London: the ‘Being Untouchable’ photo-exhibition and the poetry-reading at LSE

London was, for lack of better and more imaginative adjectives, lovely.

On 20 October 2010, at the I read my poems from Touch and Ms.Militancy at the London School of Economics (LSE) Arts public poetry reading and discussion.

Well, what took me to London? I was a part of the Being Untouchable exhibition (at HOST gallery) of photographs of Indian Dalits by Marcus Perkins (organized by the Christian Solidarity Worldwide).

And, in the meanwhile, I also spoke to BBC’s Robert Brown about caste discrimination and untouchability in India. Also, read an article by David Griffiths in New Statesman on this exhibition.

Anger, art and India’s apartheid: Article in the Prospect Magazine

(Marianne Brown’s article in Prospect Magazine cross-posted from here).

In a small gallery off Old Street, a woman with a glass of wine and Vero Cuoio shoes stares at the photograph of another woman—thousands of miles away—shovelling shit from a public latrine used by 450 people. The caption says it’s a job this faraway figure merits because she is a Dalit, an untouchable, the lowest caste in Indian society.

A child severely burnt for walking on the wrong footpath, a widowed leprotic widow—the exhibition of humanitarian photographs, “Being Untouchable,” taken by Marcus Perkins, brings one face to face with the daily horrors Dalit people endure under India’s system of social stratification. It is a centuries-old system, supported even by Mahatma Gandhi.

This endorsement of subjugation by the so-called “father of the nation” is something provocative young writer and poet Meena Kandasamy asked the audience to think about as she made a special address at the exhibition on Wednesday. In one of her most controversial poems, the Sylvia Plath-inspired ‘Mohandas Karamchand’, she lampoons Gandhi’s  behaviour towards his wife and his insistence on people working only in their traditional occupations.

An outspoken feminist and one of India’s foremost Dalit poets writing in English, Kandasamy was there to give a voice to the people in the photographs, something she is famous for doing back in India. The 26-year-old published her first book of poetry,Touch, to critical acclaim in 2006. Her much anticipated second collection, Ms Militancy, distributed by Dalit-only publishers Navayana, is out in November.

It is interesting then, that Kandasamy chooses the language of colonial oppression in her poetry, a language she herself describes as “privileged”. The answer lies in ownership. “Much of the oppression is codified within language,” she says. “Poetry can attack structures and attack form. Poetry has an enormous political power which I try to use.” Also important, however, is bringing the issue to an international audience: “The only thing that can put an end to this evil system is the aroused opinion of the international community.”

They say a picture can paint a thousand words, but listening to Kandasamy read her poetry at a discussion event at the LSE earlier in the day, and one could argue the truth of that old adage. She describes herself as an angry young woman, and as she reads her work, spitting fiercely into the microphone, her passion is almost tangible.

Kandasamy was joined on the stage by journalist and founder of Navayana publishing house, S Anand. Was it problematic to set up an elitist publishing house as part of a movement to eradicate differences? Not according to Kandasamy. The Dalits have no voice in the media, she says. “What is not in the newspapers and on TV does not exist for the vast majority of people, so it is very important that Dalits have a way to express themselves.” The caste system is banned under India’s constitution, but as Dr Ambedkar, champion of the Dalit cause famously said: “it will take more than a law to remove this stigma from the people of India.”

I asked her what would happen if she lost some of her anger.

“There are only two options, either I become a victim, end up voiceless, or I become angry and I decide to act on it.” In this small gallery in London, her words resonate as the faces of the untouchables stare back at us.

(Meena Kandasamy’s collection of poems Ms Militancy is out next month published by Navayana)

The Phoenixes of Banishment and Oppression (Article in The New Sunday Express, Feb.28)

Read the official, edited version here.

Recently I had the opportunity of reading Changiya Rukh : Against the Night, the first Punjabi Dalit autobiography that has been rendered into English. Changiya rukh means a chopped tree–a metaphor of mutilation and a symbolic image of enforced stunting–of something made small and inferior so that the others appear larger and superior—an excellent parallel to the position of the Dalits in this deeply divided society.

Balbir Madhopuri movingly describes rural poverty and the hunger in the dry, wintry months, the closely-knit relationships among the Ad Dharm community to which he belonged and the centrality of his 100-year-old grandmother in shaping the lives of not only her immediate family, but almost every women in that village. Burdened with the stigma of untouchability in the Jat heartland, he grows up to learn that tea is an inferior drink because only the lower castes drink it, whereas milk was the staple beverage of the upper-castes.

