I am very fond of the movies, especially Malayalam movies. Particularly, comedy films in Malayalam. I was born in a family in which humour was cherished. There are jokes from my childhood which still make me laugh — for example, the one told by my maternal uncle who was a medical student back then, fifty years ago. His best friend, also a medical student, was a chap who seemed to specialise in unfailingly failing in every single exam he appeared for. One day, my uncle visited his friend’s home — it was an old ancestral seat. In the yard of that stately home, a well-fed billy goat was grazing calmly. The friend’s father sat on the veranda of the house and gazed at the animal chewing at the jackfruit leaves and said, “We need to make a good biriyani out of this fellow, after my son passes his exam!” Apparently, the goat heard this; he lifted his head and offered a wry smile! When I recreate this scene in my mind years after I first heard it, I still burst out laughing.
Continue reading Crime Foretold? Part 2 – Dileep Movies and the Normalisation of Putrid Jokes: Gayatri DeviCrime Foretold? Part 1 – Dileep Movies, Conspiracies, “Quotation Rapes”, and Rape Culture
[This is part of the series of analyses that Althea Women’s Friendship is circulating that takes a close and critical look at the movies by the actor Dileep so that the public memory about the atrocious exoneration of the Malayalam movie actor in the actor-assault case of 2017 by the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court does not fade into oblivion, like so many earlier cases of patriarchal violence. On social media, the tide of anger continues to swell with the unbelievably crude mocking that Dileep engages in against the survivor in the new piece of dirt that he throws at the Malayali public, calling it a ‘movie’. This is the first segment in the series in which Gayatri Devi takes apart Dileep’s movies — and reminds us that this crime was, in a way, foretold. The signs that the depravity were there much earlier. Just that we did not see well enough.]
I belong to that group of Malayalis who have not been watching Dileep’s movies. But his notoriety as the eighth accused in a case in which an actor was kidnapped while returning from work, threatened to the point of immobilization from shock, and subjected to gang rape made me change my resolve not to watch his movies. On December 8, the Ernakulam Sessions Court acquitted him. That is but a temporary reprieve. The Kerala State’s Special Prosecutor has declared that the State will move against the verdict with an appeal at the High Court. This is very welcome indeed.
News from the world of Malayalam cinema indicates that Dileep is being protected by a section of his colleagues. It is not possible to discern the motives of these people from the news — whether it is sympathy, camaraderie, gratitude, love, respect, or fear. For example, a new movie starring Mohanlal along with Dileep has just been released — titled Bha-Bha-Ba. This is apparently an abbreviation of sorts for the Malayalam words Bhayam-Bhakti-Bahumanam (Fear-Devotion-Respect) but it sounds like the (cruel) caricature of stuttering. That makes one think that this movie must surely be about their own lives. There are many reports in the Malayalam press that point to the difficulties encountered by all individuals who attempted to challenge him and his ways. The Hema Committee Report itself mentions the split in film industry bodies like MACTA, and how technicians who questioned his ways were banned by such bodies as FEFKA and AMMA. Describing the latter issues, it mentions without naming him, the tensions between him and the directors Thulasidas and Vinayan. He emerges from these reports as a vindictive personality who would seek revenge as a way of getting past differences.
But in his movies, he is recognized as the funny guy. He employs many different vocal tones; imitates people; dresses in female clothes; delivers egregious patriarchal nonsense in ways that project it as humorous. The last type of ‘joke’ in Dileep movies has been noticed and widely critiqued. For example, the unbelievably crude and insensitive rape joke his character makes in the hit movie Meesha Madhavan — in which he sneaks up to the sleeping female lead, and says, kedanna kedappiloru rape angottu vachu thannaalondalla! Literally that means ” … and what if I shove a rape on you when you are lying here supine and senseless!” This does not make sense in English, but the emphasis is important: rape is an instrument that can be thrust at a woman when she is least anticipating it. After spitting out this filth, Dileep’s character continues his jest waddling around awkwardly saying, “In ten months, you’ll have a belly sticking out and [you’ll be moaning] Amme… Amme— caricaturing a heavily-pregnant woman walking with difficulty. This is supposedly, humour — in any case when this movie appeared in 2002, by all reports, audiences enjoyed it thoroughly, hooting and laughing in theatres. Meesha Madhavan was the biggest hit of the year. Our people, the Malayalis love rape jokes. This joke and the laughter it elicited shows that what we have here is indeed a rape culture. But it is doubtful if the scene will elicit the same kind of mirth in 2025, even though he has been acquitted in the gang rape case.
