Ameen's Margins

Muslims have a Place in Bharat!

Ameen Muhammed — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 11:37:05 GMT

This is too long to be a Substack note and too short for an article. But here it is.

The critique against Bhagwat's statement from Muslims and Dalits is that without Muslims, caste socials will inevitably come apart in conflict and the mirage of Hinduism will cease to exist. Another strand holds that Bhagwat's NYC interview is solely for a western audience, and that Bhagwat back in India will continue with RSS's historical purpose. Both are stuck in a particular historical understanding of RSS and Hinduism that they hold as an eternal truth: RSS as a nationalist-cultural group interested in preserving a caste social, and Hinduism as a mirage of religion sweeping its "internal" conflicts under the carpet. That was the reality of RSS in its earlier decades, and that is what Hinduism too was for a large part of the long twentieth century. But to read the present through it is to miss what RSS as a political institution has become. This also miss a distinction between the Muslim as the other against which Hinduism defines itself, and the Muslim as the object over which a Hindu majority rules. RSS no longer needs the first.

Hinduism today needs to be understood as a religious reality that is not stuck in its history but has evolved. From RSS and BJP to many OBC and lower-caste social and political groups, all have shaped it into a religious reality. In that same process, RSS has been formative in making Hindus into a religio-political group rather than a union of castes. Hindutva, while politically opposed to Islam, does not require Hinduism to be defined as the other of Islam (or Christianity). In fact, contemporary Hinduism is a tradition that finds no contradiction in venerating and upholding the many social formations consumed within it, arranged in their different hierarchies. This is not to say there is no resistance to the formative and subsuming nature of Hinduism from the various caste groups tied to it. Rather, the language of resistance has changed. What was once legible as counter-hegemonic narrative, practice and political formation — the stuff of twentieth-century anti-caste politics — no longer takes Hinduism itself as its target. There is today no counter-hegemonic political mobilization against Hinduism as such; whatever contests caste now does so from within a Hindu horizon it no longer seeks to exit. In that sense Hinduism has become a true religion: not a mirage held together by what it suppresses, but a settled reality its adherents inhabit without needing to resolve what lies inside it.

Caste, one needs to be clear, has always been a hierarchy imposed. It matters to the group that imposes it; in its essence it is not the lower castes' or Dalits' to uphold. This is why the contradiction sits with the upper-caste Hindu: to be a Hindu and simultaneously to practice caste as a marker of social distinction, purity and violence. It is a contradiction held by a subject position, not by the system — and it is not one the demographically larger part of Hindu society has to reckon with in order to be Hindu. Caste atrocities hence now seldom appear as counter-hegemonic movements against Hinduism, but as modern ethical dilemmas to be corrected politically, from within it. Probably, a meaningful caste census could be the only threat that could open up new futures over this sediments.

In turn, the statement that Hindus need Muslims in India must be understood twofold. First: as much as the right-wing history of Hinduism is written through the narrative of Muslim invasion and the Muslim other, the aspect of Hindu history that is now most celebrated across the liberal political spectrum — the idiomatic contribution of the intellectual sphere to the Indian public sphere — has been the longue durée of tolerance that Hinduism is said to be. Tolerant Hinduism is adored as the very nature of Hindu-India, and Muslims are cast as the beneficiaries of that tolerance. To remain in India, on this account, is to remain the object of Hindu magnanimity. This is why Bhagwat is serious when he says Muslims should remain part of the land: their belonging is itself an expression of the majority's benevolence, not a limit on it. Second: while Muslims should exist in India, the Hindu politico-religious majority's greatest interest is in ruling them. Muslims no longer exist for RSS and BJP as the other against which they define themselves, but as the political formation that makes their own entity as a political formation necessary. Hinduism can exist as a venerated religion that myriad social groups identify with in contemporary India; but without Muslims, the political homogeneity of India as a nation would have nothing to consolidate against. Indian political parties, stripped of Muslim subjects, Muslim citizens and Muslim political parties, would be forced to abandon the very realpolitik that organizes them. Infact, as RSS has become more interested in preserving their current role as the champion Indian Nationalism, it has recognized that Indian nationalism continuously requires Muslims to exist for it to exist.

Property from Below

Ameen Muhammed — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:20:14 GMT

Centering Land — Part 4 of a 5-part Substack series

Read the earlier parts of the Substack series here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

This essay’s arguments, the framing of the problem, much of the data, and a good part of my own unease about the literature I have relied on for the three previous essays come from Ajith’s Bhoomi, Jati, Bandhanam: Keralathile Karshikaprasnam, a study of the agrarian question in Kerala published in 2002.^[1] I bring forth Ajit’s arguments and figures largely as he presents them, because he has laid out the problem and its stakes in detail and at length better than a short article like this can reproduce, and because, on the central question, I think he is right. I am grateful to Muhammad Shamil of the Islamic Chair at Calicut University for directing me to the book.

But this series is about land and property, and Part 3 concluded that pre-colonial Malabar possessed private land property of an intensity the field has not yet absorbed. Here, until the colonial period, heritable, alienable, mortgageable private property was defended horizontally by corporations, lineages, and custom rather than vertically by a sovereign. It ended by admitting that it had described a society of owners without describing the people who worked the land, most of whom could own nothing and many of whom were themselves transferred with it. This essay begins from there and asks what the history of private property looks like when the aṭiyāḷar, the agrestic slave castes of Kerala, are taken seriously as the region’s principal productive force. The answer changes what we mean by ownership; it opens up a period that the historiography has flattened into stagnation; and it explains why Kerala’s celebrated land reform left the question about property and ownership exactly where the sixteenth century had left it.

The aṭiyāḷar, from the medieval order to the present

Ajith’s argument is not that bonded labor existed alongside Kerala’s agrarian system but that agrestic slavery was the basis of its productive force from the medieval period onward. In the order that Kerala’s historiography calls jati-janmitham, the direct producers were the aṭiyāḷar; the surplus they produced sustained every tier above them; and the mechanism of extraction was aṭiyāḷattam (അടിയാളത്തം), labor bound within the lordship order, a servile rather than a chattel form, whose components, the trade in persons and the producer’s total lack of right over the product, resembled slavery without quite being it.^[2] The point no longer rests on Marxist self-criticism alone: the recent historiography of the slave trade states it flatly that “lower-caste slaves in Kerala were the primary producers sustaining the economy of Kerala.”^[3] Ganesh’s reconstruction of the medieval hierarchy shows that by the twelfth century a gradation had emerged running from the naduvazhi chief through the ūrāḷar and kāṟāḷar to the kuṭiyar, settled tenant cultivators, with “the adiyar (bonded service classes) on the lowest rung,” and the legal codes, the kaccams, were evolved precisely to sustain “the authority of the landowners over the tenants and the servile class.”^[4] The category was internally divided. By the medieval period, Ganesh notes and Ajith emphasizes, two sections had grown up within the aṭiyar: the Ezhavar, Thiyyar, Arayar, and Paravar on one side, and on the other the castes who were themselves sold, the Pulayar, Parayar, and Vellan.^[5] Sixteenth-century records class the Channar of south Travancore, and even the saltmakers and fishermen of the coast, as adiyar, a warning against reading the term as a fixed caste bloc rather than as the name of a position in the relations of production.^[6]

What did the position involve? Ajith’s model distinguishes two fused levels of extraction. At the first level, aṭiyāḷattam proper, the surplus labor of the direct producers was taken almost in its entirety, with a paddy allowance returned to keep them standing in the field; here the janmi exercised near-direct control and stood to the aṭiyāḷan less as an owner of his labor than as bharikkunnavar, his ruler. At the second level, the pāṭṭam system, tenants arrayed in tiers above the janmi’s and their own aṭiyāḷar took a share of the product and passed the remainder upward as rent. The great mass of unpaid surplus came from the first level, not the second.^[7] The aṭiyāḷar themselves were denied the right to cultivate on their own account and to build a house on land; they were constituted as a category of people possessing no human rights but the right to breed.^[8] And they were property in the fullest transactional sense. Gopalakrishnan, whose work first restored the subject to Marxist history, records janmis working two hundred Pulayar on their fields while paying wages to a hundred-odd other cultivators, government slaves employed on sarkar land, and aṭiyāḷar transferred not only under kāṇam and pāṭṭam but as janmam, in full ownership.^[9] Malayil’s eighteenth-century evidence also shows that the aḍima were reckoned as assets that could be “sold, mortgaged and rented out … independently of [the] lands.”^[10] The instruments of this second property are among the oldest and most explicit documents the region possesses. People of the lower castes were bought and sold from the fifth century onward; the Tarisāppaḷḷi plates of 849 already record an adimakasu, a levy on slaves, and price a male slave at a hundred fanams and a female at seventy; and the Malayalam title deeds that confirmed each sale commonly transferred, in so many words, the right “to tie, chain or kill.” A deed of 1763 from central Kerala conveys the slave Thevuthan, son of the Pulaya slave woman Azhaki, from one Christian household to another at a price fixed by four men, with exactly those rights recited.^[11]

An order to end slavery in British Malabar “completely” was issued in 1842; the census of 1857 nonetheless counted 1,87,812 aṭiyāḷar, and Logan reports a sale of slaves in 1855. Travancore’s proclamation of 1853 freed only the children born to government slaves after the fifteenth of September that year.^[12] Abolition, when it came, did not release the aṭiyāḷar from the land. It converted them into kuṭikiṭappukār, tied dwellers on the land of janmis and kuṭiyānmār.^[13] Enquiries in 1828 found Mavilan and Karimbalan tribals sold as part of ordinary land leases; Thurston recorded in 1909 that inhabitants were entered in the contract when forests were sold, and that many tribals called themselves “men of janmis”; volunteers of the Kerala Congress Socialist Party found Mavilan and Karimbalan people being sold for ten to fifteen measures of grain as late as 1938.^[14] By 1911 more than sixty per cent of Malabar’s agricultural population were landless laborers, the highest proportion in the country, a figure KN Panikkar explains by the near-total absence of labor input from upper-caste cultivators even on small holdings, and behind which stood “the labor rendered by agrestic slaves like the Cherumars, Pulayas and Vettuvans, who were tied to the land.”^[15]

Then came the reform, and the reform’s decisive act was to produce a definition. The Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill of 1959, redrafted in 1963, amended in 1967, and fully implemented in 1970, defined kārṣikabandham, the agrarian relation as such, as the janmi–kuṭiyān relation and nothing else. Kuṭikiṭappu, which was the colonial reform’s own product out of aṭiyāḷattam, was thereby stripped of its place in agricultural production and shrunk to a mode of residence. The people who had reclaimed the wasteland, worked the paddy, and made the implements were assigned the standing of wage laborers, and in place of a claim on land created by generations of their own labor they received the charity of miccabhūmi: ten cents of homestead.^[16] Ajith does not belittle what the ten cents meant. The ownership of a house plot produced a real awakening among the Dalit landless, and the self-confidence and readiness for struggle that rose among them in that decade exceeded the value of the land itself. But it was won at the price of extinguishing the claim on cultivable land, the plots congealed into small colonies of four and five houses whose sweetness soon went bitter, and “ten-cent landlessness,” in his phrase, became a stimulus to a new round of tenant cultivation.^[17] The exemptions in the acts did the rest. Plantation crops were excluded from the beginning; the 1963 Act raised the ceiling, deemed holders of under twenty-four acres small owners, and lifted the kāyal reclamations, pepper, cashew, and areca gardens out of the ceiling altogether; paramb, the mixed-crop garden land that Ajith calls the backbone of Kerala’s agriculture, largely escaped redistribution.^[18] What was redistributable, in the end, was the wet paddy land of the old order.

The Communist Party’s agrarian resolution of 1956, twenty-nine pages long, gives the whole of the kuṭikiṭappu question one sentence: kuṭikiṭappukār must not be evicted for any reason, and still its three pages on agrarian reform contain no analysis of the kuṭikiṭappu system at all. Yet the same resolution demands a legal ban, in all its forms, on “the practice by which janmis and nāṭṭupramāṇis make agricultural laborers, especially Harijans, into slaves and lease them out for rent.” A century after abolition, a communist party found it necessary to demand that the leasing out of bonded laborers be prohibited.^[19] Gopalakrishnan, writing in 1974, noted that when the property of a janmi or a cultivator was partitioned, the aṭiyāḷar were partitioned along with it, a practice that continued, he said, until recent times, and that he had seen himself.^[20]

After three decades of reform, backward castes held sixty per cent of Kerala’s owned land, but eighty-eight per cent of those holders owned less than an acre and a fifth of them less than ten cents. Among Dalits the direction of change was downward even as the totals rose: households with more than 2.5 acres fell from 1.5 percent in 1980–81 to under one percent in 1985–86, the average holding shrank from thirty cents to twenty-five, and total Dalit acreage grew by 12,628 acres only because the number of tiny plots multiplied.^[21] Among the same population, cultivators fell from 25.6 percent in 1961 to 16.7 percent in 1991 while agricultural laborers rose from 41.5 to 55.5 percent.^[22] Two refinements to Ajith’s work should be made clear for future studies. First, Dalits and Adivasis must not be collapsed into one “landless” category, because their histories run in separate directions: the Dalit castes were aṭiyāḷar and then tied dwellers, while most Adivasi communities were never aṭiyāḷar at all but settled cultivators with their own land, whose question is dispossession and encroachment, with its own chronology, its unimplemented restoration law of 1975, and its eight thousand petitions whittled down to a fraction of the acreage claimed.^[23] Second, women are missing from every source: no census or survey investigated women’s landholding, and the reform vested both ownership and the kuṭikiṭappu right in the male head of household, so that the majority of the labor force performing more than half of agricultural work appears in the record only as dependents.^[24]

That is the case from the medieval period to the present, and it is worth pausing to consider what kind of case it is. Ajith’s move is not the familiar one in which caste is invoked to show that Marxist categories fail in South Asia. Instead, of proposing a caste-first revision of Marxism, he insists that Marxist historians of Kerala apply their own criterion. He quotes the passage of Capital’s third volume on which the whole tradition rests, that the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers is “the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure,” and then insists that Kerala’s Marxist historians apply their own criterion.^[25] Ask who the direct producers were. The answer dissolves EMS’s durable trinity, caste as the social, janmi as the economic, naduvazhi as the political, because that architecture assigns caste to the “social” in advance and so guarantees that nobody will look for it in the base; EMS’s own late writings could enumerate nine features of janmi-domination, on the schema that every field had two kinds of owner, those who cultivate and those who do not, without once making aṭiyāḷattam an object of inquiry.^[26] The methodological task Ajith sets is the one I want to keep: identify the relation through which surplus actually moved, and let the categories follow the relation rather than the other way around. Caste, so examined, is not the cultural crust on an economic base. At the base, it is the base.

The case presented by Ajith is not neat. Ajith has no chronology: aṭiyāḷattam appears in his book as a structure with a function, not a formation with a history, and we are never told when the aṭiyāḷa castes were constituted as such, how the two internal divisions arose, or what the relation was between bondage and the temple-centered order of the kaccam centuries.^[27] His picture is also too uniform, a point I return to below. Ganesh records aṭiyāḷar clearly that they were transferred with the land, and even, in a footnote on technology, explained the stagnation of Kerala’s productive techniques by the abundance of bonded labor, which is to treat bondage as the determining relation of production while the text names a different relation as the base.^[28] But Ganesh’s essay is a history of tenure, and its silences are partly the genre’s. Nonetheless, the history of tenure Ganesh presents yields a long stagnation, the janmi–kuṭiyān–aṭiyāḷar order persisting essentially unchanged from the twelfth century until Marthanda Varma’s reforms and the colonial conquest arrive from outside to move it, and in that frame the aṭiyāḷar can only ever be present as the inert bottom layer, mentioned and set aside. Part of the work ahead is to give the category the diachrony its historians have denied it.

What, then, is private property?

I have argued across three essays that private property in land existed in Kerala long before any colonial statute, and that Malabar’s peculiarity was that this property was constituted and defended without a state, through kaccams and maryāda, yōgams and sankētams and kūṟ factions, lineages guaranteeing one another’s holdings precisely so that no janmi or chief could swell into an overlord able to revise the terms. Devadevan’s inversion, that the king is primarily the regulator of property relations and the state the reified institutional form of prior property relations, has been the theoretical spine of the argument.^[29] The aṭiyāḷar complete it, and in completing it they force a precision the word “property” usually escapes.

Property is private in one sense whenever it is held outside the state: by a temple, a church, a mosque endowment, a matrilineal taravāṭu, a Brahmin corporation, a caste assembly, a merchant guild. It is private in a second and narrower sense, the sense the Western legal tradition treats as definitional, when a single recognized person holds an absolute, exclusive, alienable right against all comers. Early modern Malabar had both, in practice and at once. Devaswam, brahmaswam, cerikkal, and taravāṭu holdings were corporate and in principle impartible; and the aṭṭippēṟu sales that Malayil counts in the Kūḍāḷi Grandhavari between 1602 and 1786, forty-seven outright transfers of janmam including forests and swiddens, none recording any overlord’s consent, are individual and absolute in fact.^[30] The second form grew out of the first across the early modern centuries, and the solvent, I have argued and still think, was money: the mortgage-led multiplication of janmam holders, the sale-led redistribution of land after the sixteenth century, and the mercantile capital, much of it Mappila and Christian, that stood behind the bonds and foreclosures.^[31] What regulated the whole was not a sovereign but maryāda, localized, unwritten custom, inviolable in principle and enforced by prestige and social pressure, which appears in the records from the fifteenth century precisely as the idiom in which rights were attributed, bounded, and defended.^[32] A rule of property without a rule of the state: that was Part 3’s conclusion.

Historiography has described this order as a system of shared rights: no one owned the land absolutely, everyone from janmi to kuṭiyān to aṭiyāḷan held a bundle of customary claims in it, and true ownership, private property and commodification of land arrived only with colonial law. Sometimes even bondage is folded into this picture, as though the aṭiyāḷan’s tie to the soil were one more right in the great lattice of entitlements. I now think this description is wrong in a precise and consequential way. What the record actually shows for the early modern period is not shared right but emerging new forms of ownership in conflict for atmost control: a continuum of transactable, heritable, monetizable interests in the same land, differing in security, price, and honor, running from janmam through kāṇam and oṯṯi to kuḻikkāṇam and verumpāṭṭam. The cultivators under janmam “were not a monolithic class”; they ranged from large landholders who put land out on sublease to simple leaseholders, and the permanent forms of pāṭṭam, marayapāṭṭam and varampadangal pāṭṭam, were held by “wealthy landholders of the area.”^[33] Kāṇam and oṯṯi were mortgages held against an advance, with interest set off against rent; kuḻikkāṇam rewarded reclamation and planting with a lower rent, converting labor into a durable, saleable claim.^[34] These are not shares in a commons. They are property interests, and their holders bought, sold, inherited, and pledged them as such. What distinguished the janmi was not that he alone owned but that he alone was recognized as owning in the region’s legal language. Munro saw the heart of it in 1820, observing that the title of janmi had “a dignity beyond the possession of land,” worth half the value of the land’s productiveness by itself, which is why impoverished janmis divested themselves of every right in the soil through elaborate sub-tenures while retaining the bare title of honor.^[35] By the twentieth century, the resettlement officers threw up their hands: a man could be the janmi of a wetland plot and the tenant of his own garden and house, an absentee landlord, a cultivating owner, a tenant, an intermediary, and a laborer all at once.^[36] Recognition and possession had come entirely apart. The kuṭiyān was, in practice, an owner whom the order, and then the historiography, declined to recognize as one.

Seen this way, kuṭiyāyma was not a customary share in the land of others. It was a form of privatization: the extension of transactable interests in land downward through society, stopping at a line. And the line was not the one between janmi and kuṭiyān, who differ in degree, swap places, and shade into one another in every record we have. It was the line at the bottom, between everyone who could hold an interest in land and those who were held as one. That line was drawn in caste; it was patrolled by the kaccams and the maryāda as surely as any boundary stone, and it is the true discontinuity in Kerala’s property system. Kuḍi originally meant a settler who labored on the landlord’s land; the Tarisāppaḷḷi plates of 849 speak of the kuḍis of the Iḷavar; only by the sixteenth century do the records systematically distinguish kuḍigal, tenants, from alaḍiyar, bonded laborers.^[37] The kuṭiyān is not the timeless peasant of the village community. He is a stratum that crossed over, out of the laboring population and into transactability, at a moment we can approximately date, and the aṭiyāḷar are the population on whose fixed non-ownership his crossing was premised.

This is why the early modern centuries cannot be filed, as the historiography has filed them, under a long jenmi-kudiyan stagnation awaiting Marthanda Varma and the Company. Read diachronically, the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is a definitive stage in its own right, in which three processes intensified together: the multiplication and deepening of kāṇam interests, making kāṇam holders into substantial proprietors and, in the north, into something like private landlords; the monetisation of the whole tenurial ladder through mortgage, advance, and foreclosure; and the intensification of agrestic slavery as the production base on which janmi and kuṭiyān incomes alike expanded. The intensification is visible from the sea as well. European demand from the sixteenth century expanded and reshaped the native system without having created it, with exports from India running at times to five and six thousand slaves a year, and the pressure reached beyond the slave castes, so that in the European period even the twice-born could be enslaved through the deliberate food-trap of forced commensality with Pulayas.^[39] A Kavalappara family record of 1770 shows what such a mortgage actually conveyed: lands for 12,700 fanams “together with Thevaraparamba and Nedumparamba and Kovi [slaves], Kammanathu Chakkan [slave], Kannan [slave] and Chathan [slave] from among the Valliyalars,” the pāṭṭam of 1,270 paras of paddy appropriated for interest, with land, trees, and persons priced in a single instrument.^[40] The three are one process seen from three positions. More transferable interests in land meant more claimants to the surplus; more claimants meant greater pressure on the level where the surplus was actually produced; and the paddy expansion that fed Indian Ocean trade, in a region that was the second most rice-producing tract of the Madras Presidency and an exporter of grain, was carried on the backs of the bonded.^[38] Even the absence of revenue is part of this story. When the chieftains told the Company that pre-Mysorean Malabar had never known a land tax, and Thackeray concluded in 1807 that none had ever existed, they were describing a system in which extraction had been privatized twice over, once in the soil and once in the people who worked it, so that any aspirant state found every channel of surplus already owned.^[41] The productive base of that fully privatized order was aṭiyāḷattam. That is the history of property in the region.

And this, finally, is what the land reform got wrong, or rather what its inherited categories made it impossible to get right. “Land to the tiller” was the slogan, but the law identified the tiller with the kuṭiyān, the holder of a cultivating tenure, and so completed the recognition that the old order had withheld: the kuṭiyān’s unrecognized ownership became full title. The actual tillers, the descendants of the aṭiyāḷar, entered the law under the same rubric of labor that had always obscured them, and were compensated in residence rather than in land. The reform, in other words, resolved the contradiction inside the owning continuum and left the discontinuity at its base untouched. The consequences are clear from the statistics of the earlier paragraphs, and they are why the caste question and the class question in Kerala remain, at the bottom of the agrarian order, the same question. The standard objection, that caste and class famously fail to map onto each other in India, is true exactly where one would expect: in the middle, where Dilip Menon’s evidence shows higher-caste men cultivating as hired hands for lower-caste landholders in 1828, janmis holding as tenants of their social inferiors in 1927, and Nayars and Tiyyas alike appearing as landowners, tenants, and cultivators.^[42] The middle was scrambled because it was open; purchase, mortgage, foreclosure, and marriage churned it continuously. At the base, the correspondence was nearly exact, because the base was closed by definition; the thing that defined it was the incapacity to hold any interest at all. The equation of caste and class is false where the property system was fluid, and true where it was sealed; both facts have the same explanation.

The religious case

In the case of Kerala, the region contained two large religious communities that were monetized and mercantile, held and traded land, and were open, in different ways and to different degrees, to people from below the line.

