Dilip Menon

The study of the political is a fraught enterprise. Much thinking on the political happens in the abstract and with a rugged sense of prolepsis, proceeding from the belief that there are already existing ideal states in some places as opposed to others. European analysts of areas called the Third World, the global South and other appellations ask the question: when will true democracy come to these areas? They ask this question unreflectively from their own sclerotic institutional and ideological spaces, where politics has become about elections and government, rather than about emancipation, human belonging beyond narrow ideas of the citizen, and so on. Fortress Europe, to use the current cliché, has generated little in terms of political thinking trapped as it is within ideas of borders, nations, and passports. It is time for a rethinking of politics and that too away from the congealed, self-congratulatory genealogies of Euramerica and its “mythical space time of philosophical thought” (5).

Ideas like the Global South give pause to conceptions of untrammeled mobility and fluidity and reassert that we need to rethink the world anew from a different standpoint. The notion of the Global South represents an attempt at an Archimedean point, from within, rather than outside the earth, a fulcrum with which to realign the world with its multiple inheritances of colonialism, the Cold War and of the unipolar present. In this essay, I shall draw upon the Kochi Biennale, and artwork from its two iterations in 2012 and 2014, to think afresh a possible project of knowledge and affinity in the Global South.

ABSTRACT The Communist Party of India (CPI) adopted a revolutionary line in 1948, but agrarian insurrection was efficiently suppressed by the newly independent Indian state. The CPI moved towards an engagement with parliamentary communism, and in 1957, Kerala became the first state in the world to elect a communist government to power. However, the idea of transformative, revolutionary violence stayed alive and became the premise for brutal internecine warfare between the Left and its opponents in the northern part of Kerala. This paper argues, pace Benjamin, that this violence must be seen as instituting another law than that of the state, positing the ideal of justice over the mere rhythms of parliamentary representation.

This essay looks at two early texts by a Hindu religious figure, Chattampi Svamikal (1853–1924), from Kerala, the southwestern region of India. Kristumatachhedanam (1890) [A Refutation of Christianity] and Pracina Malayalam (1899) [The Ancient Malayalam Region] draw upon a variety of sources across space and time: the echoes of contemporary debates across India and Empire as much as the detritus of the Enlightenment contest between rationalism and religion in Europe. Does the location of the text in “colonial India” exhaust the space-time of its imagination? The essay argues for a porous rather than a hermetic understanding; the “text” was a supplement to the actual verbal confrontation on street corners and arguments in ephemeral print. The real question is how can historians write postnational histories of thinking? How should we engage with times other than the putatively regnant homogeneous, empty time of empire or nation? I argue that there is an immanent time in texts (arising from the conventions and protocols of the form, the predilections of the thinker, and imagined affinities with ideas coming from other times and places) that exceeds the historical time of the text.

... Again Madhavan calls for a qualified acceptance while the atheist uncle is prone to the call of the nation to be born. ... The novel deals with a dominant Namboodiri Brahmin landlord who embarks on a journey into the heart of the darkness within his soul after having occasioned ...

Preface List of abbreviations Glossary Map of Malabar District administrative divisions Introduction 1. The agrarian economy and households, 1900-1930 2. Shrines and the community of worship, 1900-1910 3. Shrines, temples and politics, 1900-1930 4. Civil disobedience and temple entry, 1930-1933 5. The transformation of rural politics, 1934-1940 6. Community and conflict, 1940-1948 Conclusion Bibliography Index.

The study of the political is a fraught enterprise. Much thinking on the political happens in the abstract and with a rugged sense of prolepsis, proceeding from the belief that there are already existing ideal states in some places as opposed to others. European analysts of areas called the Third World, the global South and other appellations ask the question: when will true democracy come to these areas? They ask this question unreflectively from their own sclerotic institutional and ideological spaces, where politics has become about elections and government, rather than about emancipation, human belonging beyond narrow ideas of the citizen, and so on. Fortress Europe, to use the current cliché, has generated little in terms of political thinking trapped as it is within ideas of borders, nations, and passports. It is time for a rethinking of politics and that too away from the congealed, self-congratulatory genealogies of Euramerica and its “mythical space time of philosophical th...

