Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Of Capital and Other Punishments – Balagopal
An Ethical Compass – Anant Maringanti
B I B L I O : J A N U A R Y – F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 2
Commentary: An Ethical Compass - Anant Maringanti
http://www.biblio-india.org/tocJF12.asp?mp=JF12
Balagopal found his voice as a critical public intellectual in the early 1980s at a time when the Indian economy was shifting gears and continued to be the most prolific commentator in English and Telugu until his passing in 2009. Ear to the Ground brings together the most significant of this writing in English and serves it up in an aesthetically produced book, affordably priced.
For students and activists of three generations, Balagopal’s voice was an ethical and political compass. He was of course a product of a particular time and place – post-Emergency Telangana – but he transcended time and place not only through his wide ranging work in and on human rights in Kashmir, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, but also through his sophisticated navigation of the world of theory and practice.
The early ’80s was a troubled and violent time in Telangana. Even as agrarian surpluses largely from the Green Revolution were seeking avenues for reinvestment, older forms of exploitation and oppression were being renewed and reconfigured. Competing claims on the Indian State from caste alliances (one hesitates to use that quaint expression fractions of capital) weakened it to a point where populism and extrajudicial violence through armed forces became the only means of ensuring unjust surplus extraction. In Andhra Pradesh, as in some other states, Maoist groups emerged as a formidable force challenging the repressive order bringing about a degree of dignity to the social groups that bore the brunt of these processes — Tribals and Dalits. Building on memories of past struggles against oppression, in Telangana, the Maoists gathered force very rapidly and with a State seeking to crush it violence escalated rapidly. Academic economists and sociologists struggled to contain these processes within the abstract categories of land, labour and capital. If Balagopal’s contributions to the Economic and Political Weekly began as a parallel accounting for the same processes that the academics were preoccupied with, intervening only occasionally to expose the perils of abstractions, they also enriched abstractions by embodying them with flesh and blood. He did this from a unique vantage point — that of the general secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee. He travelled incessantly through the villages and towns of Andhra Pradesh, on fact-finding missions, enquiring into extrajudicial violence by the police, contractors and landlords, addressing the press and gathering evidence for judicial remediation. This constant transgression of the boundary between the world of abstraction and reflection on the one hand and the world of immediate action on the other, was guided by a political commitment to a particular understanding of the role of civil liberties activism in India that emerged in the aftermath of the Emergency – defending the space of State guaranteed rights so that democratic struggles can be waged by people’s organisations – in this case Maoist groups.
While by and large, the Maoist groups drove the locus of change during the ’80s, both in Andhra Pradesh and in the rest of the country, new social forces whether in the form of Dalit solidarity groups or in the form of anti displacement and environmental campaigns emerged. The APCLC had to necessarily engage with all these democratic struggles and expand its work. By early ’90s, Balagopal’s writing began to reflect a discomfort with teleological accounts of class transformations. On the one hand, the social classes that commanded the agrarian surpluses and reinvested them did not display any clear drive towards modernity and capital and on the other, the Maoist groups and their constituents not only did not seem to drive change, but also appeared to act with more and more impunity closely mirroring the very ruling classes that they were battling. Where then had historical agency shifted to? By mid to late ’90s, Balagopal began to articulate this discomfort in more and more decisive terms both in his praxis as a civil liberties activist and as an analyst. The result was a vastly broadened field of vision for Balagopal but a sharp divergence from an the intellectual and political praxis of the ’80s which envisioned the role of civil liberties as one that is by and large auxilary to the struggles led by a class determinism — namely the Maoist groups. In 1997, he was confident enough to state unambiguously that human rights movement in India could not and should not be functioning as the handmaiden to any political movement but that it had to seek its own domain of work. For observers at a distance from this deep intellectual churning, Balagopal’s trajectory signaled a simple disagreement with the Maoists on the viability of violence as means of transformation and for those who were too close to the churning, this was a shift towards liberal humanism.
Such closures may have helped different groups involved in these debates to pursue their own agendas but on the whole reducing Balagopal’s questions into rigid categorical formulations imposed a temporal sequence not only on Balagopal’s work but also on the trajectories of radical politics. Ear to the Ground, a collection of 42 essays by Balagopal previously published in the Economic and Political Weekly, organised into eight sections with a rich and nuanced Introduction by V Geetha and an appendix of a timeline of caste violence in Andhra Pradesh thoughtfully inserted by the editors, is a very important contribution to breaking the image of that sequence and foregrounds the continuities in Balagopal’s writing and thereby in social realities. The publication of this volume also brings to a conclusion, the grief that many of Balagopal’s associates and admirers have been experiencing in the two years since his passing.
