by RAMESH CHAKRAPANI
IMAGE/Oxford University Press
Slavery, to the lay Indian reader, is an alien, loathsome concept associated with horrors and atrocities in distant lands —a vile, despicable practice that characterised imperial rule in the previous century.
It usually conjures up images of Africans in chains in the Americas and brings to memory their struggles and the abolition of slavery by Abraham Lincoln. P. Sanal Mohan challenges such notions in his remarkable work on the “slave castes” of Kerala and their rebellion against the caste system that legitimised and institutionalised slavery. Without mincing words, he employs a language that is shocking in its candour yet essential to understanding the opprobrium of the system that existed and the revolts against it. By eschewing established usages such as “oppressed people” and “marginalised sections”, he distresses our comfortable views by plainly stating that what was in existence for a very long time in the region that constitutes present-day Kerala was nothing but slavery, and that its victims were “slave castes”.
But Sanal Mohan has not just written a history of Dalit suffering and their continuous battle to free themselves of the shackles of the status quo; it is also a history of the histories of his own people written by missionaries and upper-caste elite and the failings therein, because the outsider is never able to fully articulate the lived and shared experiences of the oppressed.
Black struggle for equality has a long and chequered history in the United States, right from the time slavery was abolished in the mid-18th century after protracted opposition, followed by a civil war and segregation and then the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to the most recent Black Lives Matter movement in response to police brutality that has victimised hundreds of black people.
The Dalit crusade for equality in India has a similar history, but unlike the anti-racism movement in the U.S., it has always been relegated to the sidelines, swept aside by the overarching themes of nation-building and progress.
And in the case of Kerala, where the modern movement had its origins, it has been subsumed by a pan-Kerala paradigm that consistently ignores the elephant in the room. So, the Dalit cause is not only one seeking a rightful place in society but also an effort to prevent authentic Dalit voices from being drowned out by the noise of the mainstream.
In the chapter titled “Memory and Experience: Discourses of Slavery”, the last footnote reads: “The PRDS [Prathyaksha Raksha Deiva Sabha] officially celebrates the anniversary of the [British queen’s] proclamation [that abolished slavery in 1855] every year on October 16 with public rallies. No other organisation, government, or community even refers to it.”
Perhaps unwittingly, the author has described, in one fell swoop, the negligible importance accorded to the history of Dalit struggles in Kerala and the extent to which social and organisational boycott has airbrushed from public imagination the stories of the “slave castes” and how they have been waging a battle to reclaim their dignity. It is telling that Kerala, acclaimed as “god’s own country” in a million advertisements, unites to celebrate festivals rooted in mythology and customs and traditions that valorise its past, conveniently brushing under the rug the iniquities against Dalits and indigenous people.
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