The historiographical convention assigned the communities their places in advance: Hindus farmed, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews traded; Brahmins and temples owned, Nayars mediated, Dalits cultivated, and the Abrahamic communities carried the produce away. Against this, careful examination shows Muslim and Christian presence in the agrarian hinterland and land ownership from the start of the millennium. Buchanan, around 1800, called the Mappilas the only people in Malabar with “any spirit in agriculture.”^[43] The agrarian Mappila of the nineteenth-century record, the tenant and laborer whom Panikkar’s rebels were so largely, is the visible end of a long agrarian history that the sources had been read as not containing. Dilip Menon’s study of north Malabar shows the integration at ground level: Mappilas shared with Nayar taravāṭus a right in the services of artisan castes; Nayar yajamānan families settled disputes among their Mappila tenants and donated rice to the mosque; and when a Tellicherry taravāṭu’s four branches included one that had converted to Islam, the household continued under its Hindu karaṇavan without censure.^[44] The Syrian Christians ran the same course from a different starting point. Susan Bayly’s argument, that in the high-caste society of Kerala the Syrian Christians were treated as a ritually pure population, their persons and shrines non-polluting, donors and recipients across the religious line, is what made their landed career possible; by 1904 Christians were 27.1 per cent of the persons paying a hundred rupees or more in annual land tax in Travancore, second only to the Nairs and far ahead of the Brahmins, and in the following decades Syrian Christian capital, organized through kinship and joint-stock, financed the kāyal reclamations of Kuttanad whose landlords were remembered as the Kāyal Rājākkanmār. Though the laborers who carried out the reclamation were Pulaya.^[45]

For the question this essay asks, the two communities matter because they were routes across the property line. How they grew, and what becoming Muslim or Christian meant within Kerala’s agrarian order, are large questions that I am pursuing elsewhere. It is enough, for now, to flag a possibility: that the process we call conversion can also be read socio-economically, as a movement within the order of land, labor, and transaction, and not only as a doctrinal event. To cross into these communities was, among other things, to become a person who could hold and transfer an interest in land.

The religious communities were also among the beneficiaries of the system: well before the colonial period the janmi class had come to include Nairs, Syrian Christians, and Muslims, while Ezhavas could not reach janmam and Dalits were barred even from pāṭṭakṛṣi.^[46] Mappila merchant capital stood behind the mortgage bonds and foreclosures that redistributed north Malabar’s land in the eighteenth century, and Muslim and Christian traders took part in the traffic in bonded people.^[47] The escape hatch and the engine were sometimes the same institution. Nor did crossing the line erase it. The old order reproduced its shape inside the new communities: Syrian Christian kāyal landlords and Dalit Christian laborers; Mappila janmis in one taluk and Mappila verumpāṭṭam tenants and coolies in another; each community internally stratified along lines that remained very nearly synonymous with the caste and class positions its members had entered from. Religion in Kerala’s agrarian history is one of the mechanisms by which the property line was crossed, and one of the media in which the line reconstituted itself. That double character, I suspect, is what a history of conversion centred on land will find wherever mercantile religious communities met a sealed agrarian order, on the Konkan and Kanara coasts as much as in Kerala; and it also explains the sediment that confounds the caste-class equation in the middle of Malabar’s society, an ex-labouring population distributed by conversion across the whole range of landed positions, bearing a religious rather than a caste name.

Transitions, and why the framing still matters

Was this order feudal, and did it give way to capitalism? The surplus that built Kerala’s temples, taravāṭus, and port towns was not assembled through the market; it was pumped out of direct producers held in place by caste sanction, custom, and force, and any vocabulary that cannot say so has failed at the first task. Ajith’s insistence that Kerala’s Marxists misidentified the feudal base is a contribution to the feudalism debate, not a departure from it, and his findings sharpen the classic questions rather than dissolving them: what the units of lordship were, how surplus moved between levels, what role the temple corporations played as collective lords. The capitalist framing matters because the same region was simultaneously, for centuries, a commodity-producing, monetized, credit-saturated economy exporting pepper, coir, copra, and rice into the Indian Ocean, where land and labor were both bought and sold. Banaji’s method is what allows the two descriptions to occupy the same page: if modes of production are identified by the logic of accumulation rather than by the juridical form of the labour they employ, then unfree and bonded labour can be, and repeatedly has been, the workforce of commercially dynamic economies, and Malabar’s combination of intensive commerce with intensified bondage stops being a paradox and becomes a case.^[48] The early modern conjuncture I described above, kāṇam deepening into ownership while aṭiyāḷattam deepened beneath it, is exactly the kind of transition Banaji’s categories are built to catch and stage-theories are built to miss. Ajith reads the same evidence toward a semi-feudal present, and even his account concedes how oddly the parts fit: his sketch of the eighteenth century’s “dalal capitalism,” the brokerage nexus of colonial state, naduvazhi, and portfolio capitalist, ends with the observation that these broker-capitalists failed, at the height of colonial rule, to become plantation owners or industrialists.^[49] Whether one reads the sequel as arrested transition or as a caste-structured capitalist development, the test is the same, and it is the methodological rule I want this essay to leave behind: the character of a transition cannot be adjudicated on the mobility of the intermediate strata.

One regional qualification, which Ajith does not make and the evidence insists on. Aṭiyāḷattam was not uniform. Ravindran’s reconstruction of nineteenth-century Malabar distinguishes two production regimes with different labor requirements and different class configurations: wet paddy in the south and in Chirakkal, with enormous, sharply seasonal labor demand, a large servile workforce, rack-rented tenants, ritual codes that emphasized and justified the inequality, and revenue concentration reaching a Gini coefficient of 0.88 in Palghat; and garden crops in the north, where kāṇam was substantial, kuḻikkāṇam rewarded the reclaimer, and the cultivator’s own heavy outlay checked the janmi. Buchanan’s observation that slaves were more numerous in the south is not incidental: the density of bondage tracked the crop.^[50] .

The stakes, last of all, are of immense contemporary significance. The questions that fill Kerala’s public life, Dalit landlessness and the colonies, the Adivasi land struggles, the plantation exemptions that still shelter the largest holdings in the state, the pride and the incompleteness of the land reform, are the direct sediment of the history this essay has tried to reconstruct. A society that repeats “land to the tiller” as its founding achievement has an obligation to ask who the tiller was, and the answer, for most of Kerala’s history, is not the one the statute gave.

The final essay of this series returns again to what it means to make land the central analytical object, and to what the Malabar case does to the theories of accumulation in which agrarian surplus channels mercantilism, not vice versa.

Five related readings

Ajith, Bhoomi, Jati, Bandhanam: Keralathile Karshikaprasnam (Kochi, 2002), chapters 3, 6, and 8.

Vinil Paul, Adimakeralathinte Adrushyacharithram (2021), which reconstructs the history of enslavement in Kerala from the archives of the slave trade and the missions. I draw here only on one of his essays on the local networks of the slave trade; the book itself deserves fuller engagement than this essay could give it.

Dilip M. Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar, 1900–1948 (Cambridge, 1994), chapters 1 and 2. How caste, tenure, and shrine authority actually worked in north Malabar, and why the tenure vocabulary misdescribes it.

P. Sanal Mohan, Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala (New Delhi, 2015).

Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden, 2010).

^[1] Ajith, Bhoomi, Jati, Bandhanam: Keralathile Karshikaprasnam [Land, Caste, Bondage: The Agrarian Question in Kerala] (Kochi, 2002). All translations from the Malayalam are mine. The third chapter, “Jati-Janmittam” (30–40), the sixth, on the kuṭikiṭappu question (54–59), and the eighth, the title chapter (73–92), carry most of the argument used here.

^[2] Ajith, Bhoomi, Jati, Bandhanam, 36–37, where the relation is glossed as naduvazhitha-bandhita adhwanam, labour bound within the lordship order, against P. K. Gopalakrishnan’s translation of aṭiyāḷattam as aṭimattam, slavery proper (33–34).

^[3]Vinil Baby Paul, “Local Networks of the Slave Trade in Colonial Kerala,” in Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850: Towards a Global History of Coerced Labour, ed. Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman, and Matthias van Rossum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 202.

^[4] K. N. Ganesh, “Ownership and Control of Land in Medieval Kerala: Janmam–Kanam Relations during the 16th–18th Centuries,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 28, no. 3 (1991): 301.

^[5] Ajith, 37, quoting Ganesh; Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 302, where as janmam consolidated, kuṭiyar became a generic term for leaseholders while “Adiyar (or al) still remained bonded slaves, attached to the soil in food crop producing areas.”

^[6] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 303 nn. 14–15, citing Matilakam records.

^[7] Ajith, 36.

^[8] Ajith, 37-38.

^[9] Ajith, 35, quoting Gopalakrishnan.

^[10] Abhilash Malayil, “Commercialisation and Landed Proprietorship on the Malabar Coast in the Eighteenth Century,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 60, no. 1 (2023): 16.

^[11]Paul, “Local Networks,” 200, 203–5. The 1763 deed is quoted in full at 205; the majority of sale deeds, Paul notes at 203, state “you may sell or kill him or her.”

^[12] Ajith, 43, citing Logan; the Travancore proclamation of 1853 at 43.

^[13] Ajith, 42–43.

^[14] Dilip M. Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13

^[15] K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 32–33, drawing on the 1911 Census of the Madras Presidency, Malabar District, Part I, 235.

^[16] Ajith, 54–55.

^[17] Ajith, 56, 85.

^[18] Ajith, 54

^[19] Ajith, 58.

^[20] Ajith, 57 n. 4, quoting P. K. Gopalakrishnan (1974).

^[21] Ajith, 75–77.

^[22] Ajith, 80.

^[23] Ajith, 77–79.

^[24] Ajith, 80–82.

^[25] Ajith, 33, quoting Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in Malayalam translation.

^[26] Ajith, 32–33, quoting E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s trinity and the 1997 chapter “Janmimedhavitam Keralathil.”

^[27] Ajith, 83.

^[28] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 311.

^[29] Manu V. Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 27; see Parts 2 and 3 of this series.

^[30] Malayil, “Commercialisation,” 12-14.

^[31] Malayil, “Commercialisation,” 9, 28–31; Dilip M. Menon, “Houses by the Sea: State-Formation Experiments in Malabar, 1760–1800,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 29 (1999): 1996.

^[32] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 303–4.

^[33] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 303 and 303 n. 11.

^[34] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 306–8.

^[35] Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism, 37, quoting Thomas Munro (1820).

^[36] Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism, 37.

^[37] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 302.

^[38] Ajith, 9; Malayil, “Commercialization,” 9–14.

^[39]Paul, “Local Networks,” 206–7, 211–12.

^[40]Paul, “Local Networks,” 205–6, quoting K. K. N. Kurup, Kavalappara Papers (Calicut: Department of History, Calicut University, 1984), 5.

^[41] Panikkar, Against Lord and State, 2–3.

^[42] Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism, 37.

^[43] Mahmood Kooria, “Agrarian Arabic vs. Mercantile Arabic? Negotiations of a Malabari Community between Coasts and Hinterlands” (unpublished paper).

^[44] Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism, 18–19.

^[45] Emil Manu Oommen, “Capital and Community: Syrian Christian Agrarian Enterprise in Travancore, c. 1880–1950 CE,” Indian Economic and Social History Review (2026), table 1 at 15, 19 (the kāyal reclamations, the Kāyal Rājākkanmār, and K. T. Rammohan on the Pulaya labour that carried them out), 31, quoting Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and C. J. Fuller on Kerala Christians and the caste system.

^[46] Ajith, 31.

^[47]Paul, “Local Networks,” 205, 210: the largest group selling slaves in the Dutch period were local Syrian Christians and VOC soldiers; churches served as warehouses for slaves and as sites of auction; Muslim and Jewish traders also sold. The Mulamthuruthi church records one Varky Chacko pledging a Paraya woman, Kochu, to the church against ten parahs of paddy.

^[48] Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010), especially the essays on modes of production as laws of motion and on the deployment of unfree labour in commodity-producing economies; Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), on the error of reading modes of production off juridical statuses. Both are discussed in the theory interlude to this series.

^[49] Ajith, 25.

^[50] Gopinath Ravindran, “Agrarian Production Processes and Rural Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Malabar,” Studies in People’s History 3, no. 1 (2016): 30–31 and table 1; and Ravindran, “Early Colonial Tenancy Reform and Agrarian Change in Malabar,” Review of Agrarian Studies 14, no. 2 (2024).

A Rule of Property, Before the Rule of Property

Ameen Muhammed — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:21:18 GMT

This is the third part of the Substack series that examines Land as a central concern in South Asian historiography. Here I take up the question: Did pre-colonial South Asia have private property? If you haven’t read the previous parts, which are essential to understanding the full scope of this essay, please find them here: Part 1 and Part 2. The series and my own work would benefit from your criticisms, alternative framings, and reading suggestions, all of which I hope to see in the comments.

The previous essay ended with a question of whether there was private property in land in pre-colonial South Asia. If private, heritable, and alienable ownership arrived only with colonial legislation, with the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal and the ryotwari surveys of Madras, then everything that came before must be described in other words: custom, share, tenure, community, where the pre-colonial centuries become a prehistory that lacked any worthwhile concepts. If, on the other hand, a recognizably private property in land was already at work in parts of the subcontinent, then the colonial transformation has to be described afresh, and so does the pre-colonial state, because a property that no sovereign made and no sovereign protected is exactly the anomaly that our inherited theory cannot digest. This essay takes stock of how the question has been asked over two centuries, and then carries it to the coast of Malabar. Malabar and Kerala, more broadly, do more than merely answer that private property existed. The record suggests that property there was intense enough to shape the entire political order of the region; that the famous picture of layered and shared rights over land is a datable product of an early modern conjuncture, read too far backward; and that the question of what colonialism changed has been aimed, all along, at the wrong target.

How the question was made

The claim that the East had no private property in land is older than any discipline that now debates it. François Bernier, physician at the Mughal court in the 1660s, told Colbert that the king’s ownership of the soil was the cause of Asia’s ruin. The philosophes turned the observation into a theory of oriental despotism, and the East India Company found the axiom ready when it needed a theory for its revenue. Alexander Dow could assert in 1770 that “an established idea of property is the source of all industry,” and that no such idea had developed in India because all land under its Muslim dynasties had belonged to the Crown, a notion that Ranajit Guha traced directly back to Bernier.^[1] Marx received the axiom rather than invented it. In the summer of 1853, reading Bernier while drafting his New York Daily Tribune articles, he wrote to Engels that Bernier was right to see the absence of private property in land as the basic form of all Eastern phenomena, and Engels replied that this absence was indeed the key to the whole of the East.^[2] The Grundrisse later fixed the thought into what Marx called the Asiatic form, in which the many village communities hold the soil only as hereditary possessors, while the comprehensive unity standing above them, realized at last in the person of the despot, figures as the sole proprietor.^[3] Here is the first definition the historiography ever gave: all land belonged to the state, and private property waited on Europe. It should give us pause that this answer was fiscal doctrine before it was philosophy, required by a Company that meant to step into the despot’s conveniently vacant title.

The second answer looks like the opposite of the first. Where the despot owned everything, the village community owned everything in common. This was the “little republic” of colonial ethnography, in which rights in the soil dissolved into the shared life of a self-sufficient community. In the twentieth century the picture acquired sociological rigour under the name of the jajmani system, the hereditary exchange in which the landholding castes, the artisans who serve them, and the labourers who work the fields each hold customary claims on the harvest heap, so that the produce of the land, and by extension the land itself, is parcelled into overlapping entitlements so numerous that no individual can be called its absolute owner.^[4] Walter Neale compressed the idea by saying that in India, “land is to rule,” not to own.^[5] The despotic state and the organic community are contraries on the surface and identical at the root, because in both the individual proprietor, the person who can sell, mortgage, bequeath, endow, and evict, does not exist. Both lead to the same conclusion, that private property in land is what colonialism brought. The communal picture also rests overwhelmingly on administrative description from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, generalized backward into a timeless order.

Faisal Chaudhry has shown that the scholarship on South Asian land has always had to grapple with property “both as a material relation and as an alien cultural category,” as something people did with land and, at the same time, a concept whose European genealogy makes its application to India permanently suspect. His prescription, which this essay adopts, is to write the history of landed rights across the early modern and the modern instead of letting 1793 cut it in two.^[6] The test for pre-colonial property is then not whether Sanskrit or Malayalam possessed a word that translates dominium, but whether the practices that make property a material relation, namely sale, mortgage, inheritance, endowment, and eviction, were present, regular, and enforceable.

The Marxist historians who built modern Indian economic history dismantled the despotic axiom empirically. D. D. Kosambi and R. S. Sharma read the proliferation of land grants after the Gupta period as feudalism, in which sovereignty fragmented downward into a hierarchy of landed intermediaries, and whatever else that thesis claims, it concedes that the grantee held something durable, heritable, and his own. Romila Thapar and Kumkum Roy traced the state itself to prior transformations in the control of land and surplus, which makes landed rights older than the polity that regulates them.^[7] For the Mughal centuries, Irfan Habib described a regime whose emperor took a tax, the share of a sovereign, rather than rent, the income of an owner. Beneath the imperial claim the zamindari right was hereditary and had become, from the sixteenth century, “a fully salable commodity.” Cash revenue pulled the countryside into what Habib called commodity production properly speaking, and usury fed merchant capital.^[8] Whatever the Mughal state was, it was not a universal landlord. For the far south, Dharma Kumar addressed the question “Private Property in Asia?” through examining Chola epigraphy. Roughly forty per cent of the published Chola inscriptions record grants or sales of land; the word kāṇi named a heritable right in land whose component entitlements the inscriptions itemize with the care of a jurist; and though the earliest recorded sales cluster among Brahmins in brahmadēya villages, by the late Chola period individuals of many communities were buying and selling.^[9] Her conclusion bears repeating: the axiom of absence survives only if property is defined with a stringency that no actual society, England included, could meet.

Bengal, meanwhile, became the type-case for the opposite claim. Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal read the Permanent Settlement as the enactment of an idea, a doctrine legislated into a landscape its authors did not understand, and the book’s brilliance fixed a birth year for the property in India, 1793.^[10] The Subaltern Studies project that followed turned to the insurgent peasant and the colonized mind, and left the property question standing where A Rule of Property had put it. Andrew Sartori’s Liberalism in Empire complicates the story. In the jute tracts of eastern Bengal, he found Muslim smallholders who claimed, in a Lockean idiom that nobody had taught them, a property in the improvements wrought by their own labor, so that liberalism appears as a vernacular resource seized from below rather than a gift handed down.^[11] Yet even this correction assumes that the categories arrived with the colonial encounter and were then domesticated. The Kerala materials put pressure on the premise itself.

The Kerala variations

Kerala historiography has its own distinguished version of the story in which the state comes first. M. G. S. Narayanan reconstructed the Cēra kingdom of Makōtai (c. 800 to 1124) as a Brahmin oligarchy joined to a ritual monarchy, and in his account the advent of organized Brahmin settlement and the formation of the region’s first, and last, pan-Kerala state were parts of a single process.^[12] The thirty-two Brahmin settlements of legend were planted along the wet-rice river valleys, and the temple functioned as a landholding corporation. The Perumāḷ presided as overlord, his sovereignty acknowledged in varying degrees by the chiefs of the nāṭus, and the kaccams, codes of temple and settlement governance, were read as the legal sinew of the kingdom. Over the whole arrangement stood the Paraśurāma myth, in which the land is flung up from the sea by the axe and given to Brahmins, its very fertility their entitlement.^[13] Rajan Gurukkal and M. R. Raghava Varier developed the agrarian core of this picture. Temple-centered corporations organized wetland production and institutionalized, in the same movement, the caste order of agrarian labor, with the kuṭi settled beneath the landholders and the aṭiyār bound at the bottom, while the spread of codes such as the Mūḻikkaḷaṃ kaccam across temple inscriptions far from Koṭuṅṅallūr served as the measure of the kingdom’s centralizing reach.^[14] In this literature, the early medieval period is when land rights crystallize around the temple–Brahmin–chief axis, and the state is the keystone of the arch.

For the centuries after the Cēras, K. N. Ganesh’s account of janmam and kāṇam remains the fullest reconstruction of how landholding actually worked. Janmam was birthright: ownership devolved by descent, owing no service or due to any overlord, and lost only by sale or transfer.^[15] Around it ran a live market in encumbrances. Oṯṯi and kāṇam mortgages ran for terms of one to twelve years against a money advance called artham, its interest set off against the rent, and there arose, increasingly, an intermediary class of kāṇam-holding controllers, drawn from temple servants, militiamen, and accountants, whose ascent Ganesh captured in his well-known dichotomy of ownership and control.^[16] He read this dynamic to its terminus in eighteenth-century Travancore, where a centralizing state converted customary ownership into state landlordism, while Malabar he found wanting in dynamism.^[17] The first essay in this series argued that this verdict reflects a Travancore template, but what matters here is simpler. Everything in Ganesh’s account- the sales, the mortgages, the devolution, and the foreclosures- presupposes private ownership of land as the ordinary and unremarked condition of agrarian life, centuries before any colonial settlement.

Two further moves complete the historiography. The first dismantled the centralizing state. Kesavan Veluthat’s later work described Kerala itself as a region constituted by settlement, myth, and historiographical labor rather than by any imperial fact. Dilip Menon, surveying the fragmented politics of the eighteenth century, found kings without land tax, rulers whose incomes came from trade, whose households faced the sea through their Māppiḷa merchant financiers, and whose repeated experiments in state formation never cohered.^[18] Manu Devadevan drew the theoretical conclusion on which this series builds: the king is primarily the regulator of property relations, the state is their reified institutional form, and his re-reading of the Cēra polity shows land relations first making the state and then dissolving it, never to be replaced.^[19] The second move is Abhilash Malayil’s. In the eighteenth-century record he found what he calls the Malabar consensus: Thomas Munro and F. W. Ellis, adversaries on nearly everything in the revenue debates of Madras, agreed that privately owned landed assets manifestly existed in Malabar. Janmam, also called aṭṭipēṟu, was held in the proprietor’s “own privatised account, free of all participation and control [by the state] and formerly, free of all rent.” Contemporaries counted it as an allodial ownership, “a mirās without land tax,” and it was sold outright, forests and swiddens included, in deed after deed across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and no overlord’s consent was so much as recorded.^[20] The arc of the historiography runs, in short, from a coast that could have no property because it had no despot to a coast where property was so dense that no despot could form.

The problem, restated

Begin with the textbook picture. The order of janmam, kāṇam, and aṭiyāḷar is standardly presented as a system of layered and shared rights over land, in which no one, strictly speaking, owns absolutely. The picture is not false. It is mis-dated. Until the late seventeenth century, kāṇam appears in the records as a subordinate money-lease and not as a right that seriously fettered the janmi. A janmi who commanded wealth, ritual rank, the yōgam, and armed men could rid himself of an inconvenient kāṇakkāran at renewal, whether by the correct procedure or by pressure that did not trouble to be procedural, and the maryāda that in principle restrained him had no enforcer beyond the weight of social standing.^[21] The kāṇam that could resist a janmi is a later creature: kuḻikkāṇam protecting the tenant’s investment in wells, trees, and reclaimed ground; sub-tenures converting the holder into an intermediate landlord; mortgage rights hardening toward foreclosure. All of this belongs to the early modern conjuncture, to overseas trade after the arrival of the Europeans, to mercantile money moving up the rivers into the agrarian interior, and to merchant and mercenary groups becoming landed classes in their own right.^[22] The layered character of Kerala tenure is real, but it is datable, and its intensity belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that produced most of our documentation. Read the layers back into the medieval centuries and the janmi dissolves into a mere co-shareholder. Keep the chronology straight and he stands out as a relatively absolute owner, whose capacity to appropriate wealth and command persons the idiom of shared rights systematically understates.

