Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga as a Performance and an Instance of Postcolonial Translation

Abstract

Ambikasutan Mangad’s Swarga (2017), translated to English from the Malayalam Enmakaje (2009) by J. Devika, is regarded as an important cultural artifact in the delivery of justice against biodiversity loss and corporeal abjection inflicted by state-corporate slow violence on poor, subsistence, borderland communities of Kasargod district in Kerala. A work composed in the aftermath of a grotesque eco-tragedy on a Global South landscape risks being consumed as a postcolonial exotic commodity of suffering. This article examines crucial literary mediation, circulation, translation, and fictionality questions to establish that Swarga resists voyeuristic consumption, appealing to elite savior complexes or enabling easy elitist activism. By offering a discursive sight of self-reflection set up by nature imageries, caste and class blinders, etc., that delay the reader’s sightings of poisoned ecologies and diseased bodies, and by characterizing the faceless evil of corporate power, Mangad engages a political witness who can reflect on their cultural culpabilities and blinders in this episode of violence. Additionally, by conscious thickening of the Creole language, creating elusive knowledge sources, and embedding indigenous myths, supernatural events, and scientific evidence, Mangad translates a rich cultural and spiritual cosmology half-lost and threatened by further corrosion, while simultaneously signaling the limitations of this very translation process. This work thus constitutes a self-conscious performance and an instance of postcolonial translation that inscribes the politics of ecological and cultural diversity as a resistance to extractivist monocultural infrastructures.