Column | The Blind Spot in Literature Today | Chandramohan Sathyanathan

Mahatma Ayyankali

“I did not know of Ayyankali ” : EMS

I am told that during an interview in the year 1984, EMS – EM Shankaran Nampooripad, the “ideologue-in-chief” of the-then CPI-M is supposed to have either feigned ignorance about Mr. Ayyankali or was genuinely ignorant of one of major icons of the so-called social renaissance in Kerala. In today’s times, current Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, inaugurated the Women’s wall by honoring the legacy of Mr.Ayyankali- who was once a member of the assembly of Travancore, known as the Sree Moolam Popular Assembly (SMPA) Praja Sabha.

There are several versions of responses to this incident, on behalf of the Dalit intelligentsia. One is that Ayyankali was a public figure re-captured into the popular imagination after the rise of identity politics in the 1990s and his (EMS’) ignorance was genuine.  This is true of other Dalit icons like the balladeer and social reformer Poykayil Appachan, of whom even the acclaimed Dalit poet S. Joseph was unaware until the year 2006.

Another strand of argument claims Epistemic violence. They accuse EMS of deliberately refusing to acknowledge and engage with the subaltern knowledge and its organic production. Even till recently the contributions of Sunny M. Kuppikadu- an organic Dalit intellectual engaging with the political discourse in Malayalam language were unknown to the larger public of the people of Kerala. It is indeed tragic that K.V. Pathrose who was one of the founding leaders of the communist party in Southern Kerala has not found his rightful place in the writings of Kerala’s academics-even the Marxist historians have ignored him.

I would like to draw parallels between the kind of cataracts that plague privileged perspectives everywhere- even the advanced capitalist, first-world countries divided along racial faultlines. During my stay at Iowa city, USA for about three months as part of the International Writing Program hosted by the university of Iowa, I had observed right from the airport where I landed, that manual jobs were mostly done by blacks (immigrants from Caribbean included) and white-collar jobs were done by whites/Caucasians. Being a Dalit poet writing in English and having spent all my life here, I was very curious and empathetic towards how “the other” is being dealt with in the western hemisphere.

I had a similar experience of being subjected to a kind of epistemic violence during a panel discussion at a Book festival at Iowa, one of UNESCO cities of literature. The moderator posed a question on who would win the Nobel Prize in literature in, say, 2019. The panelists excluding me were all white and in the audience, there were a couple of black women too. Rest of the atmosphere was like #Oscarssowhite. I am under the impression that such a question is posed to elucidate one’s own cultural politics of “reading” and as a reader to enumerate which literary texts or authors are pertinent and pivotal to one’s understanding of the world as it is today.

I had suggested three names. First was Kamau Braithwaite- Caribbean-American poet based in the US who had recently won the Griffin prize for Poetry from Canada for his collection “Born to slow horses”; the second was Adunis (Syrian-Arabic), a poet based in Paris, France deftly translated by Khaled Mattawa (himself a MacArthur Fellow) and the third was Less Murray –whom many consider as one the best living poets in the English language.  To my utter dismay, the first two names were unfamiliar to the audience and there were blank stares galore. No cross-cultural eye contact was made- we were inhabiting different literary and cultural wor(l)ds.

We live in an era where poets like Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine have hogged a lion’s share of the limelight usually accorded to poets of finest repute and acclaim, but an almost white and ageing population of IOWA city were not attuned to the humungous amount of visibility of poets or writers of color had achieved in the recent times in the literary mainstream of the nation or the Anglophone world. This shows that the language of the discourse we indulge in is yet to concede a breathing space for all- leave alone the historically marginalized voices and History is something not one of us can escape from.