The native of Mavelimanrom is the victim of both imperial ideology and feudal authority. And yet the myth of the 'manrom’ is posited as a haven of refuge for the dispersed, dispossessed and dislocated subjectivities of natives who refuse to be consigned to their subject positions within the framework of the ruling ideologies of imperialism and feudalism. Such polysemic, anti-colonial subjectivities and their energies, which defy the definitions of the colonizer, are muted and translated into a monolithic national identity, articulated in the rhetoric of 'Nationalism’ in Kocharethi, a Malayalam novel on the 'Malayaraya’ tribe by Narayan (1998).

             While Mavelimanrom is set in the period of capitalist territorial colonialism and imperialism, Kocharethi takes place at the fag end of this phase, in the early half of the 20^th century. It encloses a space of transition from the colonial to the post colonial within the imagined boundaries of the nation state. Thus, situated in a later milieu of Indian history, Kocharethi in a way addresses the questions of acculturation and education of the subaltern, in short of the subaltern's translation as 'appropriation'. Education as a necessary ploy for moulding homogenous identities came packaged with the label promising equality and liberty. But the subaltern aspires for education in order to be liberated from the land and its woes. Kocharethi is filled with the new subaltern dream of a government job. Narayan makes a feeble attempt to parody this process of 'modernizing' the tribal. But the novel fails in demarcating a political position opposing colonial modernity. The discourse of nationalism with its dichotomies of material/spiritual, inner/outer, resurfaces again and again in the novel with obvious privileging of the spiritual and inner.

             The novel Mavelimanrom is imbued with the knowledge and critique of imperialism as the ugly face of a particular kind of nationalism.  Kocharethi reveals the slow acculturation of the native into the economy, culture and politics of the nation state. The native in Kocharethi falls prey to the project of colonial modernity, which the new Indian state sets out to continue in order to prove its capability to self-rule. As Partha Chatterjee points out, Indian nationalism thus "produced a discourse of which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, also accepted the very intellectual premise of 'modernity' on which colonial domination was based”.

             Kocharethi depicts the plight of the native subaltern caught in the regulative politics of the infallible nation state, and betrayed by the promise of the participatory citizenship, struggling to find voice amidst the homogenized Babel of nationalist discourses. Mavelimanrom in contrast is a critique of the totalizing forms of nationalist historicism. It aims to regain the native's control over his/her own geography, language, literature and history. Kocharethi is a case in point of the 'hybridity' of the 'colonialist text' when the subject construction of the native is proscribed in the liberal humanist tradition of modernity. Mavelimanrom on the other hand is marked by an attempt at understanding the 'native' before the process of his/her becoming a native is initiated by the colonizer. So it evinces a consciousness preceding colonization, which becomes the mark of the spatial identity of the 'manrom’.

             The narration of the myth of the ‘manrom’ is used to establish and consolidate the local identity of the subaltern. Mavelimanrom is the conceptual space created through the resistance propaganda of the myth of the ‘manrom’. When the home of the Adiyors, the natural habitat is colonized, the myth of the ‘manrom’, becomes an attempt to resist looking at 'home' with the gaze of the colonizer. So remembering the original home, remembering and narrating the ‘manrom’ in one’s own language, in the oral traditions of tribe becomes a mode of resistance to the colonial epistemology. The myth of the 'manrom' thus gives a material and ideological identity to the subaltern, which transcends the boundary of the nation state. So the 'manrom' becomes an epistemological, cultural and spatial symbol of the transformative resistance of the 'Adiyors'. Narrating the ‘manrom’ thus becomes narrating a cultural identity and thereby creating a spatial identity for the subaltern. The keeping alive of memory, myth and songs ('thudippattu') even at the cost of risking lives becomes an act of revolutionary consciousness. In contrast, state hegemony, nationalist ideology, dominant language and cultural interpellation - all collude to construct the native of Kocharethi as a passive subject.

             Mavelimanrom, by producing an alternative discourse of gendered subalternity, becomes the site of an ideological warfare. Veering away from the stereotypical portrayal of women in much of mainstream Malayalam writing, the women of the novel are portrayed as possessing a strong individual and sexual identity. Refusing to be confined to sexually defined roles, they write themselves into the text through their life and struggles. With a strong sense of their own history and collective identity, they evince knowledge of their role as important links in a secret tradition of solidarity and resistance. One comes across a vibrant women's subculture, kept alive through mutual interactions and exchange of stories and songs. This is what prompts them to forge new bonds with their past, a bonding in sisterhood, which fires the memory of 'Keeyorathi’, their great ancestor in the flight for freedom.

