Abstract
In engaging with the debate on modernity, this article constructs the notion of a ‘subaltern modernity’ as a process of epistemological – spatial/temporal/agential – coalescence constituting a transverse solidarity politics. This is empirically informed by the narratives of the livelihood-environmental resistance launched by subalterns in the Indian state of Kerala, known for its twin legacies – of communist government and social development – which have proved to be a direct challenge to the state/corporate-led developmentalism in the region. The article thus attempts to contribute to the debate on modernity more from the perspective of resisting subjects and agents, with their particular subjective experience and understandings of science and reasoning. However, their resistance generates transformative events of universal relevance and thereby global issues of epistemology. As such, the article develops a theory of knowledge that takes subaltern resistance itself as modernity.
In January 2003, the highlands of Kerala in the Indian south had witnessed the birth of what could broadly be called a tribal republic, when hundreds of adivasi families, with women, men and children led by the adivasi Gotra Mahasabha, occupied the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in an assertion of their right to land and livelihood. In the days that followed, they had begun humanising the landscape by cultivating the land stripped of its forests by state-led developmentalism; they had also attempted to realise their own imageries of modernity in the form of collective living and schooling. In 2004, the state had been persuaded to take a firm stand on the production and sale of Coca-Cola, actually forcing a shutdown of the factory in the village of Plachimada as a direct consequence of a political ecological protest movement. This was the first time in the hundred-odd years’ history of the US-based Coke that it was forced to withdraw completely from operations. In another development, in May 2010, the Left-oriented state government was driven to a historic ban on the use of more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the result of more than a decade and a half of struggle and movements by the local agrarian communities in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on state-owned cashew plantations.
These historic events in the Kerala region of the global South, far from signifying a ‘lost modernity’ (see Woodside, 2006), are evidence of history in flux or what Santos (2014) would call, the ‘sociology of emergences’. The history of modernity as a collective project is thus no longer in limbo in this part of the world, as is clear from the engagement with the subaltern 1 resistance-movements inviting debates on and a re-articulation of received knowledge and practice.
Modernity or Shades of Modernity?
While any conceptual reading of modernity is problematic, and considered by various scholars as ‘muddled’ (see Chakrabarty, 2011), ‘vexed’ and even ‘slippery’ (Washbrook, 2010), it takes on a more creative hue when seen as ‘modernity as liberation’ (Wallerstein, 2000) – the triumph of humankind over oppressive forms of privilege and authority. This is particularly so when one finds most scholars debating on modernity from varying perspectives 2 (see Appadurai, 1998; Bhambra, 2007; Dussel, 1996; Eisenstadt, 2001; Gaonkar, 2001; Harding, 2008; Kaviraj, 2005; Taylor, 2004; van der Veer, 2001; Wagner, 2001; Wittrock, 2000) do not disagree with the point that the enlightenment ideals – a greater degree of equality, justice, dignity, freedom and egalitarian values – form the essence of modernity. In the context of Europe, Habermas (1987, 1996a) views modernity as an ‘incomplete’ phenomenon but one which could be ‘retrievable’. It is incomplete as an intellectual project as the ideals envisioned as part of enlightenment as a universal project are yet to be realised.
From the perspective of the global South, Santos (2012: 46; 2014: 43–67) maintains that Habermas’s view of universalism was to be an ‘imperialist universalism’ and was thus limiting, with a fair degree of control over ‘what it includes and excludes’. It necessitates, Santos asserts, alternative scientific practices visualised through plural epistemologies. The south Asian scholars, particularly those associated with the Subaltern Studies project, maintain distantly related views. Chakrabarty (2000: 4) argues that the phenomenon of modernity implies certain categories and concepts that are deeply rooted in the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe and thus it is impossible to think of modernity without invoking them. Hence the ‘ideal figure’ is utopian (Chakrabarty, 2002: 36), one who could pose a challenge to ‘thought systems’ and who seeks autonomy from ‘enlightenment rationality’ and ‘universality’. Those who agree with this themselves have different views as to how this should be addressed.
While Chakrabarty (2000: 16) himself proposes a renewal of heritage modernity – as opposed to a complete rejection of modernity itself – particularly ‘from and for the margins’ – there are others who suggest that what is to be discarded is the notion that the route to modernity lies via Europe alone (see Roy, 2015, 2016) or those who argue for ‘interdependence among processes and events’ (Dietze, 2008: 82). As concepts are not empty categories, there is much to be lost through a complete conceptual negation of modernity, particularly for those scholars who conceptualise modernity as simultaneously distinctive and Western European in its origins but interconnected (Bhambra, 2007: 2–3) and who emphasise its ‘substantive democracy’ (see Wallerstein, 2000), ‘Knowledge-as-Emancipation’ (Santos, 2014: 136–161, esp. 138) and egalitarian assertions (Roy, 2015). The routes that various scholars attempt to chart differ, but they meet at a centre-point in terms of interrogations of hierarchy and assertion of egalitarian ideals from below.
