Kallen pokkudan autobiography sample essay

Born in to the Pulayar caste in the district of Kannur in Kerala, Kallen Pokkudan spent his childhood experiencing the omnipresence of caste and feudal subjection before joining the Communist Party of India at the age of eighteen. It was in the late s that Pokkudan first became involved in the collection and planting of Mangrove seeds.

Kallen pokkudan autobiography in malayalam

There is a variety of forms of life-writing surrounding Pokkudan. Besides the endless reserve of newspaper articles, features, interviews, texts of delivered speeches, documentaries and at least one biographical film, Pokkudan has authored two autobiographies as well, which will be the specific focus of this paper. The first autobiography, titled Kandalkkadukalkkidayil Ente Jeevitham My Life among the Mangrove Forests was published in and was edited by Thaha Madayi, a biographer who was instrumental in making Dalits and other marginalized groups visible in the field of life-writing.

The book gained popular attention as a lower-caste critique of the institution of publishing as a site of exclusion of Dalits from the mainstream of history and print culture Thankappan However, dissatisfied with some of the thematic exclusions in the first, Pokkudan authored a second autobiography titled Ente Jeevitham My Life in The fundamental issue analyzed in this paper stems from the consideration that Pokkudan is illiterate, or has only minimal literacy.

This meant that both his autobiographies were dictated and parts of one adapted from some notes Pokkudan had written down using his limited knowledge of the Malayalam script. Autobiographies of illiterate persons recorded, edited and textualized by others is not an uncommon phenomenon in recent Malayalam life-writing. The autobiography of the thief Maniyanpilla, the sex-worker Nalini Jameela and that of Adivasi leader C.