Bakhtin's Dialogue and Resistance As Seen in Meena Kandasamy's Novel

The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795 The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Vol. II, Issue IV I ISSN : 2395 4795 Bakhtin’s Dialogue and Resistance as seen in Meena Kandasamy’s novel The Gypsy Goddess Vaishnavi Upadhyaya Research Scholar and Adhoc Lecturer School of Languages, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, INDIA. Abstract India is a land of many cultures, religions, regions, and sadly castes. Caste is seen as both the most archaic and the most contemporary reality of India. The recognition of caste as not just a retrograde past but an oppressive past reproduced as forms of inequality in modern society requires therefore that we integrate questions of caste with those of class and gender. It was only in the post-independence era that some educated untouchables, who became aware and gained modern education, realized the need for an alternative mode of thinking and launched literary movements leading to awakening of Dalit women and the problem of their absence in the literary field of India. In this context I choose to work on the novel titled the Gypsy Goddess published in 2014 by Meena Kandasamy. Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. I plan to use the tools given by Mikhail Bakhtin to deconstruct the caste and gender structure and build dialogue among the varied voices. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November17,1895- March7,1975) was a Russian philosopher, Literary Critic and Semiotician. In his large corpus of work, Bakhtin introduces the concepts of Dialogism, Heteroglossia, Polyphony, Chronotope, Carnival and many others. In the research paper I propose to explain his theories and show how they are aptly applicable to Dalit women’s literature by citing them in the text. Keywords : Mikhail Bakhtin, Dialogism, Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. Bakhtin wrote during the darkest years of recent Russian history, the decade following 1917, when the country suffered from effects of lost World War I, Revolution, Civil war and Famine. In the spring of 1918, Bakhtin like many others, sought relief from the chaos that followed in the immediate wake of the revolution by going into the country districts where food and fuel were more abundant. He ended up first in Nevel, and then in Vitebsk. In both the places, he quickly became a member of a small group of intellectuals who feverishly indulged themselves into the debates, lectures, demonstrations, and manifesto writing that characterised life at that extraordinary time. It was in this atmosphere of immense intellectual and political intensity, that Bakhtin sought to think through for himself some of the problems then of most concern to philosophers such as Dialogue with self, art and responsibility, heteroglossia, polyphony and novel form as a discourse. During this time Bakhtin wrote and published under the names of his friends, P.N. Medvedev and Voloshinov. The first work that he attempted to publish under his own name was Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics in 1929, but was soon arrested for underground activity and was exiled to Kazakhstan. The following decades in thirties he wrote something in the order of nine large books on topics as major and varied as Freud, Marx and the philosophy of language. Most of these manuscripts were lost and misplaced during forced moves. Some were delayed in publication for 41 years due to burning and closing of publishing houses and some like that of Rabelais and his world which he wrote for doctorate degree were charged as too aberrant for publication due to its emphasis on sex and body functions and his doctorate was denied. Bakhtin became head of the Department of Russian and World Literature in 1957. Bakhtin moved back to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1975. He was not reborn until the eve of his retirement from academic life when soviet literary scholars again took interest in him. This revival led to the publication in 1963 of the second edition of the Dostoevsky book, thirty- four years after the first. The reappearance of this book, followed in 1965 by Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, brought him into rapid prominence. Later The Dialogic Imagination was published in 1975, the year he died. Bakhtin’s works and his ideas gained popularity after his death when the archives were made available to public, and scholars and students realized that most information provided by Bakhtin was false or sometimes skewed by his own self. The Dialogic Imagination is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: "Epic and Novel" (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (1940), "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937–1938), and "Discourse in the Novel" (1934–1935). It is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship. The Novel to which I look up to cite his philosophy in application is titled The Gypsy Goddess, an intriguing name, given by its author Meena Kandasamy. She is a poet, an activist, novelist a writer. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010).Her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess was published by Atlantic Books (UK) and HarperCollins India in 2014. She was a British Council - Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University in 2011. In 2009, she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795 (IWP). She has held writing residencies at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Hyderabad. She has co-authored (with M Nisar) a biography of Kerala’s foremost Dalit revolutionary Ayyankali, and previously, she edited ‘The Dalit’, a bi-monthly English magazine. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics from Anna University Chennai, and dabbles in political & literary translation. The Gypsy Goddess depicts a massacre from history which was not been given its due attention and justice. Meena Kandasamy determines to rewrite it but not in a crude and cruel manner, rather she would like to express it and make it a literary piece of work. To state it in point blank manner it is based on a massacre that took place in the village of Kilvenmani on Christmas day, 1968. 44 Women and children were burnt alive at night and no justice was gained by the people of the village. Taking up such a heartbreaking historical truth Kandasamy is very conscious writer who is aware of the form in which she chooses to write and how she plays with. She gets very intimately close with reader so as to not withhold anything within her. It is a sharp authorial voice, parodying at times, giving history and background so that we understand it correctly. Novel is in close proximity with the reader and social media has very well helped the writer to become a friend. Passing remarks to Facebook and Twitter makes we feel that we share same jokes: “And how can I go ahead with the story when the first line itself has not instantly received a hundred thousand likes?” (Kandasamy.14) She even suggests fitting it in a Twitter or compressing it in a Sixty-Second Sound bite. But how can we even enter in this heart of Darkness. I feel as a Reader that she draws us like a Mother draws a child- she will teach the reader to learn as the story unravels. She says: “How far away from me can you stray? This is a joint venture. We collaborate on the critical condition that we do not abandon each other.” (Kandasamy.32) It is set in State Tamil Nadu, Tanjore District, Nagapattinam Taluk, in 1968. Month is Markazhi, that falls between mid-December to mid-January. This serves as Chronotope for the novel. Bakhtin explains forms of chronotope. Chronotope literally means time space. Artistic chronotope is such that Spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes artistic chronotope. The novels time and space completely agrees with the context and time space in which Bakhtin lived. In fact one who is unknown about the chronotope can easily assume that Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel The Gypsy Goddess was written by a winner of the USSR State Prize in Literature and Arts and published sometime in the late 1970s or maybe even earlier. The subject matter – the massacre of forty– four old Dalit labourers and their families by henchmen employed by upper caste landlords - is definitely a topic that would have fitted in within the milieu of Soviet literature. At that time, Bakhtin was talking about Dialogue in a manner that would break monolithic caste and class structure. His theory has been born out of the milieu of serfs fighting landlords in Russia, protest seasons and tools of carnival, The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795 demonstrations are used to showcase and deconstruct the tyranny of the rulers.

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