‘Rhetoric of Violence’ and Representation of the Self: A Study of Select Dalit Women’s Writings in Malayalam

Women in Kerala (Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Positioning)

In Native Life in Travancore, Mateer details the ritualistic burdens upon the upper caste women in Travancore in nineteenth-century Kerala. Caste purity was maintained through endogamy, and strict prohibitions of inter-caste marriages ensured this. In addition, restrictions on the upper caste women’s sexuality were executed through various caste-based customs and rituals. This is also discussed in Malabar Manual by William Logan.

It is evident that female subjugation is critical in determining the caste-based social order and maintaining racial purity. However, Dalit women stand out of these boundaries of purity, and hence, dehumanizing this community is not a difficult task for the upper caste patriarchal society. Ideologies of caste formations allow people to consider pervasive violence against Dalit women as demonstrations of the power hierarchy. It is true that all kinds of social privileges were denied for Dalit women in Kerala. The caste as well as gender identity determined their social status. Dalit women were denied the right to cover their breasts; they were not allowed to dress in certain manners which resemble those of the upper castes; they were not allowed ornaments made of gold and silver and had to bear the sexual exploitation from the upper caste men. For instance, the nineteenth-century Travancore kingdom imposed, Mulakkaram (breast tax) on lower caste women who refused to uncover their breasts.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed several, popular social and religious reforms, brought by agitations like the Shanar Agitation, Achippudava Strike, Mukkuthi Samaram (Nose Ring Protest), Kallumala Samaram (Stone Necklace Protest) and so on for the upliftment of the social status of lower caste women in Kerala. Arattupuzha Velayudha Panicker, a popular renaissance leader, led the Achippudava Strike and aimed at earning rights for the lower caste women to wear the Achippudava, a lower garment that extended beyond the knees generally worn by upper caste ladies. He also led Mukkuthi Samarm in 1860 demanding the right for the lower caste women to wear gold nose rings. The struggle of the Shanar women in South Travancore to acquire the same rights to dress as that of the upper caste Hindu women resulted in Shanar Agitation or Breast-Cloth Agitation in 1859 (Menon, 1967, pp. 306–323). On 24 October 1915, Ayyankali called upon Dalit women to discard their stone necklaces that symbolized the regressive caste system. Hundreds of women broke and threw away their stone necklaces at the meeting place at Perinad.

However, these historical struggles could not improve the status of Dalit women as they continued to be physically assaulted by the upper castes. During the 1990s, Dalit feminism in Kerala emerged to analyze the problems of Dalit women as distinct from that of non-Dalit women. Malayali Dalit women’s writings made a paradigm shift in Kerala’s public sphere by proposing a radical understanding of Dalit women’s conditions. It contested the trend of celebrating the works of Dalit women writers of other states in India such as Shantabai Kamble, ⁵ Baby Kamble, ⁶ Urmila Pawar, ⁷ Bama ⁸ and so on, while making Malayali Dalit women writers invisible in the academic sphere. This invisibility of the Malayali Dalit women writers is inevitable as their narratives question the legitimacy and authorization of the welfare state. These testimonial narratives involve the questioning of the dehistoricization of Dalit women’s agency in the political movements of Kerala and the objectification of Dalit women as mere sexual victims by male Dalit writers. Here, the Dalit female narrators attain critical agency in the act of narration and reassert the Dalit female subjectivity disrupting the binary analysis of ‘sexed subordination’ (Rao, 2003, p. 5) by the mainstream Malayali feminists. Hence, Dalit women’s writings in Kerala represent the re-inscribed authentic self-articulations of Dalit womanhood, ideologically opposing the middle class, Brahmanical feminist politics.

