Muhammed Anees delves into the recent “kuzhimanthi debate” in Kerala, focusing on the political economy of language, and analyses the role of social media as a space for contested meanings and meaning-making.
Muhammed Anees TA
In the last week of September, a Facebook post appeared on the official handle of VK Sreeraman, an activist and actor from Kerala. An English translation of the post goes as follows: ‘If I get appointed as the autocrat of Kerala for one day, the first thing I do will be the prohibition of writing, saying, and exhibiting the word Kuzhimanthi. It will be an attempt to emancipate the Malayalam language from impurity. [three different emojis of monkeys] Do not say, do not hear, do not see Kuzhimanthi’ [See figure 1]. The post initially gathered some responses but soon became viral once Sunil Elayidom–the famous Malayalam writer and public intellectual–commented on the post with a ‘thumbs up’, and Saradakutty Bharathikutty–well known Malayalam activist and writer–wrote in the comment section: ‘Whenever I hear the word Kuzhimanthi, a rodent-like creature with thick skin will appear in my mind. I don’t eat. However, my children will try one hotel after another in Calicut for the best Kuzhimanthis. I can only eat foods if their names are impressive’ [See figure 2].
Within one day, Sreeraman’s post went viral because of the apparent revulsion it professed against Kuzhimanthi, a popular meat dish originally from Yemen that received ubiquitous popularity throughout Kerala in the last decade. Subsequently, multiple posts and comments appeared, at first criticizing, vehemently opposing and tarnishing him and the two others. Then surfaced another set of posts and comments, some supporting and others explaining it. Eventually, this evolved into a full-fledged discourse within a short span and achieved the popular title of Kuzhimanthi Vivadam (the controversy/debate over Kuzhimanthi), reaching out to other media platforms as well.
Bakhtin (1981:293) has written that ‘all words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’. The Kuzhimanthi debate, indeed, was entirely about the ‘taste’ of a word, which conquered the taste of people and has a recent history behind it. Standing on the vantage point of linguistic anthropology, where language is considered a social action, this article tries to analyze the variegated responses to the debate on Facebook while looking at how ostensibly ‘academic’ perceptions regarding language ideologies and the political economy of language (Urciuoli, 1996; Ahearn, 2012) got reflected in the public domain, thanks to the mass media as a centrifugal liberating space for multi-level contestations. Facebook, just like a place of capture, is a place of erasure as well. Sreeraman’s original post that triggered this debate has since been deleted, but it survives in multiple screenshots, albeit without its rich comment section. In this essay, I analyse some of the widely noticed posts and comments regarding this on Facebook, along with the three explanatory posts and the comments that appeared in their timelines. This analysis is not meant to quantify the opinions but to pinpoint the general trends in the debate and the major issues raised in favour and against.
Good Word and Bad Word: Political Economy of the Malayalam Language
Language, like any other social action, is not devoid of prejudice. Bonnie Urciuoli, in her ethnography, Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class observes: ‘the ways in which people formulate, value, and use words, sounds, phrases, and codes are constituted through power relations: bureaucratic, economic, racial, and any combination thereof’ (Urciuoli, 1996:4) and Ahearn (2012:15) describes it as ‘political economy of language’. Malayalam, a Dravidian language commonly used in Kerala, has at least fourteen different dialects (Sunija et al., 2015). These dialects were, indeed, conceived hierarchically with varying ‘values’ and ‘tastes’. In the initial stage of the development of literary modernity in Kerala, the dominant class of literati was exceedingly vociferous about it. For instance, A.R Rajaraja Varma, Malayalam poet and grammatician of the 19th century, writes while describing the ‘good’ Malayalam: ‘There is the distinction of upper and lower in every community based on their wealth, status and position. Just like that, a distinction exists among the language of respective communities as well. Some words and sentences are used by lowers [castes] only. These come under the category of bad (Neecham) language’ (Nasar, 2022).
