Opinion What Malayali rapper Vedan’s case reveals about our willingness to avoid contradiction

Adding to the complexity, this shift from controversy to crisis happened just as much of the reportage, mostly written by men, seemed in a rush to elevate him into hero status. Glossy features, such as a celebratory Rolling Stone profile and other magazine pieces, painted him as an uncompromising voice of the people, often without interrogating the discomforts and contradictions his public presence already carried. Vedan first entered academic debate for his widely known track ‘Bhoomi’ (‘Earth’), a jagged, defiant work that rages across global injustices, from George Floyd’s killing in the United States to the war in Syria and famine in Somalia, blending Malayalam rap with a protest aesthetic. Its inclusion in Calicut University’s Malayalam literature syllabus stirred controversy. The initial debate was whether ‘Bhoomi’ belonged to the same classroom as the carefully crafted verse of poets like Ayyappa Paniker and Sugathakumari. Now the question has shifted: How do we hear a voice that speaks of dispossession and injustice when the man behind it stands accused of harm in his personal life?

Kerala’s cultural response to Vedan was never nuanced. His inclusion in the syllabus triggered predictable camps. Some demanded his removal, citing past accusations and moral grounds. Others rushed to celebrate him as a people’s poet and a challenger of caste privilege. Both positions, cancel or canonise, were impatient. Neither wanted to sit in discomfort. And discomfort is where we must stay now. ‘Bhoomi’ was never meant to be polished; it was a scream, a raw inventory of global wounds. By placing it in literature without framing it politically or ethically, we may have been trying to domesticate that scream. Now, that scream carries another charge: It unsettles not just our ideas of poetic form, but also our ability to reconcile protest with perpetration.

This problem is not new. Many celebrated male artists have been accused of, and sometimes admitted to, acts of violence or exploitation. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who remains a global literary icon, wrote in his memoir about sexually assaulting a Tamil woman while posted in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In Kerala, actors like Mukesh and Siddique continue to enjoy popularity despite serious allegations, with public discourse often sidestepping the issue. Internationally, Michael Jackson’s legacy survives despite decades of child abuse allegations, his music and persona still lionised by millions. But Vedan’s position is more precarious. He comes from a marginalised caste background. His voice is disruptive, unpolished, and politically charged. Those very qualities that once made him worth listening to now deny him the cultural patience often extended to more “established” figures. Where others are met with ambivalence or selective amnesia, he faces swift exclusion. This exposes an uncomfortable truth: Society’s willingness to separate art from artist often depends on the artist’s social location.

This is not to dismiss the seriousness of the accusations against him. Any engagement with Vedan’s work must acknowledge that shadow. But to read him only through that lens risks erasing what his art represents. The real challenge is to hold both truths at once: That the harm matters and the work matters. If ‘Bhoomi’ is to remain in the classroom, and that is now an unsettled question, it cannot be treated simply as literature to admire or as a moral example to reject. It must be read as a difficult artefact, a performance that lives in the tension between political relevance and personal controversy. Its meaning now lies not only in the injustices it names but in the contradictions it embodies. This moment demands more than the tired refrains. Not the easy “separate the art from the artist” escape, and not the purist’s desire to scrub contradiction from culture. What we need instead is a willingness to teach discomfort in order to create classrooms and cultural spaces that do not offer safety from contradiction, but train us to navigate it.

Vedan should not be elevated uncritically. Nor should he be erased to avoid trouble. He should be read precisely because his work is difficult, because it forces us to ask what protest means when it is fractured from within. Kerala’s discourse, and the world’s, has grown dangerously binary. Every figure is either a villain or a saint, every utterance either literature or noise. We are losing the ability to hold complexity, to sit with contradiction long enough to think through it. The crisis is bigger than Vedan. It is about how we read in a time when public accusation and fractured trust shape every cultural conversation. How we hold anger and accountability alongside resonance and rupture. How we deal with the fact that sometimes the voices crying out against oppression are themselves entangled in it.

Artists like Vedan do not need canonisation or immunity. What they, and we, need is a reading space where contradiction is not erased but confronted. Where we can say: The work matters, and the harm matters too. Because in the end, it is not just ‘Bhoomi’ that is crying. “Malaakkil kanneer veenathil/Enne pettathaayu bhoomi karanju” (In the tears that fell from Malaak, the chief of hellgates, the earth wept, having birthed me).

If we are to learn how to read again, it must be with open eyes and unclean hands, willing to stay in the discomfort rather than rush to resolution.

The writer is a visiting artist with Adishakti Theatre and currently a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University