Postmodernism and politics in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess

Abstract

Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel The Gypsy Goddess tackles the plight of a community of Dalit agricultural labourers who live and work in inhuman conditions, coping with the unrelenting oppression and heartbreaking atrocities inflicted upon them by their ruthless upper-caste landlords in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In particular, this novel revolves around the historical massacre that took place in the village of Kilvenmani on Christmas Day, 1968. The aim of this article will be to analyse the different ways in which Kandasamy, so far known as a critically acclaimed poet, uses the novel as a literary genre, together with some well-known postmodern theories and strategies, in order to disclose the shortcomings of traditional linear plot-driven novels, criticize the exoticism so often displayed in contemporary Indian fiction, unearth the “other” side of official Indian history, dig up the traumatic story of an entire Dalit community’s fight for freedom, and give voice to those who were for so long relegated to silence, invisibility, and oblivion. As this analysis will make clear, the experimental nature of this novel allows Kandasamy to confront readers with an unpalatable reality beyond the capacity of the conventional realist novel.

Introduction

Since she was a teenager, Meena Kandasamy has felt the need to write about contemporary Indian issues, especially the social rules and assumptions that assign specific and fixed roles to people on the grounds of caste and gender. Interestingly, it was poetry that first sparked her particular interest. When she was asked why she had chosen poetry as a weapon against discrimination, she explained that it was poetry that allowed her to escape the constrictions concomitant with academic language, and become an activist: “poetry is not caught up within larger structures that pressure you to adopt a certain set of practices while you present your ideas in the way that academic language is. Despite being an academic myself, I dread academia’s ultra-intellectualizing”. The reason for Kandasamy’s dislike of academic discourse is mainly because this is not “the language to speak of the oppressed […] the language in which any victim would speak” (qtd. in Duarte, 2010: n.p.). At the age of 17, Kandasamy wrote her first poetry in English, and also started translating books by Dalit writers into English. Touch (2006) was her first published poetry collection and has been translated into five different languages. Her second poetry collection, Ms Militancy (2010), retells Hindu and Tamil myths from an anti-caste feminist perspective.

Although the awakening of her political and literary conscience occurred at a time of concerted violence against India’s lowest castes, the source of Kandasamy’s rebellious attitude can also be found in her own home, as she grew up in an extremely conservative Hindu family, and also suffered domestic abuse at the hands of her husband, whom she eventually divorced. Violence, she has concluded, “plays a ‘universal’ social role in India, despite its reputation for peaceful protest” (qtd. in Kidd, 2014: n.p.). It was her need to make a wider reading public aware of the Indian outcastes’ suffering of poverty and constant violent reprisals that led her to put poetry aside temporarily and try her hand at writing The Gypsy Goddess, a postmodern/metafictional novel with a fearsome political agenda or, as James Kidd puts it, “a novel of self-conscious experimentalism and unmistakable fury”, which “throws down a gauntlet to conservative literary and political sensibilities, especially in India” (2014: n.p.). Her main sources of inspiration for this unconventional novel were, on the one hand, the story of her own landless and orphaned father, who escaped rural poverty by moving to Chennai, where he eventually completed a PhD; and, on the other, the massacre that was perpetrated on 25 December 1968 at Kilvenmani, a village in the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu, where a number of women and children were burnt to death for taking part in a strike to ask for improved wages and fundamental human rights.

The Gypsy Goddess as a postmodernist Dalit novel

In her writing of The Gypsy Goddess, Meena Kandasamy critically engages with conventions of the novel as a literary genre, in concert with well-known postmodern theories and strategies. She does this in order to disclose the shortcomings of traditional plot-driven linear novels, to criticize the complacent exoticism so often displayed in contemporary Indian fiction that mainly aims at enticing the non-Indian reader, and to unearth the other side of official Indian history by digging up the traumatic story of an entire Dalit community’s fight for freedom, thus rendering silenced Dalits audible and visible.