Apply the same discipline to the state, and the centralizing Cēra thins in the same way. The case rests heavily on the kaccams, above all the Mūḻikkaḷaṃ kaccam of the temple inscriptions. Read closely, however, the kaccams regulate something much more particular than imperial jurisdiction, namely the conduct of temple trustees and settlement bodies. The Mūḻikkaḷaṃ code prescribed fines, forfeiture, and excommunication for ūrāḷar who encroached on temple land, who took usufructuary mortgages on it, or who charged their personal expenses to the village. That is trustee regulation, not territorial administration.^[23] Different temples invoked different kaccams as the need arose, and the choice traveled with Brahmin migrations, with shifting allegiances, and with patronage, rather than with the writ of any imperial center. Where kaccam did not reach, maryāda governed. This was the loose, localized, unwritten custom through which caste hierarchies, occupational roles, and social status were managed, with instruments no more coercive than social pressure and the threat of lost standing.^[24] A normative order of this kind presupposes no punitive state, and in most cases it did not even require an ūr or a sabhā to act as one. The upshot cuts both ways: the evidence for pre-colonial property in Kerala is not evidence for a pre-colonial state that made it, since property was regulated, transmitted, and litigated by corporate and customary machinery that owed nothing to sovereignty.

jūta ceppēṭ or Jewish copper plates of Cochin (plate I, side I), c. 1000 CE

Third, there is what lies outside the historiography’s own categories of ownership. Brahmasvam, dēvasvam, and cērikkal, the property of Brahmin households, of temples, and of chiefly houses, describe the caste and temple complex, and they stop there. But landed institutions existed outside that complex from very early on. In 849 CE, the Tarisāppaḷḷi plates conveyed land, with cultivating and artisan families attached, to a Syrian Christian church at Kollam, and Devadevan reads the grant as the act of a mercantile order anchoring itself in agrarian property because maritime trade alone was seasonal and unstable.^[25] Around 1000 CE, the Jewish copper plates of Bhāskara Ravi endowed Jōsēph Rabbān and the Añcuvaṇṇam with privileges that were held heritably.^[26] From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the material record of coastal Islam thickens as well, from tombstones at hinterland Nilamuttam to the Muccunti mosque epigraph at Calicut recording a ruler’s endowment, until mosques, churches, synagogues, and cemeteries stood along the littoral from Kannur to Kollam.^[27] Institutions belonging to communities outside the caste and temple order could be founded, maintained, and inherited only where land could be privately held and alienated to them. Waqf as a category recognized in local law is almost certainly a modern arrival, but the endowments themselves are old, and they presuppose exactly what the communal picture denies, alienable private land.^[28] And these communities were economically indispensable to the local polities and to Indian Ocean trade, so their landed standing stood near the center of the region’s order. A further thought I owe to a conversation with Abhilash Malayil. Private property may first have crystallized as an idea on this coast at precisely this interface, where the temple and caste land order met wealthy trading communities whose institutions could not be housed within it, so that their grants had to be thinkable as something else.^[29]Did the idea of alienable property become necessary during a period when these mercantile and newly arrived religious communities began settling along the coastal littoral and its interiors? Can we think of the emergence of new landed rights, such as Upayam (denoting housing or domestication rights), paramb (for cultivating orchards and gardens), etc., as related to the private interests of these new landed social groups?

Fourth, protection without a sovereign had to be organized horizontally, and it was. The yōgams and sankētams of the Brahmin corporations, the kūṟ factions into which the great landed lineages arranged themselves, and the alliance politics of the svarūpams were, among other things, machinery for guaranteeing each holder’s right, precisely by ensuring that no janmi, chief, or temple swelled into an overlord who could revise the terms.^[30] The same fact explains the region’s famous fiscal anomaly. Appropriation in the janmam and kāṇam order ran as rent, as pāṭṭam flowing from cultivator to holder to owner, and no political entity took a stable share of the produce. When Company officials went looking for the land revenue of pre-Mysorean Malabar, the chieftains testified that there had been none, and William Thackeray concluded in 1807 that none had ever existed.^[31] The absence of revenue is not the absence of extraction. It is the signature of extraction fully privatized, in which every channel of surplus is already owned, and it meant that any aspirant state found the fiscal base it needed enclosed against it in advance. Private property did not merely exist without the state. It is what made the state fail.

Fifth, the question of what colonial rule changed has therefore been aimed at the wrong target. Guha gave us a colonial state that legislated property into being, Sartori gave us colonial subjects who seized the idiom for themselves, and both assume that the category arrived with the encounter. In Malabar, the Company arrived to find owners, and its real problem, documented in two confused decades of settlement reports, was not to create private property but to insert a sovereign claim above a property order that had never conceded one.^[32] Seen from this coast, ryotwari, remembered as the settlement that made the individual cultivator a proprietor, did something close to the opposite. It replaced a wholly privatized system of rent rights with a tax-state and subordinated the janmam title, for the first time in its long career, to a public claim on the produce. The revenue settlement was not the birth of private property in South India. It was the moment when private property was, for the first time, made to pay.^[33]

Sixth, and finally, consider the contradictions that the present historiography holds together without acknowledging them. Under the Company’s settlement, it was the janmi, and not the kāṇam holder, who was recognized as the natural proprietor, and William Logan would conclude, half a century later, that the kanamdar had lost out substantially to the janmi through the British misrepresentation of his pre-colonial status.^[34] The judgment assumes what it ought to demonstrate, that the thickening of kāṇam across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had amounted to a standing near ownership, which the British then betrayed. The new weight of the kāṇam holder was lease-control without alienable right, and the cultivation beneath both janmi and kāṇakkāran was performed overwhelmingly by the aṭiyāḷar, the bonded castes, whom Ajith insists were the primary producers of the agrarian order. These were people denied even the right to cultivate on their own account or to raise a house on the land, and the deeds counted them among its appurtenances.^[35] The historiography must therefore decide what it wants kāṇam to be. If the replacement of kāṇam control is mourned as a loss of shared rights, then its earlier weakness must be admitted, and with it the janmi’s earlier absoluteness. If it is celebrated as the rise of an improving quasi-proprietor, then the idyll of shared rights dissolves into a contest between two strata of property holders, financed by merchant capital and conducted over the heads of an enslaved workforce. What the sources show from the seventeenth century onward is that privatization intensified within property, while the laboring base of the order remained not merely propertyless but property itself. Historiography has not only ignored the prominent productive force of the aṭiyāḷar population, but, by defining landed rights as shared, it has also wrongly regarded the aṭiyāḷar themselves as a group with minimal but definite and non-alienable rights to the land they were tied to.

What remains to be examined

A survey of a problem should end with the problems, and three seem most urgent. We need a documented history of the janmi’s powers before 1700, of eviction, dispossession, and the ancestors of the notorious mēlccāṟtt, the over-lease by which a landlord installed a rival above a sitting tenant, worked from the granthāvari and kōleḻuttŭ records themselves rather than from nineteenth-century retrospection, so that the chronology proposed here can be tested. We need a legal history of the non-temple endowments, of how mosque, church, and synagogue lands were held, transmitted, and litigated across the medieval and early modern centuries, and of what became of them when real fiscal states finally arrived, for which the career of the Arakkal endowments under Mysore’s inam rules is the natural laboratory. We need the kāṇam deeds counted in a serial history of mortgages and sales by period and locality to establish how much of the layered order predates mercantile capital.^[36] While all these are difficult studies to conduct for a region like Malabar, because of the lack of persistence of palm leaf land deeds from the medieval and early medieval period. Nonetheless, epigraphic data and granthavari records can be studied carefully to assess the extent to which private land existed in the region. Areas like the Canara and Konkan could also provide substantial support for such studies.

Beneath all these questions lies a question this essay has deliberately left at the edge. If pre-colonial Malabar was a society of owners to a degree the field has not yet absorbed, it was also, by the same token, a society in which most of those who worked the land were themselves held as property in it. The aṭiyāḷar are the largest silence in every account discussed here, and they have remained the silence in this one. The next essay turns to that problem and how the lack of critical understanding has gravely shaped land tenure and land reform systems in modern and contemporary Kerala.

The State Inverted

Ameen Muhammed — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:03:03 GMT

This is the second part of the five part Substack series that aims to study debates and theories on land in South Asian history and if you haven’t read the first part, please find the link for the same here. While this is written from a historian’s perspective, I hope it resonates with other disciplinary concerns. Since my own reading and concerns have been mostly related to Kerala and Malabar, that is what you will find as the regional focus here too, even though I will attempt to connect it to the general historiographical and theoretical issues concerned with land, state, labor, caste, etc for the whole of South Asia. The series and my own work would benefit from your criticisms, alternative framings, and reading suggestions, all of which I hope to see in the comments. Even though I had planned to post a new part of the series once every week, reading and writing is taking a lot more time that I expected, hence delays, as in the case here, should be expected.

The first essay of this series argued that the historiography of South Asian land, for all its sophistication, has carried a single assumption: that the state is a byproduct of land relations, and that these relations, in turn, are legible as effects of sovereign power. The colonial revenue settlement taxed, surveyed, and titled; the Asiatic mode of production made the sovereign the universal landlord; and whenever a state was absent, its absence was read as a void, a stateless zone awaiting incorporation. This essay inverts the sequence and asks a question that sounds almost naïve when posed directly. Does land need a state? Must a sovereign, or any institution of centralized power, pre-exist for land to function as private and alienable property, for landed hierarchy and bonded labor to hold, and for the customary rules that govern tenure to operate at all?

The wager is not the simple reversal that puts land where others put the state. It is that land relations, as they intensify, tend to culminate in the state. Centralizing aspiration is the recurring drive, and the sovereignty that forms arrives as the protector of the prevailing order of property, at times deepening the very relations that produced it. Malabar reverses this tendency at its source. There the intensification of privatized land relations worked against state formation itself, frustrating every aspiration to sovereignty and denying any ruling class the room to rise into a centralizing power above the privatized order.

Malabar between roughly the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries furnishes the sharpest case, because there an intensive and emphatically private order of landed property grew dense while sovereignty stayed thin, and, I will argue, sovereignty stayed thin in part because private property grew dense. To reach that argument, the essay first moves through the theory that frames how the question can be asked, then through the South Asian historiography that has addressed it, and finally to the case of the south-western coast, where the possibility of a new theory is least avoidable.

The state as the author of property

Classical political economy treated property in land as a fact of nature rather than a work of history. John Locke’s chapter on property in the Second Treatise provides the founding statement. A man owns himself, therefore his labor, therefore whatever he has mixed his labor with, drawing it out of the common by natural right.[1] The decisive feature is that this right is pre-political. Property in land arises in the state of nature, before government, and the magistrate’s later task is merely to guard a title that already exists. Adam Smith set the individual proprietor in motion, making land one of three great factors alongside labor and stock, each drawing its revenue of rent, wages, and profit, with commercial society as the natural terminus of a system of natural liberty.[2] The Physiocrats made land the sole source of the net product and treated the agrarian order they desired as the rational form toward which policy should clear the way.[3] What these quarreling figures share is a single structure of thought. Land is abstract and alienable; property in it precedes the political order; the market that circulates it is a spontaneous order with regular laws; and commercial society is the destination of one human history. Ranajit Guha would later show this structure legislated into Bengal through the Permanent Settlement of 1793, as a Physiocratic and Lockean abstraction imposed as social reality.[4]

The response that brought the necessary rupture was Marx’s, and at its core lies the inversion of the liberal abstraction. The commodity is a social relation that appears as a thing. Ground-rent, which Smith read as a natural return to a factor, Marx read in the third volume of Capital as a historically specific social form, the tribute a class of landowners levies on surplus value by virtue of its monopoly over a condition of production.[5] Property in land becomes the outcome of class struggle and state power rather than a fact given before either. Against the Lockean idyll of property growing quietly out of labor, the chapters on so-called primitive accumulation narrate the genesis of capitalist property as an act of separation. The English peasantry was prised from the land by enclosure, statute, and the gallows, and the same stroke manufactured both concentrated landed property and a class obliged to sell its labor power to live.[6] The market in land was instituted by force and by law. Here the dynamic this essay tracks comes into view. Class relations make the state, and the state in turn makes and guards property. Karl Polanyi sharpened the point from outside the Marxist tradition. Land, with labor and money, is a fictitious commodity, never produced for sale and saleable only when an authority institutes and defends its commodity form. Land is the most fictitious of the three, since to marketize it is to dissolve the web of social and ecological relations that communities have built around the soil.[7]

Marx left two problems that the next century worked to solve, and both bear on land. The first is the residue of stage theory. The teleology of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes could harden into a ladder every society must climb, with the Asiatic mode reserved as an embarrassing siding for the societies, India chief among them, that appeared to stand still.[8] The second is the case of the peasant. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, the French smallholders form a class by their common conditions and yet remain incapable of acting as one, scattered across self-sufficient plots much as potatoes form a sack of potatoes, and so requiring a Bonaparte to represent them from above.[9] Both inheritances cast the agrarian world as a residue awaiting dissolution. Peasant studies answered the second. Where liberal modernization saw a backward producer destined to be improved off the land, and orthodox Marxism saw a petty-bourgeois remnant destined to split into bourgeois and proletarian, the body of work gathered by Teodor Shanin insisted that the peasantry was a durable social formation with a logic of its own.[10] Chayanov had shown that the peasant household obeys a calculus of consumption needs balanced against the drudgery of labor rather than a drive for profit,[11] and Eric Wolf showed that commercialization, by tearing the customary world out from under a middle peasantry, makes the most traditional cultivators the most rebellious.[12]

The transition debate took the stage theory at its heart. Maurice Dobb placed the motor of change within feudal class relations, Paul Sweezy in trade and towns, and Robert Brenner later swept both aside to argue that the structure of agrarian class relations, who held the land and on what terms, decided why agrarian capitalism emerged in England rather than France under the same markets and the same demographic cycles.[13] The lesson that travels here is that markets cannot, by themselves, explain capitalism; what must be explained is the relation that compels production for the market.

Two thinkers then turned the debate from a sorting of economies into a usable method. Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst pushed Althusserian structuralism to its limit, treating a mode of production as a theoretical object built in thought rather than a type one finds lying about in India or medieval Europe.[14] They redefined feudalism as a purely economic structure, the extra-economic appropriation of surplus through the landlord’s exclusive control of landed property, so that labor rent, rent in kind, and money rent become variant forms of one feudal relation rather than separate modes. They insisted that the relations of production constitute the productive forces and not the reverse, which removes the temptation to explain capitalism by a rise in productivity or to collapse feudalism under the mechanical weight of towns and trade. And they replaced the pure mode with the social formation, an articulation of several modes with one dominant, thereby dissolving the idea that a society is feudal or capitalist in its pure state. This licenses the question Malabar invites, which mechanism of surplus appropriation actually prevailed there, rather than which European stage it most resembles. Jairus Banaji then recovered the mode of production as a totality, with its own laws of motion, rather than as a labor form.[15] The same labor form serves opposite logics. Capitalist relations can run through small peasants who are never proletarianized, where merchant capital and moneylenders advance credit against a crop and take the surplus as interest or as a dictated price, so that the peasant appears independent and is in reality a capital-producing laborer; to call such an economy semi-feudal is, in his phrase, a myth created by a failure of abstraction. Two further provocations are also worth utilizing in the case of Kerala. The opposition of free and unfree labor is ideological, since law is present at every level and constitutes the labor market rather than reflecting it, a lesson any history of the bonded agrarian castes of Kerala requires, and this will be worth discussing in a separate part of the series.

Henry Bernstein and Terence Byres carried the same anti-essentialism into the present, framing land as a process of class differentiation and warning that the cultural turn defunded the material questions of land, labor, and property.[16] The apparatus reaches the Indian threshold in the divergence debate, where comparing economies as per-capita aggregates risks reimporting the very abstraction Marx and Polanyi worked to destroy.[17] Rajat Datta returns the question to the ground. His reconstruction of the late-eighteenth-century Bengal grain trade shows a dense, monetized, indigenously run commerce that drew cultivators into the market as underdogs, through a combination of market and non-market constraint, so that production appeared dominated by merchant capital while the cultivator remained a small household producer.[18] This is Banaji’s capital-producing peasant found in the archive, and it reframes divergence as a question about relations rather than levels. I will take up Pomeranz, Datta, and Ravi Palat in detail in a later part on commercialization and the Indian Ocean trade.

How land relations make the state

Read with land and state at the focus, the materialist historiography of South Asia tells a consistent story. Land relations, as they intensify, culminate in the state, and the state returns to guard and deepen them. D. D. Kosambi reconstructed the past from tools, crops, and trade routes rather than dynastic lists, and Romila Thapar traced a passage from lineage to state in the Ganga valley in which the surplus of wet-rice agriculture and the displacement of clan redistribution by territorial extraction generated monarchy as the outcome of an agrarian transformation; Kumkum Roy read the same emergence as the hardening of the rāja into a single coercive and extractive office.[19] The centralizing drive is already legible here, with the agrarian serving as the womb of the polity.

R. S. Sharma’s theory of Indian feudalism read the post-Gupta proliferation of land grants as a downward fragmentation of sovereignty that tied peasants to the soil and decayed towns and coinage.[20] Harbans Mukhia answered that there was no feudalism in India, rejecting both feudalism and the Asiatic mode as European straitjackets, while acutely observing that caste, rather than serfdom, secured the flow of labor from the landless to the landed.[21] But this has slid away from rejecting a borrowed periodization to rejecting the materialist analytic itself, and licenses a retreat from land, surplus, and class. Banaji shows that feudalism was never adequately defined by serfdom, so that the absence of European serfdom in India settles nothing about whether a feudal law of motion was at work, and Hindess and Hirst show that what an Indian land grant institutes, the right to appropriate the produce of cultivators who continue to work the soil, is feudal in precisely the structural sense that matters. Mukhia’s caste insight, far from refuting the analytic, points to where it must be deepened. Caste may be the very mechanism through which surplus labor is secured, a claim that returns with full force in the case of Kerala coast. I develop this argument at length in the section on labor and caste; here, it serves as the hinge between a European periodization and a materialist analysis that can be reworked for the materials at hand.

South India broke the centralized state into pieces while keeping it the locus of new theoretical works. Burton Stein dispersed power into a segmentary pyramid of nāṭu localities held together by ritual, and Kesavan Veluthat could write that the Brahmanical temple stood as a synonym for the state, the organ through which surplus was extracted and the caste order installed, while Rajan Gurukkal reconstructed the temple as a redistributive center that gathered land, labor, and produce and reallocated them through ritual and patronage.[22] In Polanyi’s vocabulary, the temple is a textbook institution of redistribution, and reading it so shows the state coming apart as a unit of analysis, since the real work of extraction and ordering is done by a distributed network of temples and assemblies.

Mughal historiography cast the state instead as the great appropriator. Irfan Habib described a centralized apparatus that extracted the agrarian surplus through the zamindar and the transferable jagir, with the empire standing over a vast peasantry as the great appropriator.[23] His essay on the “potentialities of capitalistic development” then posed the question of transition directly. The seeds were genuinely present, since cash revenue compelled commodity production, usury fed merchant capital, and merchant-farmers invested in high-value crops, and yet capitalism failed to develop, because the surplus was concentrated in a ruling class that consumed it in display rather than reinvesting it.[24] Banaji’s tributary mode names exactly this structure and reads its commercialism as the working of a distinct law of motion rather than a failed approach to Europe. Cutting across all of this, David Ludden insisted on the long duration of agrarian regions and on the agrarian itself as a category with a history, which relocates the unit of analysis from the empire to the region.[25]

With colonialism, the state became, by its own account, the maker of property. Ranajit Guha read the Permanent Settlement as a Lockean abstraction installed by fiat; in the south the Company had to choose the unit of property it would recognize, weighing Munro’s individual ryot against Ellis’s corporate mirāsi right, a contest Bhavani Raman has shown to be inseparable from the Company’s manufacture of its own sovereignty through the power to decide who could lawfully sell land.[26] Across two centuries, the scholarship settles on a single proposition: that property follows the sovereign, and the sovereign is the form that land relations finally take.

Manu Devadevan states the inversion most sharply. The king is primarily the regulator of property relations, and the state is the reified institutional form of those relations, the congealed expression of arrangements over land that precede it.[27] His chapter on the Cēra state carries the claim into Kerala and shows the logic running, for once, toward dissolution. By the tenth century, households and individuals, and not the state alone, were endowing temples; assemblies such as the ūrāḷar drove an agrarian expansion that belonged to neither state nor temple; land grants declined; and as paddy gave way to pepper and the region withdrew from the dominant grain-circulation network by the fourteenth century, holdings fragmented and the ranks of landholders swelled. With surplus dispersed across a multitude of smallholders, and with local chiefs holding real fiscal grip over their own patches, no single line could assemble overlordship of the whole region. Land relations made the Cēra state, and land relations unmade it. In his study of the Tarisāppaḷḷi copperplate grant of Kollam, long mined only for its evidence of pepper and trade, Devadevan rereads the plates to argue that a mercantile order, a St. Thomas Christian church and the trade guilds around it, reached for agrarian institutions and landed endowment precisely because long-distance maritime trade was ad hoc and unstable and needed an anchor in the soil.[28] Commerce sought the durability of land through a grant that organized cultivators, revenue shares, and rights of protection, without a centralizing state. I am in close agreement with Devadevan on the order of dependence, and with the reading of Kerala as the place where it shows most plainly. The task now is to carry the inversion to its stronger form, that is - property against the state.

The architecture of land rights in Malabar

Between roughly the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, Malabar held no state in any robust sense. Authority lay with a multitude of naṭuvāḻis exercising the overlordship of the nāṭu, a patchwork of matrilineal svarūpams and chiefly houses whose claims were judicial and customary far more than fiscal, and the memory of the vanished Cēra overking survived as a virtual sovereignty that legitimated little kings without subordinating them.[29] Dilip Menon, surveying the years from 1760 to 1800, names the political reality precisely: state-formation experiments attempted again and again, only to be undone again and again.[30] This thinly governed coast carried one of the most intensive regimes of private property in pre-colonial South Asia.

The land system was named in the sources as janmam–kāṇam–maryāda, and the third term weighs as much as the first two. K. N. Ganesh’s reconstruction shows janmam as a birthright, devolved from one’s predecessors and lost only by sale or transfer, and layered downward through a graded hierarchy: the naṭuvāḻi chief and the temple at the apex; the ūrāḷar, the landholding temple trustees; the kāṇakkar, intermediary holders on the mortgage-like kāṇam tenure; the kuṭiyān, the settled tenant cultivators; and at the base the aṭiyar, the bonded castes attached to the soil and transferred with it.[31] Janmam was the absolute hereditary right. Kāṇam was a rentier arrangement in which the holder advanced a lump sum to the janmi, cultivated the land, paid a fixed pattam in rent, and held for a renewable term of twelve years, the holder’s claim strengthening whenever the janmi failed to return the advance. Kuṭikkāṇam was a sub-lease that turned the primary holder into an intermediate landlord. Kūḻikkāṇam protected the cultivator’s investment in the perennial crops of the orchard. Paramb named the right to plant and cultivate garden land, and upayam the right to build a dwelling, the two together forming the usual first step of a newcomer’s agrarian insertion. Above these ran the categories of proprietorship, the brahmasvam of Brahmin households, the devasvam of temple corporations, and the cerikkal of chiefly houses, each typically leased outward on kāṇam terms rather than alienated outright. This is a dense and articulated architecture of private right, with sale, mortgage, and devolution all present, and it long predates any colonial intervention.

Hierarchy of Agrarian land rights and ownership in Malabar. I found this in a social media post, but I am unable to locate who I should credit.

Two features did the ideological work. The first is the maryāda, the customary code that bound janmi and kuṭiyān in obligation, share, and protection, and made the tenurial relation a moral one rather than a merely fiscal one. It is the agrarian counterpart of the moral economy, lodged in the structure of property itself rather than set against the market, and it proved extraordinarily hard for any outside power to recompose. The second is the region-making force of the order. Brahmin settlement and the wetland-paddy regime were congruent, clustering on the river valleys and absent where tidal salination forbade rice, so that the social map was drawn by the soil and then sacralized by myth, and Kerala itself was constituted as a region through such acts of settlement and imagination.[32]

Property against the state

Property in Malabar preceded the state, and the early colonial observers, who had every administrative incentive to find a land tax, found instead an agrarian society they described as disassociated from political authority. Abhilash Malayil’s recovery of the Malabar consensus turns on this. Thomas Munro and his most formidable critic, Francis Whyte Ellis, agreed on almost nothing, and they agreed that privately owned landed assets manifestly existed there, held as janmam, or aṭṭipēṟu, in what Ellis called the proprietors’ own privatized account, free of all participation by the state and formerly free of all rent.[33] Munro held that the Malabar cultivator depended on his own resources rather than on any fiscal or hydraulic support, so that fixed rental income, paid whether the crop was abundant or scanty, was the organizing fact of the order; William Thackeray concluded in 1807 that no land tax had ever existed in pre-Mysorean Malabar, the rulers’ incomes coming from sea customs, fines, and customary offerings rather than from the soil.[34] Janmam, in the reckoning Malayil recovers, was an allodial right, a mirās without land tax. Rent ran horizontally, between janmi and kuṭiyān, and no sovereign stood above the relation to take a share.

The inversion can be pressed one step further, to property against the state. Where land was held allodially by a numerous class of janmis, where surplus dispersed sideways as rent rather than flowing upward as revenue, and where mercantile creditors advanced liquidity, dravyam, against the holdings of perennially indebted chiefs, any aspirant to overlordship found the fiscal base that statehood requires already parceled out beyond reach. The very density of private property foreclosed the centralizing state. What the Orientalist tradition would file as a stateless void was, in fact, a property-saturated society that held sovereignty at bay, a landed order so thoroughly privatized that no tax-state could grow up within it and no ruling class could rise to a sovereign above it. Credit did the financial work that taxation does elsewhere. The little kingdoms met their needs through the liquidity of a monetized mercantile class, and the merchant who advanced dravyam against an indebted chief was performing, in the sense Banaji recovered, the putting-out function of merchant capital, binding proprietors through the extension of credit.

