Some notes from my visit to Kozhikode
By Badri Raina | ZNet, July 31, 2009
[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]
As everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin–history—which however is for him a known history, and being as an act of origin, is a conscious self-transcending act of origin.”
(Marx, Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole, EPM)
“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessarily an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution. . .it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages, and become fitted to found society anew.”
(Marx, German Ideology.)
Teekay, who was professor of English at Calicut university in Kerala, was more importantly one of the relentless critics of stultifying orthodoxy, including, most of all, with respect to India’s Left parties and politics. Besides being erudite in Marxist theory well into its frontier extensions and amplifications upto his day.
Never one to compromise the integrity of his perceptions, he knew both the opprobrium of dogmatists, and the inside of an Indian jail.
He died at the age of 57, but left behind him a committed following, both among Kerala intellectuals and intelligentsia alike.
It was a great honour, thus, to be asked to deliver the first Teekay memorial lecture on the 21st of july, 2009 at Kozhikode on “the State of Left politics: Theory and Practice.”
Tags: Muslims, Bhagat Singh, India, Indian Left, Badri Raina, Hindus, Mahatma Gandhi, T.K. Ramachandran, Kerala, the Ganges, feudal practices, the 1857 revolt, Bankim Chander Chatterjee, Communism, India's Dalits
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