Meena Kandasamy's Touch: An Articulation of the Voice of the Marginalized

A young Tamil poet from Chennai, Meena Kandasamy is a fiction writer, translator, and activist. Her two collections of poems Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010) present the real pictures of the marginalized in Indian society. As a conscious artist with commitment she is grieved to see the age old inhuman social practices like untouchability based on caste system prevailing in our society. She expresses her anger against caste based discrimination which has crippled the dalits/marginalized to dehumanized state as they are subjected to humiliation and oppression. In other words, her works focus on poverty, oppression, injustice, caste annihilation, linguistic identity and pangs and predicaments of women. This paper attempts to explore and analyze the grievances of the marginalized communities raised in Touch by Meena Kandasamy. In one of the poems titled ‘Ekalaivan’ she takes up the episode of the Mahabharata where Dronacharya declines to train Ekalavya because of his birth in a lower caste rather than Kshatriya. In another poem ‘Liquid Tragedy: Karamchedu 1985’, she lashes out at the act and attitude of the people of the higher caste by recapturing the massacre of Karamchedu, Andhra Pradesh in 1985, where many low caste men were killed and their women were raped by the upper caste people. In fact, Meena Kandasamy seeks equality, freedom and fraternity for the marginalized so that they can lead a life with pride and dignity in society.