Dalit women writers who emerged after the 1990s in Kerala began to discuss the interface between caste and gender in understanding caste oppression. They addressed the issue of the absence of any theoretical foundation to conceptualize the problems faced by Dalit women in Kerala. Writers such as Rekha Raj, Vijila Chirappad, ⁹ Sathy Angamaly, ¹⁰ Aleena Akashamittay, ¹¹ M. D. Dhanya, Reena Sam and others present the problems of Malayali Dalit women in the public sphere from a different lens. Raj is a distinguished writer, academic and Dalit activist in Kerala. Her writings and speeches display the Dalit feminist perspectival understanding of caste oppression. In her seminal work, Dalit Stree Idapedalukal (Raj, 2017a), she documents various political and historical events that led to the emergence of Dalit feminism in Kerala. She emphasizes the specificity of Dalit women’s issues by analyzing the perils and potentials of mainstream feminism in Kerala. The work offers profound insights into the struggles and achievements of Dalit women, amplifying their voices and experiences. According to her, Dalit women activists like Kumarakom Chinnamma, Ennipachi, Kaalu, Ammu, Aniyathal Athaani and Kuliri were part of various renaissance movements headed by Poykayil Appachan and Ayyankali (Raj, 2017a, pp. 9–10). Despite the outrage of upper castes, who denied Dalit access to public places, Panchami, a Dalit girl, joined the reformist leader Ayyankali, to enter a school in 1910 at Ooruttambalam, a small village in Kerala. The contributions made by P. K. Rosy, the first heroine of the Malayalam film industry have always been overlooked in the mainstream historical discourses. The invisibility of the Dalit women activists in Communist-led agitations in the twentieth century as well as land reform movements in Kerala demands consideration. Dalit women actively participated in the communist movements since the 1940s to the Naxalite movements in the 1960s and after. They also ‘joined alternate civil society politics [that] emerged in the 1980s apart from Dalit politics’. Yet, they remained invisible in the discourses of left politics (Raj, 2013, p. 56). This creates the need to ‘reclaim’ and ‘reconstruct’ (Rooks, 1989, p. 51) Dalit womanhood which was erased from mainstream history. Lisa Pulpparambil opines that the colonial land reforms, missionary education, religious conversions, renaissance movements, the spread of Ambedkarite ideology and so on influenced the institutionalization of Dalit feminism as distinct and crucial. Along with active participation in the labour processes, Dalit women have also played significant roles in the religious ritual practices of Dalits. It is to be noticed that their roles as caretakers during and after the time of childbirth are invaluable considering their shared experiences and the collective knowledge system of traditional medical care (Pulpparambil, 2020, pp. 12–36).

Malayali Dalit women’s writings challenge the normalization of caste-based violence in contemporary Kerala society. As Teresa De Lauretis describes in her essay ‘The Violence of Rhetoric; Considerations on Representation and Gender’, ‘“rhetoric of violence” presupposes that some order of language, some kind of discursive representation is at work not only in the concept “violence” but in the social practices of violence as well’ (p. 32). The language of violence thus codifies and constructs objects and subjects of violence which in turn propagates dominant ideologies. However, by employing unconventional strategies, the Dalit women’s writings confront the oppositional positions and dismantle the social order constructed by the propaganda of violence. Their narratives reveal how violence is normalized in the democratic society to ensure the continuance of the caste system.

The article is an attempt to understand the various levels of representation and counter-representation of caste-based violence and oppression in the three select short stories from the anthology, Don’t Want Caste: Malayalam Stories by Dalit Writers (published in 2017) edited by M. R. Renukumar and translated by Abhirami Girija Sriram ¹² and Ravi Shanker, ¹³ which is a translation of the Malayalam anthology, Njaarukal (Raj, 2017b). Renukumar is an accomplished Dalit scholar, writer, translator, and painter. His writings have a significant impact on the promotion of Dalit voices in Kerala. His poetry collection titled, Kothiyan (The Greedy) received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2019.

The stories under scrutiny in this article are Rekha Raj’s ‘Njaaru’ (Seedling), Reena Sam’s ‘Mullil Kortha Kannu’ (Thorn-Strung Eye), and M. D. Dhanya’s ‘Njangalude Aanungalum Pennungalum’ (Our Men and Women). With the employment of magical realism, generational trauma produced by the violence of the caste order on the individual psyche is sketched by these authors. Moreover, the fictional representation of the past contributes to the defining of the self and redefining of the stereotypes. The gendered understanding of the characters’ oppression also gives fresh denominations that determine the power relations existing within the community. Besides, the unconventional narrative mode delineates the marginal characters from the margins to the centre.

