| Pub. Date | : March, 2021 |
|---|---|
| Product Name | : The IUP Journal of English Studies |
| Product Type | : Article |
| Product Code | : IJES040321 |
| Author Name | : Liju Jacob Kuriakose and Smrutisikta Mishra |
| Availability | : YES |
| Subject/Domain | : Arts & Humanities |
| Download Format | : PDF Format |
| No. of Pages | : 11 |
The paper argues that the rise of collaborative autobiographies from Kerala entails a misrepresentation rooted in the conception of the marginal exotic. It is triggered by capitalist interests which help produce and disseminate these narratives across the globe, particularly the English translations. Authenticity as construed by the collaborator-translator nexus manifests itself explicitly through paratextual addendums. They exist solely as interpolative superfluities, artistic or critical, which serve to severely limit the epistemological possibilities and subtexts that the life-narrative houses. In this study, Mayilamma's collaborative autobiography, Mayilamma: Oru Jeevitham (MOJ), and its translation, Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (MLTEW), are looked at in detail, exploring the politics of market and authenticity at play in the production and dissemination of the said texts. The paratextual elements, specifically in MLTEW, are analyzed as examples for the production of a marginal exotic tailored to suit the literary framework envisaged by the Western liberal literati and the vernacular elite renderings of authentic tribal culture.
The genre of life-writing, textualized expression of an individual's history of the self, has
not been completely alien to the Indian subcontinent. However, the desire to express the
different dimensions of one's self is uniquely a product of colonial modernity. "The spread
of autobiography mirrored the trajectory of print in the high noon of colonialism"
(Lambert-Hurley 2018). Pascal (2016) states that the genre is "essentially European" and those who write autobiographies in the East "have taken over a European tradition." It was in
the deep-rooted ideological moorings of colonial modernity and print capitalism that the
genre of autobiography emerged amongst the Indian literati.