Recently, Vellappally Natesan, the leader of Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), the most powerful organisation of the Ezhava community, classified as OBC (Other Backward Classes) by the government, made clearly Islamophobic statements. This statement concerned the Muslim majority Malappuram district in the state of Kerala,
Malappuram district is a separate country. Our community lives in fear there, they cannot breathe freely, they are afraid to express their opinions freely. Even after so long since independence, the backward classes are not getting any of its benefits.
These words of Vellapalli Natesan, shocking as it is, coming from the leader of a community which experienced untouchability even after independence, was welcomed by Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala.
It has been known for a long time that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI – M), had been a fellow traveller of the BJP. The relation between the BJP and CPI – M, the rising islamophobia of the latter under the leadership of Vijayan, have been rarely addressed by the national media, although international socialist journal Jacobin confronted it through an article titled “Indian Communists’ Muslim Dilemma”. The words of Natesan should be also seen in this developing context of Kerala—somehow suppressed by ‘leftist’ national media—where both the BJP and the CPI – M control the public media and social media, and new business opportunities. Congress, a clearly secular political party within Kerala, lacks the means nor intelligence among its leadership to counter this phenomenon, and be a protector for those who oppose these developments.
I urge the reader to not fall into the temptation to see either the CPI – M’s deeper understanding with the RSS organisations or Natesan’s statement as passing phases and exceptions. For example, this is not the first occasion where Vellapalli Natesan made Islamophobic remarks in public. In 2015, a Muslim auto rickshaw driver Noushad died while trying to save two lower caste sanitation workers who had fallen into a manhole in a sewage system in Kozhikode. The three bodies were recovered by the fire force. The government announced financial assistance to Noushad’s family as a mark of respect for his bravery, who descended into the manhole without considering the risk to his own life. Then came Natesan’s reaction,
In Kozhikode one Naushad has died. The Chief Minister gave Rs 10 lakh compensation to his family and gave a job to his family member. So it is better to die as a Muslim in Kerala. If a Muslim or a Christian dies somewhere, a gang of ministers from Thiruvananthapuram will reach the spot. If someone from our community dies, not even a dog comes there.
The dangerous ongoing developments in Kerala cannot make sense to anyone through the analysis of the current news items. It should be studied, as I had argued on another occasion, through the sociogenesis of Kerala, if sincere solutions are to be found.
What was the recorded experience of untouchability of the Ezhavas? How did the Ezhavas who are classified as OBC, overcome their social ‘untouchability’ somewhat in the recent past? Why do they want to forget the ‘untouchability’ of the past? Why are some Ezhavas speaking the upper caste language of caste blindness today? Why do a minority of Ezhavas represent themselves as ‘middle caste’ (such as the Nairs) to distance themselves from the Dalits? What is it about caste and race that makes the oppressed people want to disown their very own self, as Fanon shows in Black Skin, White Masks?
Towards answering these questions, in the following sections, I will outline the theoretical foundation for caste based evaluation of human beings under the theory of hypophysics, and then I will use this theory to show how the measurement of distances to be kept in caste practices were recorded under the modern state apparatuses, and to demonstrate that the Ezhavas were also a formerly ‘untouchable’ caste group. Once the experience of untouchability among the Ezhavas is explained, I will venture to outline the causes for ‘Hinduisation’ that is necessarily coupled with Islamophobia.
The Theory of Untouchability Practices
Caste is, today with the advent of technologies, a number or a statistic in a computer as Rohith Vemula said. It is also racialised view of people. It is a state classification system. It is the suffering of the body of the lower caste majority which receives punishments routinely from the upper caste minority for violations of caste rules, like riding motorcycles or keeping a moustache. But underlying all these many nearly inexhaustible experiences of caste is a unique and systematic view of world and life, or human life in particular. And this is not metaphysics; metaphysics is, as I have argued and elaborated elsewhere, a quest for the fundamental truth or unity principle of the totality of all the things in the world. Instead, caste is based on hypophysics. If this theory is not understood, then the danger is that we will miss the extraordinary power of caste oppression to always return no matter what modern methods are invented to combat it.
