memory: Derrida and the Specters That Haunt Marxism (2006). His research has been published in journals such as Citizenship Studies , Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Quarterly, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Critical Realism, International Journal of the History of Sport, Dialectical Anthropology, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Sikh Formations. He is a regular op-ed contributor to the English-language press in India.

COMMUNISM, SUBALTERN STUDIES AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

The Left in South India

Nissim Mannathukkaren First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Nissim Mannathukkaren The right of Nissim Mannathukkaren to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-05679-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05055-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19579-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC To Ammachi and Appachen for being the “Grace” and “Joy” of my life

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii List of abbreviations x

Introduction 1

1 Subaltern Studies, postcolonial theory and communism 22

2 Socialist beginnings 77

3 Towards communism 122

4 Questioning autonomy: relinking art and society 176

5 The rise of the popular in culture 220

6 Redistribution and recognition: the land reforms and the workers’ act 251

7 Reconstituting the political: the People’s Plan 295

8 The incomplete national-popular 356

Conclusion 408

Index 431

vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has accumulated a lot of debt from many people in their unstint- ing support in various ways. It would not have been possible without all the help rendered by Andalat, librarian at AKG Centre for Research and Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, for pointing to sources and procuring much valuable research material. I am grateful to him for going much beyond his call of duty. His own voluminous and painstaking compilations of original and inaccessible material on the communist movement as well as his own oral survey of subaltern Communist activists from the early period have been significant and are a vital source for those interested in research. The book would also not have been possible without the kindness shown by Pachu Ashan for sharing time as well as unpublished writings about his own experiences in the communist movement. Both Andalat and Pachu Ashan are sadly deceased. I thank Queen’s University and Dalhousie University for grants which aided the research process. Jayant Lele’s wisdom and unfailing encouragement throughout have proven invaluable in bringing this work to fruition. I have benefited immensely from conversations with him over the years as well as by reading his work. The seeds of this book were sown by grappling with, and being influenced by, his very original theoretical framework and his ruminations on “tradition” and “modernity.” I also take this opportunity to thank Elea- nor McDonald and Grant Amyot for their critical inputs and suggestions when this work was in its rudimentary stages. I thank the staff at Kerala State Archives,Thiruvananthapuram; Kozhikode Regional Archives, Kozhikode; Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai; National Archives of India, New Delhi; Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, New Delhi; Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram; Kerala Sah- itya Akademi, Thrissur, and The British Library, London. I am very thankful to M. A. Jose, Kavita Krishnan, J. Devika, Vijayan, Vijoo Krishnan, Surjit Esthose and Prasenjit Bose for all their help during the course of this research. Anil Varughese has been a great sounding board, and I have gained many insights from discussions with Shajahan Madampat and Joseph Tharaman- galam. I owe a special gratitude to Ravi Raman, Yasser Arafath and John

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Roosa for reading parts of the manuscript and making very valuable com- ments. I thank Rajin Khan and Mitherayee Augustine for their meticulous assistance. Theresa Ulicki, John Cameron, Matthew Schnurr, Robert Huish, Ajay Parasram, Marian MacKinnon and Nicole Drysdale have been the most wonderful colleagues to work with and a great source of support. I thank Taylor and Francis Ltd. for the permission to include material from the following articles authored by me: “The ‘Poverty’ of Political Society: Partha Chatterjee and the People’s Plan Campaign in Kerala, India,” Third World Quarterly, March 1, 2010, 31 (2); “Postcolonialism and Modernity,” Journal of Critical Realism, October 29, 2010, 9 (3); “Redistribution and Recognition: Land Reforms in Kerala and the Limits of Culturalism,” Jour - nal of Peasant Studies, March 1, 2011 (38), 2; “The Rise of the National- Popular and Its Limits: Communism and the Cultural in Kerala,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, December 1, 2013, 14 (4). Aakash Chakrabarty and Brinda Sen at Taylor and Francis, Ltd., New Delhi, have been immensely patient. My brother, Ashim, sister-in-law, Reena, and niece and nephew, Kunjulak- shmi and Kunjikannan, have been a pillar of strength. Finally, I thank Anu, Polu and Ashi for showing me, every waking moment, the world of manifold colors outside the world of books. Nissim Mannathukkaren Halifax, January 2021

ix ABBREVIATIONS

ABYS Abhinav Bharat Yuvak Sangh ADB Asian Development Bank ADS Area Development Societies AICC All India Congress Committee AMKS All Malabar Karshaka Sangham AMPU All-Malabar Peasants Union ATTUC All Travancore Trade Union Congress BJP Bharatiya Janata Party BPL Below Poverty Line BSP Bahujan Samaj Party CDS Community Development Societies CIA Central Intelligence Agency CID Central Intelligence Department CITU Centre of India Trade Unions CPI Communist Party of India CPI (M) Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPM Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union CSDS Centre for the Study of Developing Societies CSP Congress Socialist Party DM District Magistrate ESZs Eco-Sensitive Zones FC Forward Caste GDP Gross Domestic Product HDI Human Development Index IHDS India Human Development Survey IPTA Indian People’s Theater Association KARB Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill KAWA Kerala Agricultural Workers’ Act KKS Kerala Karshaka Sangham KLRAA Kerala Land Reforms Amendment Act KMPP Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party

x ABBREVIATIONS

KPAC Kerala People’s Arts Club KPCC Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee KPMS Kerala Pulaya Maha Sabha KRA Kozhikode Regional Archives KRPLLD Kerala Research Programme on Local Level Development KSA Kerala State Archives KSKTU Kerala Karshaka Thozhilali Union KSSP Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishath LDF Left Democratic Front MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly MSP Malabar Special Police NAI National Archives of India NGO Non-Governmental Organization NHGs Neighborhood Groups NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library NSS Nair Service Society OBCs Other Backward Classes PLM Progressive Literature Movement PTI Press Trust of India RI Rigorous Imprisonment RSP Revolutionary Socialist Party RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh SCs Scheduled Castes SDP State Domestic Product SHGs Self-Help Groups SNDP Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam SP Superintendent of Police STs Scheduled Tribes TADA Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act TNA Tamil Nadu Archives TSC Travancore State Congress UP United Provinces

INTRODUCTION

This book is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala.1 In delineating this history, it will undertake a materialist critique of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. It will also engage with the critique by Vivek Chibber of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory which has generated intense debates recently. 2 The state of Kerala, which has a population of 35 million, was the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government (in 1957). This, combined with the fact that the state has made phenomenal achievements in human development—initially, at very low levels of economic growth—and something to which the communist movement has contributed, has evoked a lot of attention among scholars both in India and outside. As one of them put it, “Under the impe- tus of a broad-based working-class movement organized by the Communist Party, successive governments in Kerala have pursued what is arguably the most successful strategy of redistributive development outside the socialist world.” 3 This had led the United Nations and other global development institutions to commend Kerala as a “model” of development. The most significant aspect of this is the fact that it has been achieved through popular struggles and democratically elected governments. This particular development trajectory was especially achieved by the elimination of landlordism, the vesting of land rights in tenants, the protection of labor, the spending of resources on the public provision of education, health, agricultural credits and food.4 As we will see in the following, some of these achievements had their roots in developments beginning in the 19th century, much before the emergence of the communism and democracy. Some scholars, in the mid- 1990s, argued that, in effect, the “Kerala model may be taken as an early prototype of sustainable development because of improvements in the quality of life, environmental stability, social and economic equality, and the decline in political strife.”5 However, in the recent decades, persisting social inequality (especially of those marginalized and silenced by the model), cultural and economic consequences of transnational migration, tendencies of neoliberal capitalism, increasing economic inequality, ecological degradation

