Poothapattu: Sobs of a Broken People, Fragmented Ethos, and the Lost Land
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Abstract
Keeping three radical ideas of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, which have not been seriously dealt with by mainstream Indian/Kerala historiography, at the backdrop, namely, the Nagas and Dravidians are the same people, the untouchables were Buddhists, and India’s history as the history of mortal conflicts between Buddhism and Brahminism, the article attempts to study a Malayalam poem that has attained a classical status in the language, Poothapattu, to unravel the concealed layers of Kerala’s past. Drawing on the distinction the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein establishes between the image and representation and on the insights provided by the Sangham Thinai conceptualizations, the article argues that in the Pootham image created by the Savarnna Malayalees, one could see sedimentation of history, where representations of the untouchable population of different historical moments are fused into a complex image, attesting to the veracity of Ambedkar’s radical ideas enumerated above.
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