‘Dalithan’: KK Kochu’s autobiography is a crucial cultural-historical-political document

Over the last few decades, autobiography as a genre has turned into a bit of a shape-shifter, incorporating within it increasingly subversive life narratives that do not just tell the story of one individual’s life but excavate political, sociological, and cultural micro-histories. Memoirs, diaries, autobiographical fiction, graphic narratives, have all negotiated space within the conventionally defined category of first-person life history.

Re-framing subaltern history

Laura Marcus in her Very Short Introduction reads the genre as existing “on the borderlines between many fields of knowledge”, while at the same time pointing out that its primary function is that of representation. Dalit writer and activist KK Kochu’s autobiography, Dalithan, translated from the Malayalam by Radhika P Menon, fits perfectly within this paradigm. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “A Worker Reads History”, Kochu sets out to challenge dominant narratives: “Mega-narratives are full of kings, castles and battles; there are no servants, no people who are trampled upon, no animals who slump in sheer exhaustion after pulling the vehicles. These people who are ignored and rendered invisible too are creators of history. Microcosms, that are ostracised, too need to get space alongside the macrocosm.” Eschewing the imagined role of autobiographical narrative as “an attempt to recover the truth of the past”, Kochu...

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