While I am largely in agreement with the observations of Bhambra (2007), Roy (2015), Santos (2014) and Wallerstein (2000), I am also in sympathy with the position that as long as modernity remains incomplete in Europe as Habermas argues, it behoves upon the non-West to bring it full circle (Davutoğlu, 2000: 174). This would be particularly relevant in the presence of suitable alternatives (Santos, 2006, 2008); and if it is an elitist project run by privileged groups and does not provide space for the marginalised and the silenced (Fraser, 1997, 2014), I would argue that it needs the agency of subalterns to make good its shortcomings through negotiation and resistance. It would thus emerge that it is the substantive democracy and egalitarian assertions conceived and practised by the subalterns that make modernity possible and universally relevant. However, I differ from them as the process of ‘intercultural translation’ between social practices and their agents (Santos, 2014: 212–235, esp. 222–235) and the ‘interrogations of hierarchy and assertions of egalitarian ideals’ (Roy, 2016: 103) are by and large limited to processes within cultures and boundaries, which are restrictive in themselves.
First, while the idea that the local-level interrogations and conflicts making modernity live does offer critical insights into the understanding of modernity, more work still needs to be done in terms of making its theoretical understanding more comprehensive. Second, while it is true that modernity is born from within a conflicting terrain, there is a failure to move beyond the immediate bordered cultures, where again, more needs to be done to understand the processes of modernity making on a global level. I propose the notion of epistemological coalescence at multiple levels – spatial, temporal and agential – to capture this process and help bridge the inadequacies. I further argue that it is the simultaneity in the production of knowledge and practice across cultures and continents that bring to the fore of what is called global epistemology, a theory of knowledge that takes subaltern resistance itself as modernity on a global scale. Not only knowledge production but also a mutual intelligibility to the effect of ‘global cognitive justice’ (see Santos, 2014: 212–235) completes this circuit and it is only at those historical junctures that the co-production of knowledge and practice with universal relevance is acknowledged.
As Bhambra (2007) rightly points out, what matters is the recognition of patterns of integration in particular instances, and their subsequent projection and adaptation to other sites and thereby the challenge thrown to pre-existing hierarchies of knowledge. It also implies that the ‘self-knowledge’ of neither the West nor the South could be developed in isolation from the other. I also propose the notion of transverse solidarity politics (TSP) to capture the shared antagonism due to the materialist-structuralist premises generating spaces of articulation and resistance and thereby a new meaning for subaltern ontology. 3 The TSP conceived here locates the processes of structural impact and penetration of capitalism aided by the state in distorting the material lives of the subalterns. The latter in turn negotiates with opposing and supporting forces, conscientising the state as well, (see Raman, 2008) to build up a historical agency, though working essentially within cultures but not confined to local boundaries. In doing so, it opens up the possibility of a universally relevant reasoning and agential intervention pitted against the globally hegemonised relations of power.
The present article thus attempts to supplement/contribute to the debate on modernity more from the perspective of resisting subjects and agents, with their particular subjective experience and understandings of science and reasoning. Further, their resistance generates transformative events of universal relevance and thereby global issues of epistemology. 4 As such, the article develops a theory of knowledge that takes subaltern resistance itself as modernity and locates the ‘ideal figure’ not in the realm of autonomy in isolation from the rest nor from the values of universality but integral and embedded to the production of global epistemology with liberatory effects. The present article identifies Kerala as its geographic and historical location, and examines how multiple levels of exploitation/oppression drive subalterns to attempt to transcend forms of ‘localised globalisms’ (Santos et al., 2007) as imposed through northern epistemologies and instead generates transformative events of universal relevance.
Framing Subaltern Modernity: A Process of Epistemological Coalescing
Subaltern modernity as conceived in this article results from a coalescing of various concerns at multiple levels, being mutually inclusive. In this article, I confine myself to three such levels – spatial, agential and temporal, all towards an epistemological shift – which I hope would also help accentuate the process of overcoming the ‘inertia of disciplinarity’ (see Santos, 2009).
