Abstract
The Sri Lankan-born diaspora writer Shobasakthi’s novel is about a Dalit village in Mullaitivu, Vavuniya District after the Mullivaikal war. The Periya Pallan Kulam villagers carry not only the scars from Mullivaikal, where the state had used all its might on bombing these poor peasants, but also a long memory of caste-based depredations by their neighbors, the elite-caste Vellalars of Vellam Murippu. I argue that in writing a novel about state-sanctioned dispossession of a people, Shobasakthi writes a caste novel. Box was published in Tamil in 2015; my English translation is forthcoming. My essay is in two parts: the first part discusses the caste politics of Sri Lankan Northern Tamil country as exemplified by the Vellalar caste-identified Village Officer in his betrayal of Periya Pallan Kulam to the state. In the second section, I study closely the mimetic theater method employed by Periya Pallan Kulam in telling its unsayable truth about their suffering.
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