Praveen Ashokan
Many Dalit thinkers have observed that colonial modernity has provided untouchable communities a space to express themselves and to reconfigure their lives within emerging possibilities, inspiring a sense of hope and agency from an otherwise barbaric society, entrenched in caste hierarchies and untouchability. However, this does not mean that caste hierarchy and its oppressive dynamics have abruptly vanished in the wake of a new social order. Instead, the spatial and social dimensions have been reconfigured through new technologies of caste relations, leading to what can be termed the modernisation of caste. This does not signify the complete eradication of traditional manifestations of caste either. The point here is that caste, as a power diagram[1], continues to permeate most political and cultural experiments in the Indian polity, which are otherwise claimed to be emancipatory. In this context, I will draw two instances: the first being Narayana Guru’s encounter with a fellow passenger during a train journey, which serves as an instance of caste recognisability and spatial precaution within an apparently modern spatio-temporal manifestation. The second instance illustrates how this spatial precaution and caste recognisability continue to take on a new form of spatial modernity in present-day Kerala.
Scene I: the Diagram, the Spatial Precaution, the Capturing Anxiety
A biographical account of Narayana Guru describes an event in Guru’s Life as follows:
So, the next month on the 25th of Kanni, Guru boarded the train from Aluva along with two disciples. He did not appear to get bored on the journey … The question of a person sitting next to Guru roused him from this reverie.
“What is your name?”
“Narayanan”, Guru said.
“Who are you by caste?”
“What do you feel seeing me?”, Guru responded with a question.
“Unable to make out.”
Then Guru said with a smile: “If you are unable to make out by seeing, how can you understand by telling?”
Recalling this conversation with disciples while he was in Madras, Guru explained: “There is only one caste, not many … no need for any special proof that there is only one caste. When a dog sees another dog, it understands that it belongs to its caste. All animals have this understanding. They all live with such an awareness. Only humans have doubts about caste. He has no ability to recognise his caste. It is worse than animals.”
This event or encounter in the train—in this machine of empire, a symbol of colonial modernity —seems, at least momentarily, to rearrange the old order. Within its metallic enclosure, an “untouchable body” can come in proximity with an “upper caste person”, sharing a bench, a journey, a direction. The railway appears to stage a quiet disruption, a fleeting suspension of caste’s spatial logic. And yet, this disruption is only partial—perhaps even illusory. The air inside the compartment remains unchanged. Caste does not dissolve at the threshold of modern infrastructure; it travels with it. It lingers in the hesitation before contact, in the silent negotiations of distance, in the invisible lines that persist even when bodies are forced into proximity. The train, rather than erasing hierarchy, becomes another site for its subtle reproduction. In this moving apparatus, caste is not left behind—it is carried forward, smuggled into modernity, adapting itself to new forms while retaining its old force.
This conversation and the Guru’s rejoinder are a provocation to see the profoundly immanent and diagrammatic nature of caste manifested in a modern apparatus. The traveller’s question— “Who are you by caste?” —or the precaution of knowing the other body in proximity, is not merely a request for information, but a spatial precaution of caste and a technique for managing proximity. It reveals caste as a constantly emerging force of spatial segregation. Founded upon the Brahminical perceptual ordering, the act of seeing itself functions as a mode of territorialisation[2]. Breaking the genesis or chrono-logic, it proceeds through breaks and fractures, producing new syntheses in its culmination and manifestation—a continual modernisation of caste as a power diagram. Overemphasis on the behavioural patterns of caste encounters may end up disguising a phantom behind it. In other words, it risks producing a mere historicism of caste. Like the way it functions in this context, the logic of caste validation persists across social life. Urban landlords, for instance, often ask cryptic questions to newly visiting tenants seeking apartments or rooms, such as “What’s your surname?” or “What is your father’s name? enact the same regime of caste approximation. It is an attempt to capture the other body within a prefigured grid of caste recognisability. Such moments should not be read as the residual traces of a premodern evil lingering into the present. Rather, they reveal how caste actively reproduces itself within modernity through emergent semiotic codes, continually reconfiguring its modes of perception, validation, and exclusion.
Here, Narayana Guru’s counter-question—“What do you feel seeing me?”—disrupts the flow of this mechanism. Rather than offering an identity, he displaces the very epistemological ground for recognition itself. Here, Guru seems to be proposing a radical ontological proposition: a knowing being founded on an ontological equality across species that escapes any logic of capture. The response or the expression “unable to make out” marks a crucial threshold: a moment of perplexity and indeterminacy, where the body in front resists immediate classification and recognition. Guru’s subsequent response with a question: “If you are unable to make out by seeing, how can you understand by telling?” foregrounds seeing as a primary sensorial act through which one can feel or sense the presence of another being in proximity, without the validation through representation or capture. This becomes obvious in Guru’s later explanation: “No need for any special proof that there is only one caste. When a dog sees another dog, it understands that it belongs to its caste. All animals have this understanding. They all live with such an awareness. Only humans have doubts about caste. He has no ability to recognise his caste. It is worse than animals.” What Guru asserts here is a form of prelinguistic, pre-representational rationality—an immanent awareness of oneness that precedes any symbolic frameworks of classification and identity such as caste.
