Vajid Punakkath is a PhD candidate in Critical Theory. His research project, titled “Rebel-Subject at the Dawn of the Biopolitical: A Critical-Theoretical Study of Mappila Rebellion, 1836-1921” (funded by Generation Delta), is a historical and critical study of a 19th Century peasant rebellion in the Malabar Interiors of Southern India. The project engages with a vast array of historical writings, political commentary, and archival data on the rebellion, connecting them with critical theoretical and historiographical debates on the entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, and modernity. The rebellion is analyzed as a revolutionary rupture occurring at and against the emergence of biopolitical modernity. Vajid argues that this rupture has not ceased to exist; the questions, contradictions, and antagonisms that animated its tumultuous history have only become more central to the political and cultural discourse of the postcolonial republic. The critical issues of caste, labor, and property remain ever-present; the fault lines of nation, religion, and minority identity; the political questions of governmentality, subaltern violence, and revolutionary praxis—continue to coalesce around the singularity of the Mappila Rebellion.

Using the historiographic battlegrounds of the Mappila Rebellion as a canvas, Vajid’s thesis further doubles as a study of contemporary Indian political situation and the crises facing its emancipatory horizon. In this moment of intractability, facing ever ascendant fascist domination, memories of rebellion are re-mobilized by activists and scholars as forces of inspiration and imagination for emancipatory politics and critical theory. The historical rupture of the rebellion is theoretically extended as a critical rupture against the normativity of India’s generalized counterinsurgent condition, where resistance appears foreclosed. Foregrounding the coloniality of biopolitical modernity and its contemporary hegemony, as well as the Mappila rebels’ historic refusal of its interiorizing structures, Vajid proposes the rebel-subject as the constitutive negativity and conceptual persona of renewed decolonial critical theoretical practice. A short piece on his engagement with political theology of rebellion is published in Political Theology Network. In conjunction with his academic work, he also works and researches on border questions of antifascism in India, revolutionary politics, and histories of anticolonial and anti-imperialist internationalism.