In keeping with some central postmodernist tenets, such as: the questioning of all kinds of universal or official, and by extension realist, discourses as transparent accounts of reality; the relative nature of truth, always linked with power; and the urgent need to realize that ideology, or how one particular culture represents itself to itself, systematically naturalizes narrative representation by offering what actually is constructed meaning as something inherent in that which is being represented, The Gypsy Goddess strives to show that the past is no longer an objectified entity that can be fully grasped and comprehended, and thus neutrally represented. It is, instead, something with which we must come to terms through its traces (such as documents, testimonies, archival materials, and so on). As Linda Hutcheon, one of the early and key theorists of literary postmodernism, warned, we should be conscious that “facts are events to which we have given meaning. Different historical perspectives therefore derive different facts from the same events” (1988: 57). However, the fact that different individuals can come up with different, and at times even contradictory, interpretations does not deprive these narratives of meaning and value. On the contrary, the proliferation of narratives of many different kinds undoubtedly contributes to revealing that truth is never monolithic and one-sided, since it is possible to interpret and narrate the same event in different ways. Consequently, the more stories we are told, the more perspectives we are offered, the better, for it is only through all of this diversity that multifaceted reality can be properly approached.

Not only does The Gypsy Goddess testify to the fact that we cannot avoid representation, but its self-conscious nature also pays tribute to metafiction as the genre whose

lowest common denominator […] is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinctions between “creation” and “criticism” and merges them into the concepts of “interpretation” and “deconstruction”. (Waugh, 1984: 6)

Generally speaking, what provides the impulse for the writing of metafictional novels is the search for self-identity against the background of history, and the conviction that literature can disclose truths that cannot be grasped from traditional or dominant historical narratives, focusing on characters marginalized on grounds of class, race, sex, or culture, and revolving around past events which, having been regarded as unimportant or marginal by those holding power, have ended up silenced or relegated to oblivion.

It is undeniable that, while mainstream Indian literature insists on shunning and distorting Dalit concerns, contemporary Dalit literature is striving to bring them to the fore, and often with a vengeance. ¹ In spite of the fact that recognition for Dalit works is still rather poor, the late 1980s saw the emergence of many Dalit writers on both the regional and the national level, and there are now numerous Dalits writing in almost all the Indian languages, and some Dalit writing has even been included in Indian university syllabi. ² The Gypsy Goddess is a good example of this ever-growing Dalit field of defiant literature. If, as P. Sivakami (2012: 436) argues, Kuruthipunal, the novel published in 2006 by Brahmin writer Indira Parthasarathi, represented the killing of 44 Dalit agricultural labourers in Kilvenmani as precipitated by the sexuality of the murderer, Gopalsamy Naidu, then Kandasamy’s novel revolves around the same tragic event but this time making it clear that it is caste and untouchability, and not sex, that were to blame for this massacre. To quote Sivakami again, most Dalit narratives “largely focus on the past and present experiences, historical struggle, language, and culture of Dalit people” (2012: 436) while encapsulating a Dalit aesthetic which, in line with Ambedkar’s notion of Dalithood, ³ might be defined as the expression of their fight “against exploitation, repression, and marginalization” (2012: 439). In this light Kandasamy’s novel clearly partakes in the revolutionary political agenda. On the other hand, it conspicuously foregrounds and relies on sophisticated postmodern theories in order to counter mainstream literary scholars’ claims that, since Dalit literature is “subjective and based on narrow identity-politics […] it constitutes a celebration of the marginal and a denial of all other concerns” (Sivakami, 2012: 436).