In a caste Hindu society like Kerala, the notion of good and bad is interchangeable with purity and impurity and generally sublates to culinary practices as well. In this debate, interestingly, we see an intersection of language and food concerning the notion of impurity. Kuzhimanthi, being a foreign dish with an Arabic or Turkic origin, is an amalgamation of two words from two different languages: Kuzhi from Malayalam and Manthi from Arabic.1 Known as Manthi in the middle eastern Arab countries, it reached out (widely) to Kerala, arguably at the beginning of the last decade, and got the prefix of Kuzhi, which meant ‘pit’, indexing to its distinct cooking method using big pits in the ground. Globalization, generally understood as a homogenous process, has its own local variations, and Kuzhimanthi is one among them in Kerala. Currently, multiple hotels exhibiting the word ‘Kuzhimanthi’ on billboards are a pervasive sight throughout the state.
Since it went viral, the post was widely read and contextualized as an expression of conscious or ‘unconscious’2 repulsion of an ‘elite Hindu liberal’ in terms of cultural and economic ‘impurities’ embedded in Kuzhimanthi as a food and not as a word. As alleged by numerous posts, the cultural impurity got derived from its foreign origin, especially from its middle eastern or Islamicate connections. On the other hand, its economic impurity was perceived to be emanating from its cheapness and the immense popularity it achieved among the middle-class Kerala society.
MC Abdul Nasar, Malayalam professor at Sri Shankaracharya University, wrote on October 1: ‘VK Sreeraman needs the word Kuzhimanthi to be prohibited. According to his explanation, the word and the substance are “impure”. An “impure” word shouldn’t be bought or given into a language. …It is the hegemony prevailing in his unconscious mind that comes out as an allergy towards a word’. Apart from these grounded criticisms, another general trend of the time was the wide proclamation of support by posting images of eating Kuzhimanthi with friends and relatives. The huge number of such posts and statuses indicates the pervasiveness of the debate among the public that, arguably, forced all three of them into posting their explanations on Facebook.
VK Sreeraman, in his explanation posted on October 1, apologized for the write-up, saying that it was not meant to be a serious post and he has no problem with Kuzhimanthi as a food. ‘My revulsion was personal and towards the word only.’ He didn’t explain any particular reason for it; instead, he reiterated his freedom to like or dislike a ‘word.’ Sunil Elayidom, in his explanation posted on the same day, repeated what Sreeraman said of personal disgust and tried to root it in Malayalam linguistics. He wrote: ‘I do not like that word personally. I always thought that a good dish needs a better name. …The name of another food, “Molusiam”, is also one I personally don’t like’. He also didn’t provide any specific reasons for his dislike. Saradakkutty Bharathikutty, too, on the same day, wrote an explanation and argued that anyone can like or dislike any word, and it has to be taken as their personal freedom of expression.
She explained her reason in a comment (mentioned above): the phonic resemblance that the word ‘Kuzhimanthi’ produces in her mind to ‘Peruchazhi’ (it means rodent. ‘Kuzhi Eli’ is another rarely used word for rodent in Malayalam). This phonic similarity to a ‘bad’ word that Kuzhi or Manthi carries was a general theme in the discussion. Some supporters, like Saradkutty, found problems with Kuzhi, while some others felt it with Manthi as it resembles Manth, the name of a disease in Malayalam (elephantiasis in English) or Kari+Manthi, a rarely used word for black monkey. These explanations, to some extent, took away the debate in the direction of the ‘prohibition’ in the original post as an instance of political incorrectness, thus obliterating the debate over the assumed ‘badness’ as a personal (hence, justifiable) thing. Nonetheless, many people pointed out the problem of ‘selectiveness’ in it, thus indicating a hidden political economy of language underlying their personal predilections.