Materialization of Caste Oppression in Contemporary Kerala

‘Njaaru’ by Rekha Raj, narrates the tragic plight of Mathayi, a Dalit Christian farmer and his wife Anna, in liberating their identity from the clutches of caste hierarchy. The story depicts the social violence meted upon Mathayi’s family through ostracizing in independent India influenced by modern education, land reform movements and urban migrations. In the story, they have accumulated wealth to purchase agricultural land from a landlord and his children are mentioned as educated, employed and probably settled in metropolitan regions. Yet, Mathayi’s efforts to establish himself as a landowner and a large-scale farmer is shattered as the upper caste landlords refrain the labourers from working for him. His attempts to reform the downtrodden identity as a landless Dalit slave end up in meaningless hallucinations. His personal experience has political implications as it represents the materialization of caste oppression in the daily life of a Malayali Dalit. The existing social order systematizes the upper caste monopolization over the production economy. Hence, Kerala’s feudalistic economy, structured on the basis of caste hierarchy excludes Dalits from its parameters. The economic reductionism of the socialist and communist understanding of social stratification in Kerala society failed to address caste as a residual element influencing the power structure. Consequently, it overlooked the cultural and social dimensions of caste as a deeply entrenched system of exploitation and subjugation (Madhavan & Komath, 2023, p. 358). It is clear that even after the establishment of land reforms, tenancy acts and industrialization during the twentieth century, Kerala society resists such progressions by continuing upper caste dominance in the sociocultural domain. Caste acts as the major capital that determines an individual’s economic status as well as accessibility to resources. The mere legal possession of land neither ensures security nor contributes to the upliftment of Mathayi’s social status. He is not able to exercise authority over the purchased land as the existing sociocultural system makes him incapable of establishing himself as a land-owning farmer. Furthermore, the anti-bourgeois, proletarian ideologies of the left-wing parties are shown as ineffective in enforcing social justice and granting constitutional rights to the Dalits in Kerala.

The pre-independent Kerala economy was a predominantly agrarian one that thrived on its slave labourers, consisting of several Dalit communities like Pulayas, Paraiahs, Kuravas, Vedars and so on. Even after religious conversion, Mathayi and his family are still trapped in the conventions of agrarian slavery followed in Kerala. While recalling his slave forefathers into the narrative through a vision, he is revisiting the violent past that they had to endure. In the vision, a group of forefathers including old men and women, pregnant ladies, children and others from the nearby burial ground, exclusively partitioned for Dalit Christians, come to help Mathayi plant the seedlings. Through Mathayi’s vision, the author explores the historical nature of discrimination, how it has shaped the present, and depicts the impacts of the cycle of generational trauma on Dalits in Kerala. The centuries of discrimination, social exclusion and violence are part of this generational trauma. The deep scars that it has left, affect not only their economic and social status but also their mental and emotional well-being. The encounter with the slave ancestors lets Mathayi acknowledge the sufferings endured by Dalits in Kerala as an integral part of their identity and history. Moreover, the transformation of the caste order and its manifestations from the public domain to that of the private is reiterated. In other words, the spectral characters make him realize the meaning of his existence beyond the mundane world. By breaking the everyday reality, Mathayi is able to reconnect with his ancestors and identify himself as a perpetual victim of the caste order.

From this moment, the painful experience that Mathayi shares is reformulated as part of the community’s collective experience. The spectral presence creates the community sphere needed to ‘cultivate counter memory’ (Gutman, 2017, p. 3) that critiques the dominant narratives of slavery. The short story validates this ‘counter memory’ as the richest source of history for Dalits. The radical understanding of this shared past is inevitable for constructing Dalit consciousness. This history as recited by the community, counters the misrepresentations in the dominant narratives.

Mathayi’s descriptions also bring to light the social environment in which Dalit women in Kerala survive. The participation of women in physical labour outside the household is significant as they represent the community whose history is erased in the ‘conceptualization, identification and remediation’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140) of caste and sex discrimination. Their contributions to the economic system, especially in agricultural labour are prominent. Their social as well as domestic labour is important in building up the society. Mathayi acknowledges that Anna is not confined within the household walls as she contributes to the family income. He proudly proclaims that their adult children have banned Anna from working in the paddy fields of the landlords. Herein, he hopes that financial security ensures improvement of social status and honour in the society for him. This newly acquired honour has its impact on Anna’s agency and bodily movements. However, the restriction on physical mobility is described as a reassurance that Anna will no longer be exploited by the upper castes.