In Changiya Rukh, he documents the inner turmoil to which Dalits are reduced whenever they have to conceal their caste identity. We observe instances of how, sometimes, the Dalit people themselves internalize the view of caste-Hindu society and develop a feeling of inferiority. Simultaneously, Balbir reveals how he was so upset with his Hindu-sounding surname that he dropped it and instead took up the name of his birthplace Madhopur. By expunging one identity, and taking on another, he succeeds in rejecting an entire history of oppression.

He notes how neither the Communist movement, nor the movement for an independent Khalistan actually addressed the problems of the Dalits. The pleasures of discovering Communist  literature and writing revolutionary poems is short-lived since Balbir’s immediate task at hand is to take up a job and support his family. He moves to Delhi, and with his wife and children, struggles to even find a house since caste-Hindus are unwilling to rent their flats to a person whom they suspect is a Dalit. Modern literature is replete with instances of what it means to find ones home, and literary discussions are rife with the idea of returning home, but from a Dalit perspective, the stark reality associated with ‘home’ is managing to find accommodation.

Dalit autobiographies, since their first, stunning arrival on the literary terrain, address such divisive issues that refuse to go away.

Autobiographies are also the most prominent and marketable genre of Dalit literature today. The caste-Hindu elites’ interest in Dalit autobiographies spring not only from the fact that they satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity of the non-Dalits by documenting the lived experiences, but they also provide them the necessary guilt-trip. Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan dealt with the Bhangis in Uttar Pradesh, Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi portrayed life in rural Maharashtra, Vasant Moon’s Vasti (translated by Gail Omvedt as Growing Up Untouchable in India) spoke of life in an urban Dalit slum, and Kesharshivam’s Purnasatya highlighted the plight of Gujarati Dalits.

Narendra Jadhav’s memoir Outcaste probed what it meant to be an highly educated Dalit.The publication of Dalit autobiographies, coupled with their literary assertion has recast and revitalized the literatures of the regional languages.

Semi-fictional narratives like Bama’s Karukku and Sivakami’s Grip of Change recorded what it meant to be young Dalit women under the shadow of casteism. Urmila Pawar’s Aydaan (rendered into English as The Weave of My Life) is not merely testimony but also manifesto—seeking to locate the position of the Dalit woman within the stifling constructs of casteism and patriarchy without sensationalizing or romanticizing suffering.

Every narrative has unfailingly recorded how the rural structure is strict in its segregation: Dalit wadas/ cheris/ colonies/ bastis were all set away from the caste-Hindu village, a banishment that was brutal not only because of the geographic exclusion but also because of how easy it became for the oppressors to launch violent attacks on the Dalit people. These first-person life stories are a means of expressing angst and assertion, they reverberate with an experience of pain and discriminatory politics,  and they uniformly seek to exorcise the ghost of untouchability that has haunted their communities.

For a nation that loves to live in denial, such authentic narratives will hopefully lead to a greater engagement with understanding, and possibly, eradicating caste.

Another Interview

(An edited version of this interview appeared in the Indian Express North American. Sujeet Rajan interviewed me for the weekly. This came out about a month ago, but only today I was suitably lazy to do this job)

You write candidly of love and love-making; leaving windows open to the bedroom sometimes. If it is autobiographical, how difficult is it to tabulate emotions of love and love-making through poetry?

I am not sure it is always the bedroom window I leave open, for love, after all, happens everywhere. And again, I am going to keep the suspense and not own up or disown the possibility of my poems being autobiographical! I think poetry is best equipped to enclose some emotions and exhibit others, because writing of love/ love-making in prose would simply call for too many excruciating details, and in the most cautious of cases, it would require a great deal of aesthetic and choreography to get the damn scene right. And only rarely can such elaborate construction capture spontaneity, which is what love is all about.

From an artistic medium, what is best to express love: the written word, the spoken word, brush on the canvas, silence? Why?

I have done everything but paint. And well, you have left out something which I see as central to love: movement. As in dance, as in theater, and also as in all of language.

3. Is anything taboo for you to write about?

No. Except of course if someone asked me to write a poem of praise, that tends to make me nasty.