             As the narrative unfolds, the reader is caught in the realization that the subaltern man's experience of oppression is different from the subaltern woman's experience and the focus shifts to the shaping of patriarchy by class, caste and colonialism.

             The reconsolidation of native patriarchy by imperial power is countered in Mavelimanrom by recharging the old myths with new possibilities of meaning. In one of the most powerful feminist critiques ever attempted in Malayam literature Mavelimanrom offers a scathing attack of the hegemonic, nationalist, patriarchal code, completely subverting its discourses which represent the subaltern as the domesticated 'other'. The subaltern women of Mavelimanrom- Chambi, Jevani and Ira take a vow not to be impregnated by any man subscribing to this patriarchal code. The dominant tradition of imaging the land as women also glorifies woman's fertility and her capacity to nurture. Not giving birth, by willful abortion becomes an act of defiant subversion. Refusing gender specific roles, the women also refuse representation in the paradigms of the sexual / maternal body.

             Rape as a prominent signifier in Mavelimanrom is used as an analogue for the violation of the land and other economic and political exploitations. Those blatant descriptions of rape are often used to reveal the rape mentality of the colonizer more than the experience of the oppressed women. Women's bodies thus become larger battlegrounds where greater territorial and cultural battles are waged; the gendered subalterns of Mavelimanrom are choked by the power of the colonial master, even over their reproductive capacities. Denied all sense of subjectivity, positioned as sexual merchandise and forced to breed a slave class to cater to the needs of colonialism's labour market, the subaltern women is forced to present her sexual, social and reproductive labours as offering before the Master. And yet the women of Mavelimanrom speak. Rejecting patriarchal, feudal or imperial norms of caste and class, they join together, refusing to break up under the phallic rule. They stand testimony to the subaltern's muted voice-consciousness. Thus, Mavelimanrom attempts an epistemic unsettling of both patriarchy and imperialism by turning to the archives of colonial dominance to unearth the ideology of patriarchal canons.

             In contrast Kocharethi embraces and enhances the task of colonial modernity to instill middle class values and bourgeois virtues into the gendered 'national' subaltern subject. The new woman, conscious of her identity, is at the same time out of her roots. As Parvathy, the educated subaltern migrates to the city, the narrative, in an allegorical twist leaves Kochuraman and Kunjipennu stranded in a government hospital, at the mercy of state welfare aids. Thus one sees the articulation of gender being translated into a different idiom by the interventions of the modern state. Narayan assumes a nationalist identity by which he sees education of subaltern women as necessary but not at the cost of losing the essence of their 'femininity' and ‘culture’. The ideological distance from Javani and Ira to Kunjipennu is a space articulated by a translated colonial discourse, which constructs the woman as the upholder of tradition, an embodiment of its representation. Kunjipennu sees Parvathys' education as encroaching upon her feminine essence. Kunjipennu is thus made to fit into the ideological framework of the nationalist narration of woman. Though the need for education of women is presented as imperative, the anxiety that it might devalue feminine virtues like chastity, modesty, patience and devotion persists. Here as before, one can see caste Hindu signs and symbols translated into the tribal discourse. Thus the process of subjection of the subaltern woman under new patriarchal codes of upper caste Hinduiam is initiated. The uniqueness of Mavelimanrom as a subaltern text is that it creates a history for the subaltern, where the female subject has a speaking voice and participates in insurgency. Where in Mavelimanrom, Kaippadan and Ira share the responsibility of sowing the seeds of the ‘manrom’; the women of Kocharethi have no role in the struggle for independence. As Parvathy inhabits the secure space of her home, Madhavan and his comrades go out into the public domain to free the nation, thus lending their subaltern identities to structure the hegemony of a patriarchal nationalist culture.

             A close reading of Kocharethi reveals the nuances through which gender and ethic relations become inextricably linked to the formation of the Indian state. Kocharethi is in a sense, the tragic culmination of the heroic struggle waged by the women in Mavelimanrom over dominant, capitalist modes of production. The dream of the ‘Manrom’ has transmogrified itself into the hard reality of the Indian nation state. Together, these novels provide a framework to picture the formation of India as a sovereign, socialist, democratic, republic, where native and gender identities are subsumed and tokenized to strengthen the unifying logic of the nation.

