Volume V Issue III July-September 2025

Name of Author : HP Suma

Title of the paper : Narrating the Unspeakable Metafiction, Historical Trauma, and the Kilvenmani Massacre in The Gypsy Goddess

Abstract: Meena Kandasamys debut novel The Gypsy Goddess 2014 confronts the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre, a devastating act of caste violence in postcolonial India that remains marginalized in mainstream historiography and public memory. This essay argues that Kandasamy deploys radical metafiction not as a stylistic indulgence, but as an ethical and political apparatus to narrate historical trauma. Drawing on trauma theory, historiographic metafiction, and Dalit literary aesthetics, the analysis demonstrates how the novels formal instability actively resists the commodification of Dalit suffering. By juxtaposing self reflexive, self interrupting narration with clinical state documents and fragmented survivor testimonies, Kandasamy exposes the violence of official archives that reduce human lives to bureaucratic data and weaponize caste logic to grant legal impunity. Furthermore, the novel constructs a counter-history grounded in collective memory and polyvocality, deliberately refusing the narrative closure and aesthetic consolation characteristic of upper caste literary traditions. Ultimately, this essay contends that in The Gypsy Goddess, form is politics. The text functions as a vital counter archive and memorial practice, transforming the act of reading into an ongoing, implicated act of historical witness that challenges state sanctioned violence and demands continuous ethical accountability from its readers.

Keywords : Dalit aesthetics, Historiographic metafiction, Historical trauma, Kilvenmani massacre, Counter archive

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Page No. : 44-51