But I decided not to begin from his commercial movies, but from the ‘high cinema’ in which he has appeared. I started watching his filmography from the movie Pinneyum (Once Again) (2016) directed by none other than the leading figure in ‘high’ Malayalam cinema, Adoor Gopalakrishnan. In it, he played the role of a notorious criminal who once fascinated Malayalis : Sukumara Kurup. His notoriety stemmed from the peculiarly-cruel crime that he committed. Faking his own death for the sake of a fifty-lakh insurance payout in 1984, Kurup strangled to death in his car a man called Chacko near Karuvatta in the Alappuzha district, who had asked for a lift. He burned his body and tried to make it look like it was he who died. This crime was apparently planned by him and his family. Adoor Gopalakrishnan tries to retell the story of this warped mind as the tale of intensely-twisted love. It is one of Adoor’s least-watchable films, and the screenplay and dialogues are so bad and brash that one wonders if it were really written by Adoor at all. One would even think that the usual fare in his movies — long-drawn-out shots of women cooking and serving food to useless men who cram down endlessly — was so much better.
But then, this is indeed the same man who had the temerity to try to dismiss the critical remarks of the well-known singer and the Vice-Chairperson of the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi, P R Pushpavathi in the film conclave organised by the Kerala government early this year against his obviously-casteist claims: his actual words were, reportedly: “Who is this woman? The film conclave is not some marketplace where any woman who passes by can just step in and talk!” I fear that his wrath might land on me too. However, I am an address-less ‘just-a-woman’ and so it may bypass me.
Adoor may think poorly of marketplaces in general, but he is surely on the side of the man who holds the levers of commercial cinema in Malayalam, Dileep. After all, cinema is indeed a high-level, sophisticated market place where human beings are bought and sold. Adoor directed Pinneyum in 2016; just a year after, in the wake of the actor-assault case, he stated publicly that he believed in Dileep’s innocence. It is of course a total coincidence that Sukumara Kurup’s and Dileep’s real names are the same: if one is Gopalakrishna Kurup, the other is Gopalakrishna Pillai. Thus the movie involved three Gopalakrishnan’s. The wife of the protagonist in the movie, Devi, was played by Dileep’s present partner, Kavya Madhavan. This was her last movie; she married Dileep that year. The attack on the actor happened the next year, in February 2017. Ms Madhavan’s last outing on screen was as the wife of a notorious and unrepentant criminal. Just months later, her husband was accused of conspiracy to organise a hair-raising gang rape. What a coincidence, or maybe fate!
The court has dismissed the case against Dileep, but in the above-mentioned movie, he is indeed the master-conspirator. Though it is all highly coincidental, anyone watching the scenes in Pinneyum in which the criminal and his wife and their relatives gather around make a plan to find a dead body and burn it cannot helping thinking about the accusations against him in the 2017 case. When they watch the scenes in which they strangle Chacko to death in the car and pack straw to set him alight will surely recall the actor trapped in a moving vehicle being sexually assaulted by six thugs. (It is worth remembering that the actor-assault case differs quite significantly from the Nirbhaya case of 2012. If the latter was about a young woman mistaking an off-duty private bus for a DTC bus, this was about a young woman being trapped in the very vehicle arranged for her by her own employer. This, then, is a workplace crime). We can also hardly help remembering the testimony of the late film director Balachandrakumar who witnessed Dileep and his family members gathering together to watch the recording of the assault. “The Cruel Deeds of Pulsar Suni,” Dileep reportedly joked.
From now on, we cannot help seeing all his ‘family movies’ differently.
Of course, that raises the question whether these ‘family movies’ can be viewed within family contexts — if that means social spaces shared by people bound by love, care, notions of equal worth, and mutual respect. They are stuffed with not just cheap, salacious humour and rape jokes (as mentioned earlier) — more than that is a kind of obsession with rape that surfaces repeatedly in his movies. After Pinneyum (2016), I watched a commercial movie of his that predated it, Mr Marumakan (Mr Son-In-Law). It was released in 2012, the same year as the Nirbhaya case.
In this movie, the villain (played by Baburaj) who had a score to settle with the lead character played by Dileep, hires a thug (played by Suraj Venharammood) to rape his sister. The movie describes this as ‘quotation rape’. The thug receives his payment, touching the villain’s hand reverentially, as though to acknowledge the auspicious nature of the deal. These scenes are stuffed with filthy dialogues like: “Until now, I had to pay so that I could do this; this is the first time I am getting paid to do it!” The plan is to lure the young woman to a room in a lodge, then rape her, simultaneously inform the police of sex trafficking happening there so that the matter becomes public, and the lead character’s family drowns in shame.
