Sunday, 18 October 2026

Assignment of Paper 201: Indian English Literature – Pre-Independence

Assignment of Paper 201: Indian English Literature – Pre-Independence

The Problem of the Receiver: Epistemic Violence and the Structural Impossibility of Being Heard in T. P. Kailasam's The Curse or Karna

A Postgraduate Assignment Read Through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

Academic Details

  • Name: Kruti.B.Vyas

  • Roll No.: 13

  • Enrollment No.: 5108250035

  • Sem.: 3

  • Batch: 2025 - 2027

Assignment Details

  • Paper Name: Indian English Literature – Pre-Independence

  • Paper No.: Paper 201

  • Paper Code: 22406

  • Unit 2: T.P. Kailasama’s The Curse or Karna

  • Topic: The Problem of the Receiver: Epistemic Violence and the Structural Impossibility of Being Heard in T. P. Kailasam's The Curse or Karna

  • Submitted To: Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar

Document Statistics

The following information numbers are counted using QuillBot.

  • Images: 5

  • Words: 3151

  • Characters: 21424

  • Characters without spaces: 18266

  • Paragraphs: 48

  • Sentences: 150

  • Reading time: 12 m 36 s

Abstract

This paper departs from the conventional reading of T. P. Kailasam’s 1946 Kannada play The Curse or Karna, which frequently reduces Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of the subaltern to a simplistic shorthand for a marginalized figure lacking a voice. By applying Spivak’s "problem of the receiver," the essay argues that Karna’s tragedy lies not in literal silence as he speaks articulately throughout the play but in the structural impossibility of being heard on his own terms within the dominant dharmic and caste order. The study extends this framework to Kunti, positing her as a "doubly-shadowed" gendered subaltern whose critical actions are effaced by codes of chastity and royal reputation, making her consciousness entirely irretrievable. Finally, drawing on Peter Struck's framework of myth-revision, the paper suggests that Kailasam structurally reorganizes the epic to deliberately position the external modern audience as the sole ethical receiver capable of validating Karna’s claims.

Keywords Subalternity; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; T. P. Kailasam; The Curse or Karna; Problem of the Receiver; Myth-Revision; Structural Silencing; Indian Writing in English Translation.

Research Question:

Within the dramatic and moral structure of Kailasam's play, who occupies the position of "receiver" for Karna's speech, and does that position ever allow his claims to register as anything other than deviance from an already-fixed dharmic and caste order?

Hypothesis:

In T. P. Kailasam’s The Curse or Karna, the protagonist's subalternity is defined not by literal silence, but by the absence of a structural "receiver" within the play's dharmic economy capable of treating his speech as an independent claim rather than proof of transgression. Consequently, Kailasam's dramatic revision of the myth functions to circumvent this internal ideological blockade by reorganizing the epic's architecture, thereby positioning the external audience as the only viable receiver for both Karna's overt claims and Kunti's deeply effaced, gendered subalternity.

1. Introduction

T. P. Kailasam's Kannada play The Curse or Karna (1946) retells the life of Karna from the Mahabharata, tracing his humiliations at the hands of Parashurama, Bhishma, Drona, and Duryodhana's court on account of his uncertain birth. Existing student criticism of the play almost uniformly reaches for the label ‘subaltern’ to describe Karna, treating Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) as a shorthand for ‘the marginalised figure who has no voice.’ This is a misreading of Spivak's actual argument. Spivak does not claim that subaltern persons are literally silent; several of Kailasam's Karna scenes in fact show him speaking at length, argumentatively and persuasively. Spivak's more demanding claim is that the subaltern subject's speech, however articulate, has no structural position within the dominant order from which it can be received as an autonomous claim rather than as a confirmation of the very hierarchy that produced the subaltern position in the first place.

This assignment therefore departs from the familiar ‘Karna as voiceless subaltern’ template and instead asks a more precise question drawn directly from Spivak's text: who, within the dramatic and moral structure of Kailasam's play, occupies the position of ‘receiver’ for Karna's speech, and does that position ever allow his claims to register as anything other than deviance from an already-fixed dharmic and caste order? The essay extends this question to Kunti, arguing that her silence constitutes a second, arguably more deeply buried, instance of subalternity within the play. It also situates the argument within the wider field of Subaltern Studies scholarship, since the term ‘subaltern’ has itself been a site of ongoing conceptual dispute since Ranajit Guha and Spivak first adapted it from Antonio Gramsci for the study of colonial South Asia.