1 INTRODUCTION and other deleterious tendencies show the need for a comprehensive, rather than a romantic understanding of the Kerala development experience. Communism was a late entrant into Kerala, compared to the other regions of India, with the formal constitution of the Communist Party only in 1940. What should be of interest to any student of history is the short span of time—just about two decades—in which many fundamental changes in society took place. For those who experienced them, and for those who dedicated their lives to communism, these were changes that were “more powerful and magical than what Aladdin’s magic lamp could have conjured up.”6 From our perspective, one of the keys to unraveling the significant transformation that made the “most ostentatiously deferential region in India in the early twentieth century . . . the most pervasively clamorous by the middle of the twentieth”7 is in the recognition that these changes did not come about on their own, but were brought about.8 Not by the bourgeoisie, but by the subaltern castes and classes, the peasantry, workers and other marginalized groups, thus, putting question marks on the famous dictum of Barrington Moore Jr.: “No bourgeois, no democracy.”9 This particular feature, I will contend, will be of utmost importance in the arguments proposed in this book. Kerala, as elsewhere in India, was a society characterized by extreme caste (and class) inequalities.10 Everyday activity had to signify one’s place in the social hierarchy and one’s deference to “higher” castes. Violations and trans- gressions were strictly punished. There has been a general consensus on the fact that caste oppression in Kerala was more severe than other regions.11 Along with untouchability, unapproachability was prevalent too.12 Among the main communities, at the top of the hierarchy were the Kerala Brahmins called Namboodiris. The Nairs were ranked below the Brahmins and pre- formed martial and administrative functions.13 They were followed by the Ezhavas/Thiyyas “who were in a social limbo” between the Shudras and the “untouchable” castes14 like the Pulayas, Cherumas and Parayas. Ezhavas/ Thiyyas were also considered as “polluting” and experienced untouchability like the Dalit castes although they were ranked higher than the Dalits.15 Caste is a stark reality among Christians. Almost 80% of Christians belong to the upper castes, who follow the Syrian rites16 and were historically considered superior to the polluting Hindu castes. Muslims in Kerala and Ezha- vas/Thiyyas are a part of the administrative category called Other Backward Classes (OBCs) which include the Shudra castes.17 But there are caste-like hierarchies within Muslims as well. There was no prominent Hindu business caste in Kerala. Muslims and Christians were involved in trading activities.18 The land tenure system was characterized mostly by a strong caste–class correlation (especially at the top and the bottom). The upper-caste Nam- boodiris, Nairs and temple authorities ( devaswoms ) controlled most of the land as landlords.19 Nairs, Syrian Christians, Muslims and Ezhavas/Thiyyas leased lands as tenants with different kinds of superior and inferior rights.

2 INTRODUCTION

Ezhavas/Thiyyas also worked as agricultural labor, coir workers, toddy tap- pers, etc. The Dalit untouchable castes were largely the agricultural labor, who hardly had any rights on land. The most egregious aspect of the system was the existence of agrestic slavery of the Dalit labor.20 The sum effect of the communist intervention in society was that, on the one hand, it led to the sowing of the seeds of a national-popular will in the Gramscian sense21 which played a key role in postcolonial liberation. The national-popular was absent in Gramsci’s description of Italy during the 1930s. According to him:

In Italy, the term “national” has ideologically very restricted meaning and does not in any case coincide with “popular” because in Italy the intellectuals are distant from the people, i.e., from the “nation.” They are tied instead to caste tradition that has never been broken by a strong popular or national political movement from below. 22

The communist national-popular had some similarities to the early Dra- vidian movement in Tamil Nadu, in which, M. S. S. Pandian argues, the campaign for Tamil became not only a linguistic movement but also “a site for a ‘national-popular’ project by encompassing a range of democratic concerns connected with caste, gender and region, and involving different subaltern groups” which was against not just the Brahmin orthodoxy but also the homogenizing Indian nation state.23 However, the crucial distinc- tion in the communist national-popular will was the presence of class (along with nationalism). Thus, it simultaneously attempted to negotiate exclusions based on class, caste, language, region and the nation. In the only other major Indian state where communism became dominant, West Bengal, its rise was due to its “promotion of a notion of social citizenship through class struggle.” 24 On the other hand, the communist national-popular will in Kerala did not contend with all the exclusions equally or eliminate all hierarchies. In fact, the national-popular and its distinctness in terms of class could only partially address the question of caste. This is despite that one of the main factors for the entrenchment of communism in the initial phases was what Dilip Menon argues as the “reshaping of communism into a doctrine of caste equality.”25 And that the struggles for dignity and against blatant caste oppressions were bound together with those for material redistribution. The Dalit castes and the Indigenous people located at the bottom of the social hierarchy continue to be placed there despite substantive changes heralded by the communist movement, which also shows the incompleteness of the class agenda. The failure to deliver a decisive blow to caste in society and bring Dalits and Adivasis, numbering about 10% of the population, to high leadership positions and substantive equality within the movement would count as the greatest failure of communism. Communism could not make

3 INTRODUCTION significant ideological inroads into the Christian and Muslim communities also in which religion and confessional political formations remained strong. The national-popular was further built by a reinforcement and recasting of some pre-existing exclusions like that of gender and the communist movement, like the rest of the society, was male-dominated.26 Thus, there was no simplistic progressive march to democracy and freedom, as in many linear accounts. 27 The communist intervention was riddled with contradictions. There were formulations of theory which went beyond mechanical understandings, but they often did not become common sense. Culture became a vital aspect of the communist mobilization, but it was also used instrumentally, becoming subservient to political ends. Radicalism and conservativism, developmentalism and Luddism often mixed without any tension; the movement that created an extensive network of civil society organizations was also hostile to an independent civil society, and later, the emerging New Social Movements; the movement that sought “revolution” was conservative with regard to norms of family and sexuality; and finally, the revolution itself was postponed interminably in favor of parliamentary battles. At the same time, a semblance of the national-popular emerged, which contributed to the building of a social democracy, which, Richard Sand- brook calls as “the most radical social-democratic regime in the global South.” 28 However, contrary to the dominant literature on Kerala welfarism and the democracy, it has to be understood that its significance is largely in comparative national and global terms; but, internally, there is a long way to achieving substantive equality for the most marginalized castes and classes. It is in the context of features like slavery, and extreme caste repression in Kerala, which still persists overtly in many other Indian states, that the social transformation brought about by communism, like the challenging and end- ing of feudal landlordism, acquires a bigger resonance in academic analysis considering also that it had to navigate the colonial state at first, and, later, the bourgeois democratic framework of the Indian state and a hostile federal government. I argue that a social democracy itself was realized because of imaginations and revolutionary dreams which went beyond that of social democracy. However, the full potential in the communist movement for more radical outcomes which existed and the goals of anti-capitalist, democratic socialism remained unrealized. The Stalinized framework 29 also meant that the movement did not foster a vibrant culture of dissent and criticism. The distinctive feature of Kerala, in comparison with other states, has been the high levels of political mobilization and participation as well as mil- itant struggles by the lower castes, classes and marginalized groups, which cannot be restricted to the communist movement alone. As has been well established, this “immense pressure” from below “is the heart of the Kerala Model”30 and has led to robust public intervention, substantial social expen- diture and consequences like adoption of pro-poor policies and significant

