A call for mutual change and progress: An interview with Aravind Malagatti and Dharani Devi Malagatti

This interview with Dr Aravind Malagatti and Dr Dharani Devi Malagatti, conducted in Mysore, India, in April 2019, was one of several interviews I conducted for my doctoral thesis that examines caste system and Dalit struggles in the context of India. Dr Aravind Malagatti has contributed more than sixty books to Kannada literature, out of which his autobiography, Government Brahmana published in 1994 is considered the first Dalit autobiography in Kannada ( Government Brahmana, 2007). It was translated and published in English in 2007, and Dr Dharani Devi Malagatti is one of the three translators who translated the work. In this interview, Government Brahmana is discussed as a springboard to understand the social, economic, religious, political and legal aspects of caste and its practices in modern India. Dr Aravind Malagatti provides anecdotes to explain the significance of Dalit consciousness, what it entails and who can possess it. His responses are powerful statements calling for mutual change and progress for Dalits and non-Dalits. Dr Dharani Devi Malagatti talks about the challenges of translating the radical aesthetics of Dalit personal narratives as well as the scope and possibilities offered through translation. The interview explores the undertones of patriotism in Dalit identity, and the synthesis of individual and collective consciousness.

“New patriotism” in post-war Sri Lanka and the revival of the Walauva as a site of power in contemporary Sri Lankan English fiction

An emerging body of fiction by contemporary English novelists in Sri Lanka during the immediate post-civil war decade (2010–2020) indicates a renewed interest in the feudal grand house (the walauva) as a site of power. Often described in romantic terms and presented from positions of entitlement, in its renewed form, the walauva is constructed as a benevolent patriarchal system in which class superiors and servants share cordial and meaningful relationships. With primary reference to Nayomi Munaweera’s “What Lies Between Us”, Madhubhashini Ratnayake’s “There is Something I Have to Tell You” and Charulatha Thewarathanthri’s “Stories”, I place this emergent romanticized impression of the feudal grand house within the centralist power agenda of majoritarian populism prevalent in post-civil war Sri Lanka: a mass consciousness engineered by Sinhalese nationalist political fronts postwar, which historian Nira Wickramasinghe terms Sri Lanka’s ‘new patriotism’. While appreciating the contemporary writer’s imagination as being shaped by demands of ‘new patriotism’ the article identifies a deviation of her reading from the representations of the walauva as a site of power by Sri Lanka’s English literary canon from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.

The aesthetic sublimation of pain in Niyi Osundare’s City Without People

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in the volume, before proceeding to argue that the poet’s pain, largely psychic, is a product of losses of various kinds. The article goes further, demonstrating how the poet “worked through” the pain to attain wellness. Relying on insights from trauma theory, complemented by some assumptions about the concept of scriptotherapy, the analysis of poems drawn from across the collection demonstrates the paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain.