In her novel, The Gypsy Goddess, Meena Kandasamy treads the line between fiction and

critique. This is an account of the historical uprising of agricultural workers against their upper-

caste landlords in Tamil Nadu. At the same time, it is a meditation on the impossibility of writing

a novel. Blending historical documents with a storytelling style that is as experimental as it is

lyrical, Kandasamy follows the spark of revolution as it spreads from villager to villager, across

the paddy fields of Southern India, eventually combusting in massacre. Kilvenmani, the shy and

oppressed village in East Thanjavur district, is the protagonist. The massacre took place in 1968

in Kilvenmani village, in the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu, South India when 44 landless Dalit

agricultural labourers, including women and children, were locked in a hut by a group of

landowners and burnt alive. This reluctant novel fictionalises the events that led up to the attack

a long-standing battle between powerful landlords and the Communist party, who organised

resistance against landowners, demanding better wages and working conditions. It was over the

demand for an additional half-portion of rice that the labourers in Kilvenmani were crushed so

brutally.

The story is an intersection of politicking and discrimination, and is split into four

sections: Background, Breeding Ground, Battle Ground and Burial Ground. Kandasamy knows

the secret of empathizing with her characters and strives to do the same with her readers. But, for

her, the reader is a collective noun. Her running commentary and crass retorts in advance to the

questions she assumes one will ask all point to this. She loses you several times to bursts of self-

indulgence and unconnected digressions, but brings you back with jolts of lyrical ache. The book

silently asks several questions, most of which are left unanswered. Every chapter is an

experiment. She plays with various literary devices. Chapters come in the form of a Marxist

party pamphlet, an inspectors observations, an anatomy of a fairy tale, minutes of the Paddy
Producers Associations emergency meeting, and even as an imagined question and answer

session with a literary critic. Kandasamy mentions in her monologue that she has left the rules of

the novel on her clothesline to dry.

Despite the narrator's claims to defy conventions of form and language, the text

inevitably simplifies these lives and struggles. For example, while touched upon in the

beginning, little is made in the novel of the complex relationship between caste and class in the

resistance against the landowners, an ongoing issue between communists and Dalit activists.

Nevertheless, it is refreshing to read an Indian English language novel that wears its politics and

ideology on its sleeve, that is about collective resistance rather than individuals.