Political violence, community and its limits in Kannur, Kerala

Abstract

This article analyses communities that the blue-collar, backward caste, local-level workers of the party Left and the Hindu Right have forged amongst themselves in the Kannur district of Kerala. Its particular focus is on members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)). For more than four decades, members of the CPI (M) and the Hindu Right have been involved in an intermittent but occasionally intense conflict. Their conflict highlights how modern practices of political mobilisation and competition condition the formation of close-knit antagonistic masculine unities regardless of the ideological affiliations in question; its violent context foregrounds affects and emotions that characterise life in such fraternal communities. While such unities have become central to the enactment of collective agency in many contexts, strong limits mark these communities. Not just those outside a community, but also those within it apprehend these limits. Violent experiences emerge as idealised modes of imagining communion with members of one's community, as well as forces that individuate them.Biographies and narratives of Left-and Right-wing workers who once sought close integration with their respective communities but now live apart from them, illuminate the already present limits of commonality and unity possible in modern political communities.

Religiosity and its others: lived Islam in West Africa and South India

“…Unlike Nigeria, the state of Kerala on the south‐west shores of India is generally seen to have remained sheltered from the waves of communal violence that in the last 30 years have accompanied the radicalisation of Indian politics along ethico‐religious lines (Harriss and Corbridge 2017). While this perception of Kerala as an island of amity and tolerance might be only partly true (Arafath 2016b; Menon 1994, 2015; Chaturvedi 2015; Punathil 2016; Zacharias 2004), in recent years Malayali publics have interrogated themselves on the shape and direction of everyday inter‐community relations in the face of an apparent erosion of a historical ‘tradition’ of communal tolerance – underpinned by ideals of secular modernity and progressive politics – the apparent hallmark of the state since independence and which for long contained the emergence of ‘communalism’ in the state (see Varshney 2002: 119ff.). It is beyond the scope of this article to trace the history of ongoing processes of community formation in modern Kerala, a state whose Hindu majority population lives alongside substantial Christian and Muslim communities – respectively approximately 18% and 27% of the total population.…”