By spatial coalescing, I mean the cumulative impact of disparate movements that shape not only the place or location in which they emerge in response to an apparently local issue at a particular point in time, but also other locations of struggles, thereby impacting on an entire region or a nation-state as a whole. In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958: 198–99) reveals how the ‘space of appearance’ becomes a political project: when and where people get together and act, and we appear to others as others appear to us. This place–space dialectics which is also implicit in Lefebvre (1991) becomes all the more liberative when political practices are ‘organised around place in form yet extend in substance to embrace space’ (Merrifield, 1993: 527, emphases in original). In Spaces of Hope, Harvey (2000: 38) has successfully explored how capitalism has used its powers of ‘spatial manoeuvre to defeat place-bound proletarian/socialist revolutions’. Going further, Kohn’s Radical Space (2003; also see Howarth, 2006) is all about how spaces of resistance and identity formation challenge the hierarchies of power relations with a focus on various sites of workers and popular mobilisation. ‘Spatial is social relations stretched out’ as Massey (1994: 2) would say; it is equally important to unravel the stretching out processes of space, the agents and the aspects of, to use Santosian own language, ecologies of knowledge (Santos, 2014: 175–176, 188–211) involved in the sociology of emergences (2014: 182–187), and to understand and appreciate the outcome as a new emancipatory politics.
There is very much an agential coalescing as the initiatives and participants of the various movements, while not exactly crossing over in physical terms except on certain occasions, borrow and share the basic notion of social and environmental justice and strive towards such goals. Closely connected with this is the coming together of identities – particularly those of caste and gender – to create an agential plurality of indigenous communities, caste dalits and minority communities including poor Muslims, backward castes, all with their ‘general attribute of subordination’ (Guha, 1982: vii), who form outliers in the wider process of developmentalist modernisation. The agency unleashed thus becomes the combined force behind a subaltern countervailing power which no hegemonic power could easily overcome.
Apart from the above, the coalescing of the various resistance-movements, although separated in place, even within a region, exhibits a fidelity to the original conception of enlightenment. This process of temporal coalescing implies the past lending strength to the present. This involves not only an undoing of historical and contemporary forms of developmentalism as capitalist modernisation that alienate the subalterns from their surroundings but also the reconstruction of the present and the futures as possible alternatives, a practice realised through transverse solidarity and politics. This also has resonance with what Sewell (1996) calls ‘evenemential temporality’ in the sense that what has happened at an earlier point in time offers lessons for a future course of action generating a fresh sequence of events across cultures and continents. This, I would argue, creates and supplements the process of an epistemological coalescence wherein it is not the distance and mutual discredibility between the epistemologies of the global South and the North/West that matters, but rather the power of combining and intertwining the commonness with the attendant move towards egalitarian and ethical forms of existence. Subaltern modernity thus represents a new web of hope: through evental temporality there occurs a collation of place, space, agents and time which opens up a window to global epistemology. The modernity that thus emerges make the future one of sustainable cohabitation through assertions and the combined production of cross-cultural liberatory knowledge helping shape mutually intelligible and reinforcible norms of social existence simultaneously advancing egalitarian ideals. This has been empirically informed by the resistance-movements in Kerala.
Kerala: The State with a Unique Modernity
Kerala has thus far passed through four overlapping phases of subaltern modernity, with the hegemonic forces themselves shifting, from imperialism to caste and the state as interactive forces. This shift was also unfolding across historical contexts, namely colonialism, decolonising conditions and post-Independence state formation. The first major revolt against the British in India was in the hill tracts of Wayanad in 1812 where the Kurichyas and Kurumbas – indigenous communities – challenged the British officials and the military apparatus with their traditional weaponry for their exorbitant revenue rates and their militant modes of collection. Though the rebellion was crushed by the military might of the British, it became the most symbolic and practical instance of the power of the bottom–up rebellion against imperialist forms of oppression that marked the first phase of subaltern modernity as resistance. The egalitarian project of colonial missionary activism 5 led by the modern aspirations of the local castes and communities who were oppressed by the feudal lords and the princely Hindu state helped usher in the second phase of modernity in Kerala, to be continued by social reform movements in the state. The subaltern castes in the region, by and large, allied themselves with the missionaries in challenging the Hindu state and thereby shared the way in which modernity was understood and enlightenment rationality was practised in Europe: the emergence of public spaces, markets and a move towards liberal democracy. In 19th-century princely Travancore, for instance, lower-caste women were not allowed to cover their breasts but this dress code as a mark of caste distinction was challenged with the support of the missionaries and colonial officials and this successfully formed the self-assertive solidarity politics of the time.
