Ravikumar's new book is perhaps the most exciting work on the Dalit question to be published recently, yet still does not live up to its promise. But Susie Tharu's patronising foreword (which does not engage with Ravikumar's frameworks at all) notwithstanding, it does set the ground for work to come – hopefully from Ravikumar himself, a Dalit activist and writer in Madras and co-founder of Navayana Press – that will alter not just Dalit critique but also Southasian critique in general. The essays in Venomous Touch can be broadly divided into two general areas: the fact-finding report and reports of atrocities against Dalits (the author is a member of the People's Union of Civil Liberties Tamil Nadu-Pondicherry, and many of these reports came from his fact-finding trips), and essays on cultural and theoretical analysis. That this is in a crucial sense a false distinction is the first and overriding flaw of the book.
In his preface, Ravikumar speaks of his "Tarzan-like travel" from Marx and Lenin to Periyar and pulp novels, from Gramsci and Althusser to Foucault and Derrida and back to Ambedkar and Tiruvalluvar. Almost none of this scope, however, touches the first set of essays, those from the fact-finding trips; they are dogged, industrious and painstaking reports, but they have none of the analytic rigour that might have taken them beyond the limiting frame of the fact-finding report as a genre. While the genre represents an important historical document, particularly in its chronicling of injustices otherwise swept under the carpet, it must, in its article or essay avatar, ask questions that the generic format would not allow.
With Ravikumar claiming that Michel Foucault's theorisation of power influenced him, surely that perspective should have come into the former's analysis of anti-Dalit atrocities. In doing so, he may have realised the problems with Foucault's understanding of power, especially in the early works, and consequently reached for the later Foucault that offers self-reflexive and more nuanced models of the Dalit subject than Ravikumar allows. Foucault's early conception of power does not really leave any scope for resistance or opposition, but later he comes to locate this in the idea of ethics and technologies of the self. But Ravikumar's schematic distinction between the kinds of essay he writes does not allow for this interplay.
This is part of a larger problem. Too often in today's scholarly writing, in this region and elsewhere, 'theory' is only utilised for an analysis of culture, and seldom in any other form than the decontextualised quote or invocation of a name, and almost never as a sustained meditation or engagement with an idea. Why do theory merely in the mode of 'doing' theory? What intellectual fashion is this that requires that ritual homage be paid to Western theorists, and the juxtaposing of their ideas with more 'domestic' issues? Why has Ravikumar not instead internalised theoretical concepts in his analyses, rather than applying theory to measure either the data's exemplary value or the theory's lack of, or exemplary, fit?