K.K .Kochu, eminent Dalit thinker and author, who passed away in Kottayam on Thursday.
After Ayyankali and Poykayil Appachan during the enlightenment struggle came Paul Chirakkarode and Kallara Sukumaran to shape the Dalit movement in Kerala.
K.K. Kochu moulded it further with a democratic accent by mainstreaming it as a cultural and knowledge discourse.
Born in Kallara in Vaikom Taluk of Kottayam district in 1949, Kochu recovered the ‘social imaginary’ of the community from the Kerala enlightenment modernity and created new liberating voices, texts and dreams that launched a new vision of society, representative democratic politics and a new ideological sphere of the Dalit community and fraternity.
He was a Dalit intellectual, writer, orator, cultural activist and socio-political agitator. He has published several books and more than 100 articles in leading periodicals in the mainstream in different capacities as a critic, editor, intellectual, historian and Dalit theorist.
His autobiography Dalithan has translated and available in English. He has been active in various frontiers of struggle in Kerala as a human rights champion, community activist, public speaker, mediaperson and organiser for the last 50 years.
He entered politics through the agricultural workers’ struggles in the 1960s and as a critical co-traveller of the extreme Left in Kerala in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, in the post Mandal-Masjid period, he had been elaborating the new discourse of Dalit community politics and the Constitutional Ambedkarite paradigm of social justice and representative democracy.
The anchoring presence of Ambedkar, Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyappan and Sree Narayana Guru is significant in his writings and rhetoric. He has also edited and led publications such as November Books, Suchakam and Utharakalam. He served as the chairperson of Kerala Dalit Mahasabha and led the new democratic movements in Kerala.
Kochu fought the caste Hindu feudal system prevalent in his village in Kottayam, in Wayanad and across the State. His new critical and deconstructive readings on Kerala history, the Buddhist legacies of the untouchables as pioneered by Ambedkar and his keen critique of language, literature and culture are all contemporary and futuristic in totalitarian times.
(The writer, a critic, teaches at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady)
Published – March 13, 2025 08:52 pm IST