In the vision, Mathayi notices the crowd of dead ancestors working in his field with the majority being women folk and only a few men engaged in building up the edges of the field. This description remarks on the politics of ‘difference’ addressed by Dalit feminists. The remark about pregnant women among the labourers indicates the harsh reality that Dalit women are forced to engage in strenuous labour irrespective of their health conditions. The lack of rest and care during pregnancy can have detrimental effects on both the mother’s and the infant’s health. This sheds light on the multifaceted challenges faced by Dalit women, including economic vulnerability, social discrimination, lack of access to proper healthcare and exploitative labour practices. Hence, Dalit women form a distinct subaltern community within the broader social hierarchy. Dalit feminist discourses always seek to address these specific struggles and inequities faced by Dalit women.

Moreover, the depiction of Dalit women from the past challenges the centralization of upper-caste female experiences in the conceptualization of gender discrimination in Kerala. This community of women reminds one the existence of a class, disadvantaged at multiple levels challenging the discourses created by upper-caste women who do not share these disadvantages. It also questions the inefficiency of these discourses to restructure the ‘distribution of opportunity’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 145). It is problematic when the concerns of upper-caste women get represented as women’s issues while those of Dalit women are always at the intersections of caste and gender concerns.

The women in spectral form are depicted as capable of retorting to injustices as they are outside of the parameters determined by the hegemonic world. The aim is to generate a voice for the voiceless by incorporating the elements of surrealism. Through the scene, the author is invoking the past prompting the readers to interrogate the systematic reproductions of cultural images of Dalit women working in the field by mainstream writers.

Individualization of Violence: Affirmation of Oppositional Positions

Reena Sam is a notable Malayali Dalit woman writer whose writings articulate the harrowing realities of caste oppression and the pervasive discrimination faced by Dalit women. Through her evocative storytelling, she sheds light on the resilience and resistance within the Dalit communities, amplifying their voices. Her story ‘Mullil Kortha Kannu’ (Thorn-Strung Eye) showcases how the discourses of caste and gender ideologies turned Dalit women into spectacles of sufferings in contemporary society. The author has chosen a deeply individual and intentionally audacious narrative language. The story unfolds through the narrative voice of a schoolgirl who reminisces her childhood memories from her school. The central character is left unnamed as she shares the memories of the collective rather than the individual experiences. The narration begins with the description of the girl’s peculiar eyes. She reminisces about the power her eyes had that terrified people during her childhood days. Her pair of eyes act as the powerful weapon through which she deconstructs her identity as a victim of violence. The act of staring back is authoritative as it stands for self-representation itself. Such self-representations dismantle the upper caste’s patronizing gaze. Hence, her existence is liberated from the conventional representations of Dalit women as the spectacle of suffering. This shift in the surveillance position is typical of de-legitimizing the hegemony.

Staring is thus established as a powerful act of resistance in the story and therefore the consequences of such actions are anticipated. Nonetheless, she describes the instances of physical as well as verbal abuse she faced from her classmates and teachers at school as irresistible. ‘For instance, in Class One, our headmistress’ daughter, the very fair Athira Mohan, poked me with a slate pencil for looking at her’ (Sam, 2017, p. 130).

In the story, it is the intruding eyes of the Dalit girl that intimidate the upper caste girl. Athira’s violent opposition towards her classmate is typical of Brahmanical patriarchy that degrades the Dalit woman’s body as permanently stigmatized. Not only upper-caste men, but also upper-caste women seem to strictly follow the casteist norms. It is the sense of moral superiority that allows the upper castes to exercise complete authority over Dalit women in brutal ways.

The protagonist also recalls the violent image of her young Dalit school teacher’s death, which indirectly refers to caste discrimination. The uncertainty over his sudden death is coded in the description of his dead body. These instances show how caste oppression has transformed itself to occupy the democratic spaces in contemporary Kerala. Violence against the Dalit girl and the Dalit school teacher is normalized by ‘delegitimizing caste from the political domain’ (Rege, 2006, p. 36). Individual practices of caste oppression are neither questioned nor punished. Furthermore, the pain induced by such an incident is conveniently left unacknowledged. The author shows how these everyday instances of violence are increasingly normalized in Kerala by marginalizing the victims as vicious, and very often, depressed. This normalization eliminates any discussions of the existence and operation of caste order through social practices. Here, the social practice of violence, thus normalized—‘names certain behaviours and events as violent, but not others, and constructs objects and subjects of violence’ (De Lauretis, 2014, p. 32). The author defamiliarizes the normality of these violence by making it a spectacle in the story. This invites deeper understanding of the social manifestations of caste violence, its existence and exercise in society.

