The Impact of Marxism and Communism: A Critical Study of Meena Kandaswamy’s ‘The Gypsy Goddess’

Meena Kandasamy is a versatile writer from India who writes poetry, essays and fiction. She was born to Tamil parents in 1984. Meena Kandasamy completed a doctorate of philosophy in socio-linguistics from Anna university, Chennai. She was very interested in writing from her childhood and even wrote her first poetry at the age of 17 before translating books by Dalit writers. Kilvenmani, an obscure village in the Nagapattinam taluk of erstwhile Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, shot to significance in 1968, forty-four Dalit were, locked in a hut and burnt alive because they demanded for hike in wages. This study is an attempt to analyze the events, looking at it not in isolation, but by placing it in the larger socio – political scenario, by examining the various narratives of the incident itself, the aftermath, and the emotions and movements it spurred among the people based on the novel The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy taking Marxism and communism as its main theme.


Introduction
The Gypsy Goddess is based on a massacre that took place in the village of Kilvenmani on Christmas day, 1968, the time when Marxist ideology was gaining popularity among disenfranchised Dalit who were shedding their sweat and blood on the paddy fields in brutal conditions. They toiled away on rice paddies. They toiled more than they filled their stomach. The demand for the raise in the measure by the labourers led to the conflict. Farm workers struck work as the landlords murder a popular communist leader ( Sikkal Pakkirisamy). The landlords try to bully them back. But the hungry people of Kilvenmani stay still in their demand for justice. To end this strick the landlords send goon squads to attack Kilvenmani. As a result of this they end up with the death of 42 villagers who had been burnt into unrecognizable corpses. Others who have lost, loved ones in the massacre were sent to jail. The above acts are rooted from capitalist ideologies which are against Marxism.
The Author Meena Kanthaswamy has done a fabulous job to bring out the capitalist world problems.

Critical Study of Meena Kandaswamy's 'The Gypsy Goddess'
In The Gypsy Goddess, Meena Kandasamy bridges the gap between fiction and critique. She has blended the historical documents with storytelling style. "Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible."(Bacon 53). The quotes of Bacon from his essay Of Truth mirror the novel The Gypsy Goddess.
"The struggle of man against power is the Struggle of memory against forgetting" (Kundera 81). The struggle of Dalit people in the society is against their own race. The Dalit are the most suppressed people of the society. The word Dalit may be derived from Sanskrit and means "Ground", "Suppressed", "crushed" or "broken to pieces". The Dalit peoples were called as "Untouchables". One among them can feel the agony of being untouched. Bama is one of the Tamil writers who has put light on the life of Dalit in one of her famous Novel Kilvenmani was turning to the land of communism. On the other side the landlords were beating hard to abolish the communism from the village of Kilvenmani. The Landlords consider communist party to be their enemies, who were making the labourers against them.
The thought of landlords about the communist party was flourished out from the nature of Gopalakrishna Naidu who plays a dominant role in the novel.
Communism is actually a killer disease that has infested agriculture. It is worse that blight. Just like curtailing an unruly goat from causing damage to his crops, it is the duty of every farmer to suitable preventive action against the communists. This party is a curse upon the human race. It is the only party that seeks to divide us, set us one against another and make us enemies. It has no intervention; it has no order, system, sequences, or result; it has no lifeliness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its character are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations areoh! Indescribable; its lovescenes odious; its English a crime against the language. (Kandasamy 31)   The society and its people develop themselves in many area's but still the poor are poor and rich are still the rich. The lifestyle of people has changed, but the thoughts and views remain equivalent throughout the generation. The field of education has stretched its hand to break the discrimination. Likewise the society and its people can completely destroy the lines of discrimination to make their society ever green without cause of death and issues. The readers, who were unaware of the historical incident of Kilvenmani have been made aware of the massacre through her novel.

Conclusion
Meena Kandasamy with the precise lines ends her novel. The Novel pays a great tribute to the people of Kilvenmani. The importance of this narrative voice, however, is in laying out the impossibility of the task at hand of the need to create a separation between author and story. Meena Kandasamy has the compassion to distinguish her limitations in an attempt at representation. The Facebook-using urban, education, middle-class author and narrator is a world away from the villagers who inhabit the novel, as is the form and language into which she is fitting them.