READING EMS NAMBOODIRIPAD ON CASTE: PROBLEMS OF THEORIZING CASTE AND EXAMINING POPULISM AS AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
Mr Subway Bhattacharjee and Ms Pemu Sherpa
Assistant Professors of English, Mirik College, University of North Bengal, West Bengal, India
Abstract:
In several speeches and articles, the Indian Marxist theoreticians, statesman and head of
the First Communist party- ruled state in India, E.M.S Namboodiropad tried to approach the
question of caste and account for its prevalence. However in attempting to formulate a
theory of caste on the basis of social and historical factors, he tended to focus exclusively on
the bourgeois governmental apparatus and the transition from the village economy to the
industrial workforce thereby ignoring the affective dimensions of the caste question. While
these affective social dimensions of the issue of caste was not reckoned by him as a serious
political incursion in the post-independence political landscape, the emergence of caste as a
major political component in Indian politics today shows a resurgence of the conspicuously
repressed component of Namboodiripad's Marxist analysis of the same. Furthermore,
following from the examination of such repressive junctures of Namboodiripad's discourse, this paper would attempt to use Caste as a significant element in bolstering and elucidating
Karl Popper's contention against Marxist analysis of history and scientific assumptions. This is so because the precise selection of and elimination of empirical evidence tends to render such Marxist analyses as biased. In the end, an attempt will also be made to see if a new theory of caste can emerge which does not present the rigidity of a master-discourse such as Marxism but rather outlines the topology of dealing with issues as complex as caste. The reference to a modern political theory of populism as advanced by thinkers like Mouffe and Laclau will be examined vis-a-vis Namboodiripad's presumptive discourse.