When Capital Meets Spectral: Magic Realism, Ecoambiguity and Narrative Resistance in Ambikasuthan Mangad’s Marakkappile Theyyangal

Alongside discussions of struggles against environmental violations stemming from capitalist incursions, it is equally important to examine their absence, and the conditions that produce such an absence, resulting in what Karen Thornber terms ecoambiguity, characterised by wavering commitment to environmental issues. In Marakkappile Theyyangal (2003), Ambikasuthan Mangad offers a literary representation of ecoambiguity by depicting a coastal community hesitant to mount any material resistance against a state-sanctioned ecotourism project. Drawing on Brenda Cooper’s insight that magic realism thrives at the intersection of capitalist expansion and pre-capitalist modes, this article argues that the novel’s deployment of this narrative technique functions as a literary intervention that confronts neocapitalist encroachments seeking to erase local cultures and degrade their ecosystems, ultimately producing environmental refugees. Mangad employs the cultural form of the theyyams to encode the topographical and social unevenness wrought by extractive development, simultaneously transforming threatened cultural symbols into vehicles of resistance—a move that departs from preservation-oriented strands of deep ecology that overlook the cultural embeddedness of environmental relations. In doing so, the novel unsettles ecoambiguities within the wider social imaginary and demonstrates how econarration can function as a strategy of political resistance against the normalisation of environmental destruction.