The early 20th-century history of Kerala, in continuation of the above, saw the rise of powerful social reformers such as Ayyankali (1863–1941) and Narayana Guru (1854–1928) from those outside the chaturvarnya, the Hindu caste order. While publicly declaring his dream of seeing at least 10 members of his own depressed caste dalits – who were considered the lowest in the caste hierarchy of the Hindus – graduate from university, and even refusing to till the agricultural lands owned by the caste Hindus in retaliation for a denial of admission to schools for their children, Ayyankali showed how modernity as education and resistance come together. The followers of Narayana Guru, according to Osella and Osella (2000: 9–10) asserted that it was through ‘dialogue between local ideas of justice and equality and European-derived notions of modernity and reform’ that one of the outcaste communities – the Ezhavas – repudiated their 19th-century selves and constructed their notion of modernity. Guru made a signed declaration in 1916 that ‘we do not belong to any caste or religion’. Like many other teachings of Guru, this was to the effect of appealing to ‘rational scientific empiricism, using modernist frames of discourses’ (see Osella and Osella, 2000: 224). Vakkom Abdul Khader Moulavi, a Muslim reformist scholar, started the Swadeshabhimani (the Patriot) paper in 1905 using a state-of-the-art press imported from England and opened up a critical print culture in the state. Subaltern Islamic modernity further found expression in a series of uprisings and movements (Mappila rebellion of 1921, for instance; see Ansari, 2005). In the above cases the ‘decolonising epistemologies’ (see Grosfoguel, 2011; Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2000; Santos, 2014) did not appear to have played a unifying role in invoking their collective sense of self. Instead, it was the reinstatement of the enlightenment ideas of egalitarian norms and the instituting of ‘egalitarian protocols’ (Guru, 2009: 222) on the one hand, and an anti-colonial/anti-feudal reprisal on the other, that helped crystallise their collective identity.
This process of necessitating the creation of a common agenda by socio-religious movements and intellectual contributions was further consolidated by decolonisation and an emerging labour class. The princely states – Travancore and Cochin – too responded positively to the bottom–up resistance by the subaltern castes and classes and the pressures from colonial administration and thereby initiated land reforms, and expanded education and health care (see Desai, 2005). The formation of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, which later became part of the Communist Party of India on the strength of workers’ unions, agrarian and industrial struggles and egalitarian assertions (see Isaac, 1985; Oommen, 1985) within the larger decolonising mode, marked another phase in Kerala’s modernity. The formation of unions, agrarian and industrial struggles (see Isaac, 1985: 5–18; Oommen, 1985) and the nationalist movements in the state prompted the two princely states and the Malabar of the Madras presidency to form the state of Kerala in 1956. It was the broad alliances – tenants in the north, landless industrial workers in south and fresh solidarities among the oppressed sections of the dominant religions (the Hindus, Muslims and the Christians) in conjunction with the ideals of enlightenment such as equality and freedom (see Desai, 2005; Heller, 1999; Isaac, 1985; Jeffrey, 1978, 2010; Kannan, 1988; Lieten, 1982; Menon, 2007) that became the primary source of parliamentary political power of the communist government of 1957, thus marking the third phase in Kerala’s modernity.
Apart from the protest movements from below and the state’s responses, the growth plan initiated by various states in India followed Nehruvian developmentalism in the post-Independence phase. Despite coming under ‘communist rule’, this development content in terms of heavy industrialisation, hydel power, scientifically managed agriculture and advances in scientific and technical education remained equally applicable to Kerala, with EMS Namboodiripad, the first Chief Minister of the state, admitting that he had turned to communism under the influence of Nehru. It was also clear that he had visualised the modernisation pattern before coming into power in 1957 (Namboodiripad, 1946), though much of the egalitarian ideals that were in the writings and documents of the Communist Party were lost during their implementation (see Devika, 2010). Thus, Kerala began to experiment with the unique notion of social democracy first under the Marxist government, then under alternate power structures every five years with both the left- and the right-wing governments. The communists played a critical role, both in the passing of the initial Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill of 1959, with the effect of fixity of tenure to the tenants and hutment dwellers, as also the Kerala Land Reform Act 1969 with the effect of abolishing landlordism. 