Interestingly, the characterization of the girl in this story does not follow the conventions of dissociating women’s perspectives from matters of sexuality. Her deepest sexual desires are freely translated into the narrative. Descriptions of intense female sexual desires from the perspective of an adolescent girl challenge the sovereignty claimed by the male writers over depictions of female bodies and desires. ‘We, time and again, have fallen upon a man’s portrayal of women’s bodies and desires until our women emphatically and rightfully claimed their space and efficiency to pen down open dialogues about sexuality, sexual desires and fantasies’ (Ghosh, 2019, para 1). It is shown that she feels herself moving away from her childhood fears and parental care after being exposed to discussions of sexuality in academic spaces. The act of sharing the girl’s provocative confessions of sexual fantasies in multiple love affairs since her adolescence is an authorial tool to claim Dalit woman’s ‘sexual freedom’. Discussions on sexuality, as employed in the story, provide ‘the power to articulate their perceptions about a body, a mind, a social position which belongs to them’ crossing the rubric of men’s imagination (Ghosh, 2019, para 16).

Dalit men often imposed sexual regulations on Dalit women’s bodies to counter the moral accusations of the upper castes. It was a part of restoring the dignity and improving the degraded status of the community. In the story, the narrator shares her mother’s dilemma over her childhood muteness, as her father’s brother was also mute. Furthermore, she provides a subtle reference to the probability of her mother having an illicit affair with her father’s brother. She asks, ‘was my bright, melancholic, chaste Amma’s (mother’s) suspicion misplaced?’ (Sam, 2017, p. 130). The confusion around her mother’s morality alludes to the exercise of ‘sexual freedom’ by a Dalit woman. It marks the reassertion of Dalit women’s ‘sexual freedom’ by breaking the sexual regulations instituted through marriage. The newly attained economic stability does not ensure complete improvement of social status for Dalits in today’s globalized scenario. Hence, graded patriarchy, which exists within the subaltern community, imitates dominant forms of controlling women’s sexuality. Herein, the narrator challenges the reconstitution of upper-caste patriarchy within the subaltern community with this ironical question.

Moreover, the narrator throws light upon matters of poverty and economic exploitation in the contemporary world dominated by the politics of globalization. The detailed description of her father’s physique suggests the impoverished economic conditions and exploitation of labourers in the emerging industrialized world. She narrates ‘…sweat reeking Achan with mud darkened nails and spindly legs’ (Sam, 2017, p. 130). The advent of industrialization only brought newer forms of oppression to marginalize the working-class Dalits and prohibited their social improvement by denying them access to material resources.

The story ends with the painful depiction of the protagonist’s lost love. It pinpoints the fact that choices in love marriages are politically and socially conditioned in Kerala. Romantic relationships involving people from different caste backgrounds are temporary and opportunities for such unions are limited to the upper caste population only. This is why she ends the story with a powerful statement. ‘The eyes of the one I’d wished would father my children, pierced on a thorn, writhing’ (Sam, 2017, p. 133). No wonder, the thorn metaphorically represents the caste order that obstructs him from fulfilling his feelings. Individuals are politically conditioned to organize their social behaviour in terms of dominant ideologies. While inter-caste marriages are legally sanctioned, they are not often socially admissible. An individual’s public and private lives are interlinked and ordained by certain cultural codes established by the dominant groups and any failure to follow such principles results in violence.

Representation of Violent Past to Construct Subjectivities

M. D. Dhanya gained recognition through her poetry collection titled Amygdala. Her poems transcend the boundaries of caste identity, as she fearlessly explores themes of female individuality, their diverse experiences, desires, and sexuality. In the story, ‘Njangalude Aanungalum Pennungalum’ (Our Men and Women), Dhanya follows a survivor narrative mode of storytelling while countering the popular historical discourses. The history of caste violence narrated through the employment of spectral characters contributes to the narrator’s awareness of her own self. This semiotics of the representation of violence signifies power relations and contributes to the production of Dalit subjectivities. Through the portrayal of a violent past, the author is presenting the ancestral voices that have been erased from the dominant historical narratives, thereby transforming them from objects of pity to subjects who speak.