The term hypophysics is borrowed from Kant, but he did not define it. Instead, it was Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, in their critical study of M. K. Gandhi, titled Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics, who defined and developed the concept of hypophysics to analyse phenomena such as casteism, racism, and some forms of naturalisms. When mankind does not obey the birth assigned roles given to them, or when humanity displaces the things of nature through science and technologies from their assigned positions, calamities result as natural punishment. Such was Gandhi’s view,
Such calamities are not a mere caprice of the Deity or Nature. They obey fixed laws as surely as the planets move in obedience to laws governing their movement. Only we do not know the laws governing these events and, therefore, call them calamities or disturbances. (Quoted in Gandhi and Philosophy, p 26)
Often these phenomena were confused with metaphysics or poorly conducted sciences, until the concept of hypophysics became a tool. Hypophysics is the identification of the nature of something with a value, that is a thing is the value.
‘Hypo’ does not imply a physics which is inferior to physics and metaphysics. Hypophysics names the underlying science of nature according to Gandhi, from out of which physics as a discipline is derived. Indeed, physics would be a deviation from hypophysics.
As Montévil writes, “the statement ‘nature is good’ is hypophysical” (Maël Montévil, “Glossary of Concepts”, in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Hurst UK). This idea says that if something is naturally so, through its birth, then it is good just that way. So is the assumption that people of white skin colour are superior, which creates the mediate and distant inferior peoples.
The same hypophysical argument is the basis for the varna theory. First comes the hypophysical organisation of the human body— through the mythic hypophysical body of the virata purusha—with the head as the “highest” or most important, to feet as the “lowest” or the least important. The birth of different Varnas—Brahmin from the head and the Shudra from the feet—create hypophysical mytho-logical system for caste. Those who are not from the body of the virata purusha are considered to be beneath his feet, the ‘untouchables’. For this very reason Aarushi Punia would argue about the hypophysical character of caste,
The hypophysics of caste makes disruption difficult, as being ‘intellectual’ and ‘pure’ are associated, inherently and in a hereditary manner, with Brahmins, while being ‘intellectually inferior’ and ‘impure’ is considered the intergenerational infection of the lower castes. Hypophysics attributes values as inherent, masking the discursive power of casteist ideologies. It forces Dalits to be the opposite of Brahmins, the inferior against whom the Brahmin is forcefully represented as the superior. ( See Aarushi Punia, “Imagining a Country Led by Lower Castes”)
What I want to show next is that the practice of untouchability follows the hypophysical gradations of value of human life on the basis of birth through the legalised distances that lower caste people had to follow in the regions of Kerala.
A. Ayyappan, the renowned anthropologist and Ezhava intellectual, writes that the Ezhavas were also a formerly ‘untouchable’ caste group outside of the four-caste system. The government had published a list of the ‘untouchable’ (“theendal”) castes of Travancore. It mentions 30 ‘untouchable’ castes. These 30 castes include Adi Dravidar, Araiyar, Chekkilian, Ezhavan, Parayan, Pulayan, and Vedan who were permitted to be visible in public. There were other castes that were not even allowed to be visible; that is, seeing them caused ‘pollution’ to the body of the upper castes. Since the bodies of the ‘untouchable’ caste were ‘unclean’ in varying hypophysical degrees, there was a provision that they had to keep a certain measure of distance from the upper castes. Some of these measures are as follows: Nayadi 72 feet, Pulayar 64 feet, Kaniyan 36 feet, Ezhavan 36 feet, Mukkuvar 24 feet.
The theendal distance, or the distance of untouchability, was recorded in the 1901 census of the Cochin kingdom: ‘24 feet for Kammalans, 36 feet for Ezhavans, Valans, Panans, Velans, Paravans, etc., and 64 feet for Pulayans, Parayans, etc.’ (Cochin Census Report,1901, cited in P. Bhaskaranunni, Patthonpathām Noottāntile Keralam, Kerala Sahitya Academy, Thrissur, 2000) By the time of the 1911 census, there were some changes in the distance of untouchability. The new distances were ‘14 feet for Ezhavas, Kammalans, and Pulluvars; 32 feet for Mukkuvars; 64 feet for Pulayans; and 72 feet for Parayans’, proclaimed the Diwan of Cochin.