The Western Ghats behind a narrow strip, the riverine wetlands, and the forested interior raised the cost of conquest and, far more, of administration, for any external power. An empire could raid the coast; building a revenue apparatus across a river-cut, monsoon-drenched country in which property was already parceled out among a numerous and litigious landholding population was another matter. When Mysore came under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan as a military-fiscal state bent on the revenue assessment the region had never known, the attempt generated not consolidation but, in Menon’s phrase, a new space of instability, on whose detritus local experiments in state formation were built, none of which cohered.[35] The machine could break the old arrangements and could install no working revenue state in their place, because the privatized ownership shared among Hindu janmis, merchant-financiers, and kanam holders, and, above all, the janmi–kuṭiyān maryāda, proved too dense and too distributed to reorder by fiscal fiat. The English Company inherited the problem in the 1790s, and Margret Frenz’s account of the passage from contact to conquest shows how little the transfer of paramountcy resembled a clean imposition, as the Company met a tangle of janmam, kāṇam, kuṭikkāṇam, mortgage, and customary share it could neither read nor map onto its categories.[36] A major consequence of this scholarship has been the stagnation of the structure of the agrarian order in Malabar. In matters of chronology, the walls between the medieval and the early modern are non-existent, for the janmam Munro examined around 1800 stands in continuity with Ganesh’s sixteenth century and with Devadevan’s tenth. In the case of Kerala/Malabar, a real space for historical scholarship lies in the ways the private property regime intensified after the dissolution of the Cera state and how commercialization and mercantile accumulation restructured it during the early modern period.

The need for a littoral land theory

Along the monsoon littorals of the Indian Ocean, the Konkan, Kanara, and Goa to the north, the coasts of maritime Southeast Asia, Oman, and the Swahili seaboard, one finds narrow tropical strips wedged between ocean and highland, drained by rivers that knit sea trade to interior cultivation, and governed, when governed at all, by dispersed and commerce-anchored polities rather than centralizing empires. Malabar shows an intensive regime of private landed property, fed by commercial surplus, forecloses the centralising tax-state from within rather than depending on it from without; trade takes on the character of the value to be protected, the quasi-sovereign that little kingdoms compete to host; and the terrain raises the cost of external consolidation to the point where even empires that covet the coast relate to it through tribute and trade rather than absorbing it into a revenue machine.

I want to be exact about the place of ecology in this argument, because the temptation to read it as an ecological wager must be refused. The terrain does not, by itself, produce property order, and the same wet-rice ecology elsewhere coexists with very different political outcomes. Ecology enters as a facilitator of class and productive relations rather than as their cause. The trading landscape of the coast, the ghat wall that guards the interior, and the riverine systems that carry the surplus of the gardens down to the ports and carry credit back up are the conditions under which a particular configuration of private ownership and commerce-anchored sovereignty could emerge, work, and prevail in changing forms over centuries. The rivers made the interior reachable for the merchant and his money; the ghats made it hard to reach for the tax collector and his army; the monsoon and the soil made both paddy lowland and orchard highland possible, and so made room for the layered rights, paramb and kāṇam and janmam, through which property was held and accumulated. The causal weight rests on the relations of production that this landscape enabled, in keeping with the materialist principle that relations constitute forces, not the reverse.

Set against the models the field has built elsewhere, Malabar ruptures them one by one, and each rupture needs to be explained thoroughly in subsequent parts. 1) It breaks the colonial-state-as-property-maker thesis, since here private property neither needed nor received the state’s authorship, and that is the matter of the part on whether there was private property in pre-colonial South Asia. It breaks the tributary great-appropriator model, since no apparatus monopolized the surplus, which dispersed sideways as rent and outward as trade. It returns Mukhia’s caste insight, since the bonded aṭiyāḷar transferred with the soil show caste as the mechanism of surplus extraction, and this will be the subject of the part on labor and caste. It unsettles the wet-rice determinism of Ravi Palat’s Indian Ocean economy, since the same riziculture that supposedly frees rulers from merchants here met no agrarian tax and a total dependence on mercantile liquidity, and this will be taken up in the part on commercialization and transition.[37] And it revises the nineteenth-century risings, since the propertied and aspiring middle peasants who carried them contested the terms of property rather than rising as a propertyless body against a taxing state; a re-reading of the part on the Mappila and the agrarian question takes up against the indispensable but state-centered account of K. N. Panikkar.[38] To center land here is to recover how property without a state has worked, and of the kind of place, found across the monsoon world, where the intensification of private land relations made the state superfluous and nearly impossible. The next essay stays on this coast and presses the question this one has circled, whether there was private property in pre-colonial South Asia at all, and what the Malabar record does to a historiography that has long treated property as a gift of the colonial state.

Rethinking Land and Capital in Kerala and South Asia.

Ameen Muhammed — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:30:47 GMT

This is an attempt to write a five-part series on how to approach the study of land as a primary analytical category in South Asian history. While this is written from a historian's perspective, I hope it resonates with other disciplinary concerns. Since my own reading and concerns have been mostly related to Kerala and Malabar, that is what you will find as the regional focus here too, even though I will attempt to connect it to the general historiographical and theoretical issues concerned with land, state, labor, caste, etc for the whole of South Asia. The series and my own work would benefit from your criticisms, alternative framings, and reading suggestions, all of which I hope to see in the comments. I will try to bring forth the subsequent parts of the series each week, one at a time, and hopefully finish it before the end of July. Thank you.

South Asian historiography has produced a vast and sophisticated literature in which land is everywhere present. Land appears as the thing the colonial state taxed, surveyed, and settled; as the surplus from which industrial capital was supposed to be squeezed; as the material substrate of caste; as the stage on which peasant insurgency was acted out. In each case land is the background against which some other drama of state, of capital, of caste, of revolt is made to unfold. The wager of this series is that if we make land itself the central analytical object, and follow its ownership, control, terrain, and the labor bound to it, we can reopen questions about state, law, property, caste, and capital that have settled prematurely into orthodoxy.

That this is not an antiquarian exercise is clear from any morning’s news. In the last few years, and more intensely debated recently, is the case of the Munambam waqf land dispute. A strip of eroding coastal land at Munambam, near where the Periyar meets the sea, is being claimed at once by a Waqf board, by several hundred resident families who have paid land tax for decades, and by a state government arguing that an old princely lease has lapsed. This dispute turns entirely on what paṭṭam and janmam once meant, and on how mercantile capital became agrarian right and agrarian right became religious endowment. I can return to Munumbum in detail later in a part of this series devoted to religious formation and land, but whatever the outcome of the court case, it raises the larger question of what is at stake in studying land in Kerala [The way history is central to this case is outlined in this two-part YouTube video]. For now it stands only as a reminder that the tenurial vocabulary of the “pre-modern” is still litigated in the twenty-first century, and that we have to write its history with the care it demands.

This is not a parochial wager. The point of centering land is to let a densely worked regional archive speak back to the largest debates in the field: whether there was private property in pre-colonial India, what form the pre-modern state took, how to think the transition from feudalism to capitalism, how caste relates to class. And the traffic must run both ways. On one side, the South Indian, and especially the Kerala, record can correct theories built largely elsewhere; on the other, questions the field has pursued vigorously for Bengal, the Mughal heartland, North-Western India, and the Tamil plains have simply not been asked of Malabar and Kerala with the same rigor. The aim throughout is to hold the regional and the general in a single plain.

The historiography

The foundational move in the modern historiography of Indian land was to treat property as an idea. Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal read the Permanent Settlement of 1793 as the legislative enactment of a theory. A Physiocratic and Lockean abstraction that Company administrators mistook for Bengal’s social reality, conjuring a class of improving proprietors into being by fiat.[1] The insight was that property regimes have an intellectual history. Andrew Sartori has since complicated this from within the same Bengal archive, showing that a Lockean language of property-in-labor was not merely imposed from above but taken up from below, becoming a vernacular idiom through which colonial subjects pressed their own claims.[2] Liberalism in the agrarian “periphery”, on this reading, was a resource as much as an imposition, which already unsettles the neat opposition of indigenous custom to foreign abstraction that so much of the field still assumes.

Alongside this idealist strand ran a powerful materialist one. The nationalist and early Marxist economic historians, much of whose synthesis is gathered in the Cambridge Economic History of India, treated land revenue and tenure as the hinge of colonial extraction and the organizing fact of the agrarian order. Robert Frykenberg’s edited volume made land control the very key to social structure, an orienting claim for a generation of regional studies. And the agrarian Marxism of D. D. Kosambi, R. S. Sharma, and Irfan Habib built ambitious models of Indian feudalism, of agrarian systems, and of the village community, Sharma reading the post-Gupta proliferation of land grants as a feudal localization of power, attended by urban decay and the tying of peasants to the soil.[3]

It is precisely here that one of the field’s most consequential reflexes took hold: the treatment of Marxist categories as Eurocentric and therefore unsuitable for South Asia. Harbans Mukhia’s well-known intervention asked whether there was feudalism in Indian history at all, rejecting both “feudalism” and the Asiatic Mode of Production as imported straitjackets and calling for a typology specific to pre-British India; he observed, tellingly, that it was caste, not serfdom on the European pattern, that secured the flow of labor from the landless to the landed.[4] To find that European feudalism does not map onto India is not to find that the categories of mode of production, surplus extraction, accumulation, and class are useless here; it is to find that they must be reworked for the materials at hand. The wholesale verdict that Marxist analysis is constitutively European has, in practice, licensed a retreat from material and economic questions altogether — a retreat this series resists. Jairus Banaji’s renovation of the concept of mode of production, with its insistence that merchant capital can drive agrarian transformation without the full commodification of land and labor, is one model of how to keep the analytic going on (Even though Banaji abandons the stage-theory and the contention it has generated in Marxist tradition is worth considering). Karl Polanyi’s account of land and labor as “fictitious commodities” whose marketization must be politically defended against is another.

The revisionist turn of the 1980s pushed against the statism of all this in a different way. David Ludden’s work on South India insisted on the longue durée of agrarian regions and on the agency of the peasants who made them, showing that what looks like a timeless village order is itself a historical sediment, and that “the agrarian” is a category with a history rather than a natural backdrop.[5] Burton Stein’s “segmentary state” recast South Indian polities as fractal pyramids of replicating local centers, ritually rather than administratively integrated, while Hermann Kulke and B. D. Chattopadhyaya offered a “processual” model in which the regional states of the sixth to twelfth centuries were the upward integration of local processes rather than the debris of a collapsed center. Each of these is, read closely, an implicit theory of land — of how rights over the soil were distributed, replicated, and tied to power. And running underneath the whole edifice, as André Wink showed in a bracing critique, were durable Orientalist assumptions: the absent or despotic state that owned all land, the changeless self-sufficient village, the East as the negative image of European development.[6] These assumptions continued to structure scholarship that took itself to be purely empirical.

The subaltern project, finally, turned from the state and the landlord to the insurgent peasant, recovering a consciousness and an agency that nationalist and Marxist narratives alike had flattened. Its gains were real. But the cultural and discursive turn that followed, entering Indian history partly through E. P. Thompson’s reworking of Marxism, enriched the study of consciousness, courtly culture, and marginal voices while quietly defunding the material questions of land, labor, and property that social history had centered. Prasannan Parthasarathi diagnosed exactly this drift, arguing that Indian social and economic history was in decline as the cutting edge migrated to cultural and intellectual history, and that the move rested on a one-sided reading of Foucault, for whom material institutions were in fact central.[7]

What unites this inheritance, and what this series means to interrogate, is the a priori centrality of the state. From the Asiatic Mode of Production to the colonial revenue settlement, land relations are read as effects of sovereign power — present in its taxing, surveying, and titling, or pathologically absent in a “stateless” zone awaiting incorporation. Bhavani Raman has shown how the East India Company in Madras quite literally crafted its sovereignty through the power to decide who could sell land, incarnating itself as a “land developer” through the act of eviction.[8] The most radical alternative available to us comes from Manu Devadevan, whose The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India inverts the order entirely. The king, he argues, is primarily the regulator of property relations, and the state is the reified institutional form of those relations, so that land does not derive from the state; rather the state is the congealed, ideologically masked expression of prior arrangements over land.[9] Tellingly, Devadevan widens the cast of revenue-holding subordinates beyond the feudatory sāmanta to include warlords, locally landed elites, peasant proprietors, and merchant groups. If that is right, then the long sequence of state-form debates — feudal, segmentary, processual, patrimonial — has been arguing about the wrong starting unit, and his own chapter on the changing fortunes of the Cēra state, read through shifts in land relations rather than dynastic narrative, shows what a land-first history of a South Indian polity looks like in practice.

Why Malabar, why Kerala

If the problem is that our theory defaults to the state, then the most useful regions are those where the state was least able to impose itself, and few regions in South Asia make the point as sharply as Malabar.

Consider what the early colonial record itself attests. When Company officials inquired in the first years of the nineteenth century, local chieftains testified that no land revenue had been collected in pre-Haidar Malabar at all; rulers’ incomes came from sea customs, fines, and customary offerings at festivals, and William Thackeray concluded in 1807 that no land tax had ever existed there.[10] Here is a wet-rice region; Malabar was the second most rice-producing tract in the Madras Presidency, capable even of export, in which the defining feature of the agrarian order was the absence of centralized taxation, with rent flowing horizontally between janmi and kuṭiyān rather than vertically toward a state. This is exactly the conjunction that ought not to exist on the dominant models, and it is what makes the region theoretically valuable.

The most careful account of how Kerala’s land order worked is K. N. Ganesh’s reconstruction of janmam–kanam relations between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and it repays close and critical reading.[11] Ganesh shows a dense indigenous architecture of layered rights, and a late-medieval dynamic in which the growth of kanam tenure raised an intermediary class of controllers — temple servants, military and royal-service men — who came to hold real control of land while the customary janmi retained nominal ownership, producing a durable dichotomy of ownership and control. This is genuinely useful. But the account has a structural flaw that will be taken up in detail in a later part. But to initiate the thinking, Ganesh theorizes largely from Travancore, where the evidence for centralization and a rising king-as-owner is strongest, and then extends the picture northward. For Malabar he concludes that the absence of agrarian expansion in a hilly, forested interior meant that no strong intermediary class arose to challenge customary right, so that conflict there took the form of Brahmin factional struggle (panniyūr-kūr against cōvaram-kūr) rather than a contest between controllers and owners.[12] This may be the history of Travancore; it is not obviously the history of Malabar. Ganesh looked in Malabar for the same intermediaries he had found in the south — persons of royal and military service — and, not finding them in strength, inferred stagnation. He gave far less weight to the Muslim and Christian kanam holders who were in fact becoming substantial landed actors in the region. The intermediary class in Malabar was, to a striking degree, made up of Muslim merchants turned portfolio capitalists whose cash, advanced as heavy mortgages to naṭuvāḻis and janmis, drove agrarian expansion in the riverine interiors; and one need not find large consolidated estates to demonstrate that expansion, since kanam holdings there were typically small and dispersed across a numerous petty-landholding population. To read the agrarian history of Malabar through the Travancore template is to mistake a different agrarian logic for the absence of one.

A second silence concerns the prehistory of the region’s most studied event. The making of the modern Mappila — and above all the long arc of agrarian unrest that culminates in the rebellion of 1921 — has been written largely through the categories of consciousness and culture. K. N. Panikkar’s Against Lord and State remains the indispensable study, reading the uprisings of 1836–1921 through a Thompsonian and Gramscian frame of rebel consciousness, religion, and the codes of revolt.[13] What such work brilliantly illuminates for the colonial period it cannot supply for the centuries before it: a prehistory of land. The agrarian formation that produced landlord, tenant, and bonded laborer in Malabar, the early modern entry of Muslims into the agrarian world, the focalization of rent, the conversion of mercantile surplus into landed right — is precisely what the cultural historiography of 1921 takes as its silent backdrop. Centering land means writing that prehistory, so that the rebellion appears not as the Muslim cultural making of a militancy, but as one outcome of changes in the socio-economic restructuring of Malabar.

Finally, there is the most ambitious reason to insist on Malabar. It is not only an exception to be explained; it is a model for a recurring kind of place. From Southeast Asia to the Konkan, Kanara, and Goa, to Oman, to the Swahili coast of eastern Africa, one finds narrow tropical strips wedged between an ocean and a hill or mountain wall, drained by rivers that knit sea-trade to interior settlement, watered by heavy monsoon, capable of both wetland and orchard-garden cultivation, and governed — when governed at all — by dispersed, decentralized polities rather than centralising empires. These are ecologically, politically, and economically comparable terrains, and they call for theories of the relation between land, religious patronage, and economic structure that do not take the empire or the centralized state as the given social form. Kerala, in other words, is a place from which to generate theory for a whole class of littoral, monsoon, thin-state regions, not a peculiarity to be filed under regional history.

Terrain, ecology, and the cosmology of land

Historical Malabar is a strip roughly fifty to seventy kilometers wide between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, running from the Konkan in the north to the latitude of Kollam in the south. Its low coastal zones and interior wetlands grew rice; its highlands carried pepper, cardamom, nutmeg, and timber; coconut spread across both.[14] Rivers descending from the Ghats made inland trade possible and tied garden-crop highlands and paddy lowlands to the ports, so that the agrarian and the oceanic were never really separate spheres. Brahmin settlement and the rise of wetland paddy cultivation were, on the standard account, congruent phenomena from around the eighth century, clustering on the banks of the Periyar and the Bhāratappuḻa and conspicuously absent where tidal salination made paddy impossible.[15]

This terrain came with its own cosmology of land. The dominant tradition held that the whole coast was land that the Brahman-warrior Paraśurāma had retrieved from the sea with the fling of his axe, then settled with Brahmins brought from the north in sixty-four grāmas — thirty-two in the Tuḷu country and thirty-two in Kerala proper — the very fertility of the land, “rich in pepper,” figured as his gift.[16] Such myths are claims about who is entitled to land and on what religious authority, and, as Kesavan Veluthat has argued, the region we now call Kerala was itself constituted as a unit through exactly such acts of imagination, identified as a distinct land by the sixteenth century not only from within but by outside observers like Duarte Barbosa and the Arab chroniclers.[17] One through-line of this series will be that myths of land, gods, and ground are part of the apparatus by which entitlement to the soil was asserted and contested. To read land seriously in this region is to read its cosmologies as legal-religious arguments. My friends Kaustubh Naik and Afeef have written two Substack pieces about this cosmological milieu that are worth pondering.

Afeef Ahmed

On Splitting the Moon and Crossing Oceans

Depiction of "Cherman Perumal Nayanar" in Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur (11th-century fresco…

4 months ago · 38 likes · 2 comments · Afeef Ahmed

Praça de Goa by Kaustubh Naik

Who belongs to Lord Parshuram's Goa?

In 1801, Bahugun Sadashiv Kamat Wagh wrote the Gomantakachi Bakhar, a chronicle of the Goan region. It begins at the end of the Dwapar Yuga with the reign of Yudhishtir in Indraprastha and provides a snapshot of shifting regimes across the Indian subcontinent. Bahugun Wagh hailed from the illustrious Kamat Wagh family of Ribandar that served as…

4 months ago · 45 likes · 2 comments · Kaustubh Naik

Returning to land in the age of the oceanic turn

There is a particular reason to insist on land now, and it has to do with the direction the field has taken. The last three decades have seen an extraordinary proliferation of Indian Ocean history — of circulation, connection, diaspora, and cosmopolitan exchange — and Malabar, as the pepper coast and the home of the Mappila and Syrian Christian merchant worlds, sits near the center of it. This scholarship has been liberating in many ways. But it has reproduced, in a new key, the very imbalance this series concerns: within the oceanic turn, too, socio-economic history has taken a back seat, ceding ground to intellectual, literary, and religious-cultural history. We now know a great deal about texts, networks, and sensibilities, and rather less about who owned the gardens and fields, or how the surplus of oceanic trade was converted into rights over the soil.

There is also a theoretical cost to the way oceanic economic history has been written. Its most ambitious syntheses, from K. N. Chaudhuri’s connected longue durée to Ravi Palat’s reconstruction of an indigenous Indian Ocean world-economy, have privileged continuity and circulation in ways that obscure the short-term ruptures and local transformations where agrarian change actually happens. Palat’s framework is the instructive case. He argues that the high productivity of irrigated riziculture generated enough tax revenue that Asian rulers did not need to depend on merchants and bankers, and so had no compulsion to grant the monopolies through which, in the Atlantic, capital accumulation became the system’s driving logic.[18] Malabar breaks this chain at the first link. It is a heavy wet-rice region — precisely the ecology Palat associates with a non-capitalist trajectory — and yet it had no centralized agrarian taxation at all; the fiscal needs of its fragmented, indebted little polities were met not by riziculture revenue but by the liquidity supplied by a monetized mercantile class as European companies stripped away their oceanic customs base. If the same ecology can yield opposite outcomes depending on political conjuncture, then the ecological-structural determinism is underdetermined as a causal argument, and a single region has done real theoretical work.

The corrective is not to turn away from the ocean but to re-anchor it in the ground. Rajat Datta’s study of late-eighteenth-century Bengal grain markets is a model here: it shows commerce and cultivation as a single circuit, the structure of local trade legible only through the agrarian production that fed it.[19] Read in that spirit, Malabar offers the chance to integrate oceanic and agrarian history into one account — of land, of the economic centers and market towns (aṅṅāṭi) that organized it, of the structure of the regional economy, and of the religious formation of communities whose mosques, churches, and landed households were built out of agrarian surplus.

What the series will pursue

The parts that follow take up, one at a time, the problems that centering land brings into focus. Here I want only to sketch them, as a map of what is coming and an indication of where the openings lie.

The state, inverted (Part 2). If, following Devadevan, the king is the regulator of property and the state its reified form, then land precedes the state analytically, and the whole typological sequence looks like an argument begun from the wrong term. The part will also treat periodization as itself a land problem: “medieval” and “early modern” are colonial-derived categories that the continuities of tenure simply cut through, so that a land-centered history should let tenure, not dynasty or epoch, set the chronology.

Private property and whose history it is (Part 3). The dominant story treats private, alienable land property as a liberal-colonial export. Against it, Dharma Kumar’s still-unanswered question — was there private property in medieval South India? — reads Chola-era sale and mortgage to puncture the axiom of its absence; Ganesh shows an indigenous architecture of janmam–kanam right; and Faisal Chaudhry urges us to treat property at once as a material relation and an “alien cultural category,” writing its history across rather than at the colonial divide. The question is whether pre-colonial South Indian materials can historicize private property as something other than a colonial gift, and what that does to the Guha–Sartori story of liberalism and empire.

Labor, caste, and the people written out (Part 4). The historiography of Kerala land has organized itself around the struggle between janmi landlords and kuṭiyān tenant-cultivators. But Ajith argues that the primary producers of feudal Kerala were the aṭiyāḷanmār, the bonded untouchable castes transferred with the land and denied the right even to cultivate or build a house on it, and that by elevating the intermediary tenant as the “real” peasant, scholars effaced the actually landless from the agrarian ledger. This is a charge that generalizes, and it doubles as a claim that caste has been under-theorized in Indian Marxist historiography.

Capital, commerce, and transition (Part 5). The standard Marxist teleology runs from agrarian surplus to industrial capital; the South Indian littoral suggests the arrow can run the other way. Abhilash Malayil’s “Malabar consensus” shows commercialization producing individual landed property; Emil Oommen traces community and mercantile capital flowing into plantations and banking in Travancore; and read with Datta, Banaji, and Polanyi, these let us ask whether mercantile accumulation shaped agrarian ownership as much as the reverse.

Suggested readings

These are starting points suited to the questions raised in this opening essay. As later parts take up the state, property, labor, and capital in turn, I will offer more specific lists.

Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire (2014) – for Bengal and colonial import as the prevalent model for private property and the idea of land in India.
David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (1985), or his Agrarian History of South Asia (1999). The case for the longue durée of agrarian regions and for “the agrarian” as a constructed category.
Manu V. Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India (2021). The most powerful recent work on pre-modern forms of property relations. R. Champakalakshmi, Kesavan Veluthat, and T. Venugopalan (eds), State and Society in Pre-Modern South India (2002). Both are Quintessential for studies related to South India.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). For the idea of land and labor as “fictitious commodities” — the indispensable theoretical foil for any history of agrarian commodification.
The Cambridge Economic History of India (vols. 1–2) and, against it, Ravi Palat, The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy (2015). Read together, they frame the debate between revenue-and-tenure economic history and the connected, oceanic longue durée that this series proposes to re-anchor in the land.

If you can understand Malayalam, I have spoken about some of these concerns regarding studying land, methodological ways ahead, and mainly the sources one should study, etc., in a related talk I gave at the Malaibar Foundation. The video link is attached.

[1] Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (first published 1963; Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). For the Physiocratic and Lockean genealogy, see esp. chaps. 1–2

[2] Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), Introduction and chap. 1

[3] R. S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism, c. 300–1200 (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1965); D. D. Kosambi and Irfan Habib are invoked for the broader Marxist tradition. The relation of this tradition to the Veluthat school is discussed in Manu V. Devadevan, “The Burden of Being Kesavan Veluthat,” introduction to the Veluthat festschrift.

[4] Harbans Mukhia, “Was There Feudalism in Indian History?” Journal of Peasant Studies 8, no. 3 (1981): 273–310; on caste rather than serfdom as the mechanism securing labor from the landless, see p. 291. Mukhia’s call for “a typology more specific to pre-British India” is also discussed in Jonathan Seefeldt, “Histories of the State in Premodern South Asia” (2018).

[5] David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Ludden, ed., Agricultural Production and South Asian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, New Cambridge History of India IV.4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[6] André Wink, “Asian Studies, Agrarian History and Orientalism”

[7] Prasannan Parthasarathi, “The State of Indian Social History,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 1–20

[8] Bhavani Raman, “Sovereignty, Property and Land Development: The East India Company in Madras,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61 (2018): 976–1004.

[9] Manu V. Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). See also his chapter “Changes in Land Relations and the Changing Fortunes of the Cēra State” in the same volume.

[10] This is a finding later officials disputed but never disproved with positive evidence. See: K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 2–3, citing the testimony of local chieftains (BRM, Vols. 110-A and 110-B) that no land revenue was collected in the pre-Haidar period, and William Thackeray, A Report on Malabar, Canara and Ceded Districts, 15; the contrary views of Macleod, Logan, and Baden-Powell are noted there as unsupported by positive proof.

[11] On Malabar as the second most rice-producing region of the Madras Presidency and a rice exporter, see Ajith, Bhoomi, Jati, Bandhanam: Keralathile Karshikaprasnam [Land, Caste, Bondage: The Agrarian Question in Kerala] 9, drawing on the Ward and Connor survey and early colonial data. On horizontal rent between janmi and kuṭiyān, see Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,”

[12] Ganesh, “Ownership and Control,” 319–20 (forests covering two-thirds of north Malabar and the limits to agrarian expansion; conflict as Brahmin factionalism) and 321 (the Mysore revenue assessment).

[13] K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State (n. 15); the study reads the 1836–1921 uprisings through a framework of rebel “consciousness” indebted to E. P. Thompson and Gramsci. The point that this and the wider cultural historiography of 1921 (e.g. Stephen Dale) lack a deeper agrarian prehistory of land is mine; on the danger of “a quite teleological reading of the politics of jihād,” see Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam, “Letters from Kannur, 1500–50,” in Clio and Her Descendants: Essays for Kesavan Veluthat, ed. Manu V. Devadevan (New Delhi: Primus, 2018), 2.

[14] Gopinath Ravindran, “Agrarian Production Processes and Rural Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Malabar,” Studies in People’s History 3, no. 1 (2016): 29–44.

[15] Rajan Gurukkal and M. R. Raghava Varier, History of Kerala (the congruence of Brahmin settlement with wetland paddy from the eighth century, and the absence of settlement where tidal salination prevented paddy); see the discussion at 78–79 and 110

[16] Kesavan Veluthat, “History and Historiography in Constituting a Region: The Case of Kerala,” Studies in People’s History 5, no. 1 (2018): 13–31, here 14 (the three constructions of “Kerala”) and the Kēraḷōlpatti account of the sixty-four grāmas, thirty-two in Tuḷunāḍu and thirty-two in Kerala; the verse figuring Kerala’s fertility as Paraśurāma’s gift (”the rainy season, under the orders of Paraśurāma, comes here frequently like a mother comes to breastfeed”) is cited later in the essay.

[17] Veluthat, “Constituting a Region,” 13–14 and the section on Barbosa and Zainuddin Makhdūm. For the Cheraman Perumāḷ legend and its grant of land and legitimacy to Muslims, see the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ.

[18] Ravi Palat, The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy Fields and Bazaars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[19] Rajat Datta, “Merchants and Peasants: A Study of the Structure of Local Trade in Grain in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 23 (1986); see also Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000).

Whom Does Karuppasamy Guard?

Ameen Muhammed — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:52:35 GMT

“If [the totem animal] is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?”
— Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

There is a particular kind of disappointment that arrives not when a film is bad, but when it is lazy with its own best ideas. Karuppu (dir. RJ Balaji, 2026), starring Suriya as a lawyer avatar of the folk deity Karuppasamy, takes on a provocative idea, almost proudly, near the middle of its runtime, then retreats from the implication as if scalded. What follows is a review that takes that abandoned moment as its occasion for a wider inquiry: into the history of gods as protagonists in South Indian cinema, into the surge of “subaltern gods” from Kantara 2022, and into the religious-philosophical problem that the film briefly names: the tension between the god who must become fully human and the god who simply refuses to.

The film Karuppu is set in the Tamil Nadu court system. An ordinary robbery case lands before a court controlled by Baby Kannan (RJ Balaji), a lawyer who, through years of institutional capture, has turned the judiciary into a private enterprise of corruption. Two simpletons seek justice and find none. The deity Vettai Karuppu, who sits enshrined at the court’s periphery—literally at the threshold, as Tamil folk deities always are—can no longer watch. He descends as Saravanan (Suriya), a lawyer, to fight the system from within.

To understand the use of gods in South Indian cinema, one must also understand what gods were to Tamil cinema in its early years. The mythological film was not a genre in Southern film industries in the mid-twentieth century. It was the language from which all else deviated. Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada cinema were built, financially and aesthetically, on the narration of divine stories such as the epics, the puranas, and the bhakti saint narratives. The actor who played the god was, in a precise and socially operative sense, the god.

The most consequential names in this history are NTR, Shivaji Ganesh, MGR, and Rajkumar. N.T. Rama Rao played Lord Krishna in seventeen films, beginning with Maya Bazar (1957), deploying the same rhetorical cadence, gestural vocabulary, and commanding physical presence he later carried to political rallies as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. Preminda Jacob demonstrates in Celluloid Deities that this was engineered, not merely received: the divine rhetoric of the screen was transferred, posture by posture, to the political body.[1] Rachel Dwyer argues that these early mythological screenings were not representations of religion but performances of it—the cinema hall as a new form of darshan, the camera a mechanism of auspicious divine sight.[2] Such was NTR’s cultivated aura that pilgrims en route to Tirupati would stop at his home after he played the Tirupati deity in Shri Venkateshwara Mahatmyam (1960).[3]

In Nandini Bhrugubanda’s careful typology, these films belonged to the “mythological” genre proper, distinguished from the “devotional” and “saint” films by their fidelity (or aspirational fidelity) to canonical scriptural narratives.[4] What this phase of cinema produced was a visually legible Hindu religious imagination. The actor’s face became the face of the ancient god; the film was the myth, and the myth was the film. These were always the gods of the great Sanskritic tradition, whose iconography was already codified in text and temple, whose stories arrived at the cinema pre-furnished with pan-Hindu recognition. The mythological genre has since retreated from mainstream production, but it did not disappear.

A different idiom has now arrived, and it arrives against a specific political backdrop. The Telugu industry has assumed leadership in producing Hindutva-adjacent epic spectacle: CGI-heavy, Sanskrit-resonant, pan-Indian in aspiration, from Rajamouli’s Baahubali and RRR onward. The films I want to discuss here—Kantara (2022 and 2025), Thangalaan (2024), Karuppu (2026)—make a different wager. These films deploy the local as their aesthetic and political language. And the local, here, is not merely a setting but an argument. Francesca Orsini, in her work on the “multilingual local” as a generative standpoint in world literary circulation, argues that the local is not the residue left over after the global has passed through but a productive geography in its own right—capable of generating its own forms of cosmopolitan connection without subordinating itself to a single center.[6] Translated into cinema, this is exactly what Kantara‘s extraordinary commercial success demonstrated: the film succeeded not despite its Tulu locality, but through it. The local was the vehicle of the global.

What Kantara genuinely accomplished, and what should not be underestimated, is significant. It brought the Bhoota Kola tradition of Tulunadu—one of the richest surviving systems of daiva worship in South Asia, rooted in the coastal ecology and agrarian communities of Dakshina Kannada and northern Kerala into the national popular. The daiva of Tulunadu are not gods in the pan-Hindu sense. Panjurli and Guliga are territorial guardian spirits whose power is constituted by the oral epic tradition of the paddana, by the covenant between spirit, community, and forest, and by the Bhoota Kola performance itself—a ritual possessed of its own aesthetic intensity and social function that predates, by most scholarly accounts, the Brahminical Hinduism of the region. Kantara’s narrative insistence on the specificity of the land-rights compact, the ecological covenant between the daiva and the tribal community, and the violation that compels divine intervention drew on real and living traditions. And yet Kantara does not leave that tradition intact. The film’s climactic song, “Varaha Roopam,” with its Sanskrit lyrics identifying Panjurli with Vishnu’s Varaha avatar, makes the fracture of the narrative evident. When Rishab Shetty himself claimed in an interview that Bhoota Kola is “part of Hindu culture,” Dr. Purushotham Bilimale’s response framed this as a pattern: “After 2014, the process [of bringing all Indian gods into the Hindu fold] has progressed with rapid speed.”[7] Here, Bhoota Kola belongs to the Desiya tradition (the local, vernacular, regional) while Vedic-Puranic Hinduism constitutes the Margiya tradition (the textual, pan-Hindu superstructure). The claim was that these are complementary, not competing: “the Dharmic superstructure of Margiya helps contain the Desiya and retain its broader meaning.” Panjurli and Guliga are powerful guardians—but they are Ganas of Shiva, avatars of Vishnu; their power is legitimated by and ultimately subordinate to the great Hindu tradition.[8] Coastal Karnataka, it should be remembered, is not a neutral landscape for this argument: it has been described as “southern India’s Hindutva laboratory,” where the RSS and BJP have worked for decades to consolidate folk communities and their traditions into a pan-Hindu political formation.[9] This is the dynamics that Robert Redfield and McKim Marriott theorized in their foundational anthropological work on great and little traditions in India. Marriott identified two complementary processes: “universalization,” by which elements of the little tradition circulate upward into the great tradition and are identified with its legitimate forms; and “parochialization,” by which elements of the great tradition circulate downward to be adapted locally. The Ayyappa cult is the textbook example of universalization[10]. The local is celebrated, but its legitimacy is warranted by its containment within the superstructure of the great tradition. While scholarship has moved much further from ideas like great and little traditions and Sanskritisation to understand the formation of Hindu identity, this framing of co-option is seen invoked, directly and indirectly, by artists who claim to represent the local.

This is not to flatten Kantara into a piece of Hindutva propaganda—the film’s narrative logic, its insistence on the ecological covenant and its violation, its rendering of Bhoota Kola on its own terms, are all genuinely in tension with easy appropriation. But the tension is unresolved. Kantara’s unevenness reflects the difficulty of centering a pre-Brahminical local tradition within a cinematic form whose commercial success depends on pan-Hindu legibility. Pa. Ranjith’s Thangalaan navigates this differently, precisely by placing Buddhist and Dalit frameworks at the center and making the film’s anti-Brahminism explicit enough to attract a PIL in the Madras High Court. The resistance it generated was a measure of how seriously it refused the terms of the great tradition.

The deities in these films, whatever else they are, share a theological signature that makes them structurally different from the pan-Indian Sanskritic pantheon: they are territorial, ecologically embedded, constituted by a specific community’s history and covenant. Karuppasamy in Tamil folk practice is a kaval daivam whose shrine sits at the settlement boundary, whose iconography is historically associated with the Nayaka-period pāḷaiyakkārar, and whose history is preserved in oral ballads and samiyadi oracle performances.[11] Panjurli is a daiva of Tulunadu whose power is inseparable from the forest, the community covenant, and the Bhoota Kola ritual itself. In Thangalaan, the tribal deity is bound to the Kolar gold ore, to the material body of the land, and to the labor of the people who worked it.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim posed the question that underpins all subsequent anthropology of religion: when people worship a totem, what are they worshipping? His answer was that the totem is the crystallization of the community’s collective consciousness in sacred form. To venerate it is to venerate the group’s own shared moral order, its territorial identity, its web of mutual obligation.[12] The sacred and the social are not separate domains—they are the same domain apprehended through different registers. This means that the totem’s meaning is radically context-specific: you cannot extract it from the social matrix that constitutes it without emptying it. Lévi-Strauss sharpened this by arguing that Totems are cognitive tools that organize a society’s understanding of the relations between nature and culture, between the human community and the world it inhabits.[13] The totemic system is a classificatory grammar, and like all grammar, it only produces meaning in relation to itself. Extract an element from the system, and what you have is a bird, a boar, a black warrior on horseback, and not a social cosmology.

The subaltern folk deity’s function and relation to the region and community can be read as a totem in this sense. Karuppasamy’s power is not a general divine authority on loan to any grievance that catches his attention. It is the specific crystallization of a village community’s moral order, territorial claim, and ecological relation. His samiyadi delivers oracles terrifyingly specific to this person’s life, this family’s transgression, this village’s grief. His shrine at the settlement boundary marks the limit of the community that constitutes him.

Similarly, Diane Mines’s study of Yanaimangalam (Fierce Gods, 2005) shows that the village’s fierce gods (kaval daivangal) are not symbols of social order but materially embedded agents within it, linked to human communities metonymically. They are, in her formulation, “pragmatic power sources” that give the non-elite “not only a kind of moral authority but also an embodied political voice.” This is close to what Geertz identified as religion’s dual function — simultaneously a model of existing social reality and a model for how reality ought to be. Mines presses the point further: the fierce gods do not merely reflect existing power relations; They are a conduit through which they are actively contested and sometimes reversed.

What the ethnographic literature also reveals is that the fierce god’s authority is inseparable from his genealogical position within a local divine ecology. Gods in Tamil village practice are related to one another as kin: brothers, fathers, through marriages, and as rivals. These divine kinship networks are not decorative; they encode and constitute the relations between communities, jatis, and lineages, such that the hierarchy of shrines maps — always imperfectly, always contestedly — onto the hierarchy of social groups.Territorial transgression is the dramatic mechanism through which this order is both reaffirmed and challenged. In Mines’s account, the Dhobi community’s fierce god, Vellalakantan, performs an annual walk that traces a different geography of the village from the dominant procession route. This procession spatially reconstitutes the ur, centering those whom the goddess festival marginalizes, and enacting, through ritual movement, what subaltern communities cannot always assert in daylight.⁵

What Karuppu does is strip the local deity of the social-territorial grammar that makes him meaningful, and replace it with something far more diffuse: a god of general goodwill that can be placed anywhere in Tamil Nadu, correcting whatever is wrong, bound to no community, answerable to no covenant. This is neither the inverse movement of Islam and Christianity (the universal made local through a specific saint and history) nor the genuine particularity of the subaltern folk deity. It is a subaltern aesthetics without the folk deity’s social constitution. The fierce mustache, the blood-red palette, the sword, all of it is grammar borrowed from a community that is no longer there to make it mean anything. The film even literalizes this universalism in its final scene: a Kaaval-Karuppu appears elsewhere —in another district, in another human form—as the popular DSP DuraiSingam from the Singam franchise, as if the deity simply franchises himself as needed, unbound by any particular geography. Universalize the deity or make him concerned with all people who suffer injustice anywhere, and you do not elevate Karuppasamy. You dissolve him. What remains is a fierce aesthetic without a community to constitute it as sacred.

In both Kantara and Thangalaan, the deity’s appearance is conditioned. The daiva comes when summoned through proper ritual, or when a specific historical transgression has occurred that he is bound by compact to avenge. His power is mediated through norms: the norms of ritual performance, of territorial claim, of the agreement (the kōlu, the compact, the covenant) between deity and community. In Thangalaan, the deity’s intervention is bound to the material transgression of a specific colonial extraction. Constraint is not a weakness of these narratives. It is the source of all their dramatic tension. The audience cannot know with certainty whether the god will appear, when, in what form, or what he will demand in return. The deity is powerful but not omnipotent in the narrative sense; he is bound by a grammar of justice that is simultaneously local, ecological, and moral. He or she is owed something, and owes something in return.

In Karuppu, there is no such constraint. The film becomes a procedural of divine correction, in which each corrupt official encounters Saravanan and is duly dispensed with. The film is narratively inert, not because it is badly made, but because it has given its protagonist a nature incompatible with the story.

At a pivot point in the second half, the god makes a promise to Baby Kannan: he will not use his divine powers. He will fight the system as a human, subject to human constraints, human error, and the genuine possibility of losing. The purpose is explicitly stated—he wants to demonstrate that ordinary humans can change injustice without divine intervention. The deity must become human not to conceal his divinity but to prove something about humanity.

This is, in the history of religious thought, one of the oldest and most generative problems. It appears in Christian Christology as the doctrine of kenosis—the “self-emptying” (kenōsis, Philippians 2:7–8) of the divine into the human. The problem kenosis attempts to solve is precisely the one Karuppu stumbles upon: how can God, if omnipotent and omniscient, also be truly, vulnerably, instructively human? If Christ knows the end of the story, in what sense is his human life a model for ordinary human conduct? The tradition has never fully resolved this; the distinction between divine attributes being “veiled” (orthodox) versus “relinquished” (kenotic heresy) has generated two millennia of Christological debate, and the irresolution is itself generative.[14]

What makes the kenotic promise in Karuppu interesting is that it poses this theological problem within the grammar of the folk deity rather than within the Sanskritic tradition. Karuppasamy is not Vishnu. He is a territorial guardian, a deified historical figure, a martial spirit. His “self-emptying” into the constraints of human legal procedure is not a cosmic dispensation but a local wager made to a specific human antagonist for a specific pedagogical purpose. The god must become genuinely constrained—by rules of evidence, the logic of legal argument, the possibility of losing—to mean anything to the humans he wants to inspire. The scenes where Saravanan had to think, argue rather than command, and persuade rather than compel had the quality of genuine drama. Suriya is at his best when performing constraint rather than omnipotence and found something true in those scenes: the god uncertain, the god experiencing the specific indignity of being right but unable to prove it within the rules. Then the film abandoned it. Without narrative motivation, the god simply reverted. The theological irony is acute. The premise of the kenotic tradition—Christian, Hindu, or “folk”—is that the god must actually be human to serve as a model. The promise to Baby Kannan was dramatically powerful precisely because it bound the god to a genuine cost: the possibility that the system would defeat even the deity operating within its rules, and maybe it would have been the most powerful anti-corruption argument the film could make. Instead, the god intervenes from above, and justice is delivered. This inadvertently confirms what the villain believed: that ordinary humans cannot change systemic injustice; only a god can. The film defeats its own argument.

Coda

Karuppu is bad in the way that squandered opportunities are bad, with a specific, almost mournful incompleteness. It had within it several interesting films: one about the ecological theology of the Tamil folk deity forced to confront a modernity that has no space for territorial covenants; one about a god who must genuinely empty himself of power to make an argument about human capacity; one about what it means for the divine to lose. It chose, instead, to be a film about a god who is right and powerful and can only win. The early cinema of NTR and MGR understood something Karuppu does not: that gods who made good film protagonists were always gods caught in a bind. The divine protagonist is interesting in moments of constraint, not in moments of power.

To not say more, Karuppu is not worth anyone’s time. I was betrayed by YouTube reviewers!

[1]Preminda Jacob, Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), pp. 45–88. For the parallel argument on NTR, see Nandini Bhrugubanda, Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in South India (New Delhi: OUP, 2022), pp. 23–67.

[2]Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 12–38.

[3]On NTR’s 17 portrayals of Krishna beginning with Maya Bazar (1957), see “Playing God on Screen: How NTR’s Mythological Roles Shaped His Political Career,” The News Minute, 28 May 2021. On the Telugu and Kannada galaxy more broadly, see S.V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after NTR (New Delhi: OUP, 2009), pp. 189–213.

[4]Nandini Bhrugubanda, Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 23–67. Bhrugubanda’s first chapter offers a careful typology of “mythological,” “devotional,” and “saint” films, arguing that the genre’s religious efficacy lies not in narrative verisimilitude to scripture but in the kinesthetic authority of performance.

[6]Francesca Orsini’s project of the “multilingual local” as a productive standpoint in world literary circulation—articulated most fully in East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2023)—is instructive here.

[7]The controversy around Kantara’s identification of Panjurli with Vishnu’s Varaha avatar was extensively documented. see “Kantara Lead Rishab Shetty Says Bhootas a Part of Hindu Tradition,” The News Minute, 20 October 2022. Actor-activist Chetan Ahimsa’s rebuttal—“Our Pambada/Nalike/Paravar Bahujan traditions predate Vedic-Brahminical Hinduism”—is cited in “No, Bhoota Kola Is Not Part of Brahminic Hinduism,” The Quint, 23 October 2022. Scholar Bannanje Babu Amin’s testimony in the same article: “In the early days we did not worship Vishnu. Bhoota Kola is Daivaradhane or worship of ancestors.”

[8]The Medium piece “Kantara: Dance of the Daiva” (by Siddharth Balaji, 2023) makes the Desiya/Margiya framework explicit and approving: “The Dharmic superstructure of Margiya helps contain the Desiya and retain its broader meaning while the Desiya brings out the richness in diversity, customs, region and expression.” This is precisely the Hindutva reading of the subaltern deity: the local is valuable as an expression of Hindu diversity, but its legitimacy is warranted by its containment within the pan-Hindu “superstructure.” See also the Swarajya Mag article “No Controversy Here: Bhootaradhane Is Proudly and Undeniably Hindu” (October 2022), which insists that Bhoota Kola is part of “the Dharmic tradition” and frames critics as attempting “ideological mass destruction.”

[9]On coastal Karnataka as a Hindutva stronghold, see “Why Coastal Karnataka Is Southern India’s Hindutva Laboratory,” Al Jazeera, 5 August 2022: “None of these issues erupted sporadically… The Sangh Parivar has worked on all of these issues meticulously over decades in this region.”

[10]Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); McKim Marriott, “Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,” in Village India: Studies in the Little Community, ed. McKim Marriott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 171–222. Marriott’s two-way model—universalization (little tradition absorbed into great tradition) and parochialization (great tradition adapted locally)—remains the foundational framework for understanding the dynamics between Sanskritic and vernacular/folk religion in India. The Ayyappa cult is the textbook example of universalization: once a local deity of the Western Ghats, it is now a pan-Indian annual pilgrimage for millions.

[11]M. Amirthalingam, “Karuppuswami: A Village Deity of Tamil Nadu,” Eco News 22, no. 1 (2017): 1–6. On the Bhoota Kola complex and Panjurli, see Basu & Tripathi (2023) and the Springer Nature article on Kantara and ecophronesis (April 2024).

[12]Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]), p. 208.

[13]Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 89–136.

[14] For the systematic paradox, see the New World Encyclopedia entry on kenosis: “an apparent dilemma arises when Christian theology posits a God outside of time and space, who enters into time and space to become human.”

You Cannot Petition a Fascist State into Honesty

Ameen Muhammed — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:31:51 GMT

Prefatory Note: on Reading the Eighteenth Brumaire now

Any serious reckoning with what the 2026 state election results mean for the Indian left could look to Marx’s most witty scholarly work, which examines how political practice, state power, and political economy intersect under authoritarian conditions. Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), written in the heat of Louis Napoleon’s coup, remains the sharpest tool available for understanding how class formations use political representation as a surrogate, how the state becomes relatively autonomous from the class it structurally serves, and how a lumpen-proletarian Bonaparte can triumph over organized class politics. And most crucially, it explains why revolutions cannot borrow their poetry from the past but must find it in the future. Whatever follows in this essay returns to that text.

