Decolonising the Mind - K.A. Gunasekaran’s Indelible Mark of Experience

Abstract

This paper examines K.A. Gunasekaran’s autobiographical work The Scar (Vadu) through the framework of decolonial theory, arguing that systemic emancipation from caste oppression requires decolonising the minds of both the oppressed and the oppressor. The study analyses how The Scar, considered the first autobiographical Dalit literature in Tamil, depicts the lived reality of caste discrimination in post-independence Tamil Nadu during the 1950s-1960s. While Gunasekaran advocates education as a pathway to Dalit emancipation, this analysis employs Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s concept of mental decolonisation and Althusser’s theory of interpellation to demonstrate that educational and governmental interventions alone cannot dismantle caste hierarchies. The paper explores how caste identities become internalised through ideological state apparatuses, including scholarship systems and educational institutions that paradoxically reinforce stratification, even through ‘positive discrimination’. Through textual analysis of key episodes throughout the work, violent discrimination, family complicity in oppression, and inherent institutional bias, the research establishes that liberation requires challenging interpellated social identities from both directions. The text functions as protest literature articulating different modes of resistance, yet previous scholarship has not adequately addressed the bilateral nature of required decolonisation. True liberation demands that oppressed communities reject interpellated identities while oppressors relinquish false superiority derived from holding power over communities.