The measurement of these distances is explained remarkably by the concept of “scalology” (a concept derived from scala naturae in pre-Darwinian biology) in the works of Dwivedi and Mohan (see Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019). Scala Naturae arranged living beings in hierarchy on the basis of how god created them, and according to the value of proximity to divine good. In that case, man was on top of all creatures, and other creatures were less proximate by degress. Scalology shows that all natural beings are measured and placed in a hierarchy, which is policed through brutal force, on the basis of the hypophysical value inherent to them. I will not venture further into this concept here, as I will be demonstrating it at work through the examples in the following sections. But it is to be noted well that Dr B. R. Ambedkar said that this scale of impurity was only increased by the ‘degraded inequality’ where distances were made between the untouchable castes themselves using the scalology. That is, a “paraya” experiences his status as lower (64 feet in Kochi) than that of a “kammalan” (24 feet) through their respective scalological position from the body of the upper caste. As I have shown above, these distances were also changing from time to time and place to place.
Ezhava Militancy Against Untouchability
Shankunni Menon, in a letter sent to J.A. Minch, the Resident of Thiruvananthapuram-Cochin on 21.01.1871, describes the disadvantages experienced by the ‘untouchable’ castes as follows:
“1) The lower castes are not allowed to enter the roads used by the upper castes;
2) They are not allowed to enter within a certain limit of the courts and public offices; 3) They are excluded from government services; and, 4) They are not allowed to enter public schools.”
Now that the scales of distances to be observed by the ‘untouchable’ castes are understood, it can be used to understand other practices the lower caste majority classed as ‘untouchables’ were forced to follow. The were obliged to make special sounds to alert the upper castes of their presence to prevent the ‘polluting’ contact. The upper castes also used to make special sounds to announce the departure of the untouchables. This was known as ‘ochaattuka’(ഒച്ചാട്ടുക) or alerting sounds. The way of shouting also differed by caste. If the upper castes were to shout ‘ho’, ‘ho’ or ‘hoi, ‘hoi’ to alert the ‘untouchables’ of their movement, and to command them to keep the prescribed scalological distance; then, among the Ezhavas would shout ‘theendale’, ‘theendale’, meaning “we are pollution”. In a state of distress at this situation in Kerala, the great poet and revolutionary orator Kumāran Āsān sang:
Those who are not to be touched, that which must not be tasted
Those who must not be seen for their very image is harmful
Those who do not have any ties, those cannot share a meal, thus live the majority. (From the poem, Duravastha)
Even in the plan of a city like Trivandrum, the scalology of caste can be witnessed, as I had demonstrated while analysing the city plan in the French journal Critique in 2020 (See J. Reghu, “Thiruvananthapuram, capitale du Kerala ou ville-temple des vaches et des brahmanes?”, Critique 2020/1 n° 872-873) Here I want to bring attention another example which is that of the sudden availability of education to the lower castes. In 1915, Kumāran Āsān spoke in the Sree Moolam Praja Sabha: “The number of educated Ezhavas is only ten out of a hundred. Children who should have been educated have become mothers and boys fathers before reaching adulthood”. (Kumāran Āsān, Sampoorna Krithikal, vol.3, National Cultural Institute, Thonnakkal, Trivandrum, 2011)
In schools, upper-caste teachers used to mete out corporeal punishment to children by beating them with canes. But once the lower caste majority entered schools these practices also adapted scalologically in order to distinguish the upper caste body from the ‘untouchable’ body. T. K. Madhavan, an Ezhava intellectual and revolutionary, from a well to do family, says, “They used to hit the children of the lower castes with long sticks and then release their grip on the stick altogether before contact. And that throw is the beating (എറിഞ്ഞടി or thrown-beating) […] just as electricity flows through the wire, through the palm of a lower-caste child’s hand and into the stick ‘pollution’ flows”.