The villain’s sister assists in this crime; she draws the other girl into the lodge on the pretext of introducing her to her parents. She is about to lock her in a room — when Dileep arrives and rescues her. Then, to extract revenge, he pushes the villain’s sister into the room and locks the door, knowing that the thug would soon arrive and rape her. Before he locks the door, he tells his sister to deliver a sharp slap on the other girls’ face. And smiles, seeing woman punish woman. Then he invites the villain and the local sleaze-sheets and the police to uncover the illicit goings-on in the lodge. The villain arrives, expecting to find Dileep’s sister, but finds his own sister and the thug trying to hide under the cot. Some people try to sneak away; others take photos. A girl tries to cover her breasts weeping as the cameras wink around her.
Wow, what a ‘family movie’!! But wonder if you remember any instance of ‘quotation rape’ in Kerala in the recent times?
There are bursts of laughter when Suraj Venharammood’s rapist-character appears on screen. They are our favourite jokers, aren’t they? Mr Marumakan was a bumper hit of 2012. The rapists who tore out the intestines of that young woman known as Nirbhaya and Dileep’s Mr Marumakan share something in common: the phenomenon called rape culture. Through deeds and words, characters and narrative styles, they make rape feel absolutely normal, trivial, and palatable to our sensibilities. That is what Dileep’s cinema has been doing.
Anyway, watching these two movies gave me a sense of what ‘Dileep’s cinema’ is. The man himself peeps out from behind them. ‘Dileep’s cinema’, ‘conspiracy’, and ‘quotation rape’ — these seem to be expressions made in the same breath. In his movies, he seems to have explored them quite thoroughly. This is the ‘comedy’ that has brought him wealth and fame.
I will write more about his other movies soon. Let the awful taste that these two films have left in me subside.
[Gayatri Devi is a scholar of English based in the US. She is part of Althea Women’s Friendship. Translated by J Devika.]
Delhi Declaration: Reject SIR, Reclaim Universal Adult Franchise
We, people’s movements, peoples’ organisations and citizens from across India, express our deep concern at the undemocratic, unconstitutional and illegal deletions of crores of voters under the guise of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. We confront the largest ever disenfranchisement in the history of any democracy. We face a challenge to the universality of the universal adult franchise — the foundational achievement of our freedom struggle.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has weaponised a seemingly routine administrative exercise into an unprecedented and sweeping rewriting of the rules of who can be a voter.
This tectonic shift in the country’s electoral architecture was introduced without a constitutional amendment, without public or legislative debate, and without any change in the statutory rules or even the ECI’s own Election Manual. This has resulted into a double whammy for the people of India. First, the responsibility for inclusion on the voters’ list has been shifted from the State to the citizen. Second, the presumption of citizenship has been overturned. These provisions fly in the face of the letter and the spirit of our constitution, are a case of wanton abuse of law, disregard of the judicial pronouncements and the ECI’s own established norms of transparency, accountability and fairness.
The experience of Bihar stands as a stark warning. The SIR unfolded as a chaotic exercise in bureaucratic overreach that imposed impossible demands on the frontline election staff and needless misery for ordinary people. There is ample evidence that the SIR in Bihar failed every quality test of electoral roll revision: completeness, equity and accuracy. The population–elector ratio declined sharply, resulting in a net reduction of forty-five lakh names from the voters’ list. The burden of exclusions fell disproportionately on the poor, migrants, minorities and women. Meanwhile, inaccuracies in the voters list remained unresolved—duplicated entries, blank records, gibberish data and bulk voters at single addresses persisted.
Yet, instead of learning from this disaster, the Election Commission has chosen to go ahead with SIR in the rest of the country. Evidence from the second phase of SIR shows that more than eleven crore voters now face the threat of disenfranchisement—because they could not submit forms on time, or because they could not trace themselves to an arbitrarily set qualifying electoral rolls of 2002 or 2003. The burden has fallen once more on the most vulnerable, especially women, migrants, dalit, adivasis, nomadic and trans communities and the religious minorities, mainly the Muslims. Again, impossible deadlines have been imposed on inadequately trained and overburdened BLOs, leading to multiple tragic cases of their deaths and suicides.
This runs counter to the consultative and inclusive spirit that the ECI has upheld for decades
and deepens the suspicion that this mass exclusion is being carried out at the behest of the
ruling dispensation. The Election Commission faces a crisis of credibility like never before, as the lines dividing the Commission, the Government and the ruling party have been blurred.
In a democracy voters choose their government. A democracy loses all meaning if the government is allowed to choose its voters. That is the abyss the SIR is leading India into.