Language as Personal and Social: A Word and More
This debate and the huge responses it generated need to be juxtaposed with recent social media campaigns related to food in Kerala. At the end of 2021, a rigorous campaign took place on Facebook against ‘halal food,’ mainly mediated through the right-wing handles. It was a deliberate political campaign supported by Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) against the halal food industry in Kerala. At that phase, halal (non-veg) foods were discouraged in terms of corporeal ‘impurity’ and video of a man in traditional Muslim attire allegedly spitting into a food container was widely circulated, accusing all halal foods of being unhygienic. To some extent, we also see right-wing supporters taking over the debate in terms of actual impurity as evident from multiple responses supporting VK Sreeraman. Yet another controversy regarding ‘Muslim’ food surfaced in social media on May 2022, when former Congress MLA turned BJP ally PC George alleged Muslim-run restaurants of mixing drugs causing impotence in tea. These instances, along with their numerous precedents,3 contribute to the process of ‘social charging’ behind the word ‘Kuzhimanthi.’
Considering these three recent debates over food together, ranging from hygiene to sterility to language–all vilifying the same in one way or another- will offer an enticing insight into the more contemporary and apparent ‘power relations’ that food has in Kerala society. For a more nuanced understanding, a thorough investigation into the ‘systemic aspects of language’ is needed (Hill, 1985). Kuzhimanthi, as a prevalent and widespread word in usage, is just like any other word for many. It doesn’t invoke intrinsically any undesirable semiotic apprehensions in their mind. Had there been any, it should have been reflected in the market economy. It shows that the contradictions expressed in terms of personal choice, essentially, indicate the varying taste and value of a word as suggested by Bakhtin and Urciuoli and denote the power structures in Kerala society. As Bakhtin (1981:293) argues, ‘language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the world of speaker’s intentions; it is populated -overpopulated- with the intentions of others.’ It is evident that the innocent freewill of the above-mentioned three to feel/form and express their revulsion is not something ‘personal’ that emerged in a discrete individualistic realm. As Ahearn (2012:261) proposes, in line with Bakhtin that ‘agency -the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act- is an essential aspect of, and counterpart to power’ is relevant here.
The idea of ‘habitus’ that denotes ‘the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them’ as proposed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Wacquant, 2005), is really helpful for a more situated understanding of these personal predilections. While scrutinizing the similarity among the three, though crude and rudimentary it may seem, we see all three of them belonging to the mainstream literary circle of Kerala, which was predominantly elite and exclusive in nature. The metapragmatic division of good and bad as evident in their explanations, though on a ‘personal’ taste, has a ‘reflexive social process’ guiding them, which is essentially formulating the familiarity (desirability) and unfamiliarity (undesirability) (Agha, 2007).
Jane H. Hill, in her study about the peasant community of Malinche Volcano and their usage of Mexicano and Spanish, has instantiated Bakhtin and Voloshinov’s theory of ‘translinguistics.’ According to that, ‘a single utterance can combine a variety of voices in an intertextual polyphony or dialogue, in which both ideology and the language system function as constraints on combinations’ (Hill, 1985:728). Similarly, here we see a single word, Kuzhimanthi, combining two varieties of voices in which language ideology functions as a social constraint not apparently because of the combination, but for its social and cultural connotations, hence creating, according to Volosinov (1973), ‘an arena of class struggle’ where the normative literary traditions confront the quotidian semantic notions.
Finally, this debate indicates that social media is not a ‘centripetal’ force but a ‘centrifugal’ one, as argued by Jannis Androutsopoulos (2016). New media like Facebook instrumented a space for challenging dominant language ideologies. The once granted notion of a ‘literary’ Malayalam, which differentiates even words into pure and impure as in the above-mentioned writing of A.R Rajaraja Varma, is no more a valid categorization and among other factors, social media has played a significant role in deconstructing it.
In a nutshell, Sreeraman’s post and the subsequent debate on Facebook were rare incidents where the dominant ideologies related to food and language got unveiled to the public, leading to variegated multi-level responses. Food being the basic need of everybody, and language being the medium through which everything is mediated, this debate provided a unique combination that opened up an insightful platform for observing and critically evaluating a larger spectrum of issues in the ‘langscape’ of Kerala society.
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About the author: Muhammed Anees TA is a first-year MA Society and Culture student at IIT Gandhinagar. He worked as editor of Thelicham Monthly (2017-2020) and Book Plus publishers (2021-2022) and translated two books from English to Malayalam.