The Gypsy Goddess opens with the Prologue, which contains the letter or memorandum written by Gopalakrishna Naidu, the President of the Paddy Producers’ Association, to the Chief Minister of Madras, in order to complain about the dangerous spread of communist ideas among agricultural labourers in the region, and ask for the “immediate redressal of the grievances of paddy cultivators” (Kandasamy, 2014: 3). ⁴ Part One, titled “Background”, is a literary, and to some extent also philosophical, digression into the author’s anxieties about how to tell her story; about the subversive power of the novel’s hybrid English, interestingly labelled as “Taminglish”, “a crime against the [English] language” (31), and of humble prose over despotic poetry; about her choices of the standpoints from where to construct the narrative; about the numbing effect of nostalgia or exotica in many contemporary Indian novels; and about the relativity and unreliability of official historical discourses. Some legends are touched upon, and then bits and pieces of the history of the Nagapattinam district (to which Kilvenmani belongs) are given: from the Greeks to the Danes, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and finally the British, to end up offering some snapshots of the district’s present sociopolitical situation. Intertextuality is yet another recurrent device; the novel teems with literary references and allusions to such authors as Conrad, Dostoevsky, Kundera, Steinbeck, and Vonnegut, in an attempt, it seems, to add more and more layers of meaning to an already complex and convoluted narrative. The reader is being constantly addressed, warned, and compelled to play an active role and bear with the lack of “order, system, sequence, or result” (31) that “this fancy prose style” (29) so adamantly deploys:

If you are finding this difficult to follow, remember that not only am I weighed down by the task of telling a story, but also that you are equally responsible for your misery. […] Life is linear, I can hear you argue. It is, but it is cyclical, too. If you ask a mathematician, she will tell you that life possibly exists in the nth dimension, and beyond the third, none of your fucking senses can perceive anything at all. That’s where stories unravel themselves. Those of you stressed out by this haphazard storytelling, please relax. Stay, those of you who have thought too many times of wandering away. How far from me can you stay? This is a joint venture. We collaborate on the critical condition that we do not abandon each other. (32)

Several possible beginnings are then offered, using the traditional formula “once upon a time”: “Once upon a time, in one tiny village, there lived an old woman”; “Once upon a time, in another tiny village, there lived another old woman”; “Once upon a time, in some village of some size, there lived an old woman” (13–14; emphasis in original), but none of them actually reveals who this “old woman” is whose story is apparently going to be narrated, and none of these tentative beginnings is regarded as convincing and final. “I am willing to try everything to get this story across” (29), the narrator–author exclaims, as she questions the consistency and relevance of well-consolidated critical terms such as realism, modernism, postmodernism, even postcolonialism. Subversion lies at the core of her artistic declaration of intentions. As she puts it, her art “plagiarizes the most scathing criticism”, and “prides itself on its ability to disappoint” (30). Even the novel’s title is brought into question. Relying once again on well-known poststructuralist theories, the narrator–author dares to affirm that coherence in the choice of title is totally irrelevant:

The minute you realize that the novel is quite unlike the university dissertation, you gain the necessary courage to be experimental. You will soon realize, especially if you have been confounded by Derrida-Schmerrida at college, that a book does not have to be about its title. A title does not have to be about the book. Trust me, they are generous enough to co-exist with each other. (39)

Several possible titles were considered (Long Live Revolution, The Red Flag, Tales from Tanjore, Butcher Boys, Kilvenmani, Christmas Day), but all of them were finally rejected to “settle on the curiously obscure and mildly enchanting choice, The Gypsy Goddess” (41). Although an abridged version of the legend of the Gypsy Goddess is given (44), and some connections might be established between this mythical figure and the character of Maayi, the old woman upon whom it falls to hold her village people together after the massacre, there is no way in which readers can unquestionably relate this cult goddess to any specific character in the novel. However, given the fact that according to legend she is the sublimated embodiment of seven gypsy women who were murdered along with their babies, it could be argued that the gypsy goddess stands for, and can be easily identified with, all the victims in the novel. Yet, the final words of Part One prevent readers from clinging to any reassuring conclusion: “Now, you can forget about this, and move on to the novel. Fuck these postmodern writers” (46; emphasis in original).