4 INTRODUCTION poverty reduction.31 According to Heller, in terms of substantive democratic outcomes and qualitative measures of democracy, “Kerala clearly stands apart from the center and from all other Indian states,” and resembles Euro- pean social democracies.32 The kind of “subaltern politics of insurgent citizenship” that is now questioning India’s formal democracy in other regions and states33 thus has had a much longer provenance in Kerala. This construction of a relatively egalitarian development and welfare model makes Kerala seemingly very different from the general experience of what Partha Chatterjee terms as the “postcolonial misery” 34 of much of the colonized nations—the extreme disenchantment following the non- fulfillment of the hopes and dreams that characterized the moment of liberation from the colonial yoke. If Kerala has avoided this denouement, it immediately throws up questions about the peculiar trajectory of this society in the Global South. Why and how this particular social transformation took place will be the natural questions that arise. Studies have dealt with this and the role of what has become popular as “public action.”35 Credit for it has also been attributed to state policy in both the colonial and postcolonial periods, as Manali Desai does, for example: “Kerala’s uniqueness has to be understood as a historical confluence of changes and continuities at three levels—state, regime, and government.”36 And there are scholars who attribute the successes in poverty alleviation more to migration-fueled remittances than the development state.37 Prerna Singh, in her recent work, has made a substantially new argument, against existing explanations like policies of princely states,38 Left party mobilization, and Christian missionaries, to explain the uniqueness of the Kerala development success. According to Singh, the introduction of progressive social policy (which led to development welfare outcomes) “occurred only after and as a consequence of the emergence of a sense of subnational community” in the late 19th century. It is this collective cultural identity that motivated the political elite to support progressive social policy. 39 Post-independence years only saw a deepening of Malayali subnationalism with intense electoral competition between the Congress and the Communists, and their responsiveness to “subnationalism-generated mass demands for social welfare.” Its apogee was when the Communists took on the leadership of the Aikya Kerala (United Kerala) movement.40 Of course, Singh does not argue that “social welfare policies and outcomes are prod- ucts only and/or entirely of a province’s strength of subnationalism” but that it is “a relatively novel and underexplored variable that . . . provides an additional significant and substantial fillip to social expenditures and development.” 41 The central arguments that I propose here based on the theme of the national-popular will differ with this emphasis on subnationalism in some crucial ways. This book does not focus on the origins of Kerala’s development or its trajectory. Nevertheless, I argue that the problem of development here cannot

5 INTRODUCTION be reduced to its political-economic aspects; instead the cultural imaginaries, which go beyond that of linguistic subnationalism that contributed to the building of the model, need to be examined. In the same way, it can be argued that without the construction of something akin to a national-popular will in the cultural sphere, the communist contribution to the politico-economic model could not have been realized.42 The uniqueness of Kerala in terms of class mobilization and the hegemony that the Communists were able to establish was made possible by the struggles in the cultural sphere, broadly conceived. At the same time, the silences of the national-popular, showing that it was not homogenous and seamless, have to be accounted for. Culture, thus, will be one of the main foci here.

What the book intends to do The point of this book is that it is interested in the larger theoretical question related to the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement as well as its engagement with the state and its implication for postcolonial societies. This is where Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory come in, and the book’s contention with them. The book seeks to make a theoretical contribution to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory as well as to the scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South. It will be the first to engage with the communist project in Kerala in relation to postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies in a sys- tematic manner.43 This book’s focus is not on a comprehensive survey of communism in Kerala or that of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. It focuses on how certain important aspects of communism, including its failures, can be used as an empirical substantiation of the critique of some of the central arguments of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. They also illustrate the difficulties that emerge from Vivek Chibber’s critique of Subaltern Stud- ies and postcolonial theory even when many of its contentions are relevant. What is stark in Subaltern Studies, despite its professed claim to recover the subaltern voice, is its curious omission of the working classes/peasants in building democracies in postcolonial societies. As Aijaz Ahmad argues, “In almost thirty years of their voluminous work, subaltern [scholars] have simply never engaged with either the histories and social analyses that Com- munist writers have produced, or with the actual activities of trade unions, peasant organizations and workers’ parties.”44 Sumit Sarkar too points out that this ignorance is despite that the organized communist movement in India is one of the largest in the world.45 One major aim of the book, therefore, is to fill this astounding absence and also understand the relevance of organized class-based politics and its successes when such politics has still not acquired salience in India. Ironically, in the same era when globally neoliberal capitalism achieved hegemony by decimating class-based politics

6 INTRODUCTION of the subordinate classes,46 class-based analysis declined in India under the “cultural turn” of the Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. 47 The class-based analyses that exist also have generally adopted a reductionist approach.48 Further, the book is placed in the most critical juncture of India’s postcolonial history when new cultural imaginaries of religious majoritarian- ism, fused with unprecedented degrees of state power, are not just upending subaltern struggles for democracy but are threatening even India’s formal democracy.49 Therefore, class- and materiality-based secular politics acquires a particular urgency and relevance. And there is a need for renewing interest in class analysis given the criticality of class politics for the subaltern classes.50 Of course, in the absence of full industrialization and a proletariat in the classical sense, and with a large informal workforce in insecure and precarious work, the nature of class struggle itself has changed in India (and in the Global South).51 The book aims to throw light on the mode of subaltern resistance as well as subaltern–elite interaction, especially, in the early, more radical, mass-movement-driven period of communism (even under a Stalinized framework), until the capture of state power and its entrenchment in electoral politics at the expense of class struggles. The book also comes at a time when organized trade unions and dominant communist parties of the present have themselves become forces which are largely not conducive to aid further radical democratization and are becoming a marginal force electorally in India. Similarly, while theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory have existed in large numbers, engagements which base themselves on empirical examples are still very few.52 The prominent example in the recent times is the work by Vivek Chibber which seeks to engage with Sub- altern Studies and postcolonial theory, but does so by relying on empirical material generated by the Subalternists themselves or by other scholars,53 and material on the histories of Europe, and not India. 54 Chibber’s book, as he acknowledges, “as a work of critique . . . operate[s] on the same level of generality as the theories that it interrogates.”55 Another lacuna of the book is that the cultural aspects, specificities, contradictions and the category of caste are ignored. How subjects on the ground actually construct meanings about oppression, hierarchy, liberation, Marxism and communism and so on are not a part of the framework of the book. It privileges the nomothetic over the ideographic.56 This might be a limitation resulting out of the theoretical scope of the book. However, this theoretical framework also ignores the wide range of theorizing produced by cultural Marxism, including that of Gramsci, leading to some of the problems outlined earlier. Besides, Chibber’s work is anchored, problematically, in a simple defense of the Enlightenment. Ironically, Subaltern Studies, too, which started with Gramsci, abandoned him later. One of the main endeavors of the present book’s materialist critique will be to think about culture and consciousness in a non-reductive way,