6 However, these pieces of legislation were only partially successful. The introduction of ceiling provisions was a failure as the corporate plantations remained exempt from land ceilings. Moreover, the party failed to block fake transfers of land from the previous landlords, which effectively reduced the surplus lands available for distribution. Further, it excluded the outliers, the dalits and adivasis as the land was given to the tenants, despite the fact that the rallying point for communist mobilisation was ‘land to the tiller’ (see Mannathukkaren, 2011; Radhakrishnan, 1981; Ramachandran, 1997; Rammohan, 2008; Sreerekha, 2010), a frequently invoked question amidst the contemporary land struggles such as Chengara, Aralam and Arippa land struggles by the subaltern castes. The state then aggressively followed routes to modernisation such as industrialisation, technological up gradation and major capital investments. One of the first major developmental projects in Kerala under the first communist rule, in keeping with the Nehruvian developmentalism, was to invite the Birlas to invest in the state, in an attempt to redeem it from its industrial backwardness (Rammohan and Raman, 1988). State-led developmentalism, however, intensified further, and ascended through a variety of forms – large-scale monoculture cashew plantations along the lines of colonially evolved coffee, tea and rubber wherein the indigenous people were displaced at multiple levels for releasing forest lands (Raman, 2015 [2010]) and so on; multinationals such as Cadbury and Coca-Cola followed suit (Raman, 1991, 2008). However, while the social model came to be lauded for progress and human development making Kerala a comparatively better place to live (Dreze and Sen, 1995; Franke and Chasin, 1989; Jeffrey, 1978, 1992; also see Oommen, 1990; Parayil, 2000), the livelihood-environmental issues of marginalised communities emerged as domains of exclusion, struggles and resistance (see Kjosavik and Shanmugaratnam, 2015; Kunhaman, 1985; Kurien, 1995; Raman, 2010; Sivanandan, 1979; Steur, 2015). 7
Contemporary Sites of Power/Resistance
Three sites of contemporary power/resistance among others are explained below. The Dhebar Commission of 1960 suggested that all lands that had been seized since 26 January 1950, the day on which India became a Republic, be restored, but to no avail. The Communist Party backed Congress government had passed the Scheduled Tribes Act (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) 1975 which legally assured the restoration of alienated lands to the adivasis. The various amendments that followed complicated the land question even further (see Bijoy and Raman, 2003; Raman, 2002). By the year 2000, many of the adivasi groups in the state – the only ethnic minority in the state of Kerala, constituting 1.14 per cent of its 31.8 million population – had come to realise that their legal battle over the 1975 Act legally assuring the restoration of alienated lands to the adivasis gave scant consideration to the fundamental question of rehabilitation of the 45,000 landless families, not to mention the larger question of self-governance for the entire adivasi community. Despair gave rise to revolt: in one instance, a few women of the Ayyankalippada waylaid a civil supplies truck to unload and feed starving adivasis (Raman, 2002).
CK Janu, an adivasi leader and M Geethanandan, a former dalit Maoist, took a different route backed by hundreds of adivasi families. On 30 August 2001, while mainstream society was celebrating Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala signifying prosperity, hundreds of adivasi families erected ‘refugee huts’ in front of the Chief Minister’s residence and the offices of the State Secretariat in the Kerala capital of Thiruvananthapuram. They demanded their right to livelihood, land for the landless. Within the past two years, more than a dozen deaths from starvation had been reported in the state.
The Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha (AGM) negotiated a fresh pact with the state government in October 2001 agreeing that five acres of land would be given to all adivasi families and greater autonomy to the local indigenous communities (Bijoy and Raman, 2003; Steur, 2010). Little was done, with the state bureaucracy and its political leadership in collusion with other sectarian interests ignoring this agreement with the adivasis. The forest department refused to release even its degraded forest-lands and all the while surplus land that lay sequestered under big capital remained untouched. To radicalise the resistance, the AGM asserted their land rights by occupying the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in January 2003. They converted barren lands to build their own villages and schools. However, on 19 February 2003 – after 42 days of occupation – the armed state police drove them out of the land in a most brutal fashion: even killing Jogi, a middle aged adivasi man in the Muthanga encounter; a policeman was also killed during the fight. As recently as 2014, the ‘procrastination politics’ of the state, 8 has resulted in the adivasis returning to the State Secretariat to establish the latest phase of their resistance.
The Muthanga occupation was symbolic of the deep discontent among adivasis and their assertions to rights of ownership and autonomy, derivative of indigenous struggles in the global South. This movement for land, food, shelter, constitutional provisions and reparation for losses incurred by foreign intervention holds parallel to indigenous movements elsewhere, for example the Zapatistas in Mexico. I would argue that it represents a classic case of Santosian ‘translation’ between the cultures of the global South. Continuity in such cross-cultural translation processes is evident from the common demand across borders for bread, freedom, dignity and social justice (e’eish, horreya, karama, a’adala’hijtima’iya in Arabic, see Plaetzer, 2014) in the post-2011 uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (also see Achcar, 2016). As in the case of the protests in Kerala, these upheavals were also couched within regional cultural practices while resonating well with cross-cultural processes in the global South. Equally important was the convergence of egalitarian ideals through the enlightenment project, thus translating ideals between the North/West and the South while remaining free from essentialist epistemological notions.