However, from 19th century India had also begun witnessing the force of anti-caste politics and theory. The first to fan the flames of Indian consciousness against untouchability and Brahminism was Mahatma Phule in Maharashtra. Then Harichand Thakur, Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, Periyar (Erode Venkata Ramasamy), Ayoti Das, Babu Mangu Ram and many others initiated the struggles to awaken anti-caste consciousness in Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab.
Through the self-pride and political will cultivated by their leaders—Dr Palpu, Narayana Guru, Sahodaran Ayyappan, T. K. Madhavan, Kumāran Āsān among others—Ezhavas became a militant force in the emerging political theatre of Kerala in the early 20th century and they fought against the ‘untouchability’ which had humiliated and enslaved them. In 1918, a proclamation was issued, calling for the end of slavery (yes, it existed in Kerala) by T.K. Madhavan in the Praja Sabha. In 1921, a great gathering of the Ezhavas was held in Thrissur, it demanded the King of Cochin to stop the untouchability practices. In 1923, at the annual meeting of the SNDP, which is still held in Kollam, a resolution was passed against untouchability. And these points establish that Ezhavas experienced severe untouchability in the recent past, and I must note here that in the deeper socio-cultural networks of Kerala Ezhavas are still kept outside the door. In other words, the classification by the state of the lower caste majority (SC, OBC, ST) do not reflect the reality of caste discrimination, caste oppression, and their history. I have addressed some of these processes and the confusions created by the propaganda of “Savarna Marxism” in a book chapter titled “Relocating the Ezhava Movement in Kerala”, in Development, Democracy and the State: Critiquing the Kerala Model of Development, Routledge: Contemporary South Asia, London, 2010.
In the following section I will outline, through the references to well established previous research publications, the role colonial administration played in complicating the upper caste control of public resources, the birth of Hinduism, and then in the conclusion I will return to Islamophobia.
Colonial reforms, Democracy, and Hindu Hoax
But all these bureaucratised scalologies of grading ‘untouchability’ were coming into confrontation with colonial rule at the same time. In a letter sent by the Resident (where) on 23 April 1870, it was clarified to the upper castes that ‘the roads in all cities are the property of all’, which contradicts the scalology of distance. But the Diwan if Kochi wrote in a letter to the Resident, “I believe that the British Government will not insist on the implementation of this principle here.” This letter makes it clear who the enemy of the untouchables in India and Kerala was.
From the 19th century onwards rule of law, the parliamentary system and elections became popular in India as a result of British rule. The ideas of the European Enlightenment that came to India with the European colonialists – freedom, equality, and human rights – created a new ‘self-consciousness’ among the ‘untouchable’ castes of India. British rule caused a major explosion in the ‘self’ of people who had obediently borne the yoke of untouchability for centuries. The overwhelming majority of the oppressed castes, who had believed that caste was natural and divine (hypophysics), began to view it critically. Attempts to break the chains of untouchability imposed by caste and ethnicity for centuries began in most parts of India in the last decades of the 19th century.
The upper caste leaders of India were pricked by the movements among the lower caste majority to come free of their shackles using the modern legal discourse and politics. The upper caste nationalists opposed the British policy of public roads being public property that everyone had the right to use regardless of caste, under the name of ‘colonialism’. British rule, which was felt as a foreign domination by the upper castes, was liberating for the lower castes.
As electoral victory became the criterion for political power, numerical strength became a threat to the upper castes. The upper castes, a numerically insignificant minority, had survived all this time by keeping the untouchable majority in ignorance and fear of karma. But the new situation created by British rule made the traditional survival of the upper castes impossible. The upper castes cannot win even a single panchayat ward in India with their own votes. To win, they need the votes of the untouchable castes. The untouchable castes, who have achieved their awakening, are unlikely to vote for the upper castes.
The search by the upper caste minority for a political formula that can subsume the lower caste majority under it began. Such a political program had to be both a national project and at the same time justifiable before the international community that was taking an interest in India’s nascent anti-colonial project. There were two significant moves that were made by the upper caste minority, both are different in character, but gained significant effectivity in controlling the public discourse when yoked together—Savarna Marxism and Hinduism.