A beginning like this is bound to confound and put off many readers but, as I have suggested, this is by no means a conventional novel. The first chapter of Part Two (“The Cutthroat Comrades”) offers, in quite a realist mode, a critical description of Gopalakrishna Naidu’s personality and of the autocratic way in which he conducts the Emergency Executive Committee Meeting of the Paddy Producers Association, to be followed by other chapters which, although swerving away from realism and a linear narrative style once again, nonetheless manage to plunge readers straight into the story of a village and a people. It must be noted that, however experimental this and the following sections may be, they paradoxically narrate a true story, part of the long history of caste conflict and the struggles of agricultural labourers in India. They tackle the plight of a community of agricultural labourers, largely Dalits, who live and work in inhuman conditions, coping with the unrelenting oppression and atrocities inflicted upon them by their ruthless upper-caste landlords in Tanjore district in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. At the time the novel is set, in 1968, the Green Revolution is well under way and the farm yields of paddy have risen. The agricultural labourers are mobilized by the Communist Party leaders to demand a higher share of the yield, and they decide to go on strike, but most landlords manage to break the strike. However, there is one village, Kilvenmani, which decides to defy their landlords, keep their red flags hoisted, and refuse to go back to work. On the night of 25 December 1968, the landlords send in rowdies to attack these rebellious labourers. Knowing that they are their target, most able male villagers desperately run away to save their lives, but most women, children, and old people remain in the village. They all try to hide in a hut, but their attackers lock them up, bolt the door from the outside, and set fire to the hut, burning alive the 44 people locked inside. Weeks later, most perpetrators are acquitted in corrupt courts and biased investigations, and all evidence of the crime is cynically removed or quickly destroyed. The traumatized victims of the massacre, meanwhile, are charged with murder and armed rebellion and taken to jail, or else left to their own devices and mercilessly made to relive the tragedy once and again — “We burned all over again” (220), one of the victims complains — till they are completely “forgotten. That was all. This was it” (217). The Dalits and their plight are “digested easily” (222) by the caste Hindus, ⁵ which inevitably brings to mind Aniket Jaaware’s well-known contention that “the non-dalits manag[e] to eat the dalit, without ever really having to eat with the dalit” (2001: 281; emphasis in original). Whereas Jaaware refers to the ever-increasing circulation and consumption of Dalit poetry among non-Dalits, which by no means makes the latter commit themselves to the Dalit cause, in this context it can be used to denounce the same ease with which the upper castes systematically digest and dispose of the Dalit problem.

Caste/class/gender

One of the issues with which critics such as Kavita Bhanot (2014: 1) have found fault is the novel’s vague and, on the whole, elusive treatment of the complex relationship between caste and class in this fight against the landowners, an ongoing issue between communists and Dalit activists. As Anupama Rao (2013: 55) contends, caste and class imply different things and should never be equated:

Unlike capitalist relations of production to which labour was central, caste society was not organized around bourgeois accumulation. […] In this schema the Untouchables’ labour did not “count”; it was extraneous because it was already defined as defiled and impure. In brief, the problem […] involves the collision of two kinds of body history, of the body as value, and the body as dispossessed and disposable life. (2013: 53; emphasis in original)

To transform caste into class, Rao goes on to argue, simply ignores “caste’s history as (Hindu) violence” (2013: 55). As many Dalits see it, Marxist interpretations have often concluded that the Dalit movement is not an independent movement with a clear-cut political agenda: Marxist critics insist on giving priority to their category of class at the expense of ignoring that of caste, which prevents them from fully understanding the idiosyncratic Dalit identity. It is undeniable that The Gypsy Goddess touches upon this issue, making it clear that the Communist Party is anything but well-organized and ideologically consistent, and that this sociopolitical/religious territory can be rather slippery. As it happens, the party flirts with the established political system, trying to oppose the system while also abiding by the system’s rules:

The party had morphed itself to enjoy the charms of the parliamentary system, and it consoled its cadre that it was playing by the rules of this new game. But also to fulfil its role as a revolutionary force among the proletariat for which it was originally intended, the party’s local offices held public meetings everywhere. (125–26)

