Situating the Tribal: Mother Forest, the Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu

Abstract

The current explosion of lived narratives has necessitated a renewed perception of the canonical concept of expression of the self as a genre. The conventional, patriarchal, western, elitist subject position stands confronted by voicing of the postcolonial, the female, the abject, the surplus, the redundant. Through Janu’s Unfinished Story the paper proposes to establish how the rendering of a tribal woman’s life story becomes a significant slice of the history of Kerala, the state eulogised for it’s unique model of development. The mobilization of the tribal community by an unschooled tribal woman to establish and exercise their rights in a society that brands them as encroachers and primitives, and evidences women’s agency for social change.