Read against the backdrop of what has just happened in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Assam, that is, the SIR’s bureaucratic demolition of the electorate, the BJP’s institutional capture of state organs, the fragmentation of the left and regional parties’ base — the Brumaire tells us something that no amount of electoral post-mortem can: that organized political fronts under authoritarian terrains must understand the state not as a neutral arbiter that can be petitioned into fairness, but as a terrain of class struggle in which the ruling bloc has decisive, if not permanent, structural advantages.

On Stolen Votes:

There is a grammar to how fascist states dismantle democracy. It does not announce itself as destruction. It comes dressed in the bureaucratic vocabulary of “revision,” “purification,” and “accuracy.” The SIR of electoral rolls, conducted ahead of the 2026 assembly elections, is the most legible recent specimen of this grammar.

In West Bengal, the primary theatre of vote-chori this election season, the SIR removed approximately 9 million voters from the rolls, representing around 12% of the state’s total electorate. Of the roughly six million entries categorized as “absentee or deceased,” the status of another 2.7 million remained pending before tribunals even as polling commenced. In Muslim-majority districts that historically anchored the TMC’s vote bank, such as Murshidabad (460,000 deletions), North 24 Parganas (330,000), and Malda (240,000), the erasure was most concentrated and consequential. Journalist investigations in North 24 Paragana have shown that families whose documents were in order had their names nonetheless vanish, and others struggled with spelling discrepancies or surname changes related to remarriage. In Bengal’s case, even sections of the Matua community (Hindu Dalit refugees from Bangladesh) found themselves caught in the SIR’s net despite the BJP’s simultaneous promise to them under the Citizenship Amendment Act.

Source: Press Trust of India - Facebook page.

The TMC moved the Supreme Court. Mamata Banerjee, in the aftermath of the BJP’s sweeping 207-seat victory, refused to resign as Chief Minister, helping us witness a rare, constitutionally untenable but politically legible act: declaring that the votes had been looted by force and that the entire voting process was rigged.

In Kerala, the SIR’s operation was less numerically dramatic but no less politically pointed. The state’s overall voter roll contracted by 8.65% after SIR. Thiruvananthapuram district recorded the sharpest decline: a 14.31% fall -- the steepest in the state, nearly double the state average. Northern districts like Kannur and Malappuram, where the party cadre system for the left and Muslims is stronger, and populations are denser, saw the least reduction. Thiruvananthapuram, already a contested terrain where the BJP ended the Left’s 45-year hold over the city corporation in December 2025, went on to deliver two assembly seats to the BJP in 2026: Nemom (Rajeev Chandrasekhar, won by 4,165 votes), Kazhakoottam (V. Muraleedharan, won by 428 votes), along with Chathannoor in Kollam. In Kazhakoottam, where Muraleedharan defeated a three-time sitting LDF minister by fewer than 500 votes, the question of who was quietly removed from the rolls before polling is not paranoid. The BJP’s overall vote share growth in Kerala was a mere 0.12%; its three-seat victory was less a surge than a perfect storm of anti-incumbency, strategic positioning, and a voter roll revised precisely where their margins were thinnest.

In Rahul Gandhi’s recent press conference, which is the most serious attempt from a mainstream national party leader to name this crisis, the allegations were towards the systematic creation of fake voters on one hand, and on the other, the erasure of real ones, most disturbingly, the disenfranchisement of the poor, migrants, Dalits, and Muslims in Bihar’s SIR pilot. Read in conjunction with Bengal, the structural pattern of collusion between the ECI and the ruling BJP becomes unmistakable. While the evidence is damning, there appears to be no concrete plan about what to do with it. In an ethical civil society, such revelations could alone have toppled governments. In India’s present conjuncture, they will be met with institutional silence from the judiciary, the media, and the very state organs implicated. And so what one is left with is a press conference, and a press conference is not a plan.

More critically, it must be said: a party genuinely connected to the ground, capable of maintaining a functioning cadre in each booth and constituency, would not need to wait for election results to notice these discrepancies. Unlike Bihar, where Congress’s accusations came only after polling, TMC identified patterns of voter deletion and addition before polling began, making it a major concern of the election itself. That is the difference between a party with a living cadre infrastructure and one with only institutional memory. The lesson for CPI(M), Congress, and all parties claiming to contest the BJP is that, when institutionalized access to power is denied, party organizations must understand that they still wield power through their capacity to monitor and mobilize. A booth-level cadre that can document additions and deletions is not a luxury; it is the first condition of electoral accountability. It is also the precondition for contesting the BJP’s delegitimacy from below.

TMC’s mass documentation of SIR irregularities, including patterns in Muslim-dominated constituencies and constituencies where the BJP had never previously won, achieved something significant even in defeat: it made visible to large sections of the population that the election did not represent a fair mandate. If channeled properly, the BJP’s rule in Bengal can be continuously reminded of its structural delegitimacy, not only by the TMC but by every organized force that refuses to ratify the result as the voice of the people.

Party and Cadre.

The most significant political statement of the post-election week was Mamata Banerjee’s refusal to resign. What Mamata’s refusal signals, whatever its strategic coherence, is that TMC, for now, is prepared to contest BJP not only in the assembly but outside it. This matters enormously. And it is precisely where Congress chronically fails: its phatu liberal ass, as always, waits for the next election, operating on its long memory to do petitions, to respect institutional protocols, even when those institutions are the weapons being used against them.

Read Fanon, and one can see clearly how stepping away from liberal modes of resistance is not a failure of politics but its fullest expression. Against colonial and fascist forces that monopolize state violence, the oppressed have one structural advantage — numerical superiority — and that advantage can only be capitalized through force. The colonized must understand, Fanon argued, that the settler’s world does not cease to be colonial because one party files an electoral petition in its courts. Paolo Freire’s conscientização is not literacy or legal awareness alone; it is the recognition that the oppressed can only come into their own humanity through praxis, that is, through action upon the world that transforms both the world and the actor. A party that tells its base to wait for the next election cycle is not educating them into political agency. It is managing their dispossession.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Bonaparte’s success rested precisely on the fragmentation of organized class forces and the consequent availability of the state apparatus to whoever could most effectively colonize it. The Indian Left’s failure to maintain counter-institutional power outside electoral and legislative frameworks, and its reduction to an electoral force that wins or loses rather than a class force that builds, is not accidental. It is the result of decades of institutional accommodation that has made the Left illegible to the grammar of power from below.

What parties like CPI(M) and TMC must now understand, is that the model for effective opposition under an authoritarian state is not waiting for the next electoral cycle but constructing what one might call pseudo-governmental presence at the local level: the kind of organized party formation that can intervene in governance adjudication, provide legal and material support to affected communities, and make BJP’s administration of daily life difficult and contested. This is how the CPI(M) in Kerala built its cadre base in the decades before electoral success: through party-mediated dispute resolution, union work, and the cultivation of the party as the first port of call in community life. That model is precisely what was abandoned as the party became a governing machine.

The situation in Bengal for Muslims is evidently dire. Post-poll violence has been immediate and alarming: mosques vandalized in Darjeeling, Muslim-owned shops and sellers threatened, party offices across Tollygunge, Baruipur, Kamarhati, Howrah, and Baranagar attacked or occupied. This, as some left handles analyze the TMC loss, is not a teleological ground-clearing of class struggle for the left to wait and capitalize on; it is a communal consolidation following electoral capture. Organized political forces like CPI(M), ISF, Congress, and the remnant TMC cadre must quickly take shape if the party has to express itself as a relief in these regions.

The only way to arrest electoral capture and manipulation is to create genuine fear. Not rhetorical fear, not electoral fear, but the kind of fear that reaches the body, the wealth, and the mind of state officers, ECI functionaries, and BJP-RSS cadres who currently operate knowing there will be no consequence for them. That is what makes power legible to a fascist state. The Indian left, particularly its Kerala variant, which has made a virtue of institutional comportment, has long needed to remember this.

On the Left’s post-electoral analysis

There is a particular kind of post-election commentary that needs to be resisted: the kind that reads TMC’s Bengal loss and TVK’s surge in Tamil Nadu as expressions of lumpen-proletarian politics. This reading is seductive and wrong. The lumpen proletariat, in Marx’s own formulation in the Eighteenth Brumaire, is that fraction of the working class so thoroughly dislocated from production and collective solidarity — casual laborers, petty criminals, déclassé individuals — that it becomes available as a political instrument of reaction. It is not the class that votes; it is the class that can be bought to suppress votes. What Marx called the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes”, which Bonaparte mobilized as his Société du Dix Décembre, is not analogous to the thousands of voters who left their go-to political camps.

The deeper story in Bengal is the structural conversion of CPI(M)’s own cadre base into BJP’s rural organizational infrastructure — a process that accelerated after 2011, when TMC came to power and the Left’s organizational capacity collapsed. West Bengal has averaged over twenty political killings annually since 1999 (per NCRB data). When TMC came to power, it visited retributive violence on CPI(M) workers in an extension of the same party-society logic that the Left itself had pioneered. For CPI(M) workers without their party’s protection, joining the BJP became a matter of survival. After induction, many underwent VHP training programs emphasizing “prioritizing Hindus,” an ideological reorientation made possible by the Left’s organizational abandonment. The Left in Bengal did not simply lose its cadre through poaching. It left its own workers exposed in a system of political violence it had helped construct, and those workers found the only available patron. An important piece to read here is this Indian History Collective piece.

It is therefore neither correct nor ethical for parties like CPI(M) to define BJP’s victory as a natural progression of TMC politics. The fascist state’s institutional capture is not something TMC particularly paved the way for. TMC’s contradictions are real and consequential: the RG Kar rape and murder, the syndicate economies, and the organizational centralization around the Banerjee-Abhishek axis. None of this is minor. But the fascist state apparatus operates by its own structural logic. Confusing TMC’s failures of governance with the BJP’s systemic capture of democratic institutions is an analytic error that serves only the BJP.

The Kerala story is more complex and more theoretically troubling because it requires confronting what happens when the caste-class categories through which the Left mapped its political constituency no longer correspond to social reality. Early communist organizing in Kerala worked because there was a coherent overlap between caste and class positions — particularly among Ezhava/Theeya communities and the broader body of kudiyans (tenants and petty landowners). EMS Namboodiripad’s early theorization of the working class took this overlap as its organizational anchor: the Ezhava-Theeya caste complex mapped reasonably well onto the laboring and land-tenure classes of Malabar and Travancore.

That mapping was not without its suppressions. Marxist historiography of Kerala has consistently underplayed the internal stratification of the agrarian laboring class — specifically the distinction between kudiyans (tenants with customary rights to upayam, i.e., rights to settle, build, and lease land) and the adiyalar communities (slave castes including Pulayar, Parayar, Vellan) who had no such rights and formed the most extracted layer of the agrarian economy. The number of adiyalar workers directly employed under a jenmi’s demesne was often lower than those employed as auxiliary kin-laborers under kudiyans themselves — meaning that the kudiyan class, studied as “working class,” concealed within it a structure of sub-exploitation over bonded labor. Marxist historiography, by collapsing Ezhavar/Theeya tenants with Pulayar/Parayar slave castes into a single “laboring class” analytical category, systematically missed this and thereby misread who the working class in Kerala actually was and is. (I will take up this question in a subsequent Substack piece on land and labor in Kerala.)

As the caste-class overlap has dissolved in recent decades — as Ezhava communities have moved into middle-class service and professional economies, as caste identity and Hindu religious belonging have become their primary political concerns, as SNDP Yogam has aligned with BJP and Sabarimala has become a communitarian flashpoint — the Left’s class rhetoric directed at Ezhava voters has become both less persuasive and politically embarrassing. The result is that LDF has come to be perceived less as a working-class party and more as an Ezhava party. This is not something imposed from without. It emerged from within, from a continued application of a caste-class equation that history has increasingly dissolved.

Meanwhile, the bonded agrarian laboring classes, particularly Adivasi and Dalit communities, have not been theorized or organized as a working class with anything approaching the seriousness they require. The dominant Left historiography, including the landmark work of the JNU Marxist school as applied to Kerala (K.N. Panikkar), has attended to Mappila petty workers and small landowners with greater care than to the adiyalanmar communities, whose caste constituencies were always more heterogeneous and more severely exploited than the unified “bonded laborer” category suggests.

The growth of crony capitalism, uneven middle-class-ification alongside accumulating unemployment and lumpenism, the collapse of the agrarian sector, the rise of unorganized labor, and migration have all displaced class politics in favor of identity and communal politics. The reading, however, that identity politics constitutes a “false solution” imported from outside, something that was foisted upon a previously class-conscious Kerala or Bengal, misses that this is also an internal problem of the Left’s own making.

E.P. Thompson’s great contribution in The Making of the English Working Class was to demonstrate that class is not a structure but a relationship, and that religious rhetoric, communitarian marking, and cultural solidarity were always instruments of working-class mobilization, not obstacles to it. Panikkar’s own analysis of Mappila petty workers and small landowners shows that their communal and religious identity was not false consciousness but the available cultural grammar through which they organized resistance and articulated rights. The lesson the contemporary left needs to relearn is that the line between the instrumental use of community symbolism and communal harm is visible to anyone paying attention. It is not thin. Marxist parties, leaders, and intellectuals must be able to distinguish between the use of religious rhetoric and communitarian marking and communal demands and harm. If they are not, the fault lies with the Marxists.

Alliance and the Long Game

In the immediate aftermath of TMC’s defeat, some voices, such as Mahua Moitra’s ambivalent commentary (”If Bengal wanted BJP, then Bengal has got BJP”), will suggest that Muslim voters’ fragmentation caused TMC’s defeat. TMC’s Muslim vote did shift: toward Congress, CPI(M)-ISF, AIMIM, and reportedly some toward BJP through fear and bhuya voter manufacture. This reading needs to be firmly resisted. If the question of vote-chori is raised, it must be raised for Muslim-majority constituencies with the same seriousness as everywhere else. It is not vote-chori when Matua voters are displaced, and voter preference when Muslim constituencies shift. The disenfranchisement of Muslim voters through SIR is the electoral manipulation story.

Tamil Nadu presents a theoretically distinct problem. TVK emerged as the single largest party with 108 seats, reshaping the state’s traditional political landscape. That TVK was not immediately invited to form government by the Governor, despite holding a clear legislative majority, and was effectively pressured to demonstrate a floor majority before government formation, is itself a diagnostic of the fascist state’s tactical repertoire: the use of constitutional ambiguity to make populist non-BJP formations seek alliances with the established order. To DMK’s credit, its response displayed political maturity. The party announced it is prepared to allow its allies to support TVK, and would observe the government’s functioning for the next six months. That is a non-trivial concession from a regional “hegemon”.

Yet the deeper question that TVK’s governance will answer (or fail to answer) is one of party formation from above versus from below. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is instructive here too: Bonaparte’s power rested not on a class with historical agency but on the most fragmented and unrepresented fraction of the French peasantry — a class that could not represent itself and therefore required representation. A charismatic leader of a party constructed around his image, without bottom-up organizational infrastructure, replicates this structural problem. Vijay, as much as he can embody the savior-star, will find that his eyes, ears, and hands cannot meet the governance requirements of a state as complex as Tamil Nadu. Single-spearheaded parties find it difficult to operationalize governance that requires distributed power centers, accountability mechanisms, and institutional knowledge accumulated over cycles of administration.

VCK offers an instructive comparative case. As a nascent top-led formation that has nevertheless cultivated a genuine Dalit base and maintained ideological coherence around Thol. Thirumavalavan’s leadership, VCK, demonstrates how crucial the perception of political thought and the presence of organic power conflicts within a party’s structure are for the long-term legitimacy of a political formation. The central question for TVK is whether it can transition from a fan formation organized around a celebrity to something resembling Gramsci’s party-as-modern-prince—a collective organism capable of will formation and strategic action beyond the horizon of its leader’s charisma. Since Vijay has put social justice and equity at the heart of his Dravidian politics, the decisive test will be how these commitments are operationalized as governing policy, or whether the TVK government risks becoming what is called the rule of experts: the technocratic management of popular aspirations without their political transformation.

On the question of the CPI(M) itself: the coming period may offer an opportunity for a structural correction in the relationship between the central party apparatus and the Kerala leadership that has dominated it for the past decade. Under Pinarayi Vijayan’s back-to-back victories in 2016 and 2021, the Kerala unit accumulated disproportionate weight in the Polit Bureau and Central Committee. MA Baby’s elevation as General Secretary was widely interpreted less as a new direction than as a consolidation of the Pinarayi order. With the LDF reduced to 35 seats and Pinarayi exiting the Chief Minister’s office in political silence, the structural conditions for a genuine rebalancing — a central committee less subservient to a governing Kerala machine — are more present than they have been in years. Whether MA Baby and the broader central committee have the political courage and ideological clarity to use this opening is another question. On many important issues, including the party’s response to PM Shri schools and MA Baby’s own public remarks, the central body and the state party have been in visible contradictions. A correction of these imbalances would, in this context, be a welcome development.

The political stage ahead will make alliances difficult. The power vacuum across multiple states, diverging interests among TMC, Congress, CPI(M), DMK, and TVK, and the sheer inaction of several parties in the face of organizational challenges will make a coherent anti-BJP front increasingly difficult to sustain. It is worth stating clearly: in the southern states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu — BJP’s electoral presence, while growing at the margins, remains structurally limited. Three seats in Kerala, contested through patient consolidation and borrowed anti-Left sentiment with 0.12% total vote share growth, do not constitute an alarm. Political parties with major differences and historic conflicts in a region should not be expected to paper over those conflicts in the name of resisting a party that is not yet a serious electoral threat in that region. Recognizing political needs for what they are — rather than demanding alliances driven by a fear not yet localized — is not complacency.

CPI(M) in opposition is, in some fundamental respects, not a bad thing. Opposition is where disruptive politics lives. And this is the moment, in whichever state they contest, for the party to undertake a rigorous postmortem that goes beyond self-critique and into genuine structural rethinking: who is the working class in each region now? What are the real caste-class dynamics at play? Where have Adivasi and Dalit communities been analytically subordinated within the category of “labor,” and how can that be corrected in both theory and organizing practice?

The Ambedkarite critique that Marxist parties have systematically underutilized caste as an epistemological and resistive category, treating it as regressive identity politics rather than as a mode of materialist dialectics, is not merely an external point of attack. It is, at its best, a call to correct Marxist methodology for Indian conditions. Some Ambedkarite intellectuals and organizations have themselves recognized and utilized the epistemological and resistive potential of historical materialism. That convergence is worth taking seriously in Marxist circles. The mistake was never that class analysis is wrong. The mistake was that Indian Marxists consistently mistook a particular caste-class configuration at a particular historical moment for a universal and permanent structure of the working class.

Similarly, Marxist thought carries a long-standing and unresolved contradiction about the role of the intellectual, particularly the public intellectual, who positions themselves as a guide to political movements. The question of whether critical thought and intellectual practice exist outside the material conditions of productive forces and relations, or whether they are themselves products in dialectical relationship with those forces in the Hegelian-materialist sense, is not merely a philosophical puzzle. Marx’s own resolution — that consciousness does not determine being, but being determines consciousness — implies that the intellectual’s thought is always a product of the class relations within which they are materially embedded, however mediated. This creates a structural problem for the class-in-itself-to-class-for-itself transition at the heart of Marxist political theory. The transition between these two moments requires political work and the construction of what Gramsci called organic intellectuals: thinkers who arise from within the class itself and articulate its experience in the language of political strategy, rather than traditional intellectuals who claim a detached, universal role above class struggle.

The question worth asking in the current conjuncture is whether the public intellectual of the left is, in fact, a product of precisely the class-in-itself system they claim to analyze and transform. The transition to organic intellectual function, in Gramsci’s sense, first requires a transition in the social formation being represented: the creation of class-for-itself. And as has been argued throughout this essay, that creation first requires correctly identifying who the working class actually is in each region’s current political economy — not who it was at the moment of the Left’s founding, not who it was when the caste-class overlap was coherent, but who it is now: which communities are the bearers of structural exploitation, which caste-class configurations are in motion, which identitarian expressions are the class-in-itself articulating its position in the only available cultural grammar.

Thompson showed this for the English working class: that the religious Nonconformism, the fraternal lodges, the chapels and the moral economy of the crowd - all of which liberal historiography dismissed as obstacles to class consciousness — were in fact the idiom through which the English working class first became for itself. The theoretical task for Marxist parties and intellectuals today is not to shun or ridicule these communitarian and identitarian expressions, but to treat them as the expression of class-in-itself that must be engaged, worked through, and organically transformed into class-for-itself. The postmortem of this electoral defeat needs to begin not with the votes lost, but with the question of what kind of political formation is being built, and for whom.

The Eighteenth Brumaire closes with a famous formulation: the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but must let the dead bury the dead. Earlier revolutions required the self-deceptions of historical memory to sustain themselves, as the Jacobins wrapped themselves in Roman togas, and the English revolutionaries in the language of the Old Testament. The coming revolution, Marx argued, must find its content in the future, not its poetry in the past. The political, theoretical, and organizational work that the present moment requires correctly identifying the constituent subject, building a cadre that can contest power outside the ballot box, developing organic intellectuals capable of articulating that class to itself, and refusing both the liberal timidity of the Congress and the teleological passivity of the romantic communist left.

A sunset from May 6th, 2026, at Kiltan Island, Lakshadweep

Note: Sorry if the article appears disorganized; I wrote this over the last two days with a jarring head, while waiting for boats and ferries, as I shuttle between the Lakshadweep Islands and network delays. Much of this is a synthesis of recent social media posts I have written.

Thanks, Ihsan and Salih, for delaying my writing this; I hope I was a good assistant to your archival work ;)

Idle Worship: Manu Pillai's History of Hinduism

Ameen Muhammed — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:04:59 GMT

Earlier last week, I wrote a critique of Manu S Pillai’s Substack article on the Breast Tax, clothing, and caste in Kerala. I had been reading his book – Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of Modern Hindu Identity (Penguin Random House India, 2024) -- for the past two weeks, and it was then that I stumbled upon the above article while looking for what else the author had written recently. In the article, Pillai argued that the history of upper-clothing is less about gendered oppression faced by lower-caste women and more indicative of caste and social rank customs in Kerala. The issue isn’t that Pillai was wrong about clothing indicating caste, but that by portraying the history of upper-cloth and its absence as a “normal” practice across caste groups—both men and women—he detached it from questions of dignity, which was central to the narratives put out by anti-caste writings on this issue. He also overlooked that caste oppression is experienced in a graded manner, with the body, space, and labor all being monitored and controlled by upper castes. If the writing there produced a flattened history of caste, then the problem is more severe in his 2024 book on the history of Hinduism, both because of the subject’s political stakes and because of what is becoming normalized as popular historical writing among India’s top publishing houses. In this review, I first present in detail what went wrong with Gods, Guns, and Missionaries, then use that to open a discussion about writing popular history. I am sorry that I have to write two back-to-back critiques of what Pillai has produced recently, and sorry if a somewhat long, blunt criticism is not to readers’ taste.

Gods, Guns, and Missionaries is the second book by the author that I have read. During my MA time, I read his first book, The Ivory Throne (2016), and a few chapters of his 2019 book, The Courtesan, the Mahatma, and the Italian Brahmin. Pillai has always been a great writer, with a creative ability to weave diverse narratives and historical snippets into compelling stories about India’s past. What I have recognized in reading his historical works, especially as he intended them for popular reading, is that the book is rich in references that an academic scholar can make right use of when needed. And Pillai should be genuinely credited for the density of his sourcing; nearly half the book’s pages are devoted to endnotes, and the reader who wishes to trace an argument back to its evidence and locate it in the wider scholarly literature can generally do so. These are considerable achievements for a work of popular history at this scale. What I have also recognized is that his historical works speak to one another, and he is keen to draw on suitable stories or instances he has introduced earlier in his own works. So you will notice that his own narratives regarding Roberto de Nobili, numerous Indian princely states, princes, kings, and queens, etc., all reappear in his writing, serving newer goals of each successive book. Even if I have a certain critique of Pillai’s first book - regarding the political weight and agency it attributed to the Travancore Royal Family in producing modern Kerala - what brought me to read the recent book is the topic itself, Hinduism, which I have a particular scholarly interest in.

Review

Manu S. Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries arrives as one of the most ambitious works of popular Indian history in recent years. Its subject is nothing less than the making of Hinduism as a modern religious identity: the long, contested, and enormously consequential process by which a vast and internally fractured collection of practices, communities, and traditions came to understand itself, and to be understood by others, as a single, bounded religion called Hinduism, capable of political mobilization, electoral consolidation, and finally civilizational assertion. That this process had historical causes, external provocations, and structural conditions, and that it was not the unfolding of something always latently present, is the book’s central and most important claim. And it is a claim worth making clearly and forcefully for a reading public that, in today’s India, is being aggressively told the opposite.