As in the previous story, this story is also narrated by a girl child and the author explores this opportunity to innocently portray socially challenging topics without any hesitation. It is evident that the girl lives in independent Kerala, as she lacks any direct experience of slavery. Throughout the story, the author explores the culture of the narrator’s community in a sensitive and nuanced manner. As the title suggests, the story represents the lives of men and women from the nearby Dalit colony where the girl lives. The pronoun ‘Our’ in the title as well as the first person narrative voice express a sense of authenticity over the representations made in the story. The author employs the method of exploring mythical voices and superstitions to evoke a strong sense of cultural identity. The collective experiences of the community, thus narrated through the ancestral voices, oppose the moral superiority claimed by the dominant castes as it introduces a complete alternative cultural history.

The narration begins with the geographical description of a Dalit colony where people live in congested spaces. This description creates the sense of community feeling that constitutes Dalit consciousness in Kerala. As the material reality of caste can only be portrayed through the depiction of the social lives of Dalits, the little girl’s description reveals the poverty-ridden, unclean surroundings in which Dalits are forced to adjust. The expressionist description of the girl’s physical journey through her grandparents’ bedroom signifies the psychological transformation of her inner self. While crossing the room, she listens to the voices of the ancestors that reformulate her present identity. The short journey lets her experience the generational trauma shared by the community. The painful experiences of slavery are recreated and she becomes the survivor who narrates the memories of the past. As James Figarola asserts,

Conventional histories have never been able to grasp the most fundamental aspects of the experiences of slavery, a perspective which contrasts with the tremendous growth in scholarly knowledge about resistance to slavery and suggests a discursive silence from within the world of slavery. (Pichler, 2010, p. 135)

Based on the census report of 1875, 11.2% of the total population in the Travancore kingdom consisted of slaves, out of which ‘one-eighth of the entire population were sunk in outright and acknowledged slavery of the worst kind’ (Mateer, 1883, p. 298). Their deplorable condition in North Travancore is elaborated in the Church Mission Record of 1850. They were drained by poverty as the basic necessities of life were considered to be luxuries. ‘They are bought and sold like cattle, and are often worse treated. The owners had formerly power to flog them and enchain them, and in some cases to maim them, and even to deprive them of their lives’ (p. 302). Hence the Dalit population in Kerala, cannot construct their past excluding the memories of slavery. Through the imaginary depiction of the images of forefathers from the past in the current context, the narrator is unfolding the ‘viciousness of narratives aimed at freezing the horrors of slavery in a barbarous, declining its contemporary materializations’ (Boi, 2016, p. 1).

The violent memories of slavery are transmitted through the ancestral voices. The representation of such memories, omitted from the mainstream history allows the oppressed to re-negotiate with the past as well as design an alternative future. The past thus invades the present and the present derives its strength from the past. The memories of the oppressed serve as an alternative history for the writers which challenges mainstream historical depictions that often forget and misrepresent the subalterns. The production of ‘cultural memory’ ‘operates in multiple ways to solidify and fortify, unsettle, undermine, and upset dominant perceptions of the past’ (Gutman, 2017, p. 23). The politics of memory thus argues against the popular histories glorifying the cultural heritage. Herein, the individual memory transforms into social memory that is politically structured. ‘Narrative hybridization’ (Nayar, 2011, p. 368) happens when her voice gets synchronized with the voices of her ancestors and she acknowledges the generational trauma as an important part of her identity. Moreover, the recollection of memories contributes to the surrealistic representation of the narrator’s unconscious mind. As she says, ‘She grew big enough to cross the dark room in four or five strides. And yet the dead ones and the clang of chains remained in her dreams’ (Dhanya, 2017, p. 150).

The subversion of the idea of historical heroes as given in the story is emblematic of the subaltern historical discourse. The slave farmers who toil in the fields are depicted as the heroes of this narrative. Images of slavery are linked to their economic insecurity and lack of material resources. By depicting the stories of suffering and pain, the author is trying to give voice to the voiceless. Henceforth, the representation of violent memories from the past aids emancipation from contemporary forms of age-old slavery.