7 INTRODUCTION which is vital to understand caste and social oppression. Therefore, categories like class are not simply self-evident. “Class relations are co-constituted by relations of race, ethnicity, caste, tribe, region and gender” to result in what Philippe Bourgois has termed as “‘conjugated oppression’.”57 The book will also engage with some other important concepts articulated by the Subalter- nists like the defense of the “fragment,” and “political society.” These have not been dealt with by Chibber as he acknowledges.58 The book will draw upon the rich theoretical literature on Subaltern Studies which produced important critiques right from its inauguration. Of course, the full theoretical implications of some of the Subalternist arguments became evident later.59 This is particularly true with regard to Subal- ternists taking on the mantle of postcolonial theory. Hence, there is a need to engage with these later theoretical transmutations. The broad questions that will be explored in the book are: (1) How did communism construct hegemony in a predominantly agrarian society? (2) How was this different from the bourgeois nationalist imagination? (3) What are the theoretical implications of the transformation brought about by communism at the level of both society and the state, and its significant failures in Kerala, especially, with regard to caste, and how do they fundamentally put to question some of the central ideas of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory? (4) What are the problems associated with the critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory located at the opposite end of the spectrum like that of Vivek Chibber? Some of the questions raised by Subaltern Studies are relevant even after almost 40 years since its founding. The renewed interest in empirical engagements with Subaltern Studies is an illustration of this. Thus, one of these critiques seeks to build a “constructive dialogue with the conceptual lega- cies of the Subaltern Studies project” and to redefine “subalternity in order to better grasp the dynamics of subaltern politics in India today.”60 Partha Chatterjee argues: “several of the questions raised by Subaltern Studies have been neither dismissed nor properly answered, while others are only now beginning to be addressed.” 61 However, seemingly, the answers provided by the participants of the project itself have been less than satisfactory and, more importantly, have consequences for the subjects that it claims to speak for. Chatterjee accepts that the task of answering these questions cannot “be taken forward within the framework of the concepts and methods mobi- lized in Subaltern Studies” which was a “product of its time” and that “it has managed to scatter, reinvent and insert itself in several subsequent proj- ects”62 subsequently. However, he does not think that the answers proffered before were flawed. This is what the book will contend with. It will argue that it is not the passage of time, and the emergence of new socio-historical conditions which have made many of the Subaltern Studies’ answers obso- lete; even within the initial context and framework of the project, they seem to be incomplete.

8 INTRODUCTION

Thus, while Chatterjee accepts that the “heavily structuralist depiction” of the rebel peasant consciousness in early Subaltern Studies was a mistake for it was valid only for an analysis of colonial India. And that it is inadequate to understand Indian peasant in the present. The fundamental difference that necessitates a new understanding of subalternity is that unlike in colonial India, now the subaltern has to be made sense of within a “new framework of democratic citizenship—complex, differentiated, perhaps fundamentally altered from the normative ideas of citizenship in western liberal democracies, but nonetheless citizenship, not subjecthood.” 63 I will argue that the ideas of democratic citizenship were not something that were only consoli- dated in post-Independent India, especially in the last three decades, but were a part of the struggles waged by the Communists (and others) even during the anti-colonial struggle. When Chatterjee lays out the context of the emergence of Subaltern Studies, he argues that when the project was formulated in the late 1970s, the Indian state lacked popular consent leading to violent repression and it was only later by the 1990s, under economic liberalization, that the state began to have a semblance of legitimacy with more and more people reposing faith in electoral democracy as an agent of change.64 This, again, ignores the momentous struggles to democratize the state that were undertaken right from the 1940s under the aegis of the Com- munists. Of course, we have to understand the historical context in which Subaltern Studies arose and to what type of historiography it was respond- ing and criticize it within the framework of that context rather than indulge in a debate which is separated from the context.65 Thus, I am not seeking to critique the early Subaltern Studies project by a retrospective application of theoretical and historical developments since its emergence. It is not an anachronistic critique as Taylor characterizes Chibber’s criticisms.66 The proposal of new theoretical frameworks by Subaltern Studies to keep up with changing historical conditions is also problematic, in my view, because of its deep continuities with the earlier framework of Subaltern Studies.67 A case in example is Chatterjee’s exposition of “political society” to understand the “deepening and widening of the apparatuses of governmentality [which has] transformed the quality of mass politics in India in the last two decades.”68 Even Subaltern Studies’ transformation to take on concepts of postcolonial theory like that of the critique of modernity and Euro- centrism is not misplaced.69 The question of modernity is more important than ever before. Postcolonial theory has a wider set of concerns than Sub- altern Studies. Postcolonial theory is “(largely [a] Foucauldian) program of unmasking Eurocentric essentialisms at work in the West’s representations of non-European ideas and behaviors.” 70 At the same time, Edward Said, whose Orientalism was one of the founding texts of postcolonial theory, also engages with the work of Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci,71 something which has been ignored in the poststructuralist influence on postcolonial theory. The relevant questions which have been raised by postcolonial

9 INTRODUCTION theory have not been answered adequately as well. This is especially so when the context in which postcolonial criticism is operating has changed drasti- cally after the collapse of communism and the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism.72 Here, liberalism has declared the end of history and socialism as a possible future has been completely obliterated.73 This is the juncture in which capitalism has declared its triumph that “a Marxist critique is unfor- goable.” Thus, there is a need not only to study different regions of the world in an interlinked fashion from early modernity but also to recognize “capitalism (not ‘Eurocentrism’ or ‘cultural imperialism’) as underwriting those relations in their historically specific form of ‘uneven and combined development.’ ”74 Here, as we will see from the empirical case, communist movement was not focused on a teleological political decolonization alone, but raised important questions about state and society which are critical now, as they were then. Scott argues that postcolonialism is not necessarily a better theory than anti-colonialism for it inhabits a different question–answer complex from the latter. He also wonders if the questions that were asked by postcolonial criticism are something that needs to be answered since the context has changed now. 75 Thus, he thinks that postcolonial criticism has “lost its point and become normalized as a strategy for the mere accumulation of meaning.”76 Similarly, Taylor argues that therefore, Chibber’s critique is “a work of scholarly necromancy. It resurrects a horde of the dead: dead polemics, dead methodologies, even dead fields.” 77 I would, on the contrary, argue that the postcolonial questions of power–knowledge relation, the domination of Euro-American conceptualizations of knowledge (which continue, especially in development), the critiques of the Enlightenment and modernity, are still relevant for the discussion on alternative futures especially in the new context of the deepening ecological crisis which threatens the survival of the planet itself. This is provided that they are conjoined with an understanding of the proper place of capitalism as well a non-reductionist and non- binary understanding of modernity. This has not necessarily happened despite theorists like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent theoretical explorations. For instance, his extension of the earlier critique of the Enlightenment and the Western humanist tradition to understand and deal with the ecological crisis but also the acknowledgment of the limitations of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial criticism and the need for some Enlightenment thinking in doing so.78 However, what I am primarily focused on in the book is not the direction that postcolonial theory is taking in the present, rather, as noted previously, in a critique of Subaltern Studies and its alignment with postcolonial theory’s concerns in the context that they arose. Any articulation of the future direction of postcolonial theory will, nevertheless, has to contend with its past. Besides, as we will see in the following, I am not considering the entire gamut of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, which is a vast and varied area of scholarship.