Ear to the Ground, accentuates certain dimensions of Balagopal’s work that are widely known to his readers. These include of course attention to the richness of detail, an ability to move from the particular to the general to the discovery of a universal truth, a strong sense of history and agency. It introduces Balagopal to a new generation of readers as an intellectual whose praxis builds analysis from concrete realities and works its way to theory.
Ear to the Ground also foregrounds some dimensions of Balagopal’s work that are not as widely appreciated as they should have been. Geetha’s excellent Introduction brings out these. Even through the first decade of his work, Balagopal’s work with a loyalty to class politics, was clearly strongly influenced by questions of caste and violence. In some sense, class was a category that got fleshed out through caste. While there was a schematic elegance to this style of thinking, its limitations began to reveal themselves by the early ’90s, when Balagopal began to first express his discomfort with Marxist teleology and began to look for emancipatory potential in non-class struggles. The common theme throughout all these years is however, a deep suspicion of the ruling classes – their illegitimacy and their unsuccessful attempts to win legitimacy through populism and orchestrated and subtle forms of structural forms of violence – and a deep commitment to people’s struggles. Also, the ways in which Hindutva ideology was insinuating itself into public life.
Yet for all this attention to the new social formations and their potential, there is a surprising persistence in Balagopal’s search for a unifying universal struggle — a struggle that would alter consciousness at a scale where ethical conduct will no longer remain a private dilemma but a public imperative. This search was so deep that it essentially became the main compass for his professional practice as an advocate towards the end of the 1990s. Balagopal’s writing which directly drew on his work and politics reflects a deep restlessness with partial theories. To borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall, the British cultural Marxist, Balagopal’s enduring challenge was to learn to live with a Marxism without guarantees. His journeys through philosophy exploring various strands of Marxist thought is revealed in bits and pieces in interviews published in Telugu. His rejection of the politics engendered by postmodernism and adoption of post-structuralist attention to language and culture are faintly reflected in his writing. Yet he did not leave behind any clear and conclusive answers. What we do know is that by late 2000s, Balagopal began to write and speak more and more assertively that none of the struggles that were unfolding across India seemed to have a complete answer. And yet a complete answer was the need of the hour. How does one stop the excesses of the 21st century Indian State in its tracks except by physically stopping it by large numbers of mobilised people? What would be a broad politics or analysis that will bring together such an emancipatory agenda? Perhaps Balagopal would have turned to Gramsci, after all these decades. Perhaps, he would have reconciled to the necessary incompleteness and found provisional closures through solidarity with numerous local struggles for social justice thatwere multiplying across the territory rapidly. Perhaps he would have discovered the resources for the next political project in Marxism itself. In the absence of an ambitious enough counter-hegemonic struggle that alters the commonsense radically, Balagopal’s writings collected in Ear to the Ground show a simultaneous yearning for a unifying thought and commitment to the imperatives of struggles embedded in concrete circumstances. Balagopal was fully aware of this dialectic and the quixotic ways in which it played out. For example, he recognises clearly how the regional specificity of the Maoist movement shaped its trajectories and how generalising from there into a theory of necessary violence is fraught with risks.
His is an unfinished intellectual and political project. But upon closer examination, we may find that the dialectic is no longer a significant one for our world. Or yet we may find that he is relevant. Either way, Balagopal’s life through the 1980s gives you an insider’s view to Indian society. He was one of the people who animated the most progressive of the forces that shaped it. And for those who want to continue in the best of the intellectual traditions of India, Ear to the Ground is required reading.
Ear To The Ground – Close Listening: Review by Prathamesh & Rahul Menon
A person travelling through rural coastal Andhra Pradesh in the late 1980s will have come across gigantic buildings in the middle of nowhere that resembled the urban cinema halls of those parts. These were actually godowns that stored agricultural produce grown in these fertile districts. It required the insight of K. Balagopal to point out that this bizarre resemblance was not merely a cultural idiosyncrasy, but told the story of a complex relationship between agrarian capital, caste, cinema and politics. The rich capitalist farmers of these parts, mostly hailing from the Kamma community, reinvested the agrarian capital in both agricultural industry and Telugu cinema. The investment in cinema created a space for them to use the medium for political mobilization. It was this background that created a fertile ground for the emergence of N.T. Rama Rao as a political figure.