2. Theoretical Framework: Spivak Beyond the ‘Voiceless Victim’ Reading

Spivak's essay opens by warning against Western radical criticism that claims to dissolve the sovereign subject while covertly reinstating ‘the West as Subject.’ She extends this caution to the Subaltern Studies historians associated with Ranajit Guha, whose stratification of colonial Indian society distinguishes dominant foreign groups, dominant indigenous groups at the all-India level, dominant indigenous groups at the regional level, and the residual category of ‘the people’ or subaltern classes, defined negatively as everyone who is not elite. Spivak stresses that this residual category is internally heterogeneous and unstable: a group dominant in one region may be subordinate in another, which makes ‘the subaltern’ a relational position rather than a fixed identity.

Rosalind O'Hanlon's contemporaneous critique of the early Subaltern Studies project is useful here, since it interrogates a closely related difficulty from a different angle: the risk that historians who set out to recover the subaltern as the ‘subject’ of history may, in the act of recovery, reinstall the very sovereign, self-present consciousness that the concept of subalternity was meant to unsettle (O'Hanlon). Rochona Majumdar's later re-reading of Subaltern Studies as a history of social movements makes a related point from within the collective's own historiography: she argues that the group's writings left us with a durable, if contested, ‘paradigm... of the revolutionary subject’ of popular mobilization (Majumdar). Read alongside Spivak, this suggests that even sympathetic historical recovery of subaltern action can quietly re-supply the coherent, intending subject that the subaltern position is structurally denied the same trap this assignment argues Kailasam's dharmic order sets for Karna's speech. Sara de Jong and Jamila Mascat's introduction to their special issue on ‘relocating subalternity’ reinforces the point from cultural studies more broadly: they treat Spivak's category as inherently unstable and open to ‘foreclosure,’ which is precisely why the term can be redeployed, as this assignment does, from colonial historiography onto a twentieth-century Kannada play without doing violence to its original sense (De Jong and Mascat).

The essay's most important move for this assignment is Spivak's discussion of insurgency and the ‘problem of the receiver.’ She observes that when historians recover peasant insurgency as text, the insurgent's own consciousness remains irretrievable; the historian merely receives the elaboration of the act, not the subject behind it. Spivak's question, restated for literary analysis, becomes: even where a marginalised character speaks or acts within a narrative, is there any position inside that narrative's social order capable of receiving the speech as a legitimate claim rather than as a symptom to be explained, corrected, or punished? Spivak closes the excerpted section by noting that gendered subalternity is doubly effaced, since the ideological construction of gender keeps male subjects dominant even within already-subordinated groups   a point this assignment applies to Kunti in Section 5. Peter Thomas's re-reading of subalternity in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks offers a useful complication here: rather than treating the subaltern only as “a figure of exclusion,” Thomas proposes figures such as the “irrepressible subaltern”, who remains partly legible within hegemonic relations rather than wholly outside them (Thomas). Duryodhana's partial recognition of Karna, discussed in Section 4, can be read in these terms: not as Karna escaping subalternity altogether, but as a hegemonic relation in which he is heard just enough to be useful to it which is a different, and lesser, thing than being heard on his own terms.

3. Existing Scholarship on Karna and Subalternity: A Brief Review

Because this assignment departs from the common classroom shorthand for Spivak, it is worth situating that shorthand within the actual scholarly conversation on Karna. Bharathi S. Rai and Manjula K. T.'s review of literature on the ‘re-invention’ of Karna is explicit that he is “a character... wronged vehemently from the social perspective and of relative deprivation,” and organises its survey around the paired keywords ‘Karna’ and ‘Kunti’ alongside ‘deprivation’ and ‘adroitness’ (Rai and K. T.). That pairing is suggestive: even a review of literature not working through Spivak intuitively treats Karna's and Kunti's exclusions as connected, which supports this assignment's decision to read them together in Sections 4 and 5, though the present essay departs from Rai and K. T. in asking specifically who is structurally positioned to receive Karna's grievance rather than simply cataloguing that the grievance exists.

It is worth noting what the wider Mahabharata-subalternity literature does and does not cover, since not every plausible-sounding source is in fact about Karna. Diwakar Regmi's recent study of subaltern resistance in the epic, for instance, works through Gramsci's framework but focuses on Vidura, Hiḍimbā, and Śikhaṇḍī rather than Karna, arguing that these figures practise individual rather than collective resistance to the epic's dominant order (Regmi). The relevance to this assignment is methodological rather than substantive: Regmi's finding that the Mahabharata's marginal figures resist singly, each within their own local dharmic bind, rather than as a class, is consistent with this assignment's claim that Karna's and Kunti's positions must be analysed separately rather than folded into one general ‘subaltern’ category. Sarika Sasi's monograph Subaltern Characters in the Mahabharata situates Karna within a wider cast of epic figures whose social position is fixed by birth (Sasi); it is cited here as evidence that Karna's exclusion is legible as one instance of a broader pattern in the epic, without this assignment claiming to reproduce Sasi's own analysis of that pattern.

A. Divya's study of the 2021 Tamil film Karnan (dir. Mari Selvaraj) is a useful point of comparison rather than direct evidence about Kailasam's play: Divya reads the film, which she describes as “a cinematic ode to a subaltern caste community,” as part of a rise of the ‘male subaltern’ figure in Tamil cinema, in which caste and gender are analysed together rather than treated as separable axes of exclusion (Divya). That the epic's Karna continues to be invoked, nearly eight decades after Kailasam's play, as shorthand for a Dalit protagonist's caste exclusion in an entirely different regional cinema suggests that the ‘problem of the receiver’ this assignment identifies in the 1946 play has not been resolved by later retellings so much as relocated. None of these studies, however, foreground Spivak's specific ‘problem of the receiver’ as the operative analytic category; most use ‘subaltern’ in the looser, more general sense this assignment sets out to move past. That gap is what the present analysis attempts to fill.

4. Methodological Note: Reading Karna as Myth-Revision

Following Peter Struck's framework for reading myth as a structured, reworkable system of meaning rather than a fixed sacred record, this assignment treats Kailasam's departures from the Vyasa Mahabharata as deliberate structural choices, not incidental dramatisation. Kailasam selects and compresses episodes   Karna's confrontation with Parashurama, his exclusion from Draupadi's swayamvara, his loyalty to Duryodhana   in ways that foreground the mechanics of exclusion itself. Reading these choices as revisionist myth-making allows the analysis to ask not only what happens to Karna, but what Kailasam's formal reshaping of the epic is trying to make visible or audible that the original narrative structure suppressed.

5. Karna's Speech and the Problem of the Receiver

Karna is not dramatically silent. He argues his case to Parashurama when his true caste is discovered, he asserts his right to compete at the tournament before Kripacharya, and he pledges loyalty to Duryodhana in terms that claim dignity rather than plead for pity. The critical question is not whether these speeches occur but what happens to them structurally once uttered.

In each instance, the play's dharmic order supplies a ready-made frame   the rule that a kshatriya art cannot rightly belong to a suta-putra, the rule that lineage determines eligibility for marriage and competition   that pre-interprets Karna's words before they can be evaluated on their own terms. His claim to skill is heard only as confirmation of a prior deception; his claim to dignity is heard only as evidence of misplaced pride. There is, in Spivak's terms, no position within the play's moral economy positioned to receive his speech as an independent claim rather than as further proof of the transgression his birth already represents. This is the distinction between having a voice and having a hearing: Kailasam gives Karna abundant voice while showing, scene after scene, that the surrounding social structure withholds the position from which that voice could be received as legitimate.

This reading also explains why Karna's loyalty to Duryodhana carries such dramatic weight. Duryodhana is the one figure in the play who occupies the receiver's position for Karna without first filtering his claims through caste rule. That this recognition comes from a figure himself positioned as antagonist to the play's moral centre is itself significant: it suggests that within the world Kailasam constructs, being heard is only available outside the legitimate dharmic order, never within it.

6. Kunti as the Doubly Shadowed Subaltern

Spivak's closing observation that gendered subalternity is effaced even more deeply than other forms of subalternity offers a productive angle largely absent from existing commentary on this play, which tends to treat Kunti only as the guilty mother whose secrecy causes Karna's suffering. Piermarco Piu's recent re-reading of Spivak's work argues for its “sociological... salience,” insisting that her framework is meant to illuminate “the situation of subaltern groups” in concrete social and material terms, not only as a literary-theoretical abstraction (Piu). Taken seriously, that insistence means Kunti's silence should be read as a socially produced condition   a structural distribution of who gets to speak and be believed   rather than as an individual character flaw the play simply asks us to forgive or condemn. Read through Spivak, Kunti's concealment of Karna's birth is not simply a personal failing but a subaltern act in its own right: an act performed under conditions where open acknowledgment was structurally unavailable to her as a woman bound by codes of chastity and royal reputation that Karna, as a grown man contesting his place among warriors, is not equally bound by.