Therefore, this Convention demands that:
Continue reading Delhi Declaration: Reject SIR, Reclaim Universal Adult FranchiseAn Open Letter to Bhavana and Some Reflections on the Hostile Responses to it: Althea Women’s Friendship
[This letter was written by Gayatri Devi, as the opening segment of the series of analyses that Althea hopes to collectively publish in the wake of the atrocious judgement passed by the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court, written by the controversial judge Honey M Varghese, exonerating Dileep aka Gopalakrishnan in the actor assault case of 2017. The reflections on Dileep-supporters’ responses to it were written by J Devika.
In 2017, a leading female actor was kidnapped on her way back from work and raped by six men in a moving vehicle on the roads of the city of Kochi. The lead-rapist claimed to her that he was hired to do it. The alleged role of the actor Dileep in commissioning the horrifying act of violence, which was also filmed, has been at the centre of public outrage from 2017 to this day. Dileep’s role seemed to be strongly indicated by circumstantial evidence, however in the course of the trial, the advantages that he enjoyed seemed to surface repeatedly. The whole trial appeared to be an extended punishment of the survivor, and the culmination of it therefore was hardly unexpected. Nevertheless, the public, overwhelmingly with the survivor, has not taken the judgment lightly.
We believe that it is our feminist political responsibility to develop a critical discourse on on the normalization in Kerala of the insecure masculine that Dileep and his supporters represent, over the past three decades. The material we hope to examine includes the judgement itself as well as the many films that Dileep starred in, from the so-called ‘serious’ film he acted in directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, to his many slapstick comedies which became popular. The series is anchored by Gayatri Devi, and others will also contribute. This is the first in the series.]
Dearest Bhavana:
When I first heard the verdict in your 2017 case, in my mind, I silently thanked the fortuitousness of your name, “Bhavana.” Your name “Bhavana” means “imagination.” I thanked your name, because I believed that the strength to process the disillusionment and dissatisfaction that beset you upon hearing the wrong verdict was contained in your name. You must remember this fact. You must not forget this fact. You own a precious name. Your name embodies a precious truth.
Continue reading An Open Letter to Bhavana and Some Reflections on the Hostile Responses to it: Althea Women’s Friendship“SIR” Is a Process of Mass Disenfranchisement
The Solution
After the uprising of the 17th June Election of 2024
The Secretary of the Writers Union Prime Minister’s Office
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee the message sent out via Nagpur
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another? – [Courtesy Bertolt Brecht]
The way things are going with the SIR, we are heading for the regime “electing its people” – with the full participation of the Opposition parties, who despite the knowledge of the process, have become unwilling participants. Not knowing how to respond, they seem to be running around like headless chickens. “Vote Chori” and the so-called “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) are closely tied together and though Rahul Gandhi seems to have got the import of what this means, reports suggest that RSS “sleeper cells” within and outside the Congress Party are hyperactive now, trying to undermine the campaign against vote chori. Some INDIA bloc parties have even openly distanced themselves from it. Continue reading “SIR” Is a Process of Mass Disenfranchisement
The Elite Criminal Man and the Self-Curated Criminal Man: Criminality and Misogyny in the Dileep Case
The verdict in the actor-assault case of 2017, delivered a few day back in the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court, did not surprise anyone, except the extremely naive. Not just because of the difficulties in proving conspiracies, but also because the trial court seemed so unbelievably biased against the survivor all through and actually in favour of the accused. The man accused of conspiring against the female actor and hiring a gang of thugs to abduct and rape her in a moving vehicle, Dileep aka Gopalakrishnan, is an actor in the Malayalam industry. But he is also accused of being a notorious fixer in the Malayalam movie industry, the go-to person for people who want to get things done — someone who bends things to their will, cuts through all institutional procedure and safeguards using invisible chains of influence and violence. The verdict convicted the six men who actually committed the crime – and declared that the prosecution had not proven Dileep’s involvement in the crime. In other words, the man escaped for entirely technical reasons — or the blind spots of the law.
Continue reading The Elite Criminal Man and the Self-Curated Criminal Man: Criminality and Misogyny in the Dileep CaseBeware of Aadhaar – A Warning on India’s Biometric Identity Model: Statement by Organizations and Concerned Individuals
Following is a statement issued on 10 December 2025, by over 50 organizations and 200 plus individuals on the reported adoption of the “Aadhar model” by some other countries.
We, concerned Indian citizens and organisations, are alarmed to note that efforts are being made to promote biometric identity systems similar to Aadhaar in other countries.
Aadhaar is India’s unique identity number, linked with a person’s biometrics (fingerprints, iris and photograph as of now). The number was rolled out with fanfare from 2009 onwards. The use of this number, and of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication (ABBA), was promoted to the hilt by the Indian government in close collaboration with the IT industry. Aadhaar was supposed to be voluntary, but it quickly became clear that living without it would be very difficult for most. Today, it is as good as compulsory. Most social benefits are out of reach without Aadhaar.
