INI KAMSAN PARAYATTE

Ini Kamsan Parayatte is a powerful work of cultural criticism that rereads the figure of Kamsa from the Bhagavata tradition through a radically new lens. Moving away from the familiar image of Kamsa as the absolute embodiment of evil Ajayan K. P. patiently excavates the political social and castecoded layers that produced this “villain” in the first place.Starting from the provocative insight that epics Puranas and texts like the Bhagavatam are not innocent stories but narrative technologies that secure varna–ashrama hierarchies the book asks: who gets to be remembered as “noble hero” and who is eternally fixed as “asura” “rakshasa” “mleccha” or “nishada”? Reading across Bhagavatam Devi Bhagavatam Padma Purana and other major Purana traditions Ajayan traces Kamsa’s birth as the unwanted child of sexual violence the layers of curse and fate that precede him and the slow formation of a psyche condemned to death even before it understands itself.Instead of dismissing Kamsa as a onedimensional monster Ini Kamsan Parayatte shows him as a subject produced by power – by Aryan supremacy Brahminical scriptural politics and by a narrative machinery that needs the “total villain” in order to glorify divine avatars. The book travels through figures like Veṇa Hiranyakashipu Prahlada Ashwatthama Ekalavya Shambuka and others to expose how epic–Purana traditions criminalise the nonAryan the tribal the “other” while purifying the violence of gods sages and kings through theology and ritual.Written in richly poetic yet rigorously argued Malayalam prose the work combines the sharpness of a research monograph with the energy of a manifesto. Situated against the backdrop of contemporary neofascist attempts to weaponise Itihasa–Purana as “Sanatana Dharma” Ajayan’s reading offers a pathway towards a politically alert casteaware counterhegemonic engagement with tradition.At once a postmortem of a “reversed” time and an invitation to listen to the silenced voice of Kamsa this book will be essential reading for students of literature cultural studies religion political thought and anyone interested in how stories make – and unmake – justice.