Writing as Resistance: Caste, Gender, and Subaltern Subjectivity in Poomani’s And Then

Abstract

Poomani’s debut Tamil novel Piraku, translated into English as And Then by T. Marx (2019), is among the earliest Tamil novels to render the lived experience of the Arunthathiyar (Chakkiliyar) community with sustained realism. Set in the karisal (black-soil) tract of southern Tamil Nadu, the novel follows Alagiri, a cobbler bound to a semi-feudal land-tenure arrangement called the kaani system, and his daughter Muthumari, whose life and death expose the intersecting violence of caste and patriarchy. This paper reads And Then through subaltern studies, cultural studies, and trauma studies frameworks to argue that Poomani constructs a doubly and trebly marginalized community whose labour, kinship, orality, and silence together constitute both the site of oppression and the ground of resistance. Attention to the novel’s language politics, its staging of post-Independence electoral democracy, and its gendered trauma situates And Then within Tamil Subaltern writing and the wider world literature of the soil.