Aadhaar was rolled out in an explicitly “evangelistic” mode from day one. In recent years, it has been projected as a grand success by its promoters. Their friends in high places (like Davos, the World Bank, and the B&M Gates Foundation) are on board. There is an attempt, partly successful already, to project Aadhaar as a model and “export” it to other countries. Continue reading Beware of Aadhaar – A Warning on India’s Biometric Identity Model: Statement by Organizations and Concerned Individuals
Wildlife-Human Conflict – Non-intervention is No Longer a Choice: Sandeep Menon
Guest post by SANDEEP MENON
[Earlier this year, Kerala government sought the permission of the central government to kill wild animals that “post a threat to life and property”, declaring human-wildlife conflict a state-specific disaster. As wildlife-human conflicts rage with a new intensity across different parts of India, the author underlines the need to go beyond knee-jerk reactions and put in place proper policy measures. The issue itself is highly controversial and even emotive and we present this essay here to put things in perspective and proposes some measures that are currently being debated among wildlife enthusiasts. – AN]
On the 24th of Nov 2025, a 70-year-old Adivasi woman was tending her goats on revenue lands near Masinagudi in Tamil Nadu, when she was killed and dragged into the bushes by a Tiger. It paid little heed to the shouts of witnesses who saw it moving the body to a nearby waterhole. Between late October and November, multiple attacks on people and livestock were reported from the Nugu region near Nagarhole in Karnataka, leaving 3 farmers dead and one critically injured. Including one farmer who had just recovered from a broken hip bone caused by an earlier elephant attack. In response to intense public pressure, over 23 tigers (including many cubs) have been captured from non-forest areas in a span of one month. A huge number for a small rural landscape around two sanctuaries. In many cases, operations were hindered by mobs, who screamed and pelted stones upon sighting the animal, leading to heightened aggression. One of the tigers was found to have a festering snare wound, while another was the mother of 5 healthy cubs. Things took an interesting turn, when experts found it hard to match one of the Tigresses to existing wildlife databases. Raising the possibility that she might have been completely raised outside protected areas. Nor were they all transitionary, weak or infirm animals. Some of them were found to be healthy individuals, simply finding new spaces to eke out a living. It is unclear what the department intends to do with all the captured tigers and cubs. If they end up in captivity, that would be a tragic outcome that serves neither the individual animal nor the species. Continue reading Wildlife-Human Conflict – Non-intervention is No Longer a Choice: Sandeep Menon
Remember the Children: The Palathayi Case in Kerala and the Need for Urgent Changes in POCSO laws: Althea Women’s Friendship
[The ‘Palathayi’ case refers to a shocking instance of child abuse — of a 10-year-old female child in Palathayi, Kerala, by her school teacher, K Padmarajan, a noted BJP leader. Not just the act, but also the way in which the police and the ruling CPM handled it contributed to the public outrage around it. Worse, the child counselors’ role in intimidating the child, bombarding it with invasive, sexualised and irrelevant leading questions, and the police’s long interrogations, revealed, once again, the terrible rot in Kerala’s child protection machinery. The police investigation proved extremely biased in favour of the accused, and the team had to be replaced after protests by activists including feminists, and the family’s pleas. Despite complaints by the child’s mother against the counselors, the higher authorities, including the much-romanticized Minister for Women and Children of that time, K K Shailaja, did little to deliver justice. The verdict of the court in this case which sentenced the accused to life imprisonment, condemned the counselors’ questioning and asked for immediate action against them. The counselor was suspended after the verdict, but suspension hardly suffices as a punishment form blatant verbal rape of a ten year old.
Althea has been raising concerns about the state of child welfare, especially of female children from historically-marginalized social groups and family circumstances in Kerala even before. It is apparent that we need to keep speaking about it, and we will. This statement appeared first in the Malayalam online journal Truecopy Think. This is a translation of the original Malayalam statement by Gayatri Devi, who is part of Althea.]
Continue reading Remember the Children: The Palathayi Case in Kerala and the Need for Urgent Changes in POCSO laws: Althea Women’s FriendshipThe Day the Colloquium Fell Silent – Bureaucratic Diktat and the Fate of Thought: S. M. Faizan Ahmed
Guest post by S. M. FAIZAN AHMED
The resignation of Professor Nandini Sundar from the convenorship of the seminar colloquium at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, has left an emptiness that language struggles to fill and words can barely cover. The seminar she was to host, titled Land, Property and Democratic Rights, was to be delivered by Dr. Namita Wahi, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and one of India’s most thoughtful legal scholars on land rights.