Moreover, communist leaders in the novel insist on regarding the untouchable castes as “the majority of the working-class peasantry” (95), and firmly believe that caste is their main enemy to fight and defeat, since it is “the caste mentality that divides the working classes” (79). This is the reason why, whenever the issue of caste was raised, this was done “only at the edges, at the wing tips, so that it could be brushed off before [they] would all launch into fight” (218–19). However, this approach can only oversimplify the problem. What some of these untouchables say with regard to the communists’ Marxist doctrine speaks for itself: “We were told that Marx had written about this. We were told that because we worked with our hands, we were the working class. We were also told that because we worked, and because they hated work, they hated us. […] That explained everything that required explanation” (219). The communist leaders use Marxist theories to explain everything but, as the last sentence in the previous quotation discloses with a touch of sarcasm, it is obvious that Marxism can in no way fully account for the incredible complexity that characterizes the traditional Indian social fabric. In short, although it is clear that Kandasamy’s novel is aware of this problem, it fails to tackle it in depth, for it simply brings it to light without ever exploring deeply into its far-reaching consequences and implications.

Another interesting issue that the novel subtly addresses is that of the specific problems and resilience of Dalit women, thus contributing to creating a distinct space for them by echoing the main concerns of the Dalit feminist movement, which, as K. A. Geetha argues, are mainly three: “to identify the contradictions in the thought and praxis of mainstream feminist movements, which deny space to Dalit women; […] to mobilize Dalit women and work towards freedom and self-respect; and […] to seek an identity as a Dalit and woman” (2012: 416). The Gypsy Goddess highlights the role played by Dalit women in their village’s fight for dignity and freedom, not only in the naming of the novel for this legendary female figure, but also in the description of the Dalit women who make up the Kilvenmani community. The novel reveals both their subjugated existence and the strong bond that keeps their spirit alive and dauntless. Unlike the figure of the Muselmann, which Agamben describes as the broken prisoner in a death camp who can no longer respond to his surroundings, because he has been stripped of all dignity, of all humanness (Agamben, qtd. in Roth, 2012: xx), these women dare to defy their oppressors and to risk their lives in order to preserve their humanity and fight for their right to a better existence:

When women take to protest, there is no looking back. […] Sometimes their demands are related to women alone […]. Most of the time, they fight for everybody. […] The jails are full of fighting Madonnas. They are not afraid. They are not afraid of arrests. They are not afraid of hurt. […] The landlords punish these shrill-voiced women by stripping them almost naked and tying them to trees and whipping them in front of the whole village. The police punish them by making them kneel and walk a few miles on their knees until they have no choice but to crawl. These blows do not break them. They are bold beyond the bruised skin and the bleeding knee. (75–76)

The Gypsy Goddess as a trauma novel

The massacre of Dalits in Kilvenmani has been registered in historical records and memoirs of several kinds (commemorative events have been hosted by communists, and there is even a memorial that lists the names of all 44 victims). However, by turning this atrocity into a novel Kandasamy highlights the most unpalatable and heartbreaking aspects, which have heretofore been elided, and at the same time she challenges the limits of the novel as form. As Urvashi Butalia puts it:

when Kandasamy deploys her pen — or indeed her keyboard, and her passion, her anger, her rage at the ease with which the villagers were blamed for what happened to them […] she turns the very notion of what makes a novel on its head. (2014: n.p.).

In doing so, fiction reveals itself as the weapon that can best attempt to unearth the hidden traumatic past, being nonetheless aware of the complex ethical problems that all representations of the past are bound to raise. The Gypsy Goddess could consequently be read as a trauma novel that partakes of the postmodernist project that strives to bring to mind, or to remember, what official historical records have purposely relegated to forgetfulness. As Anne Whitehead explains:

In the face of mounting amnesia, there is an urgent need to consciously establish meaningful connections with the past. Postmodernist fiction is part of this memory project. Its innovative forms and techniques critique the notion of history as grand narrative, and it calls attention to the complexity of memory. Trauma fiction emerges out of postmodernist fiction and shares its tendency to bring conventional narrative techniques to their limit. In testing formal boundaries, trauma fiction seeks to foreground the nature and limitations of narrative and to convey the damaging and distorting impact of the traumatic event. (2004: 82)

