The Poisoned Legacy: A Post-Colonial Reading of S.K. Pottekatt's Vishakanyaka
Keywords:
ethnic communities, mainstream, hegemonic culture, calibanization, dominant ideologiesAbstract
Ethnic communities are often compelled to integrate into the ‘mainstream’ culture in the postcolonial context. As Pramod K. Nayar (2008) points out, “Troubled by the trauma of a homogenising national culture, local cultures begin to have the same fears as the colony did under the Westerner” (87). The emergence of hegemonic cultures significantly alters the structure of peripheral communities. S. K. Pottekatt’s Vishakanyaka is frequently portrayed as the narrative of settlers in the Malabar region of Kerala, who transformed an uninhabited forest into a thriving agrarian paradise through back-breaking toil. This paper tries to elucidate the ‘calibanization’ of the land’s original inhabitants employing New Historicism, as advocated by Stephen Greenblatt. The paper also examines how the novel, despite its progressive inclinations, occasionally disseminates dominant ideologies by aestheticising or sentimentalising the suffering of women and indigenous communities. Drawing on insights from Spivak, Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, and Greenblatt’s New Historicism, the study locates Vishakanyaka within the socio-political transformations of postcolonial Kerala, which led to the migration of Syrian Christians to Malabar.
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