Philosophising the movement: ‘Venomous Touch’ by Ravikumar & ‘Writing Indian History’ by Achuthan M Kandyil

Ravikumar's new book is perhaps the most exciting work on the Dalit question to be published recently, yet still does not live up to its promise. But Susie Tharu's patronising foreword (which does not engage with Ravikumar's frameworks at all) notwithstanding, it does set the ground for work to come – hopefully from Ravikumar himself, a Dalit activist and writer in Madras and co-founder of Navayana Press – that will alter not just Dalit critique but also Southasian critique in general. The essays in Venomous Touch can be broadly divided into two general areas: the fact-finding report and reports of atrocities against Dalits (the author is a member of the People's Union of Civil Liberties Tamil Nadu-Pondicherry, and many of these reports came from his fact-finding trips), and essays on cultural and theoretical analysis. That this is in a crucial sense a false distinction is the first and overriding flaw of the book.

In his preface, Ravikumar speaks of his "Tarzan-like travel" from Marx and Lenin to Periyar and pulp novels, from Gramsci and Althusser to Foucault and Derrida and back to Ambedkar and Tiruvalluvar. Almost none of this scope, however, touches the first set of essays, those from the fact-finding trips; they are dogged, industrious and painstaking reports, but they have none of the analytic rigour that might have taken them beyond the limiting frame of the fact-finding report as a genre. While the genre represents an important historical document, particularly in its chronicling of injustices otherwise swept under the carpet, it must, in its article or essay avatar, ask questions that the generic format would not allow.