In tune with other postmodernist trauma novels, The Gypsy Goddess uses many devices to shock readers and make them play an active role in this harrowing reading process. To begin with, in keeping with Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (raznorechie, literally “different-speech-ness”) as articulated in “Discourse in the Novel” (1935/1981), the narration is by no means linear and contains a variety of narrative voices, genres, and compositional forms. ⁶ Different chapters take different forms: a letter, a communist pamphlet, a literary digression, a prisoner’s declaration, a trauma narrative, an official report. Although this generic hybridity generally allows for the location and expression of different consciousnesses, voices, accents, registers, and outlooks on the world, the novel’s narrative polyphony can sometimes be said to cut both ways: on the one hand, it makes it clear that reality is by no means transparent and monolithic, which clearly contributes to undermining the illusion and wish for unity, fixity, coherence, and reliability that governs most official discourses; on the other hand, it calls attention to the risks that a polyphonic story must necessarily take, and to the helplessness and silence to which unconventional disturbing stories are often condemned. To give just one obvious example, the survivors of the massacre tell their own trauma stories to the court and the commission or, rather, they strive to work through their traumatic blockage in order to desperately try to articulate the unspeakable into a partially comprehensible narrative, but most of them fail, and these official institutions are not pleased with their versions. The Special Additional First-Class Magistrate blames them for lack of consistency, and makes the most of his mastery of English, a language which “could shoot like darts, [which] could curl and coil around itself” (248), to use this variety or difference as an excuse to acquit the accused and turn the guilty innocent:

Perhaps he wanted a single story: uniform, end to end to end. The “Once upon a time, there lived an old lady in a tiny village” story. Sadly, we are not able to tell such a story. A story told in many voices is seen as unreliable. […] We were bound to lose. Because we do not know how to tell our story. Because we do not rehearse. Because some of us are tongue-tied. Because all of us are afraid and the fear in our hearts slurs the truth in our voice. (234–35)

Moreover, the novel plays with an alternation of first-/second-/third-person narration: “I was the first to come and tell everybody” (157); “it was a suffering that we had never undergone so far” (109); “now that you have swallowed the pulp, you can leave the peel intact” (107); “Sundaram […] complained of how she had to go and plead to Ramanuja Naidu” (116); “And then they shared more stories” (117; emphasis added). This alternation is put to different uses: it is clear that this constant change of point of view contributes to underlining the heteroglot nature of the novel, and by extension of Indian society; but above all it obliges readers not only to change perspectives and see facts from different angles and perspectives, but also to partly experience the vicarious trauma that many witnesses end up suffering after listening to victims’ heart-wrenching testimonies. There is no actual protagonist: the novel does not exclusively focus on the deeds and traumas of one individual character, but rather explores the myriad of traumas that this unfair society is causing. Chapter 13, for example, titled “A Survival Guide”, is a collection of different survivors’ traumas. Although the character of Maayi is used as the link between all of these apparently disconnected narratives, no comparisons between them are possible, since each of these traumas is unutterable, personal, and therefore untransferable. And yet, the whole village is plunged into the same paralysing madness: “The living in Kilvenmani lack life. Everyone is something else […]. It is strange, the way in which the village has exchanged its sorrow for insanity” (211). As well-known trauma critics such as Cathy Caruth (1995: 4–10) have explained, it is the very unassimilated nature of trauma, the fact that the event was not acknowledged or experienced fully at the time, that later on returns to haunt the survivor. ⁷ Most of these trauma victims suffer from a blockage that prevents them from reacting against, even acknowledging, what is actually happening to them, but are nonetheless haunted by memories that devour them from the inside, to the point that some of them end up taking their own lives to put an end to this torment. The case of Arumugam’s daughter can be given as an example:

