Dislocations, Marginalizations, Past and Present: Pain-Experiences of Two Marginalized Communities

Abstract

This essay seeks to locate pain within sites of memory of a past that was painful, and sites of destruction of a present. It thus seeks to understand pain through two distinct avenues, across historical space, time and cultures. First there is the Tamil Jaina community with a recorded (lived) history in Tamilnadu, a state in India, from the second century BCE onwards, and its steady marginalization over time, which is remembered and reproduced through stories of persecution suffered at the hands of the dominant tradition or communities in different time-periods in history. Then, there are the adivasis (tribal communities) by the Godavari River in Andhra Pradesh-Telangana states of India, fighting their own battles against the act of destruction of both their presents and their pasts on account of a dam, the Indira Sagar Polavaram National Project, being constructed over Godavari. However, in exploring pain through these two distinct avenues, the emphasis of the essay is to highlight the need to locate beings in pain through the idea of ‘cartographies’ that are destroyed and created afresh. This essay, thus locates pain in politics—where histories, communities, cultural spaces are constantly marginalized.