Left ~ Write

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This is the time for all columnists to hold forth on the achievements and shortcomings of six decades of our independence. Hundreds of thousands of trees have been sacrificed to produce the newsprint needed to print long column inches to celebrate the independence of our nations from colonialism. Much has been written about what has been good and what has been bad in the past 60 years of our independent republics’ existence; of whether the defining word for 1947 is independence or partition; of whether in the final analysis these 60 years have been a success or a failure; of who our villains and heroes have been.

So can this columnist save himself from the temptation to jump into the ring with his own list of high and lows? Perhaps I can, and I will do this by arguing for the necessity of the death of the nation in the era of the success of globalisation. Read the rest of this entry »

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Assertion of caste identity has increasingly become the favoured mode of agitation for rights by the working people of India. In fact, there has been no significant class based agitation of the working people since the first half of the 1970s. This shift has been paralleled by the retreat of the Left led mass agitations as well as the retreat of the Left organisational growth into its governmental enclaves of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. This is not to deny the existence of various left led movements in various parts of the country, some of them successful too, but none of these have been able to leave a lasting impact either on long term State policy, nor on political correlations. Read the rest of this entry »

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As this column argued last week, caste has been the historically specific form for expressing class division in the social formation of pre-modern, feudal South Asia. In its form of Jati, it developed parallel to the establishment of the specifically South Asian form of feudalism and received a detailed legal and ideological foundation in the Manusmriti texts compiled about a millennium and half ago.

Each caste was composed of people who were confined to a clearly defined work or occupation and each caste was placed either superior to or in subordination to other castes. Since each caste was linked to a particular work or occupation, it was not possible for social life to continue without the economic cooperation of all castes with each other, even though there were fairly severe restrictions on their social interaction. This reduced the ability of the direct producers – Shudras and the outcastes – to combine in large numbers to oppose oppression or persecution. Therefore, as was mentioned last week, one of the typical forms of lower class revolt in South Asia in pre-modern times has been migration. Read the rest of this entry »

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Just as geography is a visible yet unobserved presence in the story of our past and present, we cannot live a moment without class – the social expression of economic relations of production – impinging on our reality. Yet, more often than not, it is either ignored or denied its rightful role in historical explanations. Read the rest of this entry »