She is caught between his fear and her lack of any idea of what happened. The terror talks to her body in strange ways. She shivers when she is alone. She has seizures in her sleep. She needs to be held by someone. […] She keeps asking about the others, her friends. She calls them, one by one. They are dead, but to her it doesn’t matter. Perhaps they come and stand in a line. […] Perhaps they dance too, one leg in the air, half-bent, and then the other. Perhaps they can only stay still. She doesn’t tell the elders about her friends. After she’s called their names, after she is sure that all the boys and the girls have come, after she has finished playing, she spins like a top under a frenzied whip, and falls down in a swoon. That is when Maayi is summoned. (201)

Perhaps one of the most powerful and moving passages in the book is the description of the fire that killed the labourers in Chapter 10, titled “Mischief by Fire”. There is no punctuation whatsoever, and the whole chapter becomes one single sentence that hauntingly reproduces the fragmented, convoluted, and distorted narrative of what could be the intrusive hallucination suffered by a traumatized survivor. To quote just one excerpt:

and in desperation a mother throws her one-year-old son out of the burning hut but the boy is caught by the leering mobsters and chopped into pieces and thrown back in and in that precise yet fleeting moment of loss and rage everyone realizes that they would die if their death meant saving a loved one and that they would die if their death meant staying together and that they would die anyway because it would not be as disastrous as living long enough to share this sight and so alone and together they prepare to resign themselves to the fact that they have mounted their collective funeral pyre (164)

As Cathy Caruth (1995: 153–54) explains, the survivor of trauma is confronted, not only with the brutal facts of that traumatic (non)event, but also with the fact that their occurrence defies simple comprehension. The recurring flashbacks or traumatic re-enactment testify to both the truth of an event and the truth of its incomprehensibility, which in turn creates a dilemma for historical understanding. The amnesiac re-enactment is a story that is difficult to tell and hear; it is not addressed to anybody and therefore becomes a solitary activity. Trauma requires integration, both for the sake of testimony and for the sake of a cure, that is, trauma must be transformed into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to become part of the survivor and his or her community’s knowledge of the past. However, this narrative memory runs the risk not only of lacking the precision and force that characterize traumatic memory, but also of losing the event’s essential incomprehensibility, thus turning the unutterable experience of shock into a stable, and therefore banal and mitigated, understanding of it. Taking all of this into account, it would be no exaggeration to conclude that this chapter’s distorted grammar is a laudable attempt to pay respect to the incommensurable anguish experienced by those traumatized survivors, and by so doing bringing to light the unpalatable horror of the massacre. This harrowing passage is set against the cold-blooded official description of the 42 remains (the corpses of two babies were not actually registered) as written down in Inspector Rajavel’s inquest forms, given two chapters before. Suffice it to give number one as an example:

1. Male, age not known, nobody can identify body; height 4’10’’; marital status not known; protruding tongue, body totally burnt below the hip, hand flexed at the elbow, blackened blood all over the body (151)

The aseptic tone of this macabre tabulation also has a strong emotional effect: human remains are dealt with as if they were disposable parts of an inanimate artefact; not only are they deprived of their dignity, but also of their humanity, and thus of their right to live and be the agents of their own existence.

Even more disquieting is Chapter 7, “A Walking Corpse”, in which the narrator–author flirts with the idea that she was commissioned to help Gopalakrishna Naidu to write a letter to the chief minister, asking him for urgent intervention and protection against the communists who, he claimed, were eager to kill him. He wants this letter to read like his suicide note, and the narrator–author obeys his orders without showing the smallest hint of remorse:

This is his working principle, his modus operandi, his craving to cash in on a sympathy wave. I catch the hint and decide to use every tear-jerking, heart-wrenching adjective at my disposal. Following his advice, I also learn to successfully imitate the formula of his previous letters and thus, under his guidance, I perfect my knowledge of officialese, petitionese, and memorandumese. (137)

