The Haunted Present

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines an emergent strand in Malayalam fiction that engages inadequately acknowledged dimensions of Kerala’s social history, especially linked to depressed caste communities and the practices of slavery and forced migration. The novels and short fiction of Raju K. Vasu (b. 1959), P. F. Mathews (b. 1960), Pradeepan Pampirikkunnu (1969–2016), Johny Miranda (b. 1968), and Vinoy Thomas (b. 1975), and the earlier short fiction of C. Ayyappan (1949–2011), are prominent examples of this impulse. These writers, from Dalit, Anglo-Indian, and Luso-Indian communities, move away from social realist and modernist styles in Malayalam writing to develop new fictional imaginaries that mix fantasy and historical recall to offer a deep and conflicted engagement with contemporary Kerala. The afterlife of dead ancestors, who were victims of caste and gender oppression, shapes the fictional world, either immobilizing the present in the tight grip of haunting or serving as a resource for the new generation’s refusal of a normalizing modernity. Spirits, curses, and benedictions appear as crucial tropes, either against the background of lower-caste conversions to Christianity—in the 16th century under Dutch and Portuguese dominance and in the 19th and 20th centuries by British and European Protestant missionaries—or through the ritual invocation of ancestors by Dalit communities in Kerala. The chapter argues that these narratives may be seen as an important fictional response to Kerala’s history, its encounter with modernity, and the silences that accompany its self-perception as a progressive, enlightened, and liberal society.