All issues › Volume 1, Issue 1, July – August 2026
Trauma Without Event: Caste, Chronicity, and the Limits of the Western Trauma Paradigm in Bama’s Karukku and Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Vels Institute of Science, Technology and Advanced Studies (VISTAS), Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Abstract
Literary trauma theory, as consolidated in the 1990s around the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman, rests on a specific model of injury: a discrete, overwhelming event that exceeds cognitive assimilation and returns belatedly as intrusive repetition. This paper argues that the model, however productive for Holocaust and post-war European literatures, is structurally unable to account for the injury narrated in Dalit life-writing. Reading Bama’s Karukku (1992; trans. 2000) alongside Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants (2017), the paper contends that caste trauma is not an event but a condition — chronic, quotidian, inherited and socially sanctioned — and that the two texts consequently generate narrative forms that the event-based paradigm reads as failures. Karukku’s refusal of chronology and its withheld resolution are not symptoms of an unassimilated shock; they are the formal signature of an injury that has no before. Ants Among Elephants, conversely, distributes trauma across three generations and two political movements, producing a genealogical rather than a psychological account of suffering. Drawing on Stefan Craps’s critique of the Eurocentrism of trauma studies, Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, and Maria Root’s concept of insidious trauma, the paper proposes three revisions to the paradigm: the substitution of chronicity for belatedness, of collectivity for the wounded individual psyche, and of political redress for therapeutic working-through. The argument is offered not as a rejection of trauma theory but as an insistence that its categories be provincialised before they are applied to South Asian material.
Keywords: Dalit literature, trauma theory, Karukku, Sujatha Gidla, testimonio, insidious trauma, caste, life-writing
How to cite
Kalaivani, H. (2026). Trauma Without Event: Caste, Chronicity, and the Limits of the Western Trauma Paradigm in Bama’s Karukku and Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants. Imaginex International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Reviews, 1(1), 1–5.