Haunted Ecologies: Memory, Displacement, and Subaltern Landscapes in Mari Selvaraj’s Cinema

This paper interrogates the spectral entanglements of memory, ecological degradation, and subaltern subjectivity in Mari Selvaraj’s cinema, positioning his films as potent interventions in Tamil Nadu’s cultural and political landscapes. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism (Nixon’s Slow Violence, 2011; DeLoughrey & Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies, 2011), subaltern studies (Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, 1988; Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 1983), and multidirectional memory theory (Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory, 2009), it explores how Selvaraj constructs “haunted ecologies”—spaces where environmental destruction and caste violence produce geographies of dispossession and amnesia. These resonate with Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting as a sociopolitical condition (Ghostly Matters, 1997), where repressed histories persist spectrally.Through close analysis of Pariyerum Perumal, Karnan, and Vazhai, the paper shows how Selvaraj’s landscapes—rivers, ruins, fields—become living archives of caste atrocity and resistance. His films frame caste as both social and ecological, echoing Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question (2009) and David Mosse’s The Rule of Water (2003). Disrupting linear historiography and nationalist imaginaries, Selvaraj’s cinema offers a counter-cartography of memory grounded in Dalit epistemologies.By employing nonlinear and cyclical temporalities, his films enact a radical politics of remembrance where reclaiming subaltern landscapes aligns with justice, dignity, and ecological wholeness—contributing to a postcolonial aesthetic imperative to reimagine futures through unresolved past specters.