The event formed part of the department’s long-standing Friday Colloquium series—among the oldest and most cherished intellectual traditions in Indian academia. Over the decades, nearly every major figure in the social sciences has presented a paper here at least once. More than a seminar, it has been a ritual of conversation—one that has weathered political shifts, personal rifts, intellectual disagreements, and institutional flux, sustaining across generations a living legacy of thought, dialogue, and learning. Continue reading The Day the Colloquium Fell Silent – Bureaucratic Diktat and the Fate of Thought: S. M. Faizan Ahmed
A Shadowed Present and the Onus of Thought – Remarks, Non-Polemical or Otherwise: Sasheej Hegde
[This concluding essay of the series in Kafila titled Decolonial Imaginations. Links to the previous essays are given at the end.
The terms ‘decolonization’ or ‘decolonial’ have become quite critical now, given that the impulse of justice lies at the core of these concepts. Neither postcolonial nor decolonial perspectives are compatible with right-wing ideologies but the fact that Hindutva ideologues in India and the rightwing globally are now trying to appropriate that language makes it seem to some that the very idea of the postcolonial or decolonial is suspect. We believe that this demonizing of decolonial theory from a position defensive of the European Enlightenment needs to be unpacked in the interests of a mutually productive debate. Kafila has been publishing a series of interventions on what the idea of the decolonial imagination involves, locating decolonial theory as speaking from the margins, drawing attention to identities which the orthodox Left subsumed under ‘class’ and which the rightwing in India seeks to assimilate into Brahminism. Additionally the orthodox Left’s rejection of spiritual beliefs and inability to engage with them is also a factor that may have produced the space for right wing appropriations of a field marked “religion”.
We hope that these interventions will clear the ground for productive conversations on the Left rather than polarised and accusatory claims that mark some spurious claims to ‘correctness’.]
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In a superbly crafted, and provocative, essay titled ‘In Defense of Presentism,’ the historian David Armitage (2023) has tried to re-present the prospects of ‘presentism’ for historians particularly (even though the essay has its lessons for various practitioners across domains, critical or otherwise). As he notes: ‘Historians are trained to reject presentism: we are likely to argue that our duty is to the past and its inhabitants – and not to the present and certainly not to the future.’ But, as he shows with great analytical acuity and detail, historians are deploying the word ‘presentism’ in a variety of ways, which he then goes on to unravel, while making a case for what historians ought to be opposing and what about the present they can comfortably be accepting. My brief is surely not to detail the intricacies of Armitage’s argument for my readers here – although I would urge them to read and absorb the essay themselves (even as my moves here have been made possible by it). Rather, my effort is to quickly address some critical aspects of the ‘presentism’ that underwrites contemporary scholarship in India (and elsewhere) – although, again, for the purposes of this formulation, I shall limit myself to Meera Nanda (2025) and the terms of her critique of postcolonial and decolonial theory (henceforth PDT). My own relationship with PDT has been an ambivalent one – and, hopefully, a recent contribution will clarify that (Hegde 2025) – and there are also aspects of the critique mounted by Meera Nanda that I agree with. But this is not the ground that I will be traversing here in this short note. Continue reading A Shadowed Present and the Onus of Thought – Remarks, Non-Polemical or Otherwise: Sasheej Hegde
We Will Fight, We Will Win: ASHA Workers Vow to Continue the Protest
Today, exactly 266 days after it began, the ASHA workers’ protest led by the Kerala ASHA Health Workers’ Association vowed to continue the protest in a new form. Since the evening before, news channels and in the morning, newspapers, were claiming that the protest had ‘ended’ or was going to be ‘wound up.’ The meeting the KAHWA organised in front of the State Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram was both a celebration of the victory the workers had secured over the hubris of the CPM and its lord and master, the Chief Minister of Kerala. But more importantly, it was a declaration of the workers’ determination to continue the struggle. The local body elections are imminent, and the protesting workers intend to turn their grievance into a campaign issue.
Continue reading We Will Fight, We Will Win: ASHA Workers Vow to Continue the ProtestIs Kerala a Destitute-free State or Extreme Poverty-free State?
[Below is the English Version of a Public Statement in Malayalam released by a group of concerned economists and social activists that appeared in the Malayalam and Kerala-based English Newspapers today (31 October 2025)]
Background: The Government of Kerala have been preparing to declare the State of Kerala as India’s First Extreme Poverty-Free State on 1 November, 2025 being the State formation day. Th government claims that this achievement was attained through sustained efforts to eradicate extreme poverty in the state since July 2021, with just 64,006 extremely-poor families identified through a survey conducted by the Kudumbashree Mission and the Panchayats and Municipalities. The criteria used, as the government claims, were (i) households with no income, (ii) not even food for two times a day, (ii) those unable to cook food even with food articles available from ration shops, and (iv) those with very bad health conditions. This makes Kerala the first state in India to attain the two Sustainable Development Goals of No Poverty and No Hunger. However, this raises a number of crucial questions. It is in this background the following public statement was issued.