Such moments of insight blended with academic rigour, clarity of expression and wry humour mark this compilation of Balagopal’s articles, a testament to the academic rigour and wry humour of one of India’s most important thinkers. Balagopal’s career followed a remarkable trajectory: from a mathematician to a hero of the democratic rights movement during the heydays of the Naxalite movement to a lawyer of the poor. His influences range from the other brilliant polymath, D.D. Kosambi, to Karl Marx, from Digambara poets to Dostoevsky. This eclecticism often found its reflection in his writings, where the sensitivity to social conditions seamlessly merged with psychological insight and a strong sense of ethics.
A sizeable section of the articles, though not all, centre on the changing social and political landscape of his native Andhra Pradesh. Some of his writings on the incipient phase of the People’s War movement during the 1980s narrate how the functioning of the local nexus between the landed agrarian classes, political parties and police and the suppression of open politics left the exploited with no other choice but to respond with militant, underground forms of rebellion and protest. The series of articles on caste and politics treat caste identities not merely as politically manipulated historical baggage, but as identities that are actively generated through parliamentary politics. For instance, till the 1980s, the term kapu was mainly used to define the profession of several middle-level cultivating castes, but hardened into a caste identity through the efforts of a section of the landowning and business elites seeking political fortune.
Balagopal’s observation of Andhra Pradesh’s ground realities helps him draw conclusions that challenge many fundamental assumptions of development theory. The conventional wisdom is that development in a third-world nation will follow a linear path from agrarian feudalism to capitalist industrialization. For a modernizing Western nation in the past, this might have been the case, but there are more profitable opportunities available to the propertied classes today. Much of the agricultural profits of landowners of Andhra Pradesh were invested in film industry, real estate and liquor. These “provincial propertied classes”, whose agricultural profits are invested in the city, are at the forefront of agitations for remunerative prices for farm produce—itself a contentious issue. What really concerns the poor are issues of work, irrigation and access to land. The richer classes project their own demands as that of oppressed rural “Bharat”. The oppression of Dalits is thus a means for them to suppress dissent and display a “unified” village movement, united in their opposition of urban industrialization.
Balagopal’s great theoretical insight is to link diverse elements—the character of peasant movements, caste oppression in the villages and modern industrialization—into a magisterial theory of political economy, calling into question several accepted paradigms of mainstream thought about India’s development.
A short review does no justice to the fertility of his thought on subjects like reservations or patriarchy, and the importance of his work as an activist. Every article shines with the originality of his insight and the fury of his concern. This volume is testament to the fact that one cannot engage meaningfully with the complex changes India is going through without having one’s ear to the ground.
Ear To The Ground
Selected Writings on Caste and Class by Balagopal from 1982 thru 2009. (Listed as one of the memorable books published in 2011, Biblio Nov/Dec 2011).
Published by Navayana Publications. Buy online from Flipkart and Scholars Without Borders. Available at all leading bookstores.
Book Reviews:
An Ethical Compass – Anant Maringanti, Biblio, January – Febuary, 2012.
Book Summary of Ear To The Ground: Writings On Class And Caste
As a human rights worker active since 1981, and slightly older than Balagopal, I remember him as a magical figure. The writings in this volume help interpret the often chaotic developments in Andhra Pradesh, and provide a model tool for understanding other regional realities of India.’
—BINAYAK SEN
Balagopal’s writings, from the early 1980s till he died in 2009, offer us a rare insight into the making of modern India. Civil rights work provided Balagopal the cause and context to engage with history, the public sphere and political change. He wrote through nearly three tumultuous decades: on encounter deaths; struggles of agricultural labourers; the shifting dynamics of class and caste in the 1980s and thereafter in Andhra Pradesh; the venality and tyranny of the Indian state; on the importance of re-figuring the caste order as one that denied the right of civil existence to vast numbers of its constituents; the centrality one ought to grant patriarchy in considerations of social injustice; the destructive logic of development that emerged in the India of the 1990s, dishonouring its citizens’ right to life, liberty and livelihood. This volume comprises essays—largely drawn from Economic & Political Weekly to which he was a regular contributor—that deal with representations and practices of class power as they exist in tandem with state authority and caste identities.
Inspired by naxalism in the late 1970s, intellectually indebted to D.D. Kosambi’s writings on Indian history and society, and politically and ethically attentive to the politics of feminist and dalit assertion in the 1990s, Balagopal refused dogma and shrill polemics just as he refused theory that did not heed the mess of history and practice.
Balagopal was too self-effacing to put together his writings into a volume. But it is through his writings that his legacy lives on, giving us a roadmap for future struggles.
