Kozhikode – May 2, 2025: It was more than a commemoration. At the Kairali-Sri Vedi Auditorium in Kozhikode, voices trembled not with grief, but with an unmistakable sense of responsibility — to carry forward a legacy that changed the grammar of Kerala’s cultural, political, and intellectual discourse. “Kocchettan,” as he was fondly known, was no ordinary thinker. K.K. Koch was a fierce, original, and sometimes inconvenient voice — whose presence burned through the shadows that caste, class, and convention had cast on Kerala’s modernity.

Organized by Maruvakku magazine, Utharakalam, and the M.N. Vijayan Cultural Centre, the memorial was a rare convergence of Kerala’s critical minds — B.S. Baburaj, Gro Vasu , Dr. K.P. Ravi Mash, N.P. Chekkutti, Sunny M. Kapikkad, K.H. Nasar, Dr. V. Hikmathulla, K.K. Baburaj, Damodar Prasad, Prabhakaran Varaprath, Johnson Joseph, Ansari Chullippara, Sadhik P.K., K.S. Hariharan, Rupesh Kumar, Muhsin Parari, Zakkariya— each taking turns to speak of a man who redefined dissent with both heart and intellect.

From Red to Blue: A Life Between Ideologies

Born in 1946 as the son of a committed Communist, Koch’s early years were steeped in activism. Student politics drew him into the fold of Left movements, and his commitment was so intense that it led to periods of underground living and imprisonment. Yet, by the 1980s, he began to rethink the frames through which Kerala read its social problems. The red flag no longer spoke for everyone — especially not for those pushed to the very bottom.

Koch’s eventual journey into Dalit consciousness was not a rejection of Marxism but a reformation of its blind spots. He became associated with the Civilian Service Society in Kottayam, and later, the editor of CD Weekly. For him, writing was not commentary — it was struggle. He viewed culture as the battleground where real emancipation had to be fought. His politics was not about occupying a stage; it was about dismantling the very proscenium of exclusion.

The Intellectual Who Fought for the Ground Beneath Our Feet

Koch’s boldest interventions questioned the very foundations of Kerala’s celebrated land reforms. While mainstream narratives celebrated these as revolutionary, Koch dismantled the myth: land was redistributed, yes, but to the tenant farmers — not to the landless Dalits and Adivasis. His sharp insight that land reform in Kerala was spatially progressive but socially exclusionary still stings. He argued that the construction of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe colonies only furthered their social ghettoization — architectural apartheid in the name of welfare.

His cultural interventions didn’t stop there. He critiqued the Education Bill — hailed by many as progressive — for failing to account for Dalit exclusion from aided recruitment. He pointed out how tribal communities were systemically left out of employment benefits and intellectual spaces, long before such exclusions were commonly acknowledged.

Writing Another Kerala into Being

Koch wasn’t just a cultural critic — he was a re-writer of histories. In his 1980s book Revolt and Culture, he began tracing the threads of intellectual violence within Kerala’s literature and historiography. To him, mainstream Malayalam literature was soaked in caste bias and upper-caste imagination. In his landmark article Indulekha: A Political Re-Reading in the anthology Dalit Patham, he deconstructed the celebrated Malayalam novel Indulekha, arguing that it silenced every community outside the Nair caste — especially Muslims and Dalits. He saw this novel not as progress but as a blueprint for literary casteism and Islamophobia.

He revived forgotten or suppressed texts — such as Potheri Kunjhambu’s Saraswativijayam — pointing out how these were sidelined by elite literary criticism. His re-reading of Saraswativijayam transformed a dismissed work into a central Dalit text, so much so that it was later reintroduced into public discourse and academic syllabi.

Not Just A Pen: A Political Weapon

For Koch, every word was a weapon. He questioned Dalit essentialism as much as he criticized Brahmanical dominance. He was instrumental in introducing the idea of “communalization within Dalit society” — challenging the replication of caste within marginalized communities. His insistence on the ideological reformation of subaltern politics often made him an uncomfortable figure, both to Left parties and Dalit organizations. But that didn’t deter him.

He also warned — long before it became fashionable — of the Hindutva co-option of Adivasi and Dalit identities. He opposed efforts to recast figures like Pazhassi Raja as tribal nationalist icons, arguing that such narratives were designed to erase actual tribal histories and struggles.

The Scholar-Activist Who Refused to Belong

KK Koch was not a club member of any ideology. That made him difficult to celebrate — or contain. He frequently clashed with the organizations he helped build, including Naxalite groups, Communist youth wings, and Dalit fronts. If it wasn’t revolutionary enough, if it wasn’t inclusive enough, he walked away.

His was a life of constant movement — not just geographically, but ideologically. And yet, his anchorage was firm: the necessity of giving voice, dignity, and intellectual recognition to those erased from Kerala’s public consciousness.

The Legacy of a Bio-Intellectual

To call him a “Dalit intellectual” is to understate his significance. Koch was a bio-intellectual — someone whose very life was an archive of struggle. He was not writing from outside the system, but from within its scars. He didn’t study marginalization as an academic subject — he embodied it and illuminated it.

He didn’t seek academic appointments or literary awards. His classroom was the field, his students were activists and readers who finally found their truths mirrored in his words. Today, across Kerala, hundreds of young Dalit activists, writers, and sociologists cite Koch as their intellectual forebear.

As Dr. MB Manoj observed in his novel Jag, “When modernity lit the country with roads and buildings, Koch loudly reminded us that Dalit life remained the shadow that never left.”

A Farewell Without Full Stops

Koch’s funeral was not simply the end of a life. It was the reminder of a continuing mission. As those who gathered at Kozhikode’s Kairali-Sri Vedi Auditorium listened to speeches from comrades, critics, and fellow thinkers, what resonated was not grief — but the echo of Koch’s persistent question: “Who gets to belong to Kerala?”

By the end of the commemoration, it became clear that Koch had lit fires in too many places for his absence to be darkness. His spirit now flickers in the new essays being written in tribal hamlets, in the speeches of young Dalit leaders, in the books that now finally include chapters once omitted. In every voice that dares to critique the celebrated without fear, K.K. Koch still speaks.