As I have argued and demonstrated in the cover story of the Caravan Magazine, titled “The Hindu Hoax: How upper castes invented a Hindu majority”, Hindu religion was invented by the upper castes by the early 20th century to mask caste oppression as a feature of a larger ethno-religious identity. This has allowed the upper castes to, even today, excuse caste oppression by arguing that the lower caste majority, who are treated as less than human, are still Hindu. The “The Hindu Hoax” argues, it is as if American slavery was a religious pact between the enslaved black people and their white slave masters. However, “Hindu” has a reality only when it is opposed to Islam and other religions of India; this is very similar to the concept of “dark skin” which has reality only when opposed to “light skin”. I will come to this point again below.
Savarna Marxism, a term coined by Dwivedi and Mohan in an article “April Theses: On Democracy, Anti-caste politics, and Marxisms in India”, shows that Marxism in India deliberately suppressed the racialised oppressive character of caste and created a flummoxing public discourse on the basis of class, which has less lived reality in India. For this reason the real capital in India is caste itself—‘from the point of view of the upper castes, the caste order itself is the heritable capital, to which we erroneously gave the modest name “social capital”’.
Since these two processes took control of Indian public sphere, academic disciplines, and national projects the meaning of India and its history are both derivative of upper caste myths and their “Aryan doctrine”. If an Ezhava who has a stable income and education wants to think of his self in the larger schema of politics in India, he or she will need to look at the upper caste histories of India which are written either from the “Hindu” axis or from the axis of “Savarna Marxism”. The failure mostly of the lower caste majority movements to create alternative theories, terminologies, concepts and histories, and distribute them widely has led to a situation where the meaning of self of many a lower caste community is bound up with either “Hinduism” or “Savarna Marxism”. I must insist here that this situation is primarily due to state repression and Savarna gate keeping, which makes it impossible today for the lower caste majority to create their own public sphere and political movements.
As I said above, Islamophobia is the technology through which the upper caste minority are able to give reality to the hoax of Hinduism, and in this Savarna Marxists cannot fall behind, and it explains well what P J James in an article in the Counter Currents stated as “CPM’s inherent Islamophobia”. That is, both the “Hindu” project and “Savarna Marxism” project are intended to contain the lower caste majority and their political will under confusing categories; in this process the primary duty of “Savarna Marxism” is to serve “Hinduism”, which I had discussed in an interview published in Counter Currents titled “Class, Caste And Communism”. When Kumāran Āsān wrote about Hinduism—“The Namboothiri religion, bound together by caste itself”—he probably did not imagine that another Namboothiri Brahmin will become the first Chief Minister of Kerala, E. M. S. Namboothirippad. This earliest “bound together” character of Brahminism and Marxism is precisely the reason for Pinarayi Vijayan’s celebration of Vellapally Natesan’s Islamophobic utterances, through which Natesan has condemned the lower caste majority to continue on as servants of upper caste ambitions, and the lives of Muslims of India as the sacrifice at the Savarna altar.
Today the danger of internalising the scalology of caste through government classificatory system, which has a relation of analogy to that of distance keeping practices of untouchability, is growing. The untouchables are being divided again so that they do not unite as victims of upper caste domination. Vellapalli Natesan and his likes have taken to heart the state classification, OBC, and have repressed the reality of the ‘untouchability’ suffered by Ezhavas for centuries. The additions of “creamy layer” and other classifications create a new scalology in Indian politics, where lower caste Muslims and Dalits are falling towards the abyss. Therefore, I urge all the right-thinking lower caste majority intellectuals to not submit their theoretical and analytical exercises to the scalology of Savarna Marxism, ‘Hinduism’, and state classifications.
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J. Reghu is a political theorist and public intellectual residing in Kerala. He was formerly with the Encyclopaedia Department, Kerala. Reghu has authored several books and book chapters. His articles have been published in journals including Critique (Paris), Protean Magazine (New York), Philosophy World Democracy (Paris), and Episteme (Texas).