10 INTRODUCTION

Different strands I am not proceeding here on the assumption that the Subaltern Studies project is characterized by a complete unity. As Ludden points out, “Its internal coherence has been less intellectual than personal and more formal than substantive.”79 Similarly, Subaltern Studies itself has shown various shifts both in ideas and personnel80 and, also, “plurality of theories” and “methodologies.”81 Postcolonial theory is also very broad ranging from Marxist feminism to libertarianism.82 It has a “fairly eclectic mix of ideas, both materialist and antimaterialist, even though the most prominent theories have been unapologetically postmodernist.”83 Therefore, it is also important not to reduce the figures like James, Fanon and Cabral to the present articulations of postcolonial theory. In this book, I focus only on the Subaltern Studies scholars from India who have contributed to the further shaping of postcolonial theory. I will focus mainly on the key figures of Indian Sub- altern Studies like Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Pandey, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gyan Prakash. The entire range of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory and scholarship is obviously not covered by these scholars.84 At the same time, they are important figures within Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. 85 Chibber argues that Indian Subaltern Studies “is representative of many of the central ideas that are associated with postcolonial theory; it is extremely influential; and its internal consistency makes it not just representative, but the most attractive and plausible denizen of this body of work.”86 It has:

remained committed to a stable and remarkably coherent set of propositions about the dynamics of the (post-) colonial world, its evolution over time, and the ways in which that part of the globe differs in its structure and culture from the West. 87

However, the problem with this argument is that Chibber conflates Sub- altern Studies with postcolonial theory. Besides, it gets the chronology wrong as we saw earlier. As Benita Parry argues, Subaltern Studies “was a recipient and not an initiator of . . . [postcolonial] theory’s epistemo- logical premise.”88 And as Timothy Brennan points out, “internalizing the already entrenched positions of postcoloniality allowed the subalternists to acquire a more general reach.”89 Chibber’s reduction of postcolonial theory to Subaltern Studies (or Subaltern Studies to a few scholars) is problematic because he does not consider the work of Said, Spivak or Bhabha, some of the most important figures of postcolonial theory.90 Therefore, this book does not seek to claim that it is a critique of the entire oeuvre of postcolonial theory, or for that matter, Subaltern Studies. The references to both Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory in this book should be seen with this caveat.

11 INTRODUCTION

Chapter outline The book will present a detailed empirical substantiation of the theoretical critique of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. The communist transformation of society in Kerala will be studied through what the book considers as three important thematic moments in its history which also correspond to certain time periods. These are the processes by which communism initially established hegemony in society, including its cultural intervention, the institution of land reforms and workers’ rights, and the political decentralization project. The book does not seek to provide an exhaustive account of communism since the 1930s to the present, a task which is beyond its scope. Thus, while it focuses on the cultural, economic and political aspects in some chapters, it does not consider them chronologi- cally and comprehensively across different time periods. Certain schematic generalizations are unavoidable here. The thematic nature of the book also means that there could be other important themes like gender, or caste, through which the communist movement can be looked at. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first chapter will outline as well as critique the central theoretical concepts of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory such as the autonomy of peasant politics, the split between subaltern and elite domains, fragments, Marxism as a part of Euro- centric universalism, culturalism, externality of modernity, the glossing over the structural aspects of capitalism, governmentality, passive revolution and political society. It will also critically engage with Vivek Chibber’s work on Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. Further, it will make some theoretical observations about the communist movement. The second and third chapters cover the period from the 1930s to 1957 and will examine the processes through which the Communists constructed a national-popular will in society, thus establishing a different relationship between the elites and subalterns. Contrary to the arguments that posit communism as merely addressing local or regional concerns—which had little to do with class, anti-feudalism or anti-imperialism—it will be argued that the communist success can only be understood by the simultaneous negotia- tions of exclusions based on class, caste, language, region and the nation, and bring about their unity, even if this is ridden with gaps. These chapters will critique the Subalternist and postcolonial valorization of the spontane- ity and autonomy of peasant politics as well as the positing of religious consciousness as the main framework of the peasants. The emergence of class-consciousness could, thus, be said to be the most important feature of the period under consideration. Chapters 4 and 5 will look at the communist intervention in the cultural sphere again covering the period from the 1930s to 1957. The communist cultural assertion will be seen as another facet of the construction of the national-popular. If postcolonial theory posits anti-colonial nationalism as

12 INTRODUCTION having desired to fashion an aesthetic that was both national and modern and yet different from the Western, the communist project went beyond this to incorporate the crucial dimension of the need to communicate with the masses, and for them to express themselves. More importantly, it was an important attempt at fusing the compartmentalized spheres of art and social life. What these chapters show is that changes in the material sphere cannot be understood unless the cultural/ideational sphere, which influences them and is influenced by them, is also understood. The communist engagement was equally characterized by many contradictions and failures with regard to the question of caste and culture, which prevented the formation of a much deeper national-popular. There were also deleterious tendencies of seeing culture as a mere appendage to political struggles. Chapter 6 will focus on the communist negotiation of social transformation in the economic sphere (1957–1974) by specifically looking at the process of the struggle for, and the implementation of land reforms and the legislation for agricultural workers’ rights. The argument is that the communist project bridged the material/cultural split that characterized the bourgeois nationalist imagination (and postcolonial theory) by recognizing that the subaltern classes could not be citizens of the modern political order without a structural and material transformation of the social system in their favor. The land reforms were still not revolutionary, for the agricultural laborers, largely from the Dalit castes, only became owners of tiny homesteads and not cultivable land. Adivasis were similarly marginalized. Yet, the land reforms (and labor laws) brought about under the aegis of the communist mobilization have fundamentally moved away from the general trajectory of passive revolution that characterized the larger Indian social transformation. This is in contrast to one of the fundamental assumptions of Subaltern Studies project and postcolonial theory, which posit governmentality and passive revolution as the general characteristics of colonized societies’ experience with modernity. Chapter 7 will look at the communist intervention in the political sphere by focusing on the decentralization project, the People’s Plan Campaign first initiated in the period 1996–2001 by the Left government. It will be argued that the People’s Plan constituted an attempt by communism to inaugurate new forms of political sociability which are not just anchored in older forms of community and restructure the role of the state itself. It was undertaken at a time when the communist movement was going through severe stagna- tion and de-radicalization caused by the abandonment of radical class struggles for electoralism and under the new economic climate of neoliberalism. Twenty-five years thence, the Plan has not necessarily gone beyond social democracy in a radical fashion and is showing signs of being routinized. While it was an important effort at the extension of popular sovereignty and staggering the effects of neoliberal capital, it has not addressed the structural inequalities in society. The Plan puts into question postcolonial theory’s

13 INTRODUCTION notion of political society and its understanding of the relationship between state, civil society, political society and modernity in the Global South. The failures and prospects of the Plan and the struggles around it demonstrate the breakdown of the binary set up by Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. Chapter 8 will focus on the incomplete nature of the communist national- popular.As the dreams of communism faded, there is intense disenchantment with the actual trajectory of the communist movement and the paradoxes generated by its existence under the global hegemony of capitalism. The inability to herald substantial equality for the Dalits and Adivasis and for- mulate a program to radically challenge caste meant that communism is con- fronted by independent Dalit and Adivasi and other civil society movements, arising from the marginalization of these groups within it. Importantly, the failures of the communist movement themselves are not fully explicable by Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. Similarly, postcolonial theory, with its disavowal of the material and fear of economic reductionism, finds it difficult to theorize the communist movement’s increasing envelopment by capitalism. The conclusion will tie up and elaborate some of the main arguments.