Crucially, the play never dramatises Kunti's reasoning at the moment of decision; her motive is supplied retrospectively, through its consequences for Karna, rather than presented as her own reasoned claim. In Spivak's vocabulary, Kunti functions as a ‘sender’ whose consciousness remains irretrievable   the play, like the colonial archive Spivak examines, preserves the effects of her act while denying access to the act's own interior logic. Where Karna at least receives scenes in which he argues his case, however unsuccessfully, Kunti barely receives that much: her most consequential act precedes the play's action entirely and is narrated rather than performed. This makes her, on Spivak's terms, the more thoroughly silenced of the two figures, even though the play's title and dramatic focus centre on Karna.

7. Kailasam's Revisionist Myth-Making as an Attempted ‘Receiver’



If the Mahabharata's inherited structure denies Karna a legitimate hearing, Kailasam's formal choice to isolate and dramatise Karna's story   rather than presenting it as one strand within the larger Pandava-centred epic   can itself be read as an attempt to construct the receiving position that the myth's dominant tradition withholds. By compressing the narrative around Karna's humiliations and giving him extended, rhetorically forceful speeches, Kailasam positions the audience, rather than any figure inside the play's world, as the receiver capable of hearing Karna's claims on their own terms. This is consistent with Struck's account of myth as a living structure open to reworking: Kailasam does not simply retell Karna's story but reorganises the epic's architecture so that the modern audience occupies the position of ethical judgment that the original narrative reserved for dharmic law. The play's tragedy, on this reading, is doubled: within the world of the play, Karna and Kunti remain unreceived; outside it, in the audience's reception, Kailasam offers the hearing the myth itself withheld.

8. Conclusion

Read against Spivak's actual argument rather than a popularised summary of her title, The Curse or Karna emerges as a study not of silence but of the structural conditions under which speech fails to secure a hearing. Karna speaks throughout the play, yet the dharmic and caste order supplies the terms on which his speech is received well before he utters it, converting every claim to dignity into further confirmation of his transgression. Kunti's subalternity runs deeper still, since her decisive act is never dramatised as her own reasoned claim at all. Kailasam's decision to restructure the epic around Karna's humiliations can be understood, following Struck's account of myth as reworkable structure, as an attempt to relocate the position of reception from the play's internal dharmic order to its external audience.

Finally, it is worth noting that Spivak's categories have themselves travelled well beyond the colonial South Asian archive she originally examined. David Lloyd's essay on Irish working-class history explicitly takes up how ‘the subaltern’ and ‘the popular’ “become unfixed” once moved out of their original South Asian historiographical setting and applied to a different national context (Lloyd), and Helen Macdonald's dialogue between South Asian Subaltern Studies and post-colonial African anthropology performs a comparable relocation across disciplines. Neither essay discusses Karna or the Mahabharata, and neither is cited here as evidence about Kailasam's play; they are cited to show that redeploying Spivak's vocabulary onto a new archive   as this assignment does with a Kannada play rather than a colonial insurgency record   is a recognised, not an eccentric, scholarly move, provided the redeployment is argued for rather than assumed. The play's enduring critical interest, then, lies less in whether Karna has a voice than in tracing, scene by scene, who is permitted to hear it.

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Works Cited:


  • De Jong, Sara, and Jamila M. H. Mascat. “Relocating Subalternity: Scattered Speculations on the Conundrum of a Concept.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 5, Sept. 2016, pp. 717–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2016.1168109.

  • Divya, A. “‘Why Can’t the Son of Maadasamy Be Karnan?’: Caste, Gender, and the Rise of the Male Subaltern in Tamil Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 41, no. 4, Nov. 2022, pp. 438–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2022.2150504.

  • O'Hanlon, Rosalind. “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988, pp. 189–224. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/312498.

  • Piu, Piermarco. “The Journey of Subalternity in Gayatri Spivak's Work: Its Sociological Relevance.” The Sociological Review, vol. 71, no. 6, Sept. 2023, pp. 1258–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231194495.




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