https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.090
Aquapelagic Subalterns and the Hydrocolonial Imagination in Select Malayalam Narratives
FARISHA VM
Research Scholar & Assistant Professor
Research Department of English
MES Asmabi College, Kodungallur, Thrissur
Affiliated to the University of Calicut, Kerala
Abstract: There is something insidiously lethal about the way Malayalam literary and cinematic culture has looked at the sea. The littoral zone of Kerala, with its vast fisherfolk communities, its salt-stiffened bodies, its caste-inflected ocean labour, and its centuries of marginalization, has long appeared in the cultural imagination as backdrop rather than centre, as atmosphere rather than argument. Writers and filmmakers have given us the fisherman as silhouette, the grieving widow as metaphor, the drowned body as the punctuation mark in someone else’s tragedy. What they have rarely given us is the coastal community as an epistemological world in its own right: as the bearer of knowledge, language, and ways of being that deserve to stand at the centre of critical attention. They constitute what this paper terms a condition of hydrocoloniality; the systematic erasure of water-based communities, their lifeworlds, and their epistemologies from the dominant symbolic economies of Malayalam cultural production. This paper calls for a fundamental reorientation of Malayalam literary and film studies toward the submerged histories, dialectal knowledges, and ecological intimacies of Kerala’s long-marginalized coastal communities.
Keywords: Hydrocoloniality, Malayalam Literature, Slow Violence, Blue Humanities, Coastal Epistemology, Fisherfolk Communities, Malayalam Cinema
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