Over the last few decades, autobiography as a genre has turned into a bit of a shape-shifter, incorporating within it increasingly subversive life narratives that do not just tell the story of one individual’s life but excavate political, sociological, and cultural micro-histories. Memoirs, diaries, autobiographical fiction, graphic narratives, have all negotiated space within the conventionally defined category of first-person life history.
Re-framing subaltern history
Laura Marcus in her Very Short Introduction reads the genre as existing “on the borderlines between many fields of knowledge”, while at the same time pointing out that its primary function is that of representation. Dalit writer and activist KK Kochu’s autobiography, Dalithan, translated from the Malayalam by Radhika P Menon, fits perfectly within this paradigm. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “A Worker Reads History”, Kochu sets out to challenge dominant narratives: “Mega-narratives are full of kings, castles and battles; there are no servants, no people who are trampled upon, no animals who slump in sheer exhaustion after pulling the vehicles. These people who are ignored and rendered invisible too are creators of history. Microcosms, that are ostracised, too need to get space alongside the macrocosm.” Eschewing the imagined role of autobiographical narrative as “an attempt to recover the truth of the past”, Kochu tells the story of his life to re-frame a subaltern history, to give a voice to invisibilised caste and class identities, and in doing so, also writes a powerful critique of the lapses and inadequacies of the Communist parties in Kerala. In its obvious social commentary, Dalithan exemplifies how the personal is always political.
Born in a Pulaya family of Madhuraveli village in the district of Kottayam, Kerala, Kochu was witness to the systemic rot that normalised the unforgivable inequity between the landowning Namboodiri family and the Pulayas and Ezhavas whose labour their land (and their coffers) prospered off. Undercompensated and perennially poised on the brink of starvation, agricultural workers had no control over the produce of their labour. He writes of the gaps in history where the rich past of the Dalit community’s organisational activities in Madhuraveli and its neighbouring areas, centred around the Pulayas, went unrecorded and exists now only in fragmented oral accounts that are often unclear and undependable.
When the past has been willfully erased, literature – legends, stories, poetry, songs – can perform acts of redressal. Kochu tells the story of Untaan, a Pulaya young man from a century ago, who stole from the rich to give to Pulaya families and protected vulnerable women, emerging as a symbol of resistance to caste dominance and oppression. Untaan was murdered brutally by the savarna Hindus and powerful Christians whose hegemony he threatened. Police collusion ensured that the crime went unrecognised and unpunished. Years later, Untaan’s story was reclaimed by Dalit activists and organisations. Erasures are also caused by forced uprooting and Kochu writes of the displacement of Pulaya families, the loss of their past and consequent ruptures in communal memory. Lived experiences, stories of political resistance, as remembered and narrated by his mother, as well as legends like that of the Pulaya boy murdered by Nairs, who came back to haunt them and avenged himself on his aggressors, all come together to re-construct the socio-political history of a marginalised caste, as part of this subaltern project.
One of the focal areas of the text is the Dalit community’s experience of, participation in, and disenchantment with Communist parties in the state. The first communist government in Kerala was formed in 1957 and despite its promises to agricultural labourers, was responsible for the eviction of many families, including the writer’s own, in the wake of the Land Reforms Bill. During the Liberation Struggle – the anti-Communist protest of 1958-59 – Ezhavas and Pulayas, who formed the largest numbers of Communists, were subject to violence and destruction of means of livelihood. Neither the Congress nor the Communist governments brought any significant changes in patterns of caste behaviour and caste-based oppression.
Kochu refers to the Renaissance movement, focused on the annihilation of caste, led by stalwarts like Mahatma Ayyankali, an icon of Dalit assertion, whose organised resistance led to gradual but definite shifts in both cultural behaviour and power dynamics. He writes extensively about his work with SEEDIAN, the organisation of Socially Economically Educationally Depressed Indian Ancient Natives, comprising primarily of intellectuals from various facets of Marxist ideology. Starting from 1986, he worked as contributor to and editor of the SEEDIAN magazine, intent on educating his readers about current crises and interventions as well as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought and politics. He makes a nuanced critique of the Naxal movement and its failure to expose the repressive measures of the CPI-Congress coalition, thereby becoming irrelevant to the labouring classes. In its detailing of Kochu’s work, ranging from student politics to mobilising mass protests, to setting up a publishing house and the wide range of his critical writing, the book puts forth the writer’s political vision of inclusion, activism and self-assertion with tremendous clarity.
A diligent memoir
In her Translator’s Note, Radhika Menon has identified Dalithan as the “first vital, full-blooded and comprehensive Dalit autobiography in Malayalam”. Kochu’s writing, sparse and conscientiously unsentimental, wears many skins. It is a witness account, an activist’s diligent memoir, as also a meticulous recording of a subaltern history. Reliant on what Paul John Eakin calls “identity’s twin supporting structures, memory and narrative”, the text, somewhat surprisingly, steers clear of its author’s personal life. Kochu’s early childhood in Madhuraveli and at his mother’s maternal home during the period of his parents’ estrangement, the story of his grandfather’s defiant escape from slavery, his experience of college, are all extensively detailed, but his two marriages are dealt with, rather brusquely, in a total of six sentences. His children, similarly, are mentioned only in passing.
In the concluding chapter of his narrative, Kochu states that he was not the “main actor” in any of the struggles he participated in and had served only a representational role, refusing to align with any one political organisation. This, he asserts, is his reason for keeping his personal life out of his autobiographical discourse. However, the discrepancy between the expansive space given to his parents, his childhood home, his intuitive understanding of the politics of food, and, are but the template of much of early Marxist politics in India, cognisant of all inequities except that of gender. Despite this gap, Dalithan asserts, insistently, its role as a crucial cultural-historical-political document that needs to be read for all the speaking truth to power that it does.
Dalithan: An Autobiography, KK Kochu, translated from the Malayalam by Radhika P Menon, Speaking Tiger Books.
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