The book spans five centuries and the breadth of the subcontinent, moving from the medieval encounter with Islamic sultanates through the arrival of European missionaries, the Protestant-inflected reform movements of the nineteenth century, and finally the emergence of Hindutva ideology in the twentieth. Along the way, it passes through the breadth of India: from Bengal, Punjab, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. As David Arnold has observed in his review of the book, “one of the many strengths of Gods, Guns and Missionaries is that it doesn’t always choose the more obvious examples” … “The author devotes more space to peninsular India than most histories do.”[1] Pillai’s prose is, as his readers have come to expect, consistently fluid and accessible. The introductory pages of each chapter are frequently brilliant, which are lively, image-rich, and alert to historical irony.

But a book of history is not a survey of evidence, and the accumulation of sources, however conscientiously documented, is not in itself a historical argument. What elevates a historical work — for academic or popular readers — from an empirical record into critical thinking is the conceptual clarity that determines which details to preserve out of the overwhelming mass of what might have been said, and why. In Pillai’s case, the evidence is abundant and the narrative rarely flags. What is missing, with notable consistency, is the question that would animate the evidence into an argument: not merely what happened, but why, in whose interest, with what conditions making it both possible and necessary. History, in Gods, Guns and Missionaries, unfolds as a sequence of individual acts, responses, and episodes rather than as a set of interconnected processes with identifiable social and economic causes. The result is a book that is very easy to read and surprisingly difficult to learn anything fundamentally new from.

The book’s problems are visible from its opening pages. Pillai’s introduction, for all its readability and range, operates on a deliberately vague timeline that is often historically unanchored. Here, that vagueness does significant ideological work. When the formation of a Hindu sense of collective identity, or a Hindu awareness of adversarial religious others, is described in terms that float free of specific regional and temporal contexts, the effect is to make these formations appear older and more stable than the historical record warrants. The sense that there was, across South Asia, a shared Hindu identity and a shared consciousness of threat posed by Islamic power reads, in the introduction, less as an argument that requires demonstration and more as a premise that the rest of the book will illustrate. Even when the author cites Muzaffar Alam and others to show that the term “Hindu” was used in premodern and early modern sources to denote a broad religious-cultural zone[2], the question of whether that usage reflected any actual shared identity across caste groups, regions, or religious practices, rather than simply a category useful to those observing from outside, is precisely what requires examination.[3] Pillai’s introduction largely assumes what should be the subject of the book’s argument. The claim, for instance, that “while there was no single pan-Indian Hinduism, Brahmins had, as we saw, formed a ‘consciousness’ of unity, to which Muslim power posed a threat”[4] conflates two very different things: the existence of certain pan-regional Brahminic networks and discourses, which is historically documentable, with a pan-Indian Hindu consciousness of solidarity under siege, which requires a great deal more evidentiary work. The move from the first to the second is made quietly, without argument, and it sets a tone that persists throughout the book: Muslim power appears, recurringly, not as one political formation among others in a complex landscape of competing sovereignties, but as a civilizational threat to which the Hindu response is the natural organizing principle of the narrative.

Nowhere is this more explicit than in a passage where Pillai suggests that Muslim accommodation of Hindu religious practice — the fact that rulers did not systematically destroy temples or compel conversion across their territories — is best explained by the pragmatic need to govern a Hindu-majority country: “compromises were inevitable.”[5] Similarly, Pillai asserts: “Hindu princes tended to wrest deities: non-Hindu powers threatened their destruction.”[6] These formulations do not analyze the pre-modern politics of religion; they reproduce a nationalist narrative about it.[7] They accept, as a background condition of the history, the very Hindu-Muslim civilizational binary that a serious history of Hindu identity formation should be interrogating from the outset. A history of how Hinduism was constructed as a bounded and embattled identity cannot begin by presupposing exactly that construction as its foundation. And when describing Hindu subjects’ negotiation with Colonial authorities, Pillai writes: “’… if you respect our customs, we may yet accept your government’ — something once done with Muslim powers.”[8] The framing of Islamic rule as something that had to be “accepted” and “tolerated” by Hindus who would otherwise resist is a characterization that closely mirrors exactly the political common sense of Hindu nationalism that the book, at its best, aspires to historicize and demystify.

The most significant intellectual absence in the book is the failure to ask (and answer) a historical question that its own evidence constantly raises: what were the structural conditions that made a generalizable, textualized, pan-regional Hinduism both possible and necessary? This question cannot be answered by tracing a sequence of intellectual responses to religious others. It requires attending to the social and economic transformation of the communities that produced, disseminated, and enforced Hindu religious discourse -- above all, Brahmin communities.

The historical scholarship of the last three decades has established with considerable clarity that Brahmin communities underwent a profound structural transformation in the early modern period. Historians like Rosalind O’Hanlon and Prachi Deshpande have traced how Brahmin scribal and service elites expanded their presence across the subcontinent under the Vijayanagar and Maratha states, under Mughal successor polities, and eventually under early colonial administration — finding employment as revenue officials, legal arbiters, record-keepers, and bureaucratic intermediaries across very different political and ecological contexts.[9] This was a decisive transformation in the social basis of Brahminic authority. Earlier, in a feudal agrarian landscape, Brahmin authority was most directly grounded in the appropriation of surplus from agricultural communities: the Brahmin as landlord, recipient of land grants, and ritual legitimizer of the local agrarian order. The relationship of social domination was direct, coercive, and primarily local. What such a system required of caste ideology was local and practical: the enforcement of labor obligations, the regulation of access to land and water, and the maintenance of ritual pollution boundaries that kept bonded workers in their place. It did not require, and indeed could not easily sustain, a large, generalized account of caste hierarchy that was legible and commensurable across regions with very different caste ecologies, occupational structures, and local practices.

The transition to a bureaucratic, administrative role fundamentally changed this. A Brahmin lineage or family whose authority rested on a generalized claim to textual knowledge and ritual legitimacy — who operated across multiple political territories, served multiple rulers, and negotiated multiple local caste landscapes — needed a portable, pan-regionally legible account of caste, its hierarchy, and its Brahminic justification. The canonical understanding grounded in the Vedas and the Puranas, the shastric regulation of inter-caste relations, the more rigorous narrativization of what each caste community owed and was owed — all of this was enforced, popularized, and institutionalized with new intensity from the late medieval period onward precisely because the social conditions now demanded it. Caste became increasingly “readable” across South Asia not because the Vedas said something new, but because there was now a class with both the structural incentive and the institutional capacity to make the Vedas say something general.[10] This is the social history of the intellectual infrastructure without which modern Hinduism is unintelligible. Pillai’s book provides details that gesture toward this story. One can find in his pages evidence of Brahmin administrative expansion, of textual production and dissemination, and of the relationship between royal patronage and religious authority. Pillai traces Ram Mohan Roy’s family service to the Nawabi court, his years as a Company diwan, and his command of the pamphlet press with evident care[11] — and one is left wondering why none of this detail is ever gathered into the larger question it raises: that the man who produced a universalizing public Hinduism was himself the precise biographical embodiment of the Brahmin transition to bureaucratic and literary service.

This structural failure in the book’s account of Brahmin history produces its most damaging consequence: the effective invisibility of caste as a constitutive rather than incidental dimension of Hindu identity. Pillai’s Hinduism is populated by reformers, revivalists, and reactionaries; by texts, temples, and traditions; by encounters with Islam and Christianity that catalyze new forms of self-understanding. What it is not populated by is the full weight of what caste actually meant for the overwhelming majority of those who were nominally Hindu. The “Hindu community” that Pillai traces across his five centuries was not one available to most of those notionally within it. Most Brahmins identified nothing meaningful with Dalits other than a claim that was enforced through ritual authority, legal sanction, and outright violence to their labor, their bodies, and their space. The Dalit agricultural laborer who worked the Brahmin’s land did not share a religious identity with the Brahmin that would have made solidarity thinkable on either side. The categories of ritual pollution, occupational restriction, spatial segregation, and social hierarchy that structured everyday life for most Hindus were not peripheral features of Hinduism that reform movements of the nineteenth century would refine away. They were Hinduism’s constitutive social logic, the axis around which its authority was organized, and its practices made coercive.

This is also why Hinduism’s relationship to European universalism is more complicated than Pillai acknowledges. He notes that Europeans did not initially recognize Hinduism as a universal religion comparable to Christianity or Islam, but he does not ask why. Part of the reason Hinduism resisted European religious categorization was precisely that it was caste-specific in ways that made universal membership unintelligible. Unlike Islam and Christianity, which at least doctrinally authorize all believers — across social rank, gender, and birth — to interpret and inhabit the religion, to access its texts and dispute its meanings, Hinduism has historically concentrated doctrinal and discursive authority within Brahminic institutions. This is not an unfortunate deviation from a purer Hinduism; it is the structural condition that makes Brahminic authority reproducible, and that defines the limits of Hindu reform. As long as the Brahmin does not recognize and authorize — immediately or through a longer process of co-optation — a religious practice, community, or figure, that practice remains outside or marginal to Hinduism. This role of the Brahmin as the apostle of doctrinal authority, the necessary intermediary between religious practice and religious legitimacy, is what has sustained the continuity of Brahminic power across enormous historical transformations. It is also, critically, what distinguishes the process of Hindu identity formation from those of Islam and Christianity in ways that Pillai’s comparative framework consistently underplays.

And it is this reality — the fact that the majority of contemporary Hindus belong to communities that were peripheral to, or actively excluded from, the Brahminic Hinduism of the medieval and early modern period — that makes the recent mass incorporation of these groups into a political Hindu identity the most radical and historically unprecedented feature of modern Hinduism. That incorporation required not just the reformist projects of the nineteenth century, but the specific and deliberate political work of Hindutva organizations in the twentieth: the construction of a new caste social in which the most rigid traditional hierarchies were selectively relaxed, a new public sphere was imagined, and certain political claims were extended to previously excluded communities in exchange for electoral solidarity. This is the creation of modern Hinduism that Pillai’s framework cannot account for, because it requires attending to the political economy of caste rather than the intellectual history of religious encounter.

On the Book’s Treatment of Phule, Tilak, and Savarkar

Nothing in the book reveals its analytical limitations more clearly than its treatment of Jyotirao Phule. To include Phule as a figure in the story of modern Hindu reform [p 257] is not a minor misclassification.[12] It is a fundamental misreading of Phule’s intellectual and political project, and the anti-caste tradition has spent considerable energy resisting it.[13] Phule did not reform Hinduism. He rejected it. The critique at the heart of his work — in Gulamgiri, in Shetkaryaca Asud, in his foundational arguments about the Brahminic origins of caste and the ideological function of Vedic religion — was a critique of the claim that Hinduism could be redeemed from within, that Brahminic authority could be reformed rather than dismantled.[14] Phule’s analysis of caste identified the relationship between Brahminic intellectual authority, agrarian surplus extraction, and religious legitimation as a structural unity that could not be addressed by textual reform or ritual simplification. His founding of the Satyashodhak Samaj was an explicit rejection of the Brahminic intermediary in religious life; his readings of Indian history as the history of conquest and subjugation were developed precisely to counter the civilizational narratives that Brahminic intellectuals were constructing. The claim made in the book that Phule and Savarkar shared the same approach to history [p 299] is even more egregious, and the less said about it in detail, the more space there is for the reader to appreciate its absurdity on reflection. Phule’s materialist, anti-Brahminic reading of Indian history — which treated the Aryan myth as an instrument of domination — and Savarkar’s instrumentalized historical mythology — which deployed exactly that myth for Hindu nationalist purposes — are not methodologically comparable projects in any meaningful sense. The comparison reveals an analytical flattening that is difficult to attribute to anything other than a failure to read Phule seriously on his own terms.

The treatment of Tilak exposes another significant gap in the book’s argument. Pillai is alert to Tilak’s strategic appropriation of Ramdas’s tradition— and he notes, to his credit, that Tilak turned Ramdas’s rhetoric into a template for anti-colonial mobilization. But he does not follow this observation to where it must lead: if the templates Tilak was working with were built on an anti-Islamic rhetoric and an anti-Muslim historical imagination, then the question of how Muslims were perceived and positioned in Tilak’s political project cannot be bracketed as incidental. The anti-Muslim dimension of Maratha historical mythology was not a tool that Tilak merely borrowed and redirected. The Shivaji festivals, the Ganapati festivals, the public ceremonies that Pillai correctly identifies as Tilak’s movement of nationalism from the English-language newspaper columns of the educated elite onto the streets and into the bodies of a mass urban public — these were political formations in which the Hindu homeland, Hindu pride, and Hindu community were defined in relation to a Muslim other that the anti-Islamic inheritance of Ramdas had already positioned as the appropriate adversary.[15] Pillai observes that Tilak was “using” Hinduism, and that his nationalism was strategic rather than devout. This is a sophisticated point, and it is true as far as it goes. But the question it should prompt — how does the strategic use of anti-Muslim Hindu symbolism shape the community that is being mobilized, regardless of the intentions of those doing the mobilizing? — is never asked. The book treats it as a detail of Tilak’s political biography rather than as the crux of a historical problem.

The book builds, structurally and narratively, toward Savarkar and the crystallization of Hindutva ideology and this is where the argument should have delivered on the promises of its introduction: a demonstration of how the encounter with missionaries and colonial Christianity shaped the specific form that political Hindu identity took, how the tools and models of Christian missionary organization were repurposed for Hindu nationalist mobilization, and how the political Hinduism of the twentieth century created the Hindu community it claimed to represent. These are important and largely unresolved historical questions, and a book with Pillai’s range of sources and narrative skill was well-positioned to advance them.

What we get instead is something closer to a lengthy biographical treatment of Savarkar that never quite decides what it is doing. Savarkar appears as a complicated figure. But “complicated” is not an analytical category; it is a way of deferring analysis. What one expects to find regarding Savarkar is what the Hindutva project he articulated actually did: how it operationalized a Hindu community, how it managed the relationship between upper-caste authority and the mass of lower-caste communities it needed for electoral and social power, how it selectively relaxed certain caste distinctions while reinforcing others, and how it transformed Hinduism from a Brahmin-managed cultural inheritance into a mass political identity. These are questions about political mobilization, organizational structure, and the relationship between ideology and social power. They are the questions that the book’s introduction promised to answer. The final chapter does not answer them.

The explanations that do appear in these chapters are frequently worse than silence. For instance, Pillai attributes the crucial transformation in Savarkar’s political stance, that is, his shift from a position that could accommodate Muslim political partnership to one that made Muslims the foundational enemy of Hindu civilization, to his personal experience in the Andaman cellular jail, where Muslim prisoners were present as evil wardens. The source for this claim is Savarkar’s own testimony. To use Savarkar’s own account of his transformation, uncritically, as the book’s explanation of it is to become a vehicle for that rhetoric rather than a critic of it. To not say more, one of the most frequently cited works in this chapter is Vikram Sampath’s two-volume biography of Savarkar, which most serious historians treat as biased (or propagandist). Moreover, Sambath’s work has been credibly and extensively accused of plagiarizing Janaki Bakhle’s research, whose own work on Savarkar is among the most serious scholarly treatments of the subject recently. At one point, Pillai cites both Sampath and Bakhle in the same reference — apparently without awareness of the irony, or of the scholarly controversy that has surrounded Sampath’s work.

Underlying the failure of the Savarkar chapters is the book’s failure to seriously grapple with the distinction between political Hinduism and religious identity at the level of ordinary social life. Pillai notes, correctly, that Savarkar’s political Hinduism was not primarily devotional — that it was willing, in principle, to disregard caste hierarchy in the service of political solidarity. This is a genuine and important observation about the nature of Hindutva as a political project. But the contradiction that Pillai identifies — between the political Hindu identity that Savarkar articulated and the deeply caste-specific religious identity that most Hindus actually lived — is not a secondary inconsistency in Hindutva’s program. It is its central political challenge and its most revealing structural feature. How does a political project that requires mass solidarity across caste boundaries manage the reality that those boundaries are not merely customary but are institutionalized? And it is precisely those twentieth-century actors, such as the Sangh Parivar’s organizational machinery, its construction of a mass Hindu constituency through shakhas, schools, and processions, its management of caste through the idiom of Hindu brotherhood, who actually created the Hindu community as a political force capable of governing India.[16] This answer is almost entirely absent from the book, replaced by a vaguely biographical portrait of Savarkar that ends without delivering the structural analysis the book has been building toward.

What the Epilogue Misses

The book’s epilogue represents a final missed opportunity. Pillai gestures toward the longue durée argument that the encounter with Muslim power in the medieval period set in motion an embryonic Hindu consciousness that was then intensified and formalized by colonial modernity. But this framing, even at the close of the book, is not adequately interrogated. The problem is not simply that the longue durée is historically questionable (though it is). It is that treating colonial modernity as the intensification of pre-existing tendencies rather than as a qualitative rupture that produced fundamentally new social and political formations prevents the book from giving adequate weight to what modernity actually did.

The formation of the modern Hindu bloc required not just the hardening of a pre-existing sense of Hindu identity but the construction of a new caste social — a new set of social and economic relations between caste groups, some of which were regionally specific (the rise of various middle-caste communities as dominant landowners and commercial interests in different parts of India)[17] and some of which were generalizable across the subcontinent (the shift of Brahmin and other literate upper-caste communities into administrative, professional, and civil society roles). The peripheral sects, communities, and practices that were assimilated into political Hinduism in the modern period were not small minorities whose incorporation could be narrated as the natural expansion of a pre-existing tradition. They were, and are, the majority of contemporary Hindus. Their incorporation was not the unfolding of a longue durée but an historically specific political project that required the construction of new institutional forms, new discursive strategies, and new social bargains. To understand this through the frame of a five-century cultural history of Hindu identity formation is to mistake the product for the process, and to give far too much credit to the pre-modern past for a formation that is, in its decisive features, a product of the modern period.

The Problems with Popular Histories of Hinduism

The problems with Gods, Guns and Missionaries are not simply those of an individual book or an individual writer. They are the problems of a mode of popular historical writing that has become dominant in India over the past decade, a mode whose political and intellectual consequences are now serious enough to deserve direct examination.

The dominant register of popular Indian history writing in recent years has been the celebration of Indian civilization as inherently plural, syncretic, tolerant, and sophisticated: a civilization whose deep historical achievement was the accommodation of diversity, and whose integrity was periodically threatened — and ultimately damaged — by external forces, above all by two centuries of colonial political domination. Of course, accommodation and syncretism were genuine historical practices. The damage inflicted by colonialism was real and lasting. None of this is in dispute.

What is in dispute is the political function that this framing performs in the current moment. We are living through a period in which Hindu nationalism has consolidated state power, reshaped educational institutions, and is actively producing a version of Indian history through textbook revision, through public commemoration, through the commissioning of popular historical narratives in which Indian civilization is identified with Hindu civilization, the Muslim presence in Indian history is treated as a history of foreign conquest and desecration, and the colonial period appears as an interruption of a Hindu national continuity that is now being restored. This is an ugly and dangerous historical mythology, and it requires vigorous intellectual opposition.[18]

But the liberal pluralist celebration of Indian civilization as tolerant and syncretic is not adequate opposition, because it shares too many of the nationalist framing’s premises. Both agree that Indian civilization is the appropriate unit of analysis. Both locate the most significant disruptions of that civilization in external forces: the colonial and the foreign. Both are reluctant to attend seriously to the internal dynamics of caste, class, and religious authority that structured Indian society from within. The liberal pluralist narrative offers a kinder and more accurate picture of the past, but it does not challenge the nationalist narrative at the level where that narrative’s power actually lies: in its account of what Indian “civilization” is, who belongs to it, and who is constitutively outside it. As a reviewer noted, “On the topic of nationalism, important thinkers are not part of Pillai’s project—not even Perry Anderson’s analysis of “the Indian ideology”. This shows great intellectual self-confidence. One can only speculate how the book would have turned out if he had looked over his shoulders at the work of the more empirically oriented scholars who have worked in this area.”[19]

The book does not celebrate Hindu nationalism; on the contrary, it is clearly and genuinely critical of Hindutva’s ideological distortions and political violence. But it leaves the civilizational premise largely intact. The celebration of India’s long history and heritage, the careful documentation of accommodation and synthesis, the designation of colonialism as the primary external force responsible for hardening religious boundaries — all of this sits within a nationalist common sense that the book’s critical apparatus is not quite powerful enough to displace. A reader who finishes Gods, Guns and Missionaries with a sense that Indian civilization’s essential character is pluralist and tolerant, and that this character was distorted by colonial interference and then weaponized by Hindutva ideologues, has read the book correctly. And that reading, unfortunately, provides neither the analytical tools nor the political orientation needed to understand why Hindutva succeeded, how it built a mass constituency among communities historically excluded from Brahminic Hinduism, and what structural features of Indian society it exploited in doing so.

This is not a merely academic concern. We are in a period when right-wing popular history is producing knowledge that is entering school and university curricula. The distortion of Indian history is not happening at the level of scholarly journals, where it would be contained by peer review and specialist critique. It is happening at the levels of popular publications, public commemoration, and educational policy. These are the levels where Pillai’s book is also operating. In this context, a popular history that is broadly accurate but conceptually timid, one that challenges the most egregious falsifications while leaving the deeper premises of the nationalist imagination intact, is not a practice in the right direction. The result is a book that, whatever its author’s intentions, would cause no serious discomfort to a liberal Hindu romantic and would provide those working against Hindutva with very little that they could usefully deploy. That is a significant failure of political and intellectual responsibility for a book with this subject, written at this moment, by a writer with this big a platform.

Gods, Guns and Missionaries is an extraordinarily ambitious book. The scope of the book: five centuries, the breadth of the subcontinent, sources in multiple languages drawn from archives across India and beyond, etc., makes it one of the most extensive works of popular Indian history written in recent years. This kind of ambition is rare, and it should not simply be criticized for failing to do everything perfectly. A book this wide in scope will necessarily leave gaps; it will necessarily simplify what specialists would complicate; it will necessarily make choices about what to foreground and what to let recede that will frustrate different readers in different ways. The question is whether those inevitable simplifications are informed by a clear and defensible conceptual purpose, or whether the scale of the project has simply outrun the conceptual framework available to manage it.

This brings us to a more general and more important point about popular history writing in India, and who is writing it. The practical reality is that academic historians trained in the methods and the critical literature that would provide the conceptual framework a book like this needs largely do not write books for a broad public. The reasons are understandable: popular publication is a different skill from academic writing, the audiences have different expectations, and the institutional incentives of academic life do not reward the time investment required for a book of this scale. Popular history in India is consequently written primarily by journalists, by independent scholars, and by writers who have made the popular historical genre their primary medium. These writers are often gifted narrators, and they have made genuine contributions to public historical culture.

This is not an argument for reserving historical writing for the academy, or for dismissing popular history as inherently inferior. It is an argument for changing how we write popular history and how critical scholarship/scholars should intervene in the medium. Academic historians with serious critical training should be writing books for a broad public readership. They should find that translating their arguments for a non-specialist audience forces them to be clearer about what they actually think and why, which would, in many cases, improve their academic writing as well. The current field of popular history writing that entertains and informs without equipping its readers with the critical tools to think historically about the present is not adequate to the intellectual and political moment India now faces.

Let me know in the comments regarding your thoughts on popular history writing in India, how historians should intervene, and how you think big publishing houses can bring academic works to the public. Do share/restack the review if you like it. Thank you.

[1] “The Times Literary Supplement,” accessed April 26, 2026, https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/120495/page/12.

[2] Manu S. Pillai, Gods Guns & Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity by Manu S. Pillai, Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar (Penguin Allen Lane, 2024), 316-17. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

[3] The argument that Hinduism as a bounded religious category was a historical formation rather than a primordial given has a substantial scholarly literature behind it. For foundational accounts, see Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Will Sweetman, “Unity and Plurality: Hinduism and the Religions of India in Early European Scholarship,” Religion 31, no. 3 (2001): 209–24; and Robert Frykenberg, “The Emergence of Modern ‘Hinduism’ as a Concept and as an Institution: A Reappraisal with Special Reference to South India,” in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 29–49.

[4] Ibid., p. xxxvii.

[5] Ibid., p. xxviii.

[6] Ibid., p. 22.

