Kozhikode: What are the forms of violence we talk and write about, and what are the forms we largely ignore? Do the boundaries of land define the boundaries of human experience? And what does it mean to truly study the everyday lives and histories of people?
These are only some of the questions Professor Dilip M. Menon, director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and Mellon Chair in Indian StudiesUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, engages with in his work. On the sidelines of Kerala Literature Festival 2025, he spoke to The Wire about deviating from conventional history writing, the lasting importance of the Constitution of India, and more.
Edited excerpts from the interview follow.
You’ve said in the past that your writing – your engagement with the ocean and the maritime, and the way in which you look at history – is a disruption from the space-time of conventional history writing. What does that disruption entail and why do you think it’s important?
The disruption is at various levels. I don’t see myself as a disruptor – it is actually a kind of attempt to stand beside an existing historiography which I have been part of for so many years. So in one sense it’s also an attempt to come to terms with what I left out of my own work.
So the reasons for thinking about the ocean are many. There’s the fact that I began working on Kerala and immediately I was drawn into a literature that was centred on land. It was about land relations, and certainly with the growth of the communist movement it was about peasant struggles, and so my first work was on that. I did try and bring up this question of the fact that pepper prices were crucial, the fluctuations and the demand and supply of pepper globally, but that was like a minor coda.
The question that came up really arose out of my work at the British Library. I came across several pamphlets written by ‘lower’ caste people who had travelled across the seas and who wrote their descriptions of the ship. The descriptions were like a description of utopia; nobody recognised who they were, they could be anybody. There was food available. People sat next to each other. People talked and laughed with each other, and there was a paradigm emerging very different from that of indenture and slavery. These were people who voluntarily chose to travel in order to better their lives, and engaged in work in Southeast Asia and in West Asia, which at that point was continuous with the British Empire and British India. And so then I thought, the ocean is actually acting as a disruptor here, these are people who are coming back and challenging hierarchy.
The second thing was that when one thinks about the fact that Gandhi’s career begins in South Africa, but then he returns to India and becomes a resolutely terra-centric person. There’s a closure of the Indian mind where Nehru, who’s been speaking at the League Against Imperialism and so on, then goes on to write the Discovery of India which stops at the sea. It’s a book that refuses to get its feet wet. So then the question arose as to what were the ailments of something like this imagination? Was this an ‘upper’-caste landed imagination? What was it leaving out? Why were we so invested in this question of agrarian hierarchies? Was it about a transition to the independent state which actually inherited from the colonial state not only the boundaries of the entity called India but also an entire machine? So in that sense, looking at the ocean allowed an escape from a very conservative cast of mind, which is centred on the nation state and on the ‘upper’ castes.
In the first essay in your book The Blindness of Insight, you’ve argued that communalism in India is in fact about caste; that violence within the Hindu community has run parallel to and informed violence against the so-called other. How do we then understand today’s state-run attempt to create this pan-Hindu identity across castes, which is created in opposition to the other?
The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India, Dilip M. Menon, Navayana, 2005.
I think the question is an important one, because one of the ways in which systems of oppression work is to naturalise. So, for example, what we see in Palestine – that it’s seen by most of the Zionist Jews that Palestinians are subhuman. So what happens to them is of no consequence. We’re very familiar with this in India, with regard to untouchability, that the Dalit is not regarded human enough. The Dalit is often seen and represented as a body, as opposed to an intellect like the rest of society.
So when you think about questions like this, it becomes possible to exercise violence and to create a society based on violence and death, where large parts of society are unconscious of this fact. It’s really happening besides their heads, as it were. So this was the puzzle that led me to the question that while most post-independence sociology, history looked at the phenomenon of communalism, of Hindu-Muslim religious violence, of course with the shadow of the Partition, but they were less cognisant of the fact that prior to independence, after independence, the killing of Dalits continued, and this was just considered a low-grade fever, an everyday occurrence.
But what was happening of late is that once you have an ideology in a society where hierarchy is the order, violence towards those at the bottom of the hierarchy is the logic of the system, then that can very easily be extended to other groups within society.
So what we are seeing under Hindutva is the fact that this logic of the subhuman has been extended to the Muslims. The phrase in the 20th anniversary edition of the book, I’ve used the phrase the ‘Dalitisation of the Muslim’.
Ranajit Guha in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India uses a phrase from Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, the idea of ‘atidesha’, where a logic is extended. He used it to show that the peasant who was fighting against the moneylender then fought against the zamindar, and then went on to fight against the colonial government. What we have here is an atidesha which is working in a very perverted fashion, the Muslim has become the Dalit. So that’s a phenomenon I think we need to understand. because it doesn’t stop. Once you have a logic that there are humans and there are subhumans, this is an infinitely extendable logic.
