Backward March

Kerala’s Marxist mandarins mock a sacred Hindu tradition yet again in the name of progress.

Kerala

The Marxists of Kerala are at it again, peering through their fogged ideological spectacles and seeing menace in the most benign of Indian traditions. This time, the ritual in their crosshairs is guru puja, the age-old custom of offering flowers or washing the feet of teachers to mark Guru Purnima, a day revered across Hindu and Buddhist communities for honouring those who impart knowledge.

In a normal society, this would pass as a graceful act of gratitude. But in Kerala, where Marxist dogma masquerades as progressivism, it is deemed a “feudal relic” and an affront to democracy.

The trigger for this controversy was when Governor Rajendra Arlekar, addressing a gathering organised by Balagokulam (a cultural outfit with links to the RSS) mounted a calm but firm defence of guru puja. Arlekar delivered a stinging rebuke to V. Sivankutty, Kerala’s combative general education minister after the latter condemned the symbolic washing of feet at two CBSE-affiliated schools as “undemocratic” and “violative of progressive thinking.”

“I don’t understand from which culture these people are coming,” Arlekar had remarked, referring to the naysayers.

In the name of ‘reason,’ Kerala’s ruling party seeks to delegitimise one of India’s most ennobling cultural practices. Marxism, which has long treated religion and tradition as bourgeois constructs to be dismantled, finds itself instinctively recoiling at anything vaguely spiritual or reverent while conveniently forgetting that its acolytes themselves have elevated Marxism to a religion and Marx and Engels as their gods.

That the ritual took place in schools affiliated with the Bharatiya Vidya Niketan, an organisation inspired by Hindu ideals, was enough to invite the wrath of both the CPI(M) and the Congress.

The act of devotion, naturally, became yet another opportunity to accuse the BJP of saffronising the classroom. That the governor’s critics also dragged in caste and feudalism is telling. To the Marxist mind, every cultural gesture must be interrogated for class oppression. Thus, a student offering a teacher flowers becomes symbolic of ‘slave mentality’ as CPI(M) state secretary M.V. Govindan indignantly put it. It is an argument both threadbare and deceitful. The ritual in question is voluntary, spiritual and performed by children across castes. That Marxists see domination in every bow or folded hand says more about their historical insecurities than it does about Indian culture.

Kerala’s self-proclaimed reformers are fond of invoking the ‘renaissance’ that the state underwent in the 20th century, as if it absolves them of understanding or respecting what preceded it. But cultural renaissance does not imply civilisational amnesia. Nor does the expansion of literacy require the eradication of reverence. Education in India has never been a purely instrumental affair. It was, and still ought to be, a sacred enterprise with its purpose not just to inform but to transform. In many Indic traditions, the guru is not merely a conduit of curriculum but a remover of darkness, a guide through moral and intellectual uncertainty.

The modernist impulse to level all hierarchies has confused humility with servitude. In flattening every institution to fit the template of Western-style secular rationalism, the Left has stripped Indian education of its soul. What remains is a mechanised pedagogy - utilitarian, joyless, and allergic to meaning. That is the truly backward path.

Governor Arlekar deserves credit for defending what few in Kerala’s public life dare to: the cultural integrity of India’s traditions. Ironically, it is the Marxists who are most disconnected from the material history of the land they govern.

One would think that a government genuinely invested in ‘scientific temper’ and critical thought might spend more energy improving Kerala’s learning outcomes or investigating the appalling politicisation of its college campuses. But ideology, not education, is the CPI(M)’s first love. And so, in the name of democratic values, they attack guru puja. In the name of liberty, they deride voluntary expressions of gratitude.