She knows she has “become the mouthpiece of a miserable man” (141), and is sure her mother would be ashamed of her but, at some point, cannot help feeling some kind of sexual arousal: “I allowed my roving eye to even size up this middle-aged man […]. His eyes, drunk on decadence, sized me up in turn” (144). The Epilogue, by contrast, invites the reader to become the writer who, like the narrator–author, goes to Kilvenmani and wants to talk to everybody, victims and perpetrators alike, in order to corroborate facts, gather evidence and testimonies, and thus produce a balanced and neutral article/report. ⁸ However, as the novel also makes clear, no neutrality, no equanimity is possible in cases like this. When you (the reader–writer) say to the villagers that you also want to speak to their oppressor, they distrust your good intentions, and let you reach Gopalakrishna Naidu’s house, where you find out that he has been beheaded and that 44 parcels, each wrapped in palm fronds, have been sent to the people. It is only at this very moment that the novel can conclude, because “It has been completed. We have seen the end” (273).

Although the perpetrator finally meets the punishment that he deserves, the ethical dilemma that these provocative passages contain undoubtedly deserves some attention. It seems that moral boundaries, like literary and generic boundaries, can be rather porous, which leads us to ponder and interrogate the problematic relationship between literature and ethics, all the more so when Dalit literature is under discussion. As Aniket Jaaware suggests, it is when literature dares to tackle the ethical contradictions that are concomitant with human beings, especially when they are put under extreme conditions, that the personal and the literary become unequivocally political:

It is […] more than evident that the literary work does not have behind it a conception of any “disinterested interest” or “non-purposive purposiveness” — it is not “aestheticized” in the post-Kantian European sense, neither in the American New Critical sense of an aesthetic object that is autonomous, autotelic, etc. In fact, the clearly identifiable fracture between style and content serves, initially to sensitize the reader to the gruesome lives that are narrativized, and later to initiate what could be called an ethical consideration, as the reader gets to read of the impossible performative situations in which characters find themselves: the reader reads through a narrative that highlights the ethical as an experience of the impossibility of being ethical, and yet perform an action which will have consequences for oneself and for others. […] This ethical destitution is necessary, because it is only here, in this impoverished place, that a fusing of representation in the literary sense, and representation in the political sense can be brought about. (2012: 27–28)

Conclusion

The experimental nature of The Gypsy Goddess allows Kandasamy to confront readers with death, extreme violence, sheer injustice, and an unfair and unbearable reality that no conventional realist novel could have possibly depicted with such poignancy and forcefulness. After all, as critics such as Andrew J. McKenna have argued (qtd. in Crosthwaite, 2009: 17), “the question of the postmodern […] is the question of survival, of living on after the dead. A postmodern consciousness is indissociable […] from the consciousness of being a survivor, of living on. […] It is also, I argue, a matter of decisive historical consequence”. At the same time, it also manages to pre-empt every single objection that the reader could possibly post against its postmodernist excess:

Don’t bother asking me about authorial decorum and all that jazz. I am not running for Miss Congeniality. I stopped practising politeness at tenth grade. Because I have taken pleasure in the aggressive act of clobbering you with metafictive devices, I can hear some of you go: what happened to the rules of a novel? They are hanging on my clothesline over there. (128)

It is undeniable that the novel has a vital political agenda, which Urvashi Butalia wonderfully summarizes as follows:

at a moment when much is being made of corporate power […] caste oppression and violence have not gone away and no matter how many books are written about them, or how many inquiry committees look into them, there is still a long road to be travelled. (2014: n.p.)

The reader is directly addressed throughout the novel, from the very beginning till the Epilogue: “Come and occupy the novel, dear reader. […] enter this story” (259–60). However, the novel also makes it clear that it is a novel, and, as such, free to confront its readers with multiple and polemically contradictory realities and perspectives, and to roam freely in the realm of the inoperable. These stories are not merely stories of suffering, of deprivation, of Dalitness. Just as a monolithic notion of truth is no longer admissible, fictional narratives should not be used as mere testimonies or evidence, since they conjure up a different realm altogether. They partake of the ethical undecidability that departs from the shared moral universe that claims that caste injustice is morally wrong. They render us ethically destitute, but also and most importantly, they open up an ethical void that might, at some point, hopefully give rise to political action.