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 While the genre represents an important historical document, particularly in its chronicling of injustices otherwise swept under the carpet, it must, in its article or essay avatar, ask questions that the generic format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.

With Ravikumar claiming that Michel Foucault's theorisation of power influenced him, surely that perspective should have come into the former's analysis of anti-Dalit atrocities. In doing so, he may have realised the problems with Foucault's understanding of power, especially in the early works, and consequently reached for the later Foucault that offers self-reflexive and more nuanced models of the Dalit subject than Ravikumar allows. Foucault's early conception of power does not really leave any scope for resistance or opposition, but later he comes to locate this in the idea of ethics and technologies of the self. But Ravikumar's schematic distinction between the kinds of essay he writes does not allow for this interplay.

This is part of a larger problem. Too often in today's scholarly writing, in this region and elsewhere, 'theory' is only utilised for an analysis of culture, and seldom in any other form than the decontextualised quote or invocation of a name, and almost never as a sustained meditation or engagement with an idea. Why do theory merely in the mode of 'doing' theory? What intellectual fashion is this that requires that ritual homage be paid to Western theorists, and the juxtaposing of their ideas with more 'domestic' issues? Why has Ravikumar not instead internalised theoretical concepts in his analyses, rather than applying theory to measure either the data's exemplary value or the theory's lack of, or exemplary, fit?

Lacunae, but foundational
In the preface and one of the early pieces, Ravikumar speaks in a language of injunction about how the Dalit intellectual has to take a philosophical approach, and bridge the gap between intellectuals and the rest of society (another false binary, really). But thereafter, he does not appear to take his own injunctions very seriously. The wall between the more fact-based pieces, rational and dogged, and the cultural or theoretical pieces is firm and unbreakable.

This is not to say that the factual or fact-finding pieces do not have power. There are two superb essays: one on caste in the media, as tracked through the relationship between The Hindu and The Parayan, a Dalit daily published in Madras, and the other on the casteism of the LTTE. But both tilt more in favour of fact than analysis. The bracing reports on such cases as that involving the Melavalavu murders, the Chidambaram poll violence and the Sankaralingapuram and Challisettipatti violence – all involving atrocities against Dalits in Tamil Nadu – do not allow for analysis, as the pressing nature of the injustice is paramount. All the same, there are several other more general pieces, on land, education, the death penalty and the politics of naming (in which he speaks of how Dalits seize control of how they are named), each of which might have benefited from more of an analytical lens.

Meanwhile, in the cultural essays (mainly in the section entitled "Venomous Touch"), a more self-reflexive and theorised conceptual space could have opened up. Unfortunately, there are no real close readings of texts, no opening-out to the contradictory and productive possibilities of the Dalit psyche. Instead, there is resentment (in a piece on Dalit autobiographical narrative) or uncharacteristic pique, as in a piece on Knock Out, B Lenin's film about Tamil boxer Sanjeevi Jadav. Instead of analysing the narrative of Viramma, the famous life-narrative of a Tamil Dalit woman recorded by anthropologists Jean Luc and Rosiane Racine, for what it is worth, rather churlish accusations are made against the Racines; instead of analysing why symbolic violence is viewed as more important than a Dalit custodial death, Dalits and the Dalit movement are simply blamed for seeking political power in an un-interrogated pitting of Dalit rights and human rights against each other.

One piece, titled "The Duty of Irresponsibility" does come tantalisingly close to combining the philosophical and the material. Here, the author closes down the narrative possibilities opened by Jacques Derrida with an invocation of B R Ambedkar, calling for a break with all tradition and the forming of a new basis for society. Yet even an elementary reading of Derrida would show the impossibility of such a project, as there is nothing absolutely new possible in the Derridean universe and, indeed, such a quest would be futile to him.

There is not a single critical word about Ambedkar in the entire volume, nor about the Tamil activists Iyothee Thass and Rettamalai Srinivasan. It is as if none of these men had any productive contradiction. Contrary to Susie Tharu's introduction, the flattened portraits of these men seem quite identitarian, and not exploratory of difficulties in historical personae. Further, far from Tharu's absurd fantasy of feminism being taken on by the likes of Ravikumar in her account of her visit to the offices of Nirapirikai, the journal Ravikumar and others ran, gender too is not a steady analytic variable, but only comes in now and then with women. It is as if men have no gender at all.

All these failings notwithstanding, one does put down Venomous Touch utterly invigorated by the energy, passion and integrity that Ravikumar brings to his work. He is without doubt the closest we have today to a complex Dalit intellectual, and hopefully his future will consist of more sustained meditations on the areas he opens up here.

No view at all, really
In contrast, Achuthan Kandyil's Writing Indian History is a baffling work. Kandyil announces proudly that he has not looked at a single primary source for the book, yet still speaks in the introduction of the Hindu right's "ignorance of true historical facts". Why should one take seriously a historical account by someone not trained in historical method, and refusing to do any historical research? Even Kandyil's chapter titles leave much to be desired: "What Is Hinduism?", "Ancient Indian Civilization" and "A Brief Overview of Vedic Religion and Literature". Just these first three chapters show faith in problematic categories such as 'Hinduism' and 'India' and 'Vedic religion' that would be charming were these not so pernicious and in need of interrogation. It is difficult to know what to do with a book that claims to cover "pre-historic times to the present day" – which uses the term 'India' even in the 'ancient' period as if the country had actually been a nation since then – is anti-Hindutva but speaks of "Muslim invaders".

Ultimately, the book is a tiresome plod through ill-chosen sources, and the only view from below that emerges comes in the form of idiosyncratic, historically incoherent and absurd asides by Kandyil, like "The weakness or the strength of Muslims … is that they cannot amalgamate with people of other faiths, as the tenets of Islam prohibits it." More worryingly, the book is also a wasted opportunity. Some primary work – not necessarily in the historical archive, but from Dalit cultures and lives – would have offered a truly interesting history 'from below', and provided important counterpoint to archival histories. But there is none of that here. (Perhaps it is difficult to do that type of work from Grambling University in Louisiana, where the author has supposedly been based for decades, after being an engineer with All India Radio until 1972.)

Instead, we have all sorts of hegemonic histories rehearsed with some tokenist Dalit and anti-communal perspectivism added. Dalits are accused of not seeing the larger plan in their being opposed to the Other Backward Castes, but no analysis is offered of why this is the case. Islam and Hinduism, for all the awareness today of how they have been 'constructed', are seen as fixed, coherent entities. Ultimately, one cannot fathom why Samya agreed to publish this work, apart from the deeply patronising reason that Kandyil is Dalit – precisely the sort of identitarian offensiveness that bodes ill for serious scholarship and activism. Ashley Tellis is an activist focusing on gay, Dalit and women's issues. He is currently assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad.

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