Continue reading Is Kerala a Destitute-free State or Extreme Poverty-free State?Countering Propaganda against the ASHA Workers’ Struggle in Kerala: A Response by Anamika A. and others
Rejoinder written collectively by Anamika A, Archana Ravi, Ayana Krishna D, J Devika, Divya G S, Gayatri Devi, Shraddha Jain, Shradha S and Srimanjori Guha
[This piece was written in response to a flagrant misrepresentation of the ASHA workers’ ongoing struggle in Kerala, by Binitha Thampi and Varsha Prasad, which appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly early this month, titled “Labouring on the Margins: ASHA Workers’ Protests in Kerala and Working-class Solidarities” (Oct.4, 2025, LX, 40, 13-17). A group of us — scholars, activists, artists and others who have been closely following the struggle since its beginning — wrote a rejoinder to it. The EPW editor verbally agreed to consider it, but the edit desk insisted that it be subjected to the same peer-review process (as their special articles, it seemed). Commentary pieces, as those who have published in the EPW earlier know, were dealt with at the editorial desk, and the editor was back then obviously competent to judge whether a rejoinder to a commentary piece was a fair one or not. Now that seemingly requires a review process! That does not suit us simply because this atrocious piece of slander is aimed at an ongoing struggle, at the lives of struggling women workers, by other women steeped in academic, social, and political privilege. There is, then, the need to respond quickly, to defend the struggle from the verbal equivalent of a shower of stones thrown at it. At the same time, the very fact that B Thampi’s and V Prasad’s piece, which parrots the CPM troll position in each line and trips over themselves several times empirically and theoretically, has clearly not been subjected to peer-review by the same EPW editorial, for it would definitely would not have got published like it is now — biased in the extreme.
Continue reading Countering Propaganda against the ASHA Workers’ Struggle in Kerala: A Response by Anamika A. and othersLeft, Right, Left – Notes on Radical Post/De-Coloniality: Gita Chadha
[This post is the ninth – and penultimate – essay of the series in Kafila titled Decolonial Imaginations. Links to the previous essays are given at the end.
The terms ‘decolonization’ or ‘decolonial’ have become quite critical now, given that the impulse of justice lies at the core of these concepts. Neither postcolonial nor decolonial perspectives are compatible with right-wing ideologies but the fact that Hindutva ideologues in India and the rightwing globally are now trying to appropriate that language makes it seem to some that the very idea of the postcolonial or decolonial is suspect. We believe that this demonizing of decolonial theory from a position defensive of the European Enlightenment needs to be unpacked in the interests of a mutually productive debate. Kafila has been publishing a series of interventions on what the idea of the decolonial imagination involves, locating decolonial theory as speaking from the margins, drawing attention to identities which the orthodox Left subsumed under ‘class’ and which the rightwing in India seeks to assimilate into Brahminism. Additionally the orthodox Left’s rejection of spiritual beliefs and inability to engage with them is also a factor that may have produced the space for right wing appropriations of a field marked “religion”.
We hope that these interventions will clear the ground for productive conversations on the Left rather than polarised and accusatory claims that mark some spurious claims to ‘correctness’.]
Much has already been said in this set of essays on the difference between two kinds of Indian responses to colonial western modernity. These responses can be classified as the left leaning post(de)-colonial theories and the right-wing responses that may also be classified, by some, as post(de)-colonial theory. This set of essays are in conversations around the allegation that the former feeds into the latter. It is evident to many of us doing post(de)-colonial theory on the left that the difference between the two is unmistakable. Yet, this is missed by many on the left, leading to much misrepresentation; and by many on the right, leading to much appropriation. We also know that the responses to modernity from post(de)-colonial theories on the left are fractured on multiple axes, religion and faith being a major one. Due to the common worlds we inhabit, it is indeed possible for much confusion to occur. I think the act of demarcating the players, the fields, and the actions of the oeuvres, the right and the left is important, especially for a pedagogic purpose. Each generation seeks clarification in the classroom on several of these confusions and debates. While demarcating the difference regularly and rigorously is an important intellectual exercise for everyone in the discourse, doing this is also an ethical responsibility, particularly for those who do not wish to be either misrepresented or appropriated, which is basically those who are not bedfellows with the orthodox left and definitely not with the orthodox right. The demarcation is required to be done in multiple domains of theory as well as practice. This set of essays seeks to precisely do that. Continue reading Left, Right, Left – Notes on Radical Post/De-Coloniality: Gita Chadha
Rising international Student migration from India: ‘Mad rush’ or reflection of the domestic labour market situation? : Shraddha Jain
On 21 September 2025, The New Indian Express published an interview with Professor Irudaya Rajan about migration patterns from Kerala where the Professor characterised the rising trend of student migration from Kerala as a ‘mad rush’ and said that young people fail and don’t benefit much from migration. He also said that overseas employment as care providers, a growing form of employment in the developed countries, was a form of ‘slavery’.