While our sensorial dispositions—seeability or hearability—are organised and habituated within the regime of Brahminical power, Guru’s notion of “one caste” signifies an ontological equality that exceeds the modes of capture through which visuality and discursivity order humans as representations within hierarchies. Guru’s invocation can be construed as a form of radical ontological proposition: a seeing without capture. Seeing without capture signifies a mode of encounter prior to the diagrammatic organisation of difference into identity. It is not the absence of perception, but perception before its capture by caste. This notion of seeing without capture is not merely an ethical choice; rather, it represents an ontological impossibility within a caste society where recognition itself is already hierarchized. In this sense, it is not an alternative mode of recognition but rather an exposure of the limitations inherent in the concept of recognition itself. Seeing without capture signifies the impossibility of understanding the other as separate, categorizable, or hierarchical, as it can only mirror itself. In this context, ontological oneness is not a metaphysical claim, but a refusal or resistance to the representational apparatus that makes caste legible and operative.
While seeing is not a natural activity, but is cultured or even structured by regimes of power, the sedimented predispositions acquire the status of a mould of capture. Every act of validation in an everyday encounter functions as an approximation to this mould of capture. Mundane Malayalam Phrases such as “avane/avale kandāl ariyām” (one can recognise or know someone from their look or appearance; for instance, whether they are criminals or not) reveal this logic of approximation to the prefigured images. Yet there are moments of contingency in which what is present is not identical with or resistant to the capturing mechanism. This situation marks out the passenger’s encounter with Guru and his expression “unable to make out”. An uncertainty emerges. Let’s not confuse this uncertainty with the affirmative one—the sensory strangeness of an aesthetic moment, or an encounter that breaks with the image of thought. Rather, two subjects are produced: a subject of aesthetic affirmation that escapes capture and a desperate subject failing in its anxiety of caste recognition. The subject outside this scene—the mise-en-scene itself—is also split: between a subject in concord with the police order and an aesthetico-political subject that gestures toward a ‘redistribution of the sensible’. However, the uncertainty in the fellow passenger emerges from the failure of recognition: from an anxiety of recognition. Emerging from the sedimentation, processing in the mould like an attraction in the magnetic field, waiting for its opposite pole, but failing, its failure now transforms itself into a state of perplexity, generating an atmosphere of caste. This moment of perplexity itself is a symptom of caste, which operates at the level of an encounter with the other. In other words, caste operates not just in recognition, but also in its failure. The spectral presence of caste manifests itself as this anxiety of recognition, as this unsettled gaze, as this atmosphere, prior to its completion through displacement. This is the very psycho-pathology of caste, as Ambedkar calls it, a notional entity, a disease of the mind. Caste, in itself, is not a static entity but a power diagram that modernises itself through immanent modulation, crystallising its subjects in a graded hierarchy—a form of stagnation against any liberatory becoming.
Scene II: The Spatial Assemblage
A significant section of the Dalit population in Kerala continues to inhabit caste ghettos or colonies—settlements established through the state’s legislative measures, which are themselves corrective measures taken by the state government after the failure of the Land Reform Act 1963 (instituted in 1970) to ensure minimum housing facilities for the Dalit population. These settlements are named as Laksham Veedu Colonies. Beyond their precarious infrastructural and material conditions, it is important to note how these spaces are continuously re-inscribed within a semiotic regime that codes them as landscapes of segregation and cultural alterity. Here, land operates not merely as territory but as a visual and affective inscription—produced, stabilised, and circulated within a caste regime of cultural hegemony. V. V. Vinu, one of the Dalit artists of Kerala, in a recent conversation, discussed an interesting aspect of the title of his recent work. The work is titled Kazhchayude Purampokkukal; in general, it can be translated as ‘the otherness/margins of visuality’. Purampokku nilam (or Porampokku land) refers to government-owned land that is not assessed for revenue tax, often used for communal purposes like grazing, water bodies, or public roads. It signifies land belonging to the community or state, often categorised as excess land, wasteland, common land, or land set aside for public use. However, these are the lands typically occupied by the landless population for habitation. In the colloquial sense, it was derogatorily used to mean worthless, secondary, or of low status
when contrasted with what is considered proper, interior, or prestigious. The term acquired its derogatory status precisely because of the population living there, as with the term ‘colony’ in the rural context. In the urban context, however, the colony acquires a privileged status and is often contrasted with the cheri or the slum.