Page 1. DISCUSSION Peasants and Politics in Malabar Dilip M Menon ... So what is new in my book (as reviewers like Robin Jeffrey in IESHR, Susan Viswanathan in The Book Review andRadhakrishnan Nayar in the Times Literary Supplement have generously recognised)? ...

... Acknowledgements: For comments on this paper, both in its period of gestation as well as its long hibernation, I am grateful to G. Arunima, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Peter Burke, Nivedita Menon, Polly O'Hanlon, Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar. ...

Black lives and histories are to the fore at the moment: from #BlackLivesMatter in the United States to the movement to decolonize syllabi and pedagogy in South African universities. The film Black Panther is watched within a visual and political terrain in which the black body is presented no longer only within histories of previous abjection—slavery and apartheid—but in visions of future reconstitution. This article will put together the changing representation of T’Challa from 1966 to the present in Marvel Comics and the film and argue that blackness has meant different things at different times to the creators as much as within the historical circumstance within which the black superhero has been seen and understood. Central to this has been the dilemma of bringing together the histories of “Africa” and the tenements of the United States—Wakanda and Oakland, California, in the film, and Harlem, New York, in the comic books.

... Buchanan. writing of his tr.avecls through Malabar. wrote of the nairs as soldiers who disdained industry [Buchanan 18071. It must be borne in mind that he was travelling through the region within a decade of Tipu's defeat. ...

The study of the political is a fraught enterprise. Much thinking on the political happens in the abstract and with a rugged sense of prolepsis, proceeding from the belief that there are already existing ideal states in some places as opposed to others. European analysts of areas called the Third World, the global South and other appellations ask the question: when will true democracy come to these areas? They ask this question unreflectively from their own sclerotic institutional and ideological spaces, where politics has become about elections and government, rather than about emancipation, human belonging beyond narrow ideas of the citizen, and so on. Fortress Europe, to use the current cliché, has generated little in terms of political thinking trapped as it is within ideas of borders, nations, and passports. It is time for a rethinking of politics and that too away from the congealed, self-congratulatory genealogies of Euramerica and its “mythical space time of philosophical thought” (5).

Studies of Kerala tend to be land centred and concentrate on agrarian relations, landed households, and temples. Sitting beside the Indian Ocean, Kerala has been part of the rhythms of the ocean for millennia. What would it mean to think the histories of the land and maritime together? This paper looks at the history of oceanic involvement, the fragility of monarchies, and the changing relations of Mappila Muslims to structures of power in the 18th century

Delivered as the 10th Daniel Thorner Memorial Lecture in 2000, this paper looks at arts and the aesthetic vision in the 1950s in India and argues that a radical left impulse became subordinated to the demands of the nation-state, development and the Nehruvian vision. It looks at art, Hindi cinema and Malayalam theatre; in the latter a revolutionary peasant imagination initiated by the communist mobilisation from the 1930s gave way way to a participation in the idea of economic progress over revolutionary change

ow far does one have to go back in time to trace a history of the present? Arguably, colonialism with its narrative of the distinctiveness of post-Enlightenment epistemologies has abbreviated our notions of time in the writing of history and social theory. This essay is a preliminary reflection on the historical writings of 'Kesari' Balakrishna Pillai (1889-1960), literary critic and intellectual from the then princely state of Travancore in southern India, who embarked on two remarkable intellectual projects in the 1930s. The first was to steer the Malayali imagination away from what he saw as the sterility of English literature towards an engagement with literary modernism in Europe, psychoanalysis, and an affinity with Asian literature. The second attempt was to write a history of Kerala outside of the categories inherited from the colonial writing of history and its limited temporality. Pillai's writings on Kerala begin with the myths of the flood and the civilizations of Babylon and Sumeria. What does this leap across time and space mean as a theoretical and epistemological enterprise? Why does Pillai bring up the category of anubhavam or experience to redress the imperative of objectivity central to colonial history writing? How do conceptualizations of experience and the longue durée as much as grand espace help to create a counter-history to the history of the world presented as the history of European expansion? H

