This chapter explores the intersections of Dalit aesthetics and Environmental Casteism through a close reading of two Malayalam short stories in translation—T. K. C. Vaduthala’s ‘Sweet-offering at Chankranthy’ and M. K. Madhukumar’s ‘Paalakkunnan’s Journey’, both featured in The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing (2012). Based on these stories, the chapter argues that Dalit aesthetics, rooted in the lived realities of caste oppression, offers a distinct narrative mode that challenges dominant Savarna frameworks of representation of nature—particularly those that aestheticise nature as an object of leisure, stylisation, or romantic abstraction. In contrast, Dalit representations of nature emerge from positions of marginality, labour, and survival histories. Nature is not separate from life but enmeshed in the daily struggles of land, body, faith, and community. This embodied ecological consciousness questions the artificial binaries between nature and culture, aesthetics and politics, and subject and environment. The stories examined in this chapter foreground how caste identities shape one’s relation to the environment, revealing how ecological experience is stratified and mediated by structures of power and exclusion. By engaging with the everyday as a critical site of environmental and aesthetic articulation, this chapter argues that Dalit literature offers a powerful counter-discourse to dominant ecological imaginaries. It asserts the importance of reading environmental questions through the lens of caste and everyday life, thereby contributing to the growing discourse on Environmental Casteism and the politics of representation in Indian literature.

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Voices of the Everyday: Dalit Aesthetics and Ecology in Select Short Fiction from Malayalam

  • Dhanesh Mankulam

摘要

This chapter explores the intersections of Dalit aesthetics and Environmental Casteism through a close reading of two Malayalam short stories in translation—T. K. C. Vaduthala’s ‘Sweet-offering at Chankranthy’ and M. K. Madhukumar’s ‘Paalakkunnan’s Journey’, both featured in The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing (2012). Based on these stories, the chapter argues that Dalit aesthetics, rooted in the lived realities of caste oppression, offers a distinct narrative mode that challenges dominant Savarna frameworks of representation of nature—particularly those that aestheticise nature as an object of leisure, stylisation, or romantic abstraction. In contrast, Dalit representations of nature emerge from positions of marginality, labour, and survival histories. Nature is not separate from life but enmeshed in the daily struggles of land, body, faith, and community. This embodied ecological consciousness questions the artificial binaries between nature and culture, aesthetics and politics, and subject and environment. The stories examined in this chapter foreground how caste identities shape one’s relation to the environment, revealing how ecological experience is stratified and mediated by structures of power and exclusion. By engaging with the everyday as a critical site of environmental and aesthetic articulation, this chapter argues that Dalit literature offers a powerful counter-discourse to dominant ecological imaginaries. It asserts the importance of reading environmental questions through the lens of caste and everyday life, thereby contributing to the growing discourse on Environmental Casteism and the politics of representation in Indian literature.