Navigating Caste in Colonial Kerala: Aquatic ontology and the politics of devotion in Sree Narayana Guru’s Daiva Dasakam

This article examines Daiva Dasakam (1914), a ten-verse Malayalam prayer by Sree Narayana Guru, as a subaltern aquatic theology emerging from the caste-stricken social geography of colonial Kerala, India. The hymn, originally intended as a collective prayer, is still used today across the Ezhava community, a caste historically subjected to untouchability and socio-spatial exclusion. Reading Guru through the frameworks of aquapelagic studies and political devotion, we argue that the hymn relocates the divine from Brahmanical land-based hierarchies to an egalitarian maritime imaginary. This aquapelagic shift enables Guru to imagine a 'touchable' God and a collective of devotees navigating beyond the reach of caste authority. The analysis demonstrates how Guru's poetic theology refuses Brahmanical legibility and constructs a heterotopic space at sea. It becomes an act of theological self-authorisation that speaks to the politics of lower-caste emancipation. This article places caste and subaltern littoral poetics at the heart of aquapelagic thought, contributing to a Blue Humanities that is expanding geographically and becoming increasingly attentive to the marginalised epistemologies of the Indian Ocean world.