5. You were displaced from home, from Chennai, for more than three months, having been invited to a writing residence program in Iowa. What has been the experience like?

I loved the time I spent in Iowa, and I also got to travel widely across the USA. The best part of the program was getting to meet these fabulous writers from other countries. The next best was the University library and the second-hand bookstores. My novel is about the Kilvenmani massacre, and surprisingly I completed most of the research while I was here, in a foreign nation. And lastly, I did write like crazy. I wrote the 50-odd poems that go into my second collection of poetry (Six Hours of Chastity).

6. How has the West influenced your writing during these last three months?

Nothing radical happened. And the subtle changes, if any, will have to be picked out by scholars or theorists, and even in that case, one never knows how accurate it is! I am always in a state of flux, so I do believe that coming here, and being footloose and fancy-free, would have changed me in some ways, and which would change the poetry in a sense.

7. If you were to write a poem based on the experience of your last three months, what would you write about?

I am too involved with the experience to verbalize it right away. There will be a diary at some point, and trust me, there will be love poems too.

8. You are an intrinsic part of the Dalit movement; an indelible, vociferous voice for the underprivileged in India. How do you reconcile yourself to a situation where you yourself live in a metropolitan city which is removed from the caste predicament for the most part, and now are in a developed world which has only academic interest in the problem?

I don’t think the Dalit movement is a rural movement, or that untouchability/ casteism does not exist in cities. The migration to the city does erase some identities even as it allows the scope for anonymity, but the Dalit remains a Dalit for the most part. The metropolitan cities are better suited for the Dalit movement’s growth and establishment because they allow for the Dalits to carry out democratic/ public agitations/ demonstrations without fear of a backlash, of being targetted and done-to-death and crushed by oppressor castes whose violent diktat operates much more freely in the villages. Coming to the second part of your question, yes, the developed world only has a superficial interest in these issues, which is quite disappointing. However, the struggle against caste should be waged only by those who have suffered because of it, and it should be supported by those who don’t believe in discrimination. I guess here the curiousity of the West could help since it actually brings things to the world’s attention. There’s another way of looking at it: the militant and political Dalit struggle (or even literature) has hardly been effectively theorized, or documented, so the academic interest emanating from this is certainly beneficial.

9. You write, commiserate with Tamils in Sri Lanka; is it emotional baggage for you now that crisis in Sri Lanka is no longer in the news with the Tamil Tigers gone?

The Sri Lanka crisis is now in the news in a way in which it has never been before. The US State Department’s report of what happened earlier this year in the war zone in which tens of thousands of Tamils were mercilessly bombed to death by the SL Govt., the Tamil Diaspora re-mandating their right to a homeland in the North-east, people all over the world being concerned about the three hundred thousand Tamils caught in concentration camps, Sri Lanka being the second-most unsafe country for journalists all over the world–these are issues of prime importance, irrespective of whether the media in the US, or India decides to highlight it or not. I take up a cause because I am involved with it, or I empathize for it, and not on the basis of the amount of media spotlight that it accrues. I guess the Tamil issue will always be an emotional baggage until we receive the right to a life of safety and security and self-determination. I trust that now is the time for humanitarian people all over the world to actually support the Tamil cause because things have never been worse.

10. Race, religion and caste come to play the most when elections are around the corner. In that respect the United States might not be much different from India. Emancipation apart, what needs to be done in India to remove barriers for equalization?

Yes, what you describe is the typical vote-bank scenario. I believe that equalization can come about only when the oppressors also decide that it is time for them to change, it is time for them to mend their ways. There is a possibility that such a change can come about through self-directed/ self-initiated efforts, but there are not enough pointers from history which lets us reinforce this belief. Those who seek to maintain the status quo, those who work against equalization and democratization, are known to change only when their own power is questioned and challenged. So, much of the responsibility for bringing about change lies in the hands of the oppressed people, since they have to continue their resilient struggle against oppression. If they resist the subjugation successfully, and if they manage to break out of it, then equalization will come about. It can never be beyond reach. What needs to be done in India is to encourage the freedom of the press, to bring out more stories of victimization and resistance to light, and to empower women without resorting to any cultural dogma. Anyone can observe that all systems of oppression ideally go hand-in-hand, so none of us can be free until all of us are free. For instance, I would like the feminist movement in India to really take up the ideology of annihilating the caste system not just because it is discriminatory and inhuman, but also because it is based on the control of a women’s sexuality (in order to keep the caste pedigree pure).