Another livelihood-environmental resistance that rocked the state of Kerala was the movement against using endosulfan on state-owned cashew plantations. From the late 1970s, the Plantation Corporation of Kerala (PCK) had carried out aerial spraying at least twice a year on export-oriented commercial plantations within the limits of 11 panchayats in the northern most Kasargode district. For many years, local communities were unaware of the consequences. The situation gradually changed with an increase in reports of localised diseases, media reports highlighting the same and often directly attributing those to the aerial spraying of the pesticide endosulfan; thus raising public awareness. However, the scientific community was slow to accept the truth (see Rahman, 2015). For instance, the state-run Kerala Agricultural University was initially of the view that the use of pesticides was not as deleterious to the health of the local community as was being portrayed in the media. This called for an ‘insurrection of the subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1980: 81) and/or ‘knowledges born in struggle’ (Santos, 2014: 239, 136–161) with the spraying workers and their poor families – mainly the minority Muslim communities around – having to sensitise the larger scientific community to the effects of endosulfan on their diseased lifestyle.
Studies across the world involving various scientific institutions and bodies strengthened the arguments of the local communities: liver disease, cancer, and other such deadly afflictions were found to have a direct causative link with the long-term application of endosulfan. Both occupational and non-occupational exposures have caused residues in the blood of agricultural workers who sprayed endosulfan (Arrebola et al., 2001, cited in Watts, 2008), and in the male offspring of women agricultural workers in Spain (Carreno et al., 2007, cited in Watts, 2008) as also across the world. 9 International organisations such as the FAO, WHO and the UNEP had expressed their concerns in varying contexts over the hazards involved with endosulfan use and why alternatives – in terms of both knowledge and material production – were to be identified and assessed. This was a case of Santos’s (2006, 2008) and Foucault’s (1980) notion of epistemological coalescence wherein the application of modern scientific expertise was legitimised by the insurrection of subjugated knowledge, challenging what Santos calls the ‘totalising knowledge of modernity – modern science’ (Santos 2012: 63; fn10).
Local agencies such as cultural clubs, community organisations, agricultural scientists, medical doctors and various environmental and science groups (Society for Environmental Education in Kerala, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), etc.) brought the campaign to a new turning point. With its motto ‘science for the people’, the KSSP had found much acceptance among the highly literate middle class in the state. The public outcry in Kerala grew so strong that the government was forced to declare a ban on the use of endosulfan. This reflected on discussions and debates at the Stockholm conference favouring the endosulfan ban across the world. This was also a classic case of epistemological coalescence across cultures and borders wherein the subaltern struggles in Kerala not only helped the local populace but also aided in the completion of European modernity.
The third in the series of resistances, also a newer form of epistemological coalescence was the anti-cola struggle by the adivasis and the dalits in the Plachimada village of Palakkad. In the global South, developmentalism was followed by neoliberalism by the late 1980s, states directly negotiating with foreign direct investments. Kerala had welcomed yet another multinational to set up a factory in its northern district of Palakkad which, as if re-enacting history, turned out to be a major livelihood issue for the local population. Once again, the affected subalterns, the tribes and dalits, were forced to protest, drawing support from across civil society and other environmental agencies and organisations in a massive movement against Coca-Cola. The villagers of Plachimada were joined by social activists and NGOs warring against the 100-odd cola manufacturing units across the country turning the Cola Quit Plachimada movement into a nationwide Cola Quit India movement (Raman, 2008, 2010).
The struggle had had its beginning with the local indigenous community complaining that its drinking water was over-mined and polluted and led to many diseases among the local populace; it was gradually proved that the latter was due to the effect of treated effluents from the factory. Interestingly, the issue of excess mining of ground water and pollution of water was initially distorted, from both the scientific as well as the legal points of view; the question of pollution did not seem to exercise the Judiciary to any extent and many of the basic issues were initially side-lined. Further, the threat of imminent closure of the factory brought the workers of the factory in counter-protest against the loss of jobs. This sequence of events had the effect of slowing down the anti-cola campaign.
It was when the movement was briefly in abeyance that the UK-based University of Exeter came forward with the studies done by David Santille, which revealed high levels of two toxic metals in the solid waste discharged by the multinational. This first of all represents ‘alternative loci of knowledge production’, in this case, the West but not ‘imperialist’ in the least, with the subjective experience as organic inputs supplied by the global South. This also triggers ‘alternative thinking about alternatives’ (see Santos, 2014: 118–135) forming yet another form of creative translation or cross-border fusion of knowledges. The report from Exeter was broadcast in ‘Face the Facts’ on BBC Radio on 25 July 2003 making a transnational communicative sphere possible.