Black lives and histories are to the fore at the moment: from #BlackLivesMatter in the
United States to the movement to decolonize syllabi and pedagogy in South African
universities. The film Black Panther is watched within a visual and political terrain in
which the black body is presented no longer only within histories of previous abjection—
slavery and apartheid—but in visions of future reconstitution. This article will put
together the changing representation of T’Challa from 1966 to the present in Marvel
Comics and the film and argue that blackness has meant different things at different
times to the creators as much as within the historical circumstance within which the
black superhero has been seen and understood. Central to this has been the dilemma of
bringing together the histories of “Africa” and the tenements of the United States—
Wakanda and Oakland, California, in the film, and Harlem, New York, in the comic
books.

This essay looks at two early texts by a Hindu religious figure, Chattampi Svamikal (1853–1924), from Kerala, the southwestern region of India. Kristumatachhedanam (1890) [A Refutation of Christianity] and Pracina Malayalam (1899) [The Ancient Malay-alam Region] draw upon a variety of sources across space and time: the echoes of contemporary debates across India and Empire as much as the detritus of the Enlightenment contest between rationalism and religion in Europe. Does the location of the text in " colonial India " exhaust the space-time of its imagination? The essay argues for a porous rather than a hermetic understanding; the " text " was a supplement to the actual verbal confrontation on street corners and arguments in ephemeral print. The real question is how can historians write postnational histories of thinking? How should we engage with times other than the putatively regnant homogeneous, empty time of empire or nation? I argue that there is an immanent time in texts (arising from the conventions and protocols of the form, the predilections of the thinker, and imagined affinities with ideas coming from other times and places) that exceeds the historical time of the text. South Asian history after the subaltern studies moment has moved to a writing of the intellectual history of colonial India. Although at one level this represents an attempt to take seriously forms of intellection by indigenous intellectuals, in its form and method it may signify a return to an elite history that privileges elite thought, national identity, and a hermetic understanding of writing and texts over the contextual and miscegenated spaces of the historical imagination. The dichot-omy of writing about elite thought and subaltern action, instituted by subaltern historians, continues. Thinking, as Borges once said, is the normal respiration of the intelligence. I suggest we need to integrate intellectual history, the history of ideas, and social history; destabilize the idea of a text through emphasizing the circular relation between texts and the oral contexts of public debate and intel-lection; and stress the necessarily transnational space of intellection. To argue for the putative " integrity " of a text or of an author's thought does not reflect sufficiently on the fact that texts are constructed in an imagined dialogue with a constituency of auditors as much as readers. This is so particularly in the largely illiterate but information-rich context of colonial Indian society. As Karin Barber puts it evocatively: how can we engage with addressing " an imagined world and an imagined public that is simultaneously very local, and of

Gandhi’s lauded text Hind Swaraj is born of and located within the 19th c crisis of liberal democracy and its resolutions of an intimate animosity towards the masses. Gandhi shares considerable terrain with Indian liberals writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, the text can be seen as articulating a certain kind of conservatism that attempts to think with “recovering liberties” that Christopher Bayly charts in all its nuances of a global historicism, statistical liberalism and a benign sociology. While Gandhi draws upon this burgeoning corpus of liberal thought in India, his work is characterized by its typical impatience with ideas, and a method that combines random observation with apodictic statements. The Hind Swaraj resisted many of the impulses of Indian liberalism, even when thinking from within it, in its attempt to forge a politics of indigeneity.

The study of the political is a fraught enterprise. Much thinking on the political happens in the abstract and with a rugged sense of prolepsis, proceeding from the belief that there are already existing ideal states in some places as opposed to others. European analysts of areas called the Third World, the global South and other appellations ask the question: when will true democracy come to these areas? They ask this question unreflectively from their own sclerotic institutional and ideological spaces, where politics has become about elections and government, rather than about emancipation, human belonging beyond narrow ideas of the citizen, and so on. Fortress Europe, to use the current cliché, has generated little in terms of political thinking trapped as it is within ideas of borders, nations, and passports. It is time for a rethinking of politics and that too away from the congealed, self-congratulatory genealogies of Euramerica and its “mythical space time of philosophical thought” (5).