Speculating Dalit History in Meena Kandasamy's The Gypsy Goddess

Abstract: This article reads Meena Kandasamy's The Gypsy Goddess (2014), an exploration of one of modern India's most horrific cases of anti-Dalit violence, to trace how Dalit literature uses imaginative and speculative modalities to disrupt dominant historical frameworks. Historical erasures and excisions have made Dalit life-worlds and experiences inaccessible to the methodologies of positivist history writing. In response, Dalit writers construct and assert their history through different means. Kandasamy's novel negotiates archival limits and braids together folk memory, oral narratives, and literary imagination to recover the history of the Kilvenmani massacre. Placing this event at the nexus of national and global chronologies, Kandasamy suggests that, despite its cultural specificity, Dalit experience resonates with other globally marginalised groups. This article reads The Gypsy Goddess through a transnational lens, including through Saidiya Hartman's practice of critical fabulation, and argues that the novel's alternate historical framework supports global networks of humanitarian solidarity.