[7] On the politics of temple destruction and its relationship to pre-modern Hindu-Muslim relations, the most important corrective to the nationalist narrative is Richard Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States,” Journal of Islamic Studies 11, no. 3 (2000): 283–319, republished in David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence, eds., Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 246–81. Eaton demonstrates that temple destruction followed a specifically political logic of delegitimizing rival sovereignty, and was practiced by Hindu kings against other Hindu kings as often as by Muslim rulers against Hindu ones.

[8] Pillai, ibid., p. 97.

[9] On the structural transformation of Brahmin communities to bureaucratic and administrative service elites in the early modern period, the foundational studies are Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Letters Home: Banaras Pandits and the Maratha Regions in Early Modern India,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (2010): 201–40; Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Caste and its Histories in Colonial India: A Reappraisal,” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 3 (1998): 489–527; and Prachi Deshpande, Scripts of Power : Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India, Hedgehog and Fox : History and Politics Series. (Permanent Black, 2023). For the Maratha context specifically, see Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 1–3.

[10] The argument that caste ideology became increasingly pan-regional and textualized in the early modern period as a consequence of changing social conditions, rather than simply as the expression of pre-existing Vedic prescription, is developed with particular clarity in Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), though Dirks’s thesis on the colonial construction of caste has been substantially debated. For a more historically granular account, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

[11] Pillai, ibid., pp 215-216.

[12] On the anti-caste tradition — Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar — as a body of thought that cannot be assimilated into narratives of Hindu reform and that develops a fundamental structural critique of Brahminic Hinduism, see V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998); and Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1994)

[13] On the contemporary political inheritance of Phule’s legacy within anti-caste movements and its incompatibility with narratives of Hindu reform, see Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); and Gopal Guru, “Dalit Vision of India: From Bahishkrit to Inclusive Bharat,” Futures 36, no. 6–7 (2004): 757–63.

[14] Jyotirao Phule, Gulamgiri (Pune, 1873); translated as Slavery: In the Civilised British Government Under the Cloak of Brahmanism, trans. Maya Pandit, in Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, ed. G.P. Deshpande (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2002). See also Phule, Shetkaryaca Asud (Pune, 1883), translated as The Cultivator’s Whipcord, in the same collection. On Phule’s rejection of Brahminic Hinduism as irreformable rather than reformable, and on the Satyashodhak Samaj (founded 1873) as an institution explicitly designed to bypass Brahmin intermediaries in religious life, see Gail Omvedt, Jotirao Phule and the Ideology of Social Revolution in India (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2004); and Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low-Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[15] On Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s use of the Shivaji and Ganapati festivals and his transformation of Hindu historical mythology into a vehicle for mass nationalist mobilization, see Richard Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 5–6.

[16] See Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987); and Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

[17] On the formation of a new caste social in the modern period, in which previously rigid caste hierarchies were selectively reorganized to enable the political incorporation of previously excluded communities into a Hindu nationalist bloc, see Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and D.L. Sheth, “Secularisation of Caste and Making of New Middle Class,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 34–35 (1999): 2502–10.

[18] A minor but illustrative example of the book’s failure of critical rigor is its treatment of sati. Pillai suggests that sati was relatively rare in the medieval period, grounding this claim with evidence from the nineteenth century and citing approximately 378 cases per year in Bengal (pp. 12, 190). The implicit argument is that the practice was not as widespread or central as it is sometimes represented, and that this is meant to complicate a simplistic narrative. But Pillai fails to note what 378 deaths in a single year in a single region actually mean when assessed against the size of the upper-caste population that practiced it. For communities where the practice was documented and socially sanctioned, this figure is not trivially small. More importantly, the effort to minimize the scale of the practice sits oddly in a book that is ostensibly committed to historical honesty.

[19] P. Vijaya Kumar, “Manu Pillai’s Gods, Guns & Missionaries Reviews Hindu Identity’s Colonial Origins,” Frontline, November 27, 2024, https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/manu-pillai-gods-guns-missionaries-hindu-identity-colonial-india-review/article68918066.ece.

Was it ever "Normal"?: The Politics of the Bare Breast

Ameen Muhammed — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:27:12 GMT

Click here for the link to Manu Pillai’s article

Manu S Pillai’s latest article answers the question of whether lower-caste women were barred from covering their breasts by pointing to another question: were it only lower-caste women who were topless? For an article on Substack, Manu Pillai’s work here, too, is brimming with references and sources, like his historical monographs. And reading such a long, detailed, and well-written article for free is rare on this platform. This is a useful piece in several respects, and the correction on mulakkaram as a caste-based poll tax rather than a payment specifically for covering one’s chest is a point worth making clearly. But I want to raise a series of problems with the arguments Pillai raises, because I think the essay, in correcting one form of oversimplification, ends up producing another. I first wrote this as a restack with a note to his article, but found there was barely any interaction or readership on my Substack note, which is why this is appearing as a separate post.

The essay’s central move is to collapse the question of breast-covering into the question of upper-body exposure in general, and then to argue that bare-chestedness was a gender-neutral norm across the caste hierarchy. But the breast was not simply “the upper body.” It was identified as a sexual organ — with attendant social regulation, taboo, and moral significance — across a range of communities in the region well before Victorian missionaries arrived. Manu himself quotes KPS Menon’s sister-in-law cataloging the breasts of prospective brides in explicitly sexualised terms, and then uses this to make the point that breasts were “not devoid of sexual interest” but that “nobody felt any contingent need to cover up.” This distinction does more work than it can hold. The sexualisation of a body part and the social regulation of its visibility are rarely separable in any cultural order. That the regulation was organized through caste hierarchy and status performance rather than through Victorian prudishness is precisely what needs to be shown more carefully and not assumed by pointing to bare-chestedness as a neutral social fact.

This matters especially when we note that Muslim and Christian communities in Malabar — who are briefly mentioned toward the end as exceptions who “traditionally wore blouses” — had long-standing, internally generated frameworks around gendered bodily ethics that were not reducible to Arab or Persian importations. Both communities were themselves caste-practising, hierarchized, and socially embedded in the region’s moral order. Their norms regarding breast coverage were part of local social life, not just external impositions. To treat them as footnotes is to miss the point that the region’s history of ideas about gendered modesty is more plural and internally contested than the essay’s colonial-modernity binary allows.

Much of the essay’s argument rests on demonstrating that bare-chestedness was the cultural norm for upper-caste women as much as for lower-caste ones, for men as much as for women. This demonstration is largely successful on its own terms. But “normal” is doing a lot of unexamined work here. The bare-chestedness that travelers and colonial observers recorded as culturally normal was a norm enforced through caste power. That it was not marked as “shameful” by those who enforced it does not mean it was experienced as neutral by those whose exposure it governed. The women who were stripped of breast cloths in public, or who had them physically removed in temples, or who were told explicitly that their bodies could not aspire to the markers of status that covered upper bodies represented — these are not people for whom the norm was experienced as simply “normal.” The argument that everyone was equally topless and nobody found it strange conflates the perspective of the dominant observer with the social reality of the observed.

There is a question the essay never asks, and it is the most important one: to whom were upper-caste women permitted to appear bare-chested? The spatial and social architecture of caste in Malabar was organized around pollution, proximity, and restricted access. Namboodiri women were ghosha — they covered everything in public, not to hide their breasts specifically, but to prevent exposure to unauthorized eyes. The rani who posed bare-breasted for the camera in Mattanchery Palace was not posing for everyone. The social fact of a Namboodiri woman’s bare-chestedness in her domestic compound was categorically different from the exposure of an Ezhava woman in a market or a Pulaya woman in the field. The asymmetry is not just about who covered and who did not; it is about who had the right to look, under what conditions, and with what social consequence. Flattening this into a shared norm of bare-chestedness erases precisely the axis of power that the anti-caste critique is trying to articulate.

The essay proceeds as if the only historical force shaping norms around female bodies in Kerala was colonial modernity. The Brahmanical moral and ritual order — organized around purity, pollution, female sexuality, temple access, and the reproduction of caste hierarchy — is never seriously engaged as itself a structure through which the exposed body was regulated, gendered, and disciplined. This is a significant omission. That Brahmanical order predates the British and operates on principles entirely distinct from Victorian prudishness is not in dispute. But that means the alternative to colonial morality was not some pre-ideological cultural neutrality. It was itself a moral order — one that assigned different bodies different rights, different visibilities, different spatial permissions. To correct anti-caste writers for projecting Victorian norms backwards while leaving this prior order largely unexamined is to evade the central question. The Brahmin men and temple-going castes who organized the social norms Manu is describing were not neutral custodians of a culturally organic tradition. They were agents of a moral and political order that determined what bodies could claim, display, and refuse.

The essay’s dismissal of anti-caste writing is its most politically consequential move, and the least intellectually satisfying. The argument is essentially: those who claim that lower-caste women were denied the right to cover themselves are importing a Victorian notion of female modesty into a society that had no such concept, and are therefore guilty of unhistorical outrage. This may be partially correct as a historiographical observation. But it fundamentally misreads what anti-caste ethical claims are doing. When someone argues that women were denied the right to cover themselves, they are not making only a historical claim about the function of the breast cloth. They are articulating an ethical demand about dignity, self-governance, religious life, and the right to belong to a social public. That ethical demand may have a partly colonial genealogy; many of the most powerful anti-caste ethical vocabularies do, including those of Ambedkar himself. But pointing to the genealogy of an ethical claim is not a refutation of it. The question is not where the norm of covering came from, but what kind of social order the demand to cover was a response to, and whether the desire to govern one’s own body, assert one’s own personhood, and belong to a recognisable social world constitutes a legitimate claim regardless of whether the specific idiom of bodily modesty was locally generated or externally introduced. To tell lower-caste women and those who write in solidarity with them that their sense of historical injury is a Victorian misunderstanding is not a neutral historical correction.

Finally, the essay's evidentiary base deserves scrutiny. The argument relies heavily on European travelogues — della Valle, Nieuhoff, Grose — as well as colonial-era ethnographers like LK Anantha Krishna Iyer, Edgar Thurston, and Samuel Mateer, and missionary records like Agur’s Church History of Travancore. Even the pre-European source most prominently cited, the Tuhfat al-Mujahidin of Sheikh Zainuddin Makhdoom, is used to show that scant dress was “common to the king and to the beggar” — a characteristically remark about what was visible, not an account of how dress norms were socially structured. The epistemological problem is not that these sources are useless, but that they are structurally positioned in ways the essay does not acknowledge. European travelers in early modern Malabar accessed social knowledge through elite, upper-caste male interlocutors. Colonial ethnographers like Thurston operated within a racial-typological project that depended on caste elites to explain social life to them. That all of these observers found bare-chestedness unremarkable tells us something about the perspective from which they were looking. It is not a transparent window onto how those norms were lived by the people whose bodies they described. To treat the consensus of these sources as establishing what was “normal” in any sociologically meaningful sense — without asking who produced that knowledge, for whom, and through whose mediation — is to reproduce the epistemological limits of orientalism rather than think against them. To say that European observers saw women going bare-chested and took it as culturally “normal” is not to say that it was equally normal for all parties. That the traveler found it unremarkable tells us something about his informants; it does not tell us how bare-chestedness was experienced by the women whose exposure was being enforced by others’ social power. The historical record Manu is reading is itself a caste-structured text.

Ambedkar Was Right, Jinnah Had a Point, and Nobody Wants to Hear Either

Ameen Muhammed — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:59:36 GMT

A lot of the opposition to the delimitation bills introduced yesterday is caught up in the wrong argument, even if the frustration behind it is understandable. While it makes sense why popular political parties are choosing to attack the bill this way, for people and political organizations aligned with “minority” and working class interests, the new bill is an ideal context to bear open how the current electoral setup has been failing them.

The southern states’ case rests on the claim that they are being punished for good governance and successful population control, that proportional representation in the Lok Sabha is structurally unfair to states that did the work. As we are seeing, this has real political energy, especially given that Center-State fiscal relations are already strained. But the seekers of constitutional defense are, ironically, constitutionally confused. The Lok Sabha represents individual citizens, not states. The principle that your vote carries the same weight as mine, regardless of where we live, is not a technicality; it is the foundational democratic claim and is not a conspiracy against the South. If you want state-level interests structurally protected, that is what the Rajya Sabha was designed for. The problem is that the Rajya Sabha has been so thoroughly defanged by anti-defection laws and by the expanding definition of money bills that it no longer functions as a genuine federal chamber. The South’s frustration regarding the dissolution of federalism is real, but it is being aimed at the wrong institution through the wrong logic. Regional representation politics, untethered from a question of who that representation actually serves, tends to be a horizontal competition between political parties dressed in the language of people’s rights. On the federal question — yes, India needs a Rajya Sabha that functions as a genuine federal chamber, not just a party-political mirror of the Lok Sabha. The US Senate model, where each state gets equal representation regardless of size, seems reasonable, but, in practice, goes too far for India’s demographic realities, even though the direction is right. The upper house needs real blocking power, and its members need structural incentives to represent their states rather than their party whips. That is the conversation the South’s frustration should be channeling, rather than arguing that UP’s citizens deserve fewer votes per head.

The genuinely serious objections to these bills are structural and are barely being discussed. We are redrawing India’s constituency map using 2011 census data, eighteen years old by the time elections are held under it in 2029. Worse, Parliament has now given itself the power to decide by simple majority when any future delimitation occurs and which census it uses. There is no automatic constitutional trigger anymore. Every future government can time it to its own electoral advantage. The delimitation being carried out today could govern Indian elections for three decades, based on data that was already stale when the exercise began. Will this nullify any electoral advances possible through the realization of a caste census, which some states are considering or have considered? It surely looks probable that the BJP’s ardent enthusiasm for this constitutional amendment arises out of the need to make any potential caste census and its implications futile. If the bill is enacted, it is even likely that the BJP would be willing to roll out the caste census, as the political order would have been set for the next few decades.

It is also important to imagine what an expanded parliamentary function would look like if the bill is enacted. Expanding the Lok Sabha to 850 members without touching parliamentary procedure, committee structure, or speaker accountability is clearly not a democratic advance. India’s Parliament already cannot give its existing members adequate floor time. Consequential legislation is routinely passed in hours without committee scrutiny. The abrogation of Article 370, which unilaterally stripped a region of its constitutional status, split it into two Union Territories, and placed eight million people under an extended communications blackout, took Parliament four hours. No committee. No advance notice to the opposition. This is the Parliament that 850 seats are supposed to make more deliberative. The opposition barely secures its fair share of parliamentary time as it is. A 57 percent increase in membership with no change to sitting days, committee architecture, or Speaker accountability will not produce more voice. It will produce more bodies and more legitimating noise around the same concentration of executive power.

The arithmetic of which states loose by The News Minute - caption...

But the deeper problem is one neither regional politicians nor political parties want to confront: the electoral system itself. The debate, as it stands, is entirely about the arithmetic of representation. The critique is bound only to questions like how many seats and which states gain. What it never asks is what this representation does once achieved. The formal equality of the vote tells us nothing about whose interests the resulting MP actually advances. The MP that emerges from that constituency is not a neutral aggregate of all those interests. They emerge from a political economy of funding, party machinery, caste networks, and capital access that systematically selects for the representation of certain dominant interests over marginalized yet numerically large and dispersed caste-working class ones. Liberal electoral democracy does not resolve this and just invisibilizes it in the name of regional constituent representation.

The problems with the territorially aggregated electoral system are acutely visible in the functioning of the current reserved constituencies. Although reserved constituencies suggest a measure of political justice, the reality of politics is a stark contradiction that offers no meaningful progress for the demands of marginalized groups. When an SC constituency returns an SC MP, we know almost nothing politically useful from that fact. We do not know whether that candidate won on the strength of Dalit mobilization or on the strength of dominant-caste or sectarian networks within the constituency that found an acceptable face. We do not know which fraction within the Dalit community drove that margin. We cannot hold that representative accountable to Dalit interests specifically because the constituency that elected them is a territorial aggregate, not a politically defined community. The formal designation of the seat as reserved produces the appearance of representation without the structure of accountability. This problem is more glaring for OBC communities, for whom no reserved constituency mechanism exists at all. An OBC candidate elected from a general constituency may have won entirely on caste consolidation, or entirely despite it, or on some combination of factors that the aggregate vote total renders permanently opaque. In neither case does the community retain a structured claim on the representative’s subsequent conduct. The comparison to proportionate systems is instructive precisely here because proportionality makes the representing unit visible. When a party or list is elected as the representative of a defined community of interest — whether constituted by caste, class, regional language, or some combination — the relationship between the electing community and the elected body becomes legible. Accountability becomes possible because the constituency is knowable. Under first-past-the-post territorial aggregation, that knowability is structurally foreclosed, and the representative’s escape from community interest into party machinery, capital patronage, or upper-caste consensus is not a failure of individual character but a predictable feature of the system’s design.

This is also why Ambedkar’s argument deserves to be back at the center of this conversation. His argument for proportionate communitarian representation, for a system where the actual demographic composition of society was structurally reflected in its legislative institutions, rather than mediated through the distortions of first-past-the-post territorial constituencies, was not simply an argument about Dalit interests. It was a critique of what formal electoral equality actually produces in a society where social inequality is this deep and this organized. In a majoritarian electoral system, the largest identitarian bloc wins. Hindutva’s electoral dominance is not a distortion of Indian democracy but needs to be seen as a logical outcome of it, which nationalist leaders of the time wanted when they were hell-bent on being against proportional reservations. A movement that can successfully narrate the interests of the Hindu upper caste as the interests of all Hindus, and then organize that aggregated majority against a constructed minority threat, is playing the game of liberal electoralism with extraordinary sophistication. The answer isn’t more seats or regional seat protection. The answer is a democratic architecture that disaggregates the majoritarian bloc by making visible, and structurally representing, the specific and genuinely divergent interests within it.

The Muslim League’s demand for proportionate communitarian representation during nationalist movements and its opposition to simple-majority territorial representation were not, at their structural core, religious demands. It was a precise recognition: that in a first-past-the-post system built on aggregate population constituencies, a Muslim minority dispersed across the subcontinent could never achieve proportionate political weight regardless of regional concentration, and that a polity where a permanent demographic majority controlled legislative and executive institutions would not, in practice, protect minority political interests through the ordinary workings of electoral competition. The Pakistan demand, in its earliest political-theoretical articulation, was a response to this arithmetic. Ambedkar, who had no sympathy for the League’s later trajectory, nonetheless recognized the legitimate democratic logic in the demand for minority political protection against majoritarian arithmetic. The League’s demand and Ambedkar’s demand were answered differently — one through partition, the other through reservation — and both answers have proven structurally inadequate to the underlying problem they sought to address.

The South’s demand for protection against demographic majoritarianism and the marginalized community’s demand for genuine political inclusion are structurally the same argument, and both are pointing beyond the liberal electoral imagination that currently contains them. Both are pushing against the logic of an unreconstructed numerical majority. A system that combines individual voting rights with a genuinely empowered federal upper house and a proportionate chamber built on community representation would not be a departure from democratic principles. It would be its fulfillment under conditions of deep structural inequality. It would also be the most durable institutional defense against what we are watching: the consolidation (or a dictatorship) of a Hindu oligarchical order that has mastered the arithmetic of liberal electoral democracy with extraordinary sophistication, precisely because that arithmetic — the territorial aggregate, the majoritarian headcount, the invisibilisation of intra-majority divergence — is its natural terrain. The solution requires moving beyond a system in which the only political units are the territorial constituency and the headcount majority. It requires taking seriously what Ambedkar argued: that a democracy adequate to India’s actual social formation cannot be built on formal equality alone. It requires proportionate structural inclusion as a constitutional principle, not a temporary concession. Until that conversation is central to how we debate bills like the ones introduced today, we are rearranging the seats on a ship whose navigational logic we have refused to question.

Is Dan Brown still relevant?

Ameen Muhammed — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:49:54 GMT

The Secret of Secrets confirms something readers have known about Dan Brown for a long time: he remains one of the easiest authors to read, and one of the hardest to put down. Even when I am competing with deadlines, piles of academic reading, or sheer exhaustion, Brown’s novels almost compel you to finish them. Part of this comes from the familiar mystery structure: a professor-protagonist with a Sherlock Holmes–like ability to read signs, symbols, images, and hidden meanings. But it is also about a cinematic, formulaic style that Brown has perfected over decades—short chapters averaging three to five pages, rapidly shifting perspectives, inner thoughts and anxieties laid bare in italics, and small mysteries that resolve themselves every few pages before opening onto larger ones.

Yet Brown’s appeal is not just structural. His writing also belongs to a genre he has more or less invented for himself: a fascination with cities, history, and science that is neither quite historical fiction, nor science fantasy, nor an urban novel. These obsessions are presented almost pedagogically, as if the reader is being taken on an educational tour—sometimes so detailed that the information seems only loosely connected to the plot, unless one imagines it already story-boarded for a future film adaptation. Long-time readers will immediately recognize this as a hallmark of his work since Angels & Demons. One could argue that Brown’s writing has become increasingly conscious of its cinematic afterlife—and The Secret of Secrets will almost certainly be adapted—but it never quite becomes exhausting or dreadful. The curious reader, at least, is consistently rewarded.

What is more striking in this latest novel is a noticeable shift in its ethical and political stance. Is it fair to say that Brown has become a kind of American “softie” author? If one compares The Da Vinci Code, Inferno, and now The Secret of Secrets, the change in how institutions of American power are portrayed becomes hard to ignore. Early Brown was sharply critical of new imperial projects, secret networks, and unaccountable power. From papal institutions (the pope himself), religiously blasphemous thoughts, to NASA, to CERN, to the FBI, all have been depicted as villains in Brown’s mysteries. In The Secret of Secrets, however, these same structures—the American military-industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and their morally dubious operations—are increasingly framed as tragic necessities in a dangerous world. We are shown their brutality, their lawlessness, and their violations of human rights in painstaking detail, yet the narrative ultimately asks us to accept them as safeguards against a greater evil. This ethical ambiguity is one of the most frustrating aspects of the novel. It feels like a significant transition in Brown’s worldview, perhaps tied to what happens when an author becomes not just famous, but globally marketable—selling millions. I also am curious here about what Brown feels about rarely being considered anyone’s “favorite” writer or a literary genius. His formulaic writing has earned him a cliche dislike and contempt, where he is only seen as writing for the market rather than as a genius with a particular disposition toward literature. Nonetheless, there is a sense that the novel attempts to mitigate this ethical tension by introducing a new figure of balance and intelligence in Katherine Solomon; however, the discomfort persists. Brown seems caught between critique and naive justification.

Having read all of Brown’s works, I can definitely say that The Secret of Secrets is arguably Brown’s most intellectually provocative novel to date. Among all his books where science drives the plot—Deception Point, Origin, and now this one—this is the most ambitious in terms of ideas. Scientific inquiry is not merely a backdrop but the core mystery. The novel pushes readers to think seriously, and sometimes uncomfortably, about consciousness, the human body, and what might happen at death and beyond. Brown weaves these questions through scientific and philosophical language, drawing on real but scattered discoveries and speculative research. The central ambition of the novel is nothing less than to persuade the reader that consciousness exists outside the brain, and even outside the human body altogether. In Brown’s formulation, consciousness is non-local: an entity akin to space or time, something that exists independently of us, which human beings merely access through the brain as a kind of receiver rather than as its point of origin. Presented baldly as a philosophical or scientific claim, this idea would likely strike most readers as implausible, even absurd. Brown seems fully aware of this. Instead of foregrounding the argument, he embeds it within an escapist thriller, where Langdon and Solomon are constantly on the run from a shadowy, worldly power. The idea of non-local consciousness is thus never handed to the reader all at once; it is revealed slowly, only when the narrative has prepared the ground for belief. Brown achieves this through repetition—returning again and again to what “non-local” means in slightly altered forms—and through a playful, almost pedagogical introduction of scientific vocabulary. By the time the claim fully crystallizes, the reader has already been eased into its logic, less inclined to dismiss it outright and more willing, at the very least, to entertain it as a serious possibility.

Many will dismiss the core “interesting” provocations made in the book as mere science fiction, but what makes the book an exercise in thought is that Brown writes with conviction. He treats these ideas as legitimate scientific curiosities rather than narrative gimmicks, and that seriousness carries over to the reader. Whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, The Secret of Secrets succeeds in doing something rare for a bestselling thriller: it makes scientific and philosophical questions feel urgent, accessible, and worth thinking about long after the final chapter. If one has any nerdy fascination with history and science, The Secrets of Secrets will make one a philosopher, too.