A note on method The book is primarily a qualitative study which uses quantitative data as well. It uses different kinds of methods. Texts constitute the main research material. A variety of texts has been studied: government records and publications (including records of the colonial government from the archives), Communist Party documents and publications, autobiographies, biogra- phies, private papers of Communist leaders/activists, literary and cultural work, statistics related to the economy, newspapers and periodicals. Here, Andalat’s voluminous compilation of material from Communist Party and union newspapers, publications and souvenirs from the early period, some of which is otherwise inaccessible or lost, has been very helpful. Further, the source compiled by Andalat after a house-to-house survey of certain parts of communist-dominated Northern Malabar in the mid-1980s is particularly useful.91 This work documents the biographical details of 141 Communist activists born from the 1870s to the 1920s, and their participation in various struggles and agitations gleaned from the actors themselves or their immediate family and friends.92 The lives of the activists, who constituted the lower echelons of the Communist Party structure, provide insights into what made communism the force it became. Textual data has been supplemented with data from a purposeful sample of 105 interviews, of Communist leaders, activists, sympathizers and others (including specialized informants) that I conducted in various periods: 2003–2005, 2010–2014 and 2016–2018.93

14 INTRODUCTION

The book is not a micro-history94 or an ethnographic study with the atten- dant benefits of depth and thickness. It is focused on a broader grasp of the communist movement in Kerala rather than a specific locality only. Neverthe- less, it uses a small component of ethnographic data collected from the town of Muvattupuzha where most of the interviews were also conducted. The attempt is to make sense of the local in its interrelationship with the macro- processes at work. The town is located in central Kerala, which was a part of Travancore before. Thus, the book gives an understanding of informants from a place which is outside the communist heartland of Malabar in North Kerala, the usual focus of research on communism. 95 It is also significant for the fact that it was the first municipality after the formation of the state of Kerala to elect the Communists to power (in 1959). Yet, it is not a communist stronghold. Non-Communist representatives have represented Muvattupu- zha in the State Assembly for most of the years since 1956. Like Kerala as a whole, it has a substantial percentage of Muslims and Christians.96 The book interprets the data with the intention of understanding the authors’ categories rather than the imposed categories that are mostly part of positivist studies. However, the actors’ and authors’ points of view have not been treated as an explanation either. For example, many of the Commu- nist Party accounts tend to eulogize the role of the party and the movement, and the colonial state sometimes exaggerates the threat of communism. The methodological triangulation seeks to avoid the biases arising from relying on a single approach.

Notes 1 It will be dealing with the dominant parliamentary form of communism, not its radical strands which are still outside electoral processes and which also have left a mark on the political and cultural imaginary of Kerala. 2 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). 3 Patrick Heller, The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala: India (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7. See, for global comparative perspectives, Richard Sandbrook et al., Social Democracy in the Global Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Joseph Tharamangalam, “Human Development as Transformative Practice,” Critical Asian Studies 42, no. 3 (2010): 363–402; Richard Sandbrook, Reinventing the Left in the Global South: The Politics of the Possible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 4 Govindan Parayil, “The ‘Kerala Model’ of Development: Development and Sus- tainability in the Third World,” Third World Quarterly 17, no. 5 (1996): 941. For example, Kerala has the most expansive set of schemes for unorganized workers and also the best-operating Public Distribution System of food in India (R. Ramakumar, “Public Action, Agrarian Change and the Standard of Living of Agricultural Workers: A Study of a Village in Kerala,” Journal of Agrarian Change 6, no. 3 (2006): 321, 324). 5 Parayil, “‘Kerala Model’,” 941.

15 INTRODUCTION

6 Andalat,* Communist activist, interview, July 2003. See also his Rekhayillatha Charitram [History without Documents] (Thiruvananthapuram: Chintha Pub- lishers, 1987), 17. Names of interviewees indicated by an asterisk are actual names; the rest are pseudonyms. 7 Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-Being: How Kerala Became a Model (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1992), 96. 8 Andalat, Rekhayillatha , 17. 9 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), 418. Moore does recognize that “the wellsprings of human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of a class over whom the wave of progress is about to roll” (Ibid., 505). But this remains submerged in a reading that privileges the role of the bourgeoisie. 10 Brahminical scriptures described Hindu social system as consisting of four var- nas (and many castes and sub-castes within each): Brahmin (priests, arbiters), Kshatriya (kings, warriors), Vaishya (traders, commercial class) and Shudra (cultivators, producers). The fifth group, the “untouchables,” is considered to be outside the caste system (untouchability is legally abolished). Since it is deemed to be performing “menial” and “degrading” jobs, it is considered “unclean” and “polluting.” This social group is politically known as Dalits and administratively, Scheduled Castes (SCs) in the present. Here I will be using the term Dalit anachro- nistically for periods before the origin of the term. The “upper” castes are known as savarna or caste Hindus, and the Dalits, outside the four-fold varna system, are termed avarna, or without caste. In real social conditions, scriptural classifi- cations have variations across regions. The Indigenous people, the Adivasis, are administratively known as Scheduled Tribes (STs). 11 Thomas W. Shea, Jr.,“Barriers to Economic Development in Traditional Societies: Malabar, a Case Study,” Journal of Economic History 19, no. 4 (December 1959): 511. 12 Ritty Lukose, “Re (Casting) the Secular,” Social Analysis 50, no. 3 (2006): 45. 13 C. J. Fuller, The Nayars Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 12. They consist of many subdivisions and sub-castes. Scholars consider that Nairs were originally of Shudra origin, but acquired Kshatriya status because of the absence of the Kshatriya community (Sunny Kappikkad, “Sabarimala Protests Are a Reminder of the Role of Caste in Kerala’s Enlightened Soci- ety,” interview by T. A. Ameerudheen, Scroll , January 3, 2019, https://scroll.in/ article/904875/interview-sabarimala-protests-remind-us-of-the-role-of-caste-in- keralas-enlightened-society . 14 Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 176. 15 Kathleen E. Gough, “Nayars: Central Kerala,” in Matrilineal Kinship, ed. David Murray Schneider and Kathleen E. Gough (Oakland: University of California Press, 1961), 313–315. Thiyyas are concentrated in North Kerala while Ezha- vas are in Central and South Kerala. Although historically Thiyyas have claimed a higher status than Ezhavas, and there are some regional differences between the two, through popular imagination, state policy and political alliances, they have come to be seen as “synonymous or equivalent castes” which have different names. In the recent times, there have been attempts by some groups of Thiyyas to resist the subsumption of the Thiyya identity under the Ezhavas (Jillet Sarah Sam, “Place and Caste Identification: Distanciation and Spatial Imaginaries on a Caste-based Social Network, Ph. D Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 164–166, 286).

