Decolonising the Canon and the Author: Critiquing Meena Kandasamy’s The Orders were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle

Abstract

Literature, at the intersection of Liberal Humanities and Social Sciences, plays a unique role in intervention within a discipline; it not only explores the narratives and aesthetics of representing the subaltern, but it must also ask questions about the politics and ethics of such representation. The literary writer, hence, is neither ‘third person’, nor ‘objective’, nor are they politically neutral.  The ideological position of the literary writer informs the aesthetics and ethics of what they represent. Thus, literary authorship operates within a field of ideological construction, which in turn shapes the reader’s outlook on a social issue. This paper looks into Meena Kandasamy’s The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle (2020) to explore how literary authorship engages with the portrayal of gender-based violence and identity-construction of survivors/victims. Employing her position as a literary author and as a public intellectual, Kandasamy has explored various aspects of how the subaltern is represented. My approach in this paper is thus dual: to examine the idea of literary authorship within the canon and then to converge it with the portrayal of the public intellectual, marking a new tradition of writing.