11. Do you agree with the quota system for the backward classes in government and educational institutions in India?

It is not for anyone to agree/disagree with the quota system, what people need to concentrate on is to ensure that all sections of society achieve real growth, and that no one is left behind and marginalized. I think the decision to extend the quota system for the backward classes (here i make a distinction from the Dalits) was taken because of their abysmal presence in both state-run educational and employment enterprises. We have to become a more tolerance and more inclusive society, and affirmative action is just one way of getting there.

12. Kamala Das backed your poetry; wrote a foreword to your debut collection of poems. Why does that mean so much to you? What do you like most about her poetry?

What Kamala Das said about my poetry meant so much to me because she is a woman who calls a spade a spade, she’s forthright and outspoken and doesn’t say things that she doesn’t mean. So, when such an authentic and genuine (not to mention accomplished and fiery) poet like her encourages your work, you just gain confidence in yourself, and you channel more efforts towards writing more, representing people more. I love her poetry, because she broke the barriers against Indian woman writing on troublesome/ taboo topics; at the core of everything, she was truth-seeking. Personally, I also adore her flamboyance, her fire.

13. How do you reconcile poetry with reality? Does imagination triumph?

My poetry is rooted in my reality: the reality of the Dalits fighting against caste-atrocities and violence of the oppressive forces who want to subjugate them, the reality of women who still have to fight to assert their equality and their rights, the reality of Tamils who have to express themselves in spite of the worst kind of threat to the freedom of expression, who have to struggle against systematic genocide in their own homeland. My poetry is a product of all my multiple, coexisting realities–right now, I don’t think I outsource my poetry to imagination.

Book Review: Muslim Portraits

Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India
By Mukulika Banerjee (Editor)
Publisher: Yoda Press
Pages: 142 + xxii
Price: Rs.250

By following a policy of alienation and exclusion towards its Muslim population, India has earned a fair share of criticism. The Sachar Committee exposed how Indian Muslims have suffered from prejudice, poverty and political disenfranchisement. The committee’s report showed that Muslims lag behind in literacy, they are under-represented in the armed forces and government jobs. They find it hard to rent a home in cities, they struggle to get a bank loan anywhere. They are systematically criminalised: Muslims form 12 per cent of the Indian population, but make up 40 per cent of the prisoners languishing in its jails. Statistical and sociological studies have sketched this story of marginalisation, but by revealing the faces behind these facts, Muslim Portraits, an anthology of profiles of individual Muslims, comes to possess a legitimacy that is hard to refute or replicate in formal discourse.

In this book, anthropologists who have studied Muslims societies in contemporary India, profile one single individual whom they have befriended during the course of their research. These 11 engrossing life-stories, narrated from places as far-flung as Lucknow and Lakshadweep, let us encounter the diversity of lived experience and force us to step out of the sin of stereotyping.

Manuela Ciotti’s pen-portrait celebrates the friendship (and fictive kinship) of a Muslim barber Islam and his Chamar friend Jannulal in a village near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh as a testimony to the egalitarian spirit of Islam. On the other side of the spectrum, Shail Mayaram’s story of the story-teller Abdul belonging to an untouchable service caste called kamin, brings out the caste discrimination faced by mirasis within the Muslim community.

Brian Didier’s sketch of an alim in Lakshadweep highlights the extent to which Islam has adapted itself in order to stay in tune with age-old native practices. Didier, brought up on “searing television images of ayatollahs”, admits to having deep-seated biases about Islamic clerics that are unseated when he meets Koya. Not only does this alim uphold the island’s matrilineal heritage, but he also refrains from condemning Sufi practices because he considers social harmony the greatest virtue of Islam.

The only profile from Gujarat is about a guide, Mohammed Husain from Bhuj, who survived the earthquake of January 2001. I would much rather have read the story of a survivor of the violent Hindutva carnage in February 2002, when thousands of Muslims were massacred in Gandhi’s home state. The closest this book comes to documenting a conflict situation is through Thomas Blom Hansen’s story of Javeedbhai, a local don in Mumbai whose gang stood up against the police force and warded off Shiv Sena attacks on a Muslim locality in January 1993, shortly after the Babri Masjid demolition.