Vinu uses this term (Kazhchayude Purampokkukal) to denote his concern with the very constitutive logic of visuality itself—its own ghettoisation, the subalternity it produces, its margins and alterities in relation to the caste question. It must be distinguished from its semantic variation —Purampokkile Kazhchakal, which refers to the visuality of the purampokkukal—the landscape of the landless habitation. The latter term corresponds to the manner in which this “outside-land,” the dwelling space of the landless population, is imaginatively constituted and mediated within the cultural sphere. Expressions such as “colony,” “Onamkera Moola” (a place where even the festival of Onam does not arrive), and “purampokku” circulate within everyday discourse, literature, and cinema as signifiers of abjection. The same semiotic operation extends to the notion of “coastal language” (a dialect spoken by the fishing community), framed as an impure or culturally deficient idiom. While it projects Dalit life within a discursive field of criminality, demonisation and undesirability, it also renders these spaces as spatialities of aggression and disgust. Hence, a form of reciprocal attribution of qualities: the sociality becomes the marker of spatiality, and the spatiality becomes the marker of sociality.
Enclosed within this double attribution, Purampokku land emerges here as a caste sensorium— through a process of semiotic and affective inscription. Caste becomes a perceptual regime: the manifestation of caste operates through the organisation of perception itself. Vinu shifts his focus from the territory(purampokkukal) as an ‘object of vision’ to ‘vision as a field of territorialisation’ structured by the regimes of power. In other words, the act of seeing itself functions as a mode of territorialisation, producing subalternities, margins and perceptual alterity. He is attributing the predicate—the purampokku (the outside-land —landscape of landless habitation), a sensorium of caste, to the visuality. Hence, there is a shift of focus from the representation of a marginal territory to the operation of a diagrammatic organisation of the perceptual regime of caste in which visuality itself becomes the site of territorialisation. His shift in focus marks a careful departure from an anthropological objectification of deprivation to a critical diagnosis of the perceptual modernisation of caste, in which caste persists not as a quantifiable fact but as an adaptive visual and semiotic regime structured within contemporary modes of seeing. When land, once distributed, becomes the dwelling ground of untouchable populations, the landscape acquires the status of a new sensorium of caste, as if the very landscape acquires the smell of caste. Thus, the distributed property becomes both the ground and the instrument of a new mode of ontological separation. Caste not only territorialises land and its population, but also territorialises the perception of land. The perceptual regime of caste diagrammatically organised as the ‘perceptual perplexity’, or the ‘capturing anxiety’, is now territorialised as a spatial fact: the purampokku, the colony, the cheri, representing the spatial modernities of caste.
Towards a Counter Cartography
The misrecognition of the spectral mechanism of caste has resulted in the failure of the Land Redistribution Act and its emancipatory potential. As many have noted, the question of land distribution in Kerala has been framed through the category of class, resulting not only in the failure to identify the beneficiaries but also in the failure to address the question of a dignified life. In other words, the caste question in general and the land question in particular are reduced merely to a governable category, which protects and normalises its own epistemic violences. Hence, the Dalit struggle, that is axiomatically declared as a new norm of equality[3], cannot be construed merely as a demand for land as material possession; it must be grasped as a process of re-distribution of the aesthetic regime in which caste orders the visible and the sayable. This is not to underestimate the procedural significance of legislative measures in land redistribution, but such measures alone cannot exhaust the meaning of this struggle, nor can they be reduced to a ‘governable category’ within the administrative rationality of the state. The land question, here, exceeds its juridical determination as property; rather, it projects the land as a ‘diagram of dignity’. It could be a terrain where alternative subjectivities and collective sensibilities can take form. The struggle thus unfolds as a counter-cartography of being, where the reclamation of land coincides with the invention of new modes of perception and of being itself.
[1] Drawing from Foucault, Deleuze defines the diagram as an abstract map of the relations of forces, or as an “abstract machine”. It designates a nonstratified field of power prior to the formation of structures such as institutions, discourses, and subjects. It operates as a virtual configuration and is continually actualised in different historical forms. In the first part of the essay, I will use this conceptual framework to trace the diagrammatic organisation of power as a non-stratified relation of forces prior to the formation of a stratified assemblage, such as a caste ghetto or colony.
[2] Territorialisation, as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, refers to the processes by which an assemblage acquires consistency through the making, coding, and organisation of a territory. A territory is not reducible to a physical space but is constituted through expressive acts— rhythms, repetitions, and signs— which stabilise a milieu. In this case, the perceptual regime of caste operates as a territorialising force— seeing functions as a semiotic coding of abjection.
[3] Here, I am referring to Ambedkar’s Mahad Satyagraha speech and its further articulation by Soumyabrata Choudhury in his Book Ambedkar and Other Immortals.
Key References
• Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste. Annotated critical edition. New Delhi: Navayana Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2014.
• Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
• Sadanandan, Santhosh. (2025). Decasting Caste: Spatiality and Sociality. Critical Times. 8. 309-337. 10.1215/26410478-11806657.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated and ed. by Sean Hand. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
• Choudhury, Soumyabrata, Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme, New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2018.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Translated by Brian Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• M.K, Sanoo. Sree Narayana Guru – Life and Times (Biography).Edited by: O.V. Usha. Translated by Mukundan P.R. Open Door Media, 2017.