During the 2024 elections, you had written about the about the Constitution re-emerging as a powerful tool, in the hands of the people but also as political rhetoric for parties across the spectrum, who claimed that they were the true saviours of the Constitution. But then soon after that, we saw the Union home minister in parliament ridiculing those who were quoting Dr B.R. Ambedkar. This year marks 75 years since the Constitution was written – do you think we are in a moment where the aspirational value of the Constitution is building solidarities?
I think that’s both true and not true, because we need to not think about in a linear way, so that you have a moment where the Constitution has gone out of public recognition and then it surfaces. Think about the Pathalgadi movement, for example. So the Constitution keeps recurring. It’s a recurring trope in the Indian imagination because it exists, and it speaks about the possibility that Indians can live together in a fraternal way. That’s the pledge that we take, but it doesn’t happen.
So I think what is happening here is that we tend to think that in 1947 we gained Indian independence, and that’s the end of the story. But it’s actually the beginning of the story, which is ongoing. Right now there is a huge contention going on about what India means, to whom India belongs, who has the right to speak, who has the right to life – and in all of this, the Constitution will keep coming back. It will never go away. So the attempts that are being made now to undermine the Constitution and Ambedkar arise from the fact that the Constitution is a threat. To use a term that we learned in school, when you have a penumbra – there’s an umbra and a penumbra – the Constitution is a penumbral presence in our life. It never goes away, and I think this is important if we are to think about a future India. It’s not as if this is a sacred document, it’s not like the Vedas. But the fact that it has laid out a road map, and that there are people who are saying, look, we are not on the road, we have stepped off into the swamp, is important.
Stones placed as symbols of the Pathalgadi movement. Photo: Neeraj Sinha/The Wire
One of the things you talked about in your session was the way you use language in your history writing, and the use and study of everyday words instead of categories that you may hear of only as an academic. Why do you think that’s important, and what does it add to the field of historical study?
I think one of the things we need to think about is that in India, the reason why we value knowledge also comes from the fact that we are again, to go back to what I said, a deeply hierarchical. Every ‘lower’ caste movement has started with education, whether it’s Jyotiba Phule, Periyar, Narayana Guru… I can go on. So the question is, why has education become so important? Because education is seen as the gateway to accessing the very question of being in society. It’s not about being able to write works of philosophy, it’s about being, recognition, the struggle for recognition.
The struggle to get an education is not only about the question of advancement – we tend to think that everybody is learning English now – but it’s actually a very simple fact, that the moment one opens one’s mouth in India, one is placed in a hierarchy by accent, by the lack of English, the fact that we challenge policemen in English. Those kinds of simple everyday things.
That’s come back to the question of the everyday. If we are to observe what happens around us, there is a way in which the fault lines of power are very evident and that’s where those words, every word, has a charge. Our lives are performative, and education is something that allows us to pass that performative. As the American phrase goes, you can be somebody else through that. So I think this question of words and education is all connected to the fact that it’s not merely about aspiration and money and jobs, it’s about just being recognised.
You mentioned earlier about the tension that exists today about what is India, who is Indian. And part of that is also wrapped up in a very specific project that is being called decolonisation by the state, but for them colonisation is not just the British but much of medieval India, and their idea is to go back to a very specific past from before that. What does a decolonisation project in India, and globally, look like when not defined by these biases?
One always has to begin somewhere, you can’t stretch your legs before you sit down, right? So I think there are two questions here. One is the local perversions of the idea of decolonisation, whether this is an attempt to tie itself, ironically, to the colonial enterprise. So if you think about the Orientalists of the 18th century, William Jones, Colebrook, and so on, they attempted to recover a Hindu past, which was translating the Bhagwat Gita, the Shankuntala and so on, and the translation of Shakuntala then travels globally…the origins of the idea of world literature under Goethe with his acknowledgement of Shakuntala, and so on and so forth.
But at the same time, it’s interesting that at that orientalist moment, there’s very little discussion of Islam and the Islamic past; the attempt was to delegitimise the rule that existed earlier. The way in which decolonisation has worked for the official Hindutva enterprise is to take on this colonial project. They’re the true legatees, in some sense, of colonialism, where they use the idea that there was a glorious India, the wonder that was India, in order to just remove the entire phase of Islam, which in many senses was an egalitarian moment in Indian history.
Now how do we connect this up globally? I think the important thing to think about is that we are facing a crisis, whether we are thinking about what’s happening in the US, particularly in the state of Florida – the opposition to critical race theory, the opposition to understanding structures of power and hierarchy, all of that. And also there’s the rewriting of history, so when you watch the series Bridgerton, in Bridgerton there are large numbers of Black characters in Regency England. Now what will happen for a succeeding generation is the fact that they will forget the hierarchy that existed and they’ll forget racial segregation. So in that sense the global project really should be to bring back into recognition and understanding the fact that the world was an unequal place, the world is an unequal place and that we have to constantly engage with the hardness of the world if we are to create something new.
