Gentlemen Killers: The Politics of Remembering in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess

Abstract

While official discourse on history silences the violence witnessed by oppressed communities, Indian English fiction has been central in foregrounding ‘silenced’ voices. With the failure of the Nehruvian welfare-state manifest in post-Independence fiction, Indian English novel depicted the marginal ‘others’ whose presence gets erased from history. Meena Kandasamy’s first novel, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), is a memorial text that addresses the erasure of violence against Dalits by enabling acts of remembering. A re-visitation of the Kilvenmani atrocity of 1968 in which 44 dalit labourers were burnt alive by landlords, The Gypsy Goddess, while providing visibility to dalits (both within and outside the text), also causes ethical dilemmas because of its self-reflexive and playful narrative. As an experimental novel depicts a gruesome massacre, this article aims to analyze the narrative disjunction in the text, to comment on the memorial practices that the novel partakes in.