The portraits of four women challenge popular assumptions. Patricia Jeffery’s portrait (co-written with Roger and Craig Jeffery) of Aisha, the only female teacher at a madrasa in Bijnor, reveals a vivacious young woman who makes excellent and engaging conversation. Aparna Rao chronicles the story of Khatij, one of the unheard voices from the Kashmir valley. Khatij hasn’t even heard of ‘Bharat’, but she is politically aware enough to condemn the torture and atrocities carried out by the armed forces from ‘Dilli and Hindustan’. Sylvia Vatuk’s memoir of Dr Zakira Ghouse, who earned her doctorate at 73, and Soumya Venkatesan’s portrayal of Banu Beevi, a panchayat president, show us strong women who transcend the boundaries of gender, religion and social status because of their ambition to make a mark in this world.

Stereotyping Muslims has ensured that they are shorn of personal histories. Systematic vilification and disinformation campaigns have made them the first subjects of blame in their own country. Aggressive Hindutva and the global war on terror have strengthened Islamophobia and Muslims have been relegated to a nameless, voiceless existence. This book is a commendable attempt to correct that and could go a long way in healing new and old wounds.

Published in The New Sunday Express. Read the official online version here.

Poetry Book Review: Praveen Gadhvi’s Voice of the Last

The theme of inverting and recast(e)ing myths runs through Praveen Gadhvi’s first collection of poetry in English. While some of the images that he invokes have been tried and done-to-death in Dalit literature, a few others stand out because of his unique poetic approach. Take for instance the lament inherent in these lines: My blood is wine to arouse your inner beastliness / Otherwise, my son Bharat, the black heir of your white blood will not be untouchable for you. (Soliloquy of the Untouchable Shakuntala). The poet succinctly describes the plight of the rejected Dalit woman, who in turn rejects Dushyanta, the ruler, the twice-born. And by choosing to attack the first love relationship described in the Mahabharata, Gadhvi proves that a great deal of our myths should be subject to a radical rereading.

Read more here…

Menstruating Goddesses

Published on Ultra Violet

When it was announced recently that the first batch of non-Brahmin students were being ordained for priesthood in Tamil Nadu, it was a great reason to cheer and celebrate that priesthood has been “officially” thrown open to all the castes and that Brahmin exclusivism was set to break (at least theoretically). But, what is disappointing is that all women are denied this right and there is no talk in Tamil Nadu of any legislation, anywhere in the near future, to grant them the right to officiate as priests.

I could branch off into a tangent, right now, right here, and talk about how women are being systematically treated as a caste, and how that in turn leads them to being denied equal rights, being treated as untouchables, being discriminated against. And this, despite the obvious fact that women don’t form a homogenuous category except on the basis of their sex, and that not all women are equally disadvantaged. But I will refrain from my urge to track the caste-patriarchy nexus, not because it doesn’t exist, but because the phenomenon of depriving women the right to become priests is a disease that has infested most of the world’s religions.

Religions, whether Abrahamic  (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) or Eastern (such as Hinduism) consider a woman to be in a “fallen state” during her periods. Whereas, religions which grew as a response against caste—which encoded the concepts of purity and pollution—such as Buddhism and Sikhism condemn the practice of considering women as “impure” while they were menstruating.  

This ancient issue of impurity during menstruation has ensured that women in the reproductive age group are barred from the Ayyappa temple in Sabarimala in Kerala. The contentious reasons merit a monstrous tag: presence of fertile women causes trouble to Ayyappa’s volatile bachelorhood, and that sometimes, the menstrual odour would attract wild animals in the forests through which the pilgrims have to traverse. New age religious sects haven’t updated their views on menstruation either: Mata Amritanandamayi’s sect runs temples where two women are appointed as priests to a single temple “so that each can keep away for four days in a month, during their menstruation.”  (I am unaware of who the priest would be when the two women’s cycles begin to sync.)

Article 17 of the Constitution of India abolished caste-based untouchability, but perhaps we need another section/amendment to abolish menstrual taboos. Or, haven’t our religions heard of “seminal” fluids yet? What is their pollution quotient? Then, if pollution is any problem, will our holier-than-thou holy ones switch over to battery-powered priests? By the way, do these menstrual taboos apply to our goddesses? Are there days in every month when they too begin to pollute the temple?