The ‘chorus of voices’ (Rege, 2006, p. 16) produced by the dead ancestors is depicted as the main source of the narrator’s creativity. Gutman defines this as ‘memory activism’—the ‘strategic commemoration of a contested past’ (Gutman, 2017, p. 1). Perhaps, the narrator represents the ‘individual self-seeking affirmation in a collective mode’. She believes that her creative articulations will surpass the limited cultural imagination attributed to the lower castes. Ironically the story of the community begins where the story of the individual ends. The narrator’s search for identity is closely linked to this. The journey is also an expression of the continuing search for Dalit selfhood that the age-old casteism has failed to curtail.

The narration also involves glimpses of memories in oral narratives that are transmitted through generations which forms the core of Dalit consciousness. As these stories embody their customs and belief systems, the author claims this as the fundamental source of their cultural history. The stories expose the role of caste as a ‘metalanguage’ (Higginbotham, 1992, p. 251) by recalling its powerful, all-encompassing influence upon the construction and representation of other power relations existing in society, especially, gender, class and sexuality.

As Cornell West states, ‘the widespread refusal of black intellectuals to remain, in some visible way, organically linked with Afro-American culture’ (West, 1985, p. 112) is one of the reasons for the paucity of black intellectual activities. This comment echoes the scarcity of intellectual activities by Dalit women in Kerala. The present story is an attempt to fill this intellectual vacuum created by inadequate material resources. The emancipatory narrative mode in the story counters the oppressive silences/ silencing of history. The narration is thus an attempt to fill the voids in history with the subaltern memories recollected in an imagined form.

Conclusion

As Gopal Guru has noted, one’s ‘social location determines the perception of reality’ (Guru, 1995, p. 2548). Accordingly, these stories by Dalit women writers are distinctive in reconstructing the silenced history and the political understanding of the status of Dalits in Kerala. The writers bank on the creative vibrancy and political vitality of the newly emerged Dalit women intellectuals in the twenty-first century. They follow the path of new generation Dalit women writers like Pradnya Pawar, ¹⁴ Chaya Koregaonkar ¹⁵ and Shilpa Kamble. ¹⁶ The change in social scenario has brought a paradigm shift in Dalit women’s writings in India. Educated people from the Dalit communities have entered universities, literary and art spheres and have been subjected to newer and varying forms of discrimination. Hence, their experiences of social exclusion are unique. As Maya Pandit observes in her 2017 article, ‘How three generations of Dalit women writers saw their Identities and Struggle’, Dalit women writers who emerged during and after the 1990s exhibit a thematic distinctiveness in their writings as compared to the older generation (Pandit, 2017). This transition from caste identity to more deliberate discussions on sexuality, globalization, industrialization and class division questions the Dalit organizations concentrating on religious dogmatism and Dalit men’s understanding of community identity.

‘Njaaru’ presents the continuing upper caste monopoly over the agrarian sector in Kerala. Like the stories of C. Ayyappan, ¹⁷ Raj evokes ‘the darker diabolic other world with a deconstructive and reconstructive potential’ (Sekher, 2016, p. 19) through the protagonist’s vision. On the other hand, ‘Mullil Kortha Kannu’ depicts the internal trauma that a Dalit girl has to undergo throughout her life since school days. By carefully drawing the mindscape of the narrator at crucial stages of her life, the author represents the unpresentable. Similarly, ‘Njangalude Aanungalum Pennungalaum’ attempts to document the imaginative historiography of Dalits through the spectral voices of her ancestors that have been erased from the mainstream discourses. Through the act of writing, the author revisits the ‘repressed histories of hurt and humiliation’ (Rao, 2003, p. 3). The three stories communicate present-day violence as well as the effects of memories of violence and oppression. Perhaps the caste order in Kerala society is demonstrated through symbolic violence against Dalits. The writers’ modus operandi involves making caste violence a spectacle thereby broadening its scope and centrality in the daily lives of Malayali Dalits. The stories are authentic representations of the selves critiquing the rhetoric of the normalcy of caste violence in mainstream discourses. Subverting the common equations of the perpetrator–victim binary, these stories challenge the construction of a pre-determined object of violence as Dalits, along with critiquing the semiotic productions of gender in caste oppression.