MEMORY AS HISTORY: A SUBALTERN APPROACH TO C. AYYAPPAN’S SELECTED SHORT STORIES

Abstract

C Ayyappan is undoubtedly the most significant Dalit writer Malayalam Literature has produced. Though he had published his works during the high mark of Modernism, in the 1960’s and 70’s, typifying important features of Modernist writings he was ignored by the literary and critical establishment, dominated by caste elitism. However, in the recent decades he has been reread and reassessed thanks to the emergence of a new Dalit literary and critical intelligentsia like K. K Kochu, K. K Baburaj, K. Salimkumar, Sunny M. Kapikkad, Pradeepan Pampirikunnu, to name only a few. Though these luminaries have explored the creative contours of C Ayyappan’s fictional universe, none of them seem to have noticed the historical relevance of C Ayyappan’s short fiction. Hence the relevance of this study exploring the role of memory in his select stories using the critical perspective of Subaltern Historiography. Caste is not just a civil issue but also a country's issue. Casteism that has been going on for ages is still affecting the existence of a section of people. That is why their history is not complete even today. It can be seen that mainstream historians have deliberately ignored the history of Dalits. New discussions on caste inequalities and discrimination began to be discussed with the advent of Dalit literature. Dalit literature historicizes the existence of caste inequality and discrimination that has taken new forms in modern and democratic India. Given these aims, the main aim pursued by Dalit literary scholars through Dalit studies is to recover the history of struggles for human dignity and caste discrimination by highlighting Dalit intellectual and political activities. Dalit as subaltern was rendered invisible in history and hence, they were the outcastes of history. Written off history the caste subaltern existed on the fringes of history as the marginalised ‘Other’. With the emergence of colonial modernity fruits of learning were made accessible to them and they began to historicize their past and present memory in an attempt to construct their due space in history. Constructing such a history is possible only through fiction. Therein lies the significance of C Ayyappan’s stories. This article explores the role of memory in C Ayyappan’s fictional universe. A close analysis of C. Ayyappan's short story writings reveals that he creates his own people's history through the works using memory, a metahistorical category that includes folk history, oral history or myth, and others. C Ayyappan is reworking history’s boundaries. through memory, myth, and ghost narration. Language itself becomes a unique narrative model in Ayyappan's stories, from the speech of a haunted person to the utterances of a madman. All of these narratives are rich enough to contain both geographical and cultural clues to subaltern life.