While these logic-defying practices fall within the ambit of organized, mass religions, local practices fare no better either. The Times of India (June 8, 2008, Chennai edition) carried a report on how a Tamil Nadu state minister had on May 27 inaugrated an ‘isolation room’ for women during menstruation in the remote village of Thuvaar in Thirupattur. According to the ToI report, a soothsayer had predicted that rains failed because the village gods were antagonized over the fact that the ‘Muttukuruchi’ system had been discontinued for the past few years. In order to revive the system of isolating women and young girls on their attainment of puberty, the villagers had constructed the cramped eighty square foot isolation room were bleeding women would be banished.

Thousands of years ago, the Mayans believed that menstrual blood changed into snakes used in black magic. It appears that we hold on to such regressive beliefs, and haven’t really come of age yet.  

and the wall was broken

The increasing media attention and political pressure made the state drop its status-quoist approach and the Chief Minister said he was ready to rope in the army to Madurai if that is what is required to maintain equality. And the caste Hindus decided to hand over their ration cards and move en masse to a nearby hillock just to register their protest. Non-Brahmin forward castes, in this case, the Pillaimars (or Vellalars) are responsible for this meanness. And Prakash Karat came, visited the village, and went. Bad story, good ending.

Except what angered me was reading in a BBC news-report that the caste-Hindus were “afraid” of the “anti-social” elements among Dalits. And they haven’t returned to the village, they are still on the hillock. Since when were Pillaimars afraid of the Dalits? And how did people who had the right to build a wall of untouchability have the right to label others “anti-social”? And why does this irrational “fear” come about? Is it merely because they know that they have been in the wrong all these years? Does this “fear” arise because they know that Dalit people have a legitimate reason to be angry, a just reason to hate and hit back?

Ayyankali

In devoting this blog excessively to my personal life, or my phd or my poetry, I have done a major disservice to my non-fiction and translations. So, I think I should remedy this situation, and write about two of my books that were relased in the past 6 months. The more recent one (published in Jan 2008) is a biography of Ayyankali, in which I am the second author. The first author, M. Nisar is teaching history in the Maldives, and this book grew out of his M.Phil thesis submitted to the University of Calicut.

This book was a major learning experience in my life. Never before have I felt this humilitated or this guilty by just reading history. If somebody who extensively edited and rewrote and added a few sections feels this way, I know how a reader will feel.

It is a little over a hundred pages, makes a very interesting read because it deals with Kerala’s caste-system (that madhouse, according to Swami Vivekananda), has charcoal illustrations by renowned artist Raghavan Atholi and a foreword by Kancha Ilaiah. It is published by Other Books, an alternative publisher with a thrust on titles related to Muslims, Dalits and Kerala history. Their tag-line goes, Serious Reading. It is run by Dr. Ausaf Ahsan, dynamic  and supportive and tolerant, and more than that: very encouraging. And my friend Anver Sadath works with Dr.Ausaf, so working with them has been really worthwhile though we did run into a few glitches now and then. (all the blame should go to my Ph.D. degree: I was responsible for the undue delay in its getting into print because I had to manage my coursework and this book. I feel miserable because such things aren’t done purposefully. Sometimes the stress eats me up. Sometimes my guilt kills me.)

Read a review here (from Dalit Voice). Here’s the blurb from the back-cover:

Pulayars, one of the many Dalit communities in Kerala, were ordered to keep at a distance of ninety-six steps away from a Brahmin, not allowed to cover themselves above the waist or below the knees, denied admission to public roads and subjected to endless oppression. Besides, they were bought and sold as slaves even up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Ayyankali (1863-1941), one of the foremost Dalit leaders, challenged these brutal caste codes.

This book chronicles his organic protest in Travancore and provides a critical analysis of the social reform movements in Kerala under the colonial rule. It seeks answers to a lot of questions: How did the various reformist organizations disintegrate into instruments of caste consolidation? How did western education and colonial modernity affect the orthodox setup? What was the role of the middle class in the development of community formation? Why did the so-called reform movement refuse to bother itself with the problems of the poor, the women and the Dalits? How did the Dalits, who were inferiorized and oppressed, react to these changes? What fuelled the emergence of Dalit leadership? What were the changes brought about in the social landscape of Kerala by Ayyankali’s movement?