16 INTRODUCTION

16 K. C. Zachariah, “Religious Denominations of Kerala,” (working paper 468, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, 2016), 29. 17 According to the 2011 Census, Hindus constitute 54.7%, Muslims, 26.6%, and Christians, 18.4%. Scheduled Castes are 9.5% and Schedules Tribes, 1%. Among the Hindu castes, in terms of population, besides the SCs, the main communities are Ezhavas/Thiyyas, 21.5%, and Nairs, 12%. Brahmins constitute only 1.2% (Zachariah, “Religious Denominations,” 29). 18 Shea, Jr., “Barriers to Economic Development,” 514. 19 Temples were managed by the Namboodiri and Nair janmies [landlords] (E. P. Gopalan, Report of the Malabar Tenancy Committee, 1940 , vol. 1 (Madras, 1940), 96). 20 G. K. Lieten, The First Communist Ministry in Kerala, 1957–9 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1982), 4–5. 21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 198–199. 22 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geof- frey Nowell Smith, trans. William Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 132. 23 M. S. S. Pandian, “Towards National-Popular: Notes on Self-Respecters’ Tamil,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 51 (December 1996): 3323, 3324. 24 Subho Basu and Auritro Majumder, “Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism,” Critical Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 169. 25 Dilip Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. 26 This is beyond the scope of the book. The processes of liberation of the individual from community-based identities, in effect, individualization, in early modern Kerala, were simultaneously processes of “en-gendering” where gender specific exclusions were as important as before (J. Devika, En-Gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-Forming in Early Twentieth Century Keralam (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007)). Thus, involvement of women in radical politics like that communist labor unions was ironically accompanied by “effeminization,” the process by which women were seen as weaker and more dependent on men than before (Anna Lindeberg, Modernization and Effeminization in India: Ker- ala Cashew Workers since 1930 (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2005)). 27 While the achievements of Kerala saw a strong tendency in the earlier phase of Kerala scholarship to romanticize the Kerala development experience, the last couple decades or so have seen the emergence of a vigorous critical scholarship which complicates the narrative about Kerala by undertaking a strong critique of linear understandings of social change which do not admit contradictions and regressions. This book will imbibe the spirit of the latter without discarding the insights of the former. For my own critiques of such linear assessments while underlining the critical importance of the need to place Kerala in a comparative context, see Nissim Mannathukkaren, “The Conjuncture of Late Socialism in Kerala: A Critique of the Narrative of Social Democracy,” in Development, Democracy and the State: Critiquing Kerala Model of Development , ed. K. Ravi Raman (London: Routledge, 2012). 28 Richard Sandbrook, “Polanyi and Post-Neoliberalism in the Global South: Dilemmas of Re-Embedding the Economy,” New Political Economy 16, no. 4 (2011): 432. 29 Achin Vanaik, “Subcontinental Strategies,” New Left Review 70 (July-August 2011): 101–114.

17 INTRODUCTION

30 J. Devika, “Requiem for the Undead: On Kerala’s Sixtieth Birthday,” Kafila , October 16, 2016, https://kafila.online/2016/10/26/requiem-for-the-undead-on - keralas-sixtieth-birthday/#more-34118 . 31 John Harriss, “Comparing Political Regimes across Indian States: A Preliminary Essay,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 48 (November 1999): 3367–3377. 32 Patrick Heller, “Degrees of Democracy: Some Comparative Lessons from India,” World Politics 52, no. 4 (July 2000): 497, 517. 33 Alf Gunvald Nilsen, “‘Real, Practical Emancipation’? Subaltern Politics and Insurgent Citizenship in Contemporary India,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 76 (2016): 32. 34 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His- tories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 11. 35 See, for example, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard W. Franke, Life Is a Little Better: Redistribution as a Development Strategy in Nadur Village, Kerala (Boulder, Colorado: West- view Press, 1993); K. P. Kannan, Of Rural Proletarian Struggles: Mobilization and Organization of Rural Workers in South-West India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Heller, Labor of Development . 36 Manali Desai, State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, 1860–1990 (London: Routledge, 2006), 8. 37 See Ritty Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizen- ship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), Chapter 1. 38 This is resorted to, among others, by Desai who argues that the land, education, and health-care reforms implemented by princely states of Travancore and Cochin in the 19th century were also factors that led to “Kerala’s divergence from India well before the post-independence era” (Desai, State Formation , 8). Before the formation of modern Kerala in 1956, it consisted of three parts, Travancore, Cochin, and the British-administered Malabar. 39 Prerna Singh,“Subnationalism and Social Development: A Comparative Analysis of Indian States,” World Politics 67, no. 3 (July 2015): 530, 508. See also, Prerna Singh, How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Develop- ment in India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 40 Prerna Singh, “We-ness and Welfare: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Develop- ment in Kerala, India,” World Development 39, no. 2 (2011): 286. 41 Singh, “Subnationalism,” 548. 42 Desai does not focus on the cultural aspects. But she does mention the criticality of the communist insertion in civil society as crucial to constructing a Gramscian form of hegemony: “the moral-political authority to transform society” (Desai, State Formation , 12). 43 Ravi K. Raman ( Global Capital and Peripheral Labour: The History and Political Economy of Plantation Workers in India (London: Routledge, 2010)) undertakes a critique of Subaltern Studies but focused on the history of plantation workers in Kerala. 44 Aijaz Ahmad, “On Post Modernism,” The Marxist 27, no. 1 (January–March 2011): 32. Dipesh Chakrabarty is a partial exception here, but even he has not dealt with communism (see Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890– 1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989)). 45 Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107. 46 K. Moody, “Neoliberalism: The Shadow of Class,” Dialectical Anthropology 32, nos. 1/2 (March–June 2008): 53–58; D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18 INTRODUCTION

47 Vivek Chibber, “On the Decline of Class Analysis in South Asian Studies,” Criti - cal Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2006): 357–387. 48 Jens Lerche and Alpa Shah,“Conjugated Oppression within Contemporary Capi- talism: Class, Caste, Tribe and Agrarian Change in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 45, nos. 5–6 (2018): 934. 49 Alf Gunvald Nilsen, “Authoritarian Populism and Popular Struggles in Modi’s India,” Open Democracy, November 22, 2018, www.opendemocracy.net/en/ authoritarian-populism-and-popular-struggles-in-modi-s-india/. 50 See, for example, Indrajit Roy, “Class Coalitions and Social Protection: The Labouring Classes and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Eastern India,” Journal of Development Studies (2020): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/00 220388.2020.1826446 . 51 Lerche and Shah, “Conjugated Oppression,” 929, 932. 52 Alf Nilsen and Srila Roy, eds., Reconceptualising Subaltern Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Uday Chandra, “Rethinking Subal- tern Resistance,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 45, no. 4 (2015): 563–573 are welcome examples in the recent past. See also, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, “Law and Larai: The (De) Judicialisation of Subaltern Resistance in West Bengal,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 45, no. 4 (2015): 618–639; Alf Nilsen, “Subalterns and the State in the Longue Durée: Notes from ‘The Rebellious Century’ in the Bhil Heartland,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 45, no. 4 (2015): 574–595. 53 Other relatively recent theoretical critiques are Vasant Kaiwar, The Postcolo- nial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincialising Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014) and Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 54 Michael Levien, “Subalternists Scrutinized,” Review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital , by Vivek Chibber, European Journal of Sociology 54, no. 3 (December 2013): 487. 55 Vivek Chibber,“Confronting Postcolonial Theory: A Response to Critics,” Journal of World-Systems Research 20, no. 2 (2014): 316. Chibber is not entirely correct here. While Subaltern Studies makes general claims, they are built on a literature of historically specific studies on various topics (see Utathya Chattopadhyaya,“Time to Move On? A Response to Vivek Chibber,” Kritik (blog), June 26, 2014, http:// unitcrit.blogspot.ca/2014/06/authors-roundtable-vivek-chibber.html ). 56 Christopher Taylor, “Postcolonial Studies and the Specter of Misplaced Polem- ics against Postcolonial Theory: A Review of the Chibber Debate,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 2 (April 2018): 242. 57 Lerche and Shah, “Conjugated Oppression,” 927–928. 58 These have not been dealt with by Chibber as he acknowledges (Chibber, Specter of Capital , 27). 59 Chibber, Specter of Capital , 20–21. 60 Nilsen and Roy, Subaltern Politics , 5. 61 Partha Chatterjee, “After Subaltern Studies,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 35 (September 2012): 44. 62 Ibid., 44, 49. 63 Ibid., 46. 64 Ibid., 45. 65 Bill Crane,“On Vivek Chibber’s Critique of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies,” That Faint Light , November 11, 2013, https://thatfaintlight.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/ on-vivek-chibbers-critique-of-postcolonial-and-subaltern-studies/. 66 Taylor, “Postcolonial Studies,” 244. 67 This is something that Chandra, “Rethinking Subaltern Resistance,” ignores. 68 Chatterjee, “After Subaltern Studies,” 46. This I will deal with in Chapter 7. In explicating this new theoretical position, Chatterjee relies on poststructuralist 19 INTRODUCTION

