Adivasi Text as an Assertion and a Lament: A Feminist Perspective and a Critique of Religious Conversion and Reservations

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which Kocharethi: The Araya Woman by Adivasi writer Narayan is a significant work in Adivasi literature in the way that it opens the life-world of a community, family and individuals. Kocharethi is a story about the intimate ways in which the Malayaraya Adivasi community of Kerala relates to their land and its ownership. Kocharethi is about their exploitation, impoverishment, displacement and erasure and their interaction and negotiation with modernity. It is not an overtly political piece of writing in the sense that it does not incorporate political consciousness, language, form and content, but by centring the Adivasi life-world, it attains a political feat within a literary industry that focuses primarily on the upper-caste Hindus. In a way, Kocharethi is an assertion of the autonomous identity of the Adivasi communities in general and the Malayaraya people in particular. This article therefore engages with complex insights into the relationship between the Adivasi identity, Christianity and Hinduism and how these religions have dehumanized and accepted the people within the fold only on their own terms. The article looks into the important arguments about affirmative action, such as the policy of reservation for Dalits and Adivasis, and one of the transformations that the Malayaraya community underwent, that of conversion to Christianity. When it comes to the women of this community, it is even more complex. Hence, this article is also an attempt to reread the text by Kerala’s first Adivasi novelist, Narayan, from a feminist perspective without undermining the unique and significant position that it holds in Adivasi literature. It further looks at the issues of Adivasi women, specifically the Malayaraya women, and also analyses the patriarchal structure that is depicted in the text. The transition that the community makes due to modernity is placed subsequently.