Excerpt:
‘There is perhaps no issue on which we are such hypocrites as caste; nor any other which brings out all that is worst in us with such shameful ease. The moment V.P. Singh announces the decision to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations… an avalanche of obscenity hits the country. Caste will undoubtedly be the last of the iniquitous institutions to die out in this country. It will outlast everything else.’—Economic & Political Weekly, 6 October 1990
About the Author:
Kandala Balagopal (1952–2009) did not start out as a writer or commentator on contemporary politics. Like that other great modern Indian thinker, D.D. Kosambi, whom he read avidly, admired and wrote about, his training was in mathematics, a subject he taught at Kakatiya University, Warangal, from 1981 to 1985. The political culture of Warangal—home to the naxalite left and resonant with debates around questions of class, justice and revolution—proved decisive in Balagopal turning away from an introspective life of the mind. Instead, he came to train his acute intellect to identify, comprehend and critically examine key political and social concerns. He joined the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee in 1981, and became active in civil rights work centred at that time around extra-judicial killings of militant left cadres. Arrested under TADA in 1985 on trumped-up charges relating to the murder of a police sub-inspector, he spent three months in Warangal prison. In 1989, Balagopal was kidnapped by a vigilante group called ‘Praja Bandhu’—believed to be a front of the police, and in 1992 was beaten up badly by the police in Kothagudem.
Balagopal trained to be a lawyer late in his life and enrolled in the Bar Council of Andhra Pradesh in 1998, representing a wide variety of litigants whose lives, lands, status and employment were threatened. In fellow-traveller K.G. Kannabiran’s words, ‘Balagopal showed himself as the only lawyer of the poor of his generation with a reputation for competence.’ Owing to differences of opinion on the use of violence by naxalites, Balagopal left APCLC in 1998. He was one of the founder-members of Human Rights Forum in which he was active till his death.
దళిత – కె. బాలగోపాల్
దళిత , పరస్పెక్టివ్స్ , హైదరాబాద్ 2011.
వివిధ సందర్భాల్లో బాలగోపాల్ కుల సమస్యపై వ్రాసిన వ్యాసాలు, రిపోర్ట్లు, వ్యాఖ్యానాలు.
Balagopal essays, reports and commentary in Telugu on caste related issues from 1985 thru 2009.
నమస్తే తెలంగాణా, 11 డిసెంబర్ 2011 దిన పత్రిక లో పుస్తక సమీక్ష
రాజ్యం – సంక్షేమం, బాలగోపాల్ ఉపన్యాసాలు
హక్కుల ఉద్యమం – తాత్విక దృక్పధం
రూపం – సారం, సాహిత్యం ఫై బాలగోపాల్
మా బాలగోపాల్ – మానవ హక్కుల వేదిక బులెటిన్, 2010
సైన్సు గురించి రాజకీయంగా ఆలోచించడం నేర్చుకోవాలి – బాలగోపాల్
మత తత్త్వం ఫై బాలగోపాల్
మత తత్త్వం ఫై బాలగోపాల్
ప్రచురణ : హైదరాబాద్ బుక్ ట్రస్ట్, అక్టోబర్ 2010.
ఈ సంకలనం లో వ్యాసాలను ఈ క్రింది మూడు విభాగాలుగా సమకూర్చారు.
1 హిందూ ధర్మం – ప్రజాస్వామ్యం
2 హిందుత్వం – విద్య
3 మైనారిటీలు – సంఘ్ పరివార్
A collection of Balagopal essays, published by Hyderabad Book Trust, Hyderabad on Hindutva on topics related to,
Hindu Dharma and Democracy
Hindutva and Education
Minorities and Hindtuva.
నిగాహ్ – బాలగోపాల్ వ్యాసాలు, ప్రజా తంత్ర , 1998-2003
నిగాహ్’ – ప్రజాతంత్ర పత్రికలో బాలగోపాల్ వ్యాసాలు 1998-2003.
ఇండియా టుడే, డిసెంబర్ 2011 లో పుస్తక సమీక్ష
కడప జిల్లాలో పాలెగాళ్ళ రాజ్యం – బాలగోపాల్
Kadapa-Palegalla Rajyam ( K. Balagopal, APCLC, Kadapa District Publication, 1996).
ప్రాచీన భారత దేశ చరిత్ర , కోశాంబి పరిచయం – బాలగోపాల్
ప్రాచీన భారతదేశ చరిత్ర – డి డి కోశాంబి పరిచయం
Prachina Bharata Charitra (K. Balagopal, September 1986) – Kosambi Parichayam
( Introduction to D. Kosambi books on Indian Ancient History)
Published by Hyderabad Book Trust,Hyderabad
