---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anil Tharayath Varghese <aniltharay...@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 31, 8:41 am
Subject: The many "Vices" of Chitralekha -J Devika
To: FEC-Fourth Estate Critique
http://kafila.org/2010/01/29/the-many-vices-of-chitralekha/#more-3777
Chitralekha, a dalit woman from Payyanur, Kannur, has been in the news
since 2005, for her open challenge to the CITU in that left bastion.
An autorickshaw driver, she had protested at the CITU’s constant
interference at work and the intensely male hostility against her
presence in an almost exclusively male line of work. Braving
‘character-assault’ from the CITU which called her a ‘loose woman’, a
‘regular drunk’ and so on, she continued working until,in December
2005, her autorickshaw was burned down. She fought, however, and was
supported by various Dalit, Feminists and Citizen’s initiatives. In
June 2008, she procured a new autorickshaw with their support. This
did not mean that she was now acceptable to the CITU . Now recently,
she complained that the CITU had seized a chance encounter to beat her
and her husband, and the police, who arrived on the scene, took them
to the police station and unleashed even worse violence. Her
complaints have been ignored or treated with hostility by the
mainstream media in Kerala. Activists and concerned persons in and
outside Kerala, however, have rallied to her support.
I have been deeply perturbed not by the media (such pallid response is
just what we should expect, perhaps!)but also by the reactions of many
activists and ex-activists — whose have had long experience in
fighting for democracy — which echo these responses. I was quite
shocked when a respected activist from Chitralekha’s town, told me
just the other day that she lacked ‘ethics’ . I don’t want to list the
complaints he made — but he made her look like a shady character who
couldn’t be trusted on financial matters. And therefore we should not
‘waste’ much time on ‘her’.
I do not know whether all this is true, but even if it is true, I
think it does not affect our efforts.
My recent research into self-help groups in Kerala does reveal that
there are thousands of women in Kerala who do not repay their loans,
have to be pressurised into making prompt repayments, and indeed use
whatever little influence they have to get away. Now, this often hurts
the group which has women poorer than this borrower. However, in a
society like Kerala where the mad rush for upward mobility and the
hegemony of consumer-citizenship is too evident to be missed, how can
a thinking person so readily attribute such behaviour to the
individual’s personal ‘character’ failing? True, it is indeed a
problem for activists that increasingly people in Kerala are
resembling the rational agent of neoclassical economics — but does
that justify our silence when an underprivileged person ( who may be
behaving so) makes a complaint about harassment?
And I was also rather surprised by the manner in which the campaign
was understood as ‘helping Chitralekha’. This smacks of the older
style of social reformism in Kerala in which the Reformer-Man built a
certain relationship of non-coercive influence with women he intended
to reform (as part of the Reformer’s Burden) and therefore would
reject those women who disobeyed. I was part of the campaign to raise
resources for her rickshaw, but I always thought that this was not so
much ‘helping’ her, as making a point to the dominant powers! I don’t
think any of us can ’save’ anyone or that we should try to– and in
any case if at any point one feels that the victim is making
unreasonable demands or demands that are beyond our strength, one can
always state that clearly and take a stand.
But I’m not surprised if the ‘victims’ make such demands either! One
of the shifts we have seen in the 90s is towards a kind of activism
closely enmeshed with the thrust towards global governmentality.The
kind of relationship between activism and the groups she/he tried to
reach out to was often close to that of a caregiver — and the very
same power relationship that exists between caregivers and receivers
is reproduced here too. I often think about why the many new groups
that appeared in Kerala’s political fields did not grow into strong
and thriving movements — many have fallen back into invisibility.
There are many reasons, including shifts in global funding and so on,
but the non-sustainability of the above relations looks like a key one
to me. If this is the case, we ought to engage in self-reflexive
thinking — on why is it that, in these times, when we try to get
together a group of women in Kerala for any issue, we are besieged by
women asking what aanukoolyam (benefit) is on offer — rather than
blame the poor.
Another ex-activist told me, shockingly, that there was nothing anti-
Dalit about this! He was citing ‘drunkenness’ as a reason to ignore
the incident. Now, I have seen events in which leading Malayalee
intellectuals came dead drunk but that did not affect their minds at
all — but I have also seen unbelievable nonsense being spewed by such
characters and indeed demonstrate utterly abusive behaviour. But in
the latter occasions, they were always quietly — almost gracefully —
removed from the scene. And this is not just my experience — a friend
was recently sharing memories of how, during the 1980s, when public
poetry readings were common all over rural Kerala, there used to be
requests made over the mic that ‘all the poets sitting in the toddy
shop may kindly come over to the stage’! Mind you, it isn’t that such
events were always superior cultural events! So how come it looks ok
to react violently when an underprivileged woman gets drunk and gets
rough? And there being nothing anti-Dalit! I asked this person if a
daughter or wife (i.e suitably inserted in a familial role) of a
powerful Nambiar feudal family of the area got drunk and created a
fuss, will she be treated similarly? She would be removed from the
scene and maybe beaten at home, but would she be beaten on the road
and dragged into a police station? No, he had to admit.
A particularly interesting reaction was about the people trying to
support her: they are ‘outsiders’, apparently, not located within
Kerala and therefore suspect. Well, maybe those who voiced this fear
haven’t noticed that Kerala, since the 1970s (and actually much
earlier) has not been contained between Gokarnam and Kanyakumari, and
that we are now a diaspora. It is despicable to argue that Malayalees
who live outside the State should not intervene in what goes on here.
We aren’t so bothered, it appears, about predatory forays of big-
moneyed expats whose ‘interventions’ are radically altering the very
geography of Kerala, turning every bit of land into nothing but real
estate to be readied for their insatiable consumerist appetites! But
it isn’t as though all expats are thus. In fact if there is any way to
strengthen the women’s movement in Kerala, which is truly feeble these
days, it is by getting rid of the Gokaranam-tol-Kanyakumari image and
building networks between anti-patriarchal forces here and people who
have fled Kerala’s secularised brahmanical patriarchy and taken refuge
in other parts of India and in other countries!
But the worst was the way in which this ex-activist quipped, almost
casually, that Chitralekha was ‘out of her mind’. So what should we
do, I asked him, shut her up in an asylum? Get her out of your eye-
shot? Oh, no, he said, recommending yet another dose of ‘help’ and
‘care’. Maybe he was right. Chitralekha has a lot to gain through
being the CITU’s good girl. The Kerala government has approved of
fifty percent reservation of seats for women in local governance and
soon there is going to be a hunt for candidates, especially Dalit
women candidates. Maybe only women out of their mind will tangle with
them now! Ah, my friend, if that is the case, there are a few more of
us who should be out of your eye-shot, shut up in mental asylums!
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