https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.067
Enacting Female Agency: Subaltern Resistance in Adimamakka
SALINI P
Research Scholar (Part Time)
Research & PG Department of English
Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam, Kerala
Assistant Professor
Department of English
NMSM Govt College, Kalpetta
Abstract: The Malayalam autobiography Adimamakka by C. K. Janu constructs feminine agency as a form of collective and strategic praxis aligned with the transnational feminist critique of the victimization of Third World women articulated by Chandra Talpade Mohanty and her insistence on historically situated solidarities. Reading Adimamakka as a counter-archive of subaltern life, this paper argues that Janu challenges liberal notions of agency that privilege individual autonomy. Instead, she presents agency as a material struggle for land, livelihood, and dignity through literacy campaigns, anti-alcohol mobilization, and land-based insurgency culminating in the 2003 Muthanga occupation.
The article reveals the contradictions of Kerala’s so-called progressive developmentalism through its documentation of Adivasi dispossession, gendered violence, and the criminalization of forest-based subsistence practices. Janu integrates gender liberation with Indigenous environmental justice by conceptualizing the forest as kin and ecology as sovereignty while resisting statist conservation policies and party patronage structures. The study contributes to transnational feminist and ecofeminist scholarship by demonstrating how Adimamakka transforms autobiography into an insurgent archive, a testimony of slow violence, and a demand for restoring land as culture.
Keywords: Adivasi Resistance, Feminist Political Ecology, Life Writing, Female Agency, Subaltern Praxis
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