The consequences of such an intercultural and intercontinental translation were significant: first of all, it added a fresh impetus to the anti-cola campaign with wider solidarity from the state and also attracted much international attention. It also persuaded the state and other scientific bodies to re-engage with the question of pollution caused by the disposal of waste. Following the BBC report, an analysis of sludge and effluent, jointly conducted by the Kerala State Pollution Control Board indicated, in a reversal of its own earlier verdict, that the concentration of cadmium in the sludge was high, and making it worthy of classification as hazardous waste. The Board instructed the Company not to let the sludge out of the factory premises and to desist from supplying it as fertiliser. Whether the application of new technologies would have settled this matter or whether the multinational would have taken appropriate measures for the disposal of effluents are related questions that remain unaddressed. These fundamental questions are important, but what is more important is the fact that the otherwise subdued subaltern voices on autonomy over material resources and the necessity of contesting the macro-structural power relations were amplified to the extent that they brought the cola factory to closure, although this did extract a cost in terms of employment (see Raman, 2010).
Re-Imagining Subaltern Modernity and Transverse Politics: Emerging Narratives
I would like to reiterate the dominant theme of the article, the building up of subaltern modernity, and how that engagement with subaltern practices and resistance in an eastern theatre shaped the emergent notion of knowledge as emancipation in a regional context but with universal relevance. Four subsidiary narratives emerge on the process of coming together.
In terms of agential coalescence, what sets the above mentioned livelihood-environmental activism of Kerala apart from similar experiences in the West is its subaltern origin and the broad-based support engendered in the course of the struggle. The first and foremost concern for these activists is their own livelihood and survival, which in turn is intimately related to the question of access and control of livelihood-resources such as land, forests and water and the cultural and sovereign autonomy in controlling them. This not being assured either by the state or capital, a conscious intervention is called for from the larger society which is ready to re-imagine their future with alternatives (see Escobar, 1995; Santos, 2006): one free of concentration of resources in the hands of few, one free of pesticides, or even ‘free of cola’ at some point in history.
Thus the hitherto marginalised subaltern leads the general public towards an ethics of enlightenment. It is she/he as part of a collective project who informs the public about the finer nuances of livelihood politics. Becoming enlightened thus becomes a project of the political in relation to the subaltern and extends itself to the larger public. In this sense, the notion of transverse solidarity politics represents the agential plurality that gradually takes shape and also shares in many ways Scott’s (1998) construction of everyday resistance by a confederation of culturally distinct agents that reject high modernisation. The struggles are simultaneously ‘scaled up’ and translated on varying occasions to stand up to the rising international regime and its representative power forms – national big capital, for instance, or multinationals or various scientific/non-scientific institutions. The moment of revolt of the subaltern agency, thus need not always carry with it the ‘moment of failure’ as subaltern theorists (see Prakash, 1994: 1480) would have us believe.
In terms of praxis, the sites of resistance in Kerala as explored above demonstrate the possibility of a universalising newness in struggles with their unique aesthetics of mobilisation and protests. First of all, it is not the pre-meditated universals that matter most but the ‘public use’ of reason (Kant, 1991: 55) searched out from the particulars and emerging from the coalescing of epistemologies filtered through solidarity politics that lends fresh meaning to enlightenment. Second, the struggles though essentially of indigenous character, each have both radical and Gandhian elements – in terms of both violent and non-violent forms of protest – which blend together to form an irrevocable agency of change. This radical leftist-Gandhian confluence is imaginative particularly in light of globally influenced radical movements such as the Chiapas-based Zapatista movement in Mexico which gradually moved away from guerrilla tactics to the simultaneity of negotiation and protest: the intercultural translation that Santos talks about. It implies that the ethical element of new struggles occupies an intermediate zone between violence and non-violence, the relative weightage often depending upon the historical contexts and socio-structural conditions.
If opening up a historical epoch through resistance constitutes modernity, and rightly so, it could be attributed to the transformation and translation of a series of place-based struggles into spaces of bottom–up resistance with a shift in emphasis in response to shifting hegemonised relations of power. While the imperial and traditional caste hegemonic forms were the targets of subaltern resistance during colonialism, it was the state-led, capital-driven developmentalism that became the target of attack in post-colonial Kerala. While the state had to bow to the agential and transverse power displayed by the subalterns and their allies and show a willingness to redraw the lines of developmentalism and thereby disrupt the routines of the political system as Habermas would argue (see Couldry, 2014; Habermas, 1996b), capital was in turn persuaded to accept the limits of its own logic of accumulation. Neither the economic logic of development and growth nor the employment euphoria helped capital withstand the subaltern politics and ethics of activism and in this process the orthodoxy that state and civil society are always at opposite poles was also challenged. State resilience in favour of the civil society-subaltern led conscientisation project – thereby departing from the dominant views on state (see Jessop, 2002; Kapferer, 2005; Scott, 1990, 1998; also see Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 1990) – also offers spaces of hope from particular locations to universals.