             Language is a fundamental site of struggle in subaltern discourses resisting translation, because colonization begins in language. The language of Mavelimanrom is an eclectic mixture of literary Malayalam, colloquial Malayalam, tribal Malayalam and the specific language of the Adiyors of Wayanad. The evident pull towards colonial modernity and nationalist themes in Kocharethi is found in its language too, which is very near to standard Malayalam, the disjunctions being minimal. There is no attempt to capture the linguistic and cultural ethos of the language of the Malayaraya tribe. While in Mavelimanrom language seeks to create a distance between the nation/empire and the subaltern space, in Kocharethi there is an attempted translation of this space. Mavelimanrom rejects the stylistic hierarchies of standard Malayalam and thus politically subverts its authorities. By introducing the music and method of tribal languages, their modes of expression and aspects of orality, Mavelimanrom underwrites the power invested in the print language. While destabilizing, standard language is a palpable project in Mavelimanrom, Kocharethi appropriates Malayalam and uses it to the contingencies of a different cultural context. Though the latter effect is in no way belittled, for it too produces a different culturally marked Malayalam - lexically, semantically and phonetically, the former offers a more radical approach to write the continually shifting subaltern subjectivities into a new indigenised language which does not conform to the paradigm of the formal sociolect of Malayalam.

             The received notion that print language is the 'proper' language is done away with in the novel by endorsing the varied and various narratives are endless play under the sign of a single language. The subaltern's simultaneous adoption of the roles of singer, story-teller, author and player, oppressed subject and resisting speaker - creates the need for a language encapsulating such constantly shifting subjectivities. The inadequacy of the language of the centre to express the cognitive information of the peripheries and its inability to delineate subaltern group identity and culture crystallizes in Mavelimanrom’s compulsion to stretch the norms of Malayalam language. New words are accommodated in the lexicon along with flagrant deviations in grammar, syntax, phonology, accent and structure, in the process toppling the authority of the colonial discourse. The songs or 'thudipattu’ - as alternative discourse become a powerful political and linguistic strategy of resistance. The songs and singing with all their associated cultural significations take on a disruptive function, carnivalising societal norms. In Kocharethi, one finds by contrast a silencing of the native tongue. That the arrival of nationalism and its accompanying cultural fictions proved effective in erasing those signs and symbols that problematizes modernity and its project of homogenization is what a closer reading of Kocharethi reveals.

             The subaltern community in Kocharethi, having lost its language having been translated and co-opted into the dominant discourse, has also lost the power to name. 'Parvathi', 'Madhavan', 'Narayanan' - all names of upper caste Hindu gods, speak of the silencing a culture. A community devoid of its language is a community devoid of dignity. While Mavelimanrom emphasizes the linguistic and cultural validity of its language, Kocharethi is weighed down by the naming and interpolative functions of the dominant language, in the process disempowering the subaltern's attempt to construct an identity.

             For the subaltern interpolated in a dominant history, the very concept of history might bear the mark of an alien epistemology. But creating a narrative to historicize the tales of their ancestors 'Melorachan' and 'Keeyorathi' becomes a contingency for the subaltern, as it is only the tales of their travel that mark the site of the tribe's cultural and linguistic property. If Mavelimanrom is marked by a struggle to control, to write the history of one's tribe, for which is needed the power of language, Kocharethi is a giving in, a passive surrender to the larger history of the nation state. In post colonial parlance to have a history is to have a legitimate existence and what the latter text denies itself in this legitimacy of being, thus while in Mavelimanrom the subaltern is seen to wrest agency, to wrest speech, in Kocharethi the subaltern is deftly muted by the dominant discourse. The discourse of the colonial modernity and the nation state that one finds in Kocharethi co-opts the native and re-fashions him/her according to the norms of the dominant culture. Where the space of colonial modernity is treated as inviolable in Kocharethi, it is critiqued and subverted by the resisting subaltern in Mavelimanrom. This is made possible by eschewing the ideologically contaminated language of the colonizer. The idiom and syntax of the native language is appropriated by the native subaltern for self-determination in the face of exigencies of the colonial rule.

             The interpolated language of Mavelimanrom is charged with the subaltern's sense of belonging to his/her place while the language of Kocharethi betrays the powerlessness of its non-belonging. Reviving the ‘manrom’ in the language is a re-appropriation of lost places, a refusal to be translated and transformed by colonial/national conception of space. If the conscious inscription of subaltern identity and place in language is what makes Mavelimanrom an interpolated historical narrative, it is the conceding of place, culture and language to the master narrative of the nation that makes Kocharethi an appropriated discourse of translated subaltern identity. Subaltern translations of the lingo of the nation and nationalism thus become acts of cultural displacement. Claiming the nation in the language also means being claimed by the nation.

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