You Made Me a Communist and the sidelining of the caste question: the failure of pedagogical intervention

The paper examines the nature of secular spaces emerged in the cultural sphere of the South Indian state of Keralam during the 1950s with the staging of Ningalenne Communistakki (You Made Me a Communist), a play written by Thoppil Bhasi, under the aegis of the Communist Party. It was during this period that the cultural sphere in Keralam witnessed the staging of a drama that welcomed audience acrosscaste and class divisions, thereby challenging the norms of the existing caste-ridden society.Portrayal of the quotidian experiences of the common people in a language intelligible to them, made it comprehensible to a larger audience. This, in turn, capacitated theatre to form a social space beyond the constraints of caste, class, or religion, thereby rendering it a ‘secular’ space. However, these secular spaces failed to sensitize the lower-class sections to caste-based inequalities. Instead, the drama effaced such inequalities, reflecting the Communist Party′s understanding of caste in India as a manifestation of class-based inequality. The paper argues that the drama failed to make a pedagogical intervention in society, as it sought to create secular spaces that primarily addressed class-based inequality while overlooking caste as an angle of oppression.