The most important achievements of the Communist governments in Kerala,
India were the implementation of the land reforms and the legislation of the
Agricultural Workers’ Act. Using ethnographic and archival research based on
these events and the processes through which they became a reality, this paper will
question some of the fundamental assumptions of the influential Subaltern
Studies project and postcolonial theory like the positing of governmentality and
passive revolution as the general characteristics of ‘Third World’ societies’
experience with modernity. It will argue that, more importantly, their culturalist
framework, with its gross ignorance of class and material concerns, is hardly
adequate to understand the fusing of the aspirations of recognition and
redistribution or the material and cultural that characterizes the struggles by
the peasantry and agrarian labor, and their synthesis by the Communist Party.
Despite their professed aim of inaugurating a democratic project with the peasant
as citizen, Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, unlike the Communist
movement, do not envisage any material transformation of the agrarian classes
that will actualize this objective