Continue reading Rising international Student migration from India: ‘Mad rush’ or reflection of the domestic labour market situation? : Shraddha JainDo not Steal Our Voices, Mr Vijayan! The ASHA Workers’ March to the Chief Minister’s Residence
Dear Mr Vijayan
Yesterday, the protesting ASHA workers marched to your residence in the pouring rain, seeking to rouse you from your utterly inexcusable stupor. Yes, over the past eight months, you tried to first crush the strike, and then to kill it by ignoring it. Who does not know that the worst form of violence is indifference?
Photo credits : Shradha S, Harsh, Ashna Thambi, Santhosh Nilakkal.
When Decolonisation turns Inward – On the Dangers of Methodological Nationalism: Sabah Siddiqui
[This post is the eighth essay of the series in Kafila titled Decolonial Imaginations. Links to the previous essays are given at the end.
The terms ‘decolonization’ or ‘decolonial’ have become quite critical now, given that the impulse of justice lies at the core of these concepts. Neither postcolonial nor decolonial perspectives are compatible with right-wing ideologies but the fact that Hindutva ideologues in India and the rightwing globally are now trying to appropriate that language makes it seem to some that the very idea of the postcolonial or decolonial is suspect. We believe that this demonizing of decolonial theory from a position defensive of the European Enlightenment needs to be unpacked in the interests of a mutually productive debate. Kafila has been publishing a series of interventions on what the idea of the decolonial imagination involves, locating decolonial theory as speaking from the margins, drawing attention to identities which the orthodox Left subsumed under ‘class’ and which the rightwing in India seeks to assimilate into Brahminism. Additionally the orthodox Left’s rejection of spiritual beliefs and inability to engage with them is also a factor that may have produced the space for right wing appropriations of a field marked “religion”.
We hope that these interventions will clear the ground for productive conversations on the Left rather than polarised and accusatory claims that mark some spurious claims to ‘correctness’.]
When I first encountered postcolonial theory as a young scholar, it felt like an opening into a new way of understanding the world. Much of my introduction came through Indian thinkers, some of whom were not located in India, yet their work spoke powerfully to questions of colonial legacies, subjectivity, and the politics of knowledge. These early engagements helped me grasp the goals of postcolonial scholarship: to make visible the structures of power that colonialism left behind and to explore the ways in which it continues to shape our systems of knowledge and self-representation. Over time, however, I noticed a subtle shift; the language of postcolonial studies seems to have receded somewhat, while the term decolonial has gained prominence as a way to address questions of knowledge and authority in the present moment. Other contributors to this blog series have traced the rise and relative decline of postcolonial thinking in South Asia. I still resonate with postcolonial analysis, and have used it within my own work, but for the purposes of reflecting on the current politics of knowledge in Indian universities, I am choosing to engage now with the decolonial project.
Rotting Civil Society, Mounting Insecurity: Understanding Hijabophobia in Kerala
Last week, when most mainstream media was in the middle of yet another paroxysmal bout of Islamophobia over a thirteen-year-old child’s wish to wear the hijab to school, I was thinking: why is hijabophobia the most acceptable manifestation of the hatred of Islam in Kerala? Why is it that it seems to provoke many non-Muslim women to the point of anti-Muslim hysteria?
Continue reading Rotting Civil Society, Mounting Insecurity: Understanding Hijabophobia in KeralaPostcolonial Theory and the “Decolonization of the Indian Mind” : Professor Meera Nanda
Indian Diaspora Washington DC lecture series
Topic: Postcolonial Theory and the “Decolonization of the Indian Mind”
Speaker: Professor Meera Nanda
Finally, an Answer to Why Kerala’s CPM-led Government is Determined to Break the ASHA Workers’ Strike
Finally, I am able to understand why the government of Kerala, led by a leading communist party, the CPM, is so doggedly against the demands of Kerala’s internationally-celebrated ground-level women health workers — the ASHA workers — who have been on strike since February 2025.
Continue reading Finally, an Answer to Why Kerala’s CPM-led Government is Determined to Break the ASHA Workers’ Strike
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 