Remembering Dr. M. Kunhaman

 

Shibi Peter

The recent recollections by Dr. Sarosh Koshy of Dr. M. Kunhaman’s association with Student Christian Movement (SCM) during the late 1980s and early 1990s inspired this reflection. For those of us who joined the SCM in the early 1990s (I joined in 1992), Dr. Kunhaman remained a consistent and influential presence, not only as an academician but also as a critical voice in Christian social thought and Christian social movements in Kerala.

His involvement in the CSI Youth Movement, the People Faith Liberation Movement, and ecumenical platforms placed him within the critical intellectual genealogy of Christian interventions in Kerala’s public sphere. I first encountered him as a school student in 1990 during one of Navachetana's regular study sessions—a memory that still resonates. That program was led by Mr. Joy Joseph and Mr. K.M. Thomas, two prominent lay theologians and activists..

Although Dr. Kunhaman, alongside Dr. Sivanandan, was a familiar academic voice in economics-related engagements, what distinguished Kunhaman Master was his ideological and pedagogical solidarity with grassroots Christian and subaltern formations. His engagements marked a fundamental shift in how theological movements understood the intersections of economy, caste, and public theology.

The period to which Dr. Sarosh refers was particularly significant in the intellectual history of Christian interventions in Kerala. Even E.M.S. Namboodiripad, in his Collected Works, acknowledged the dialogical engagements between liberation theology movements and the ideological Left. However, these engagements were not free from conflict. Particularly in matters related to caste and gender, there existed deep divergences between institutional Left politics and the subaltern perspectives articulated by Christian social movements. While liberation theology initiatives attempted to interpret caste and gender through a faith-based lens—see for example Rev. M.J. Joseph’s The Golden Calf (1982)—these efforts often struggled to fully integrate into the dominant economic and political theoretical frameworks.

Dr. Kunhaman’s contributions emerged precisely in response to this epistemological impasse. His approach moved beyond classical categories of production to interrogate the asymmetries within production relations themselves—foregrounding caste as a structural determinant. In doing so, he developed a distinctive critique of development economics that offered new analytical vocabularies to popular movements navigating an ambivalent relationship with Marxist traditions. In this respect, his work parallels and complements that of Dr. Sivanandan, especially his essay Class, Caste and Economic Opportunity in Kerala (1979). Inspired by this intellectual trajectory, Rev. M.J. Joseph authored Class, Caste, Church and the Left (1988), which critically examined the uneasy alliance between the church and Left political formations.

Dr. Kunhaman’s framework, premised on the triad of resources, power, and knowledge (as elaborated in Crises of Development, CISRS), marks a paradigmatic intervention in Indian economic thought. However, the dimensions of power and knowledge were not fully engaged by liberation theology movements—largely due to the communitarian and denominational limits of their representational imagination. Rather than aligning with anti-Brahmanical epistemologies or Ambedkarite frameworks—as seen in the writings of Dr. M.M. Thomas—they often remained tethered to Marxist intellectual resources (Stop Proceed, PSA, 1990). It was only in the late 1980s, with the increasing influence of Gramscian studies (Navachetana, 1989), that Christian movements began to critically reorient their theoretical frameworks. This shift would later be amplified with the publication of Gramscian Vicharaviplavam in the mid-1990s.

The caste atrocities and anti-Dalit violence of the early 1990s—particularly the Tsunduru massacre—further intensified this intellectual ferment. In response, the Varthamanam magazine in 1991 published a special issue on caste, featuring the influential essay Dalit Ideology by Mr. K.M. Thomas, marking a historic turn in Christian Dalit discourse. The same year, the 75th conference of the CSI Youth Movement initiated profound discussions on resources, power, and representation, setting the stage for the emergence of Dalit subjectivity within church-based youth politics. The interventions of Mr. K.M. Salimkumar were pivotal in these early discourses.

Dr. Kunhaman’s intellectual contributions were foundational to this shift. What some have retrospectively described as a “crisis” in people’s movements was, in reality, a moment of epistemic rupture and subaltern assertion. This transition was further theorized by Prof. T.M. Yesudasan in works such as Towards a Prologue to Dalit Studies (with Lovely Stephen, DWS, 1993) and Dalit Identity and the Question of Power (1997), where the triad of resources, power, and representation was systematized into a coherent epistemological and political project.

It is worth noting that Dr. Kunhaman’s perspectives on resource-power dynamics remain under-theorized in academic discourse. He stands among the most organic intelletual and social critics India has produced—an intellectual who offered a language and vision to communities struggling for voice, justice, and historical agency.