The third narrative is about the power of knowledge which in turn brings us to the question – knowledge as emancipation (Santos, 2008, 2009: 103–125, 2010) – the process of synthesising knowledge negotiated by the people themselves as part of their own notion of liberation. Pre-existing versions of ‘scientific’ knowledge were re-understood, countered and re-represented through the articulation of everyday livelihood-environmental struggles. This process of combined production of knowledge, taking place across cultures in varying historical phases, induced a Santosian translation at multiple levels. First, there occurred a translation between various subaltern ‘counter publics’ (Fraser, 1997: 69–78) towards transverse solidarity. Second, there was a coming together of subaltern groups and indigenous knowledge and local scientific expertise. Third, it helped achieve an international validation of the way in which the subaltern subjective experience and local science and the associated knowledge is practised bringing a global legitimisation to the subaltern resistance ontology across cultures. This reinvented politics fashioned by subalterns with the active support of socially progressive forces in the society; there could also be historical situations in which the state itself becomes a co-agent in the egalitarian movements from below.
Signposts from the Eastern Theatre and the Challenges to Critical Sociology
Could the Kerala version of subaltern modernity be considered universalising in any respect? This is the question which forms the fourth and last narrative. What are the major signposts that Kerala offers to the rest of the global South in terms of praxis and practising critical sociology? 10 In the case of various sites of resistance as noted above, the people, particularly the victims, have been making their own history by expanding the larger ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004), challenging power without actually appropriating it (Holloway, 2002). The emergent subaltern modernity in the state also spills over to a universal validity as it is by and large framed within the enlightenment ideals. Further, the brief history of livelihood-environmental–livelihood politics in the state offers two insights: first, that subaltern activism is not linear as the movements went through peaks and troughs. Yet it could also be characterised as a ‘politics of prefigurative community’ as Epstein (1991) states in the context of the decline of the old Left in the USA; it becomes equally applicable to the modernity of subaltern agency in a state which alternated power with left-wing forces. But in contrast to the USA where the movement declined in momentum, Kerala offers a different trajectory towards success by constantly ‘revolutionising the mind’ and consciousness (see Israel, 2009), more often outside the mainstream left domains.
The emergent space is one in which the northern and southern epistemologies not only meet but undergo a levelling of pre-existent hierarchies. This would also help critiquing ‘pre-determined hierarchies of knowledge’ and power (Bhambra, 2007: 154). Further, it also represents a historical situation wherein, in a reversal of history, the North/West would be persuaded to take cognisance of the emergent knowledge production through struggles. The subalterns thus, instead of ‘provincialising Europe’, resist Europe in making particular linear claims over knowledge, including modern science and its reasoning. The ‘ideal’ subaltern is thus not one who insulates herself/himself from these processes of collective historical consciousness, but acts to help transnationalise the project of modernity by ‘intertwining’ themselves with the larger civil society (see Gramsci, 1971: 52; also see Sreekumar and Parayil (2010)), state and egalitarian institutions.
The project of modernity thus resists any attempt from the hegemonic forces – either from the North/West or from within the nation-state – to make it further invisible and has come to be a presence that is ‘retrievable’ indeed. It embraces mutually intelligible forms of knowledge generating a global epistemology constituted by a theory of knowledge that situates subaltern resistance as modernity which simultaneously translates and transforms knowledge and power of the present on a global scale. The combined production of knowledge at the University of Exeter in the UK and the local region of Kerala helped challenge the northern-based power relations epitomised by Coca-Cola. Similarly, the lobbying power of the pesticide multinationals was also challenged by the joint effort of the local and international campaigns. If it is the absence of a shared ‘social imaginary’ between the global South and the North that Fraser (2014) points out as a factor presaging the failure of the scaling up of the public-sphere, then would this global epistemology help achieve that target? As Europe has failed to generate any internal critique against its current atrocities in relation to a range of issues, ranging from waste disposal to the global South to the fight against terrorism in the Middle East or dealing with the issue of human flows from peripheries to the European core, 11 the Kantian coming of age is increasingly becoming a utopian ideal in the West as it produces multiple reasonings for the exercise of its power relations over the rest of the world. But there are sparks of hope in terms of the sociology of emergences from the global South which prompts one to think and act locally only to light up the global in these most critical of times.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is thankful to Bruce Kapferer, NR Levin and GK Bhambra for their valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. I am extremely thankful to the two reviewers who have offered very generous comments making this article more comprehensive.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.