Speculating Dalit History in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess

Abstract

 Dalit (untouchable caste) lives, pasts and experiences have either been excised from the historical archive or represented as objects of upper caste epistemologies. This erasure from history has compelled Dalit writers to reject nationalist chronologies and assert their historicity through different means. Focusing on Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess, a novel that examines one of post-Independence India’s most horrific cases of anti-Dalit violence, this paper traces how Dalit literature harnesses imaginative, speculative and mythological modalities to construct an alternative historical framework. Dominant history writing is predicated on notions of progress that are unavailable to Dalits. I suggest that Kandasamy’s depiction of the Kilvenmani massacre of 1968, re-writes nationalist history, displacing its pretensions to advancement with an iterative, mutating casteism that halts all progress. The novel negotiates archival limits and draws together oral narratives and folk memories to place a Dalit event at the nexus of national and transnational histories. Kandasamy indicates that the resuscitation of Dalit pasts and the cultivation of Dalit epistemologies is crucial to fashioning a historical space that represents marginalised groups.