and postmodern theoretical tools. Therefore, it is curious that he lists postmod- ernism and deconstruction as among the theoretical schools that have seen their rise and demise in the last five decades (Chatterjee,“After Subaltern Studies,” 44). Taylor similarly argues that poststructuralism has “more or less collapsed” and that has diminished postcolonial theory’s impact as well (Taylor, “Postcolonial Studies,” 235). But he does not take into account its usage in theories like that of political society. 69 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Sub- altern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 70 David Scott, “The Social Construction of Postcolonial Studies,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Bur- ton and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2005), 389. 71 N. Vandeviver,“Reorienting Orientalism: Edward W. Said as a Gramscian Critic” (paper presented at the Past and Present: Philosophy, Politics, and History in the Thought of Gramsci, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom, June 18–19, 2015). 72 David Scott, “The Aftermaths of Sovereignty: Postcolonial Criticism and the Claims of Political Modernity,” Social Text48 14, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 5. 73 Scott, “Aftermaths,” 11–12. Postcolonialism originated in a context, as Scott points out, not only in which the national liberation movements in the Third World had declined, but also one which was experiencing “the cultural turn.” Post colonialism, his view, was a tectonic shift from anti-colonialism which was only focused on political decolonization and that too conceptualized in essen- tialist and teleological terms (Scott, Social Construction , 391–392). See Kaiwar, Postcolonial Orient , for an excellent analysis of the material context in which postcolonial studies arose. 74 Crystal Bartolovich, “Introduction: Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Stud- ies,” in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies , ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10. 75 Of course, questions about colonialism and what they mean for the postcolonial present are something, as Scott argues, that need to be debated upon rather than taken for granted (Scott, Social Construction , 399). After all, the importance of the past for the present is looked at the vantage point of the latter. 76 Scott, Social Construction , 392. 77 Taylor, “Postcolonial Studies,” 234. 78 Dipesh Chakrabarty,“The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 199, 207–8; See also, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1–18; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (Autumn 2014): 1–23. 79 David Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” in Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contesting Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia , ed. David Ludden (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 3. 80 Ahmad, “Post Modernism,” 31. 81 Vinayak Chaturvedi, “A Critical Theory of Subalternity: Rethinking Class in Indian Historiography,” Left History 12, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 10. 82 Arif Dirlik, “Is There History After Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History,” Cultural Critique , no. 42 (Spring 1999): 30. For example, the wider postcolonial tradition also consists of anti-colonial Marx- ists like Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Amilcar Cabral, and so on (Chris Taylor, “Not Even Marxist: On Vivek Chibber’s Polemic against Postcolonial Theory,” Of C. L. R. James (blog), April 29, 2013, http://clrjames.blogspot.ca/2013/04/ not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html). Then there is Pan-Africanism, which

20 INTRODUCTION

Spivak argues is the first postcolonial argument. Postcolonial theory as we know today originating with Spivak and Bhabha is linked to the earlier scholarship of Edward Said and British Cultural Studies (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Post- colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 27, no. 1 (2014): 185). Then there is Latin American postcolonial theory as well as Subaltern Studies. Besides, as Taylor points out, postcolonial theory is in “deep debt to anticolonial and transnational feminism.” Taylor, “Postcolonial Studies,” 237). 83 Pranav Jani, “Marxism and the Future of Postcolonial Theory,” review of Post- colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, by Vivek Chibber, International Socialist Review, no. 92 (Spring 2014). 84 There are other excellent scholars within the school like Shahid Amin, Shail Mayaram, David Hardiman, Gautam Bhadra, etc., whose work did not always cohere with what has come to represent Subaltern Studies. Hardiman, for example, provided a strong class analysis and was the only Subalternist to make peasant differentiation a crucial argument (Chaturvedi, “A Critical Theory,” 12). 85 Chatterjee argues in response to Chibber, who similarly focused on these scholars, that they are not “emblematic of postcolonial theory today” (Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies,” 69). While Spivak argues that Chibber ignores “powerful subalternist historians” (Spivak, “Postcolonial Theory,” 184), it has to be said that the influence of Chatterjee and Chakrabarty on postcolonial theory globally is much more substantive than the others. 86 Chibber, “Confronting Postcolonial Theory,” 311. 87 Chibber, “Making Sense,” 618. 88 Benita Parry, “The Constraints of Chibber’s Criticism: A Review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber,” Historical Materialism 25, no. 1 (2017): 187. 89 Quoted in Neil Lazarus,“Vivek Chibber and the Specter of Postcolonial Theory,” Race & Class 57, no. 3 (2016): 93. 90 Jani, “Marxism.” 91 Andalat, Rekhayillatha . 92 Similarly, Jose Karimbana’s work on the participants of the various communist struggles in Koothattukulam, part of erstwhile Travancore, in the early period is based again on the accounts of the participants themselves (Jose Karimbana, Rakthasakshikalude Naadu [The Land of Martyrs] (Koothattukulam: Niyogam Books, 1996)). It is a very important location in the early history of communism and, as the book documents, four Communist activists from here were killed by the police. 93 Five interviews conducted in 1999 have also been used. 94 Sarkar, “Writing Social History,” 94. 95 The town of Koothattukulam mentioned earlier falls in Muvattupuzha Taluk and is the latter’s neighboring town. 96 Muvattupuzha Municipality’s total population (2011 census) was 30,397. Hindus constituted 39.91%; Muslims, 38.91%; and Christians, 21.10% of it. Scheduled castes numbered 5.22% and Scheduled Tribes, 0.46% (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, “Census 2011” (Government of India, 2011), www.census2011.co.in/data/subdistrict/5662-muvattupuzha-ernakulam - kerala.html ). Of the 9,916 main workers in the town, the number of cultivators was 207; agricultural laborers, 219; and workers in household industries, 211. The remaining were “other workers” (Ibid.).