Urban Slum Culture and Poverty Trap in Kavery Nambisan’s The Story That Must Not Be Told

Abstract

Kavery Nambisan is a noteworthy fiction writer of South India. The concern for the society is one of the dominant themes of her novels. The Story That Must Not Be Told carries a sensitive plot of two contrasting worlds. The slum Sitara portrayed in this plot has sensational incidents revolving around the characters like Velu, Thatkan, Valli, Swamy and Chellam. It brings out the difference between the dominant voices of the affordable and the plight of the downtrodden, which happened just because of the fault of being born in poor families. The life has become a curse to these slum dwellers because neither they had an answer to why they suffer nor to how long they would be exploited. This paper is an attempt to analyse the slum culture, its poor economic status, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, the demolition of the slum and the melancholic migration.