The Enduring Echo: Language, Identity, and Cultural Survival in Select Fictions of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

Abstract

Language is never neutral. For historically marginalized communities like the Adivasis, it is the first domain of erasure and the final frontier of resistance. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, writing from within the Santhal community, navigates the fault lines of power, representation, and survival in a literary landscape that has long spoken about Adivasis but rarely with them. His fictions perform a double move: they destabilize the homogeneity of Indian English while preserving the cadences and consciousness of Santali life. This paper examines how his works, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey (2014) and My Father’s Garden (2018), utilize language as a tool of resistance against cultural erasure while navigating the tension between oral tradition and written form. Throughout his fictional works, Shekhar weaves Santali words and phrases into his writing, often without providing direct translations for his English-speaking readers. This choice serves two main purposes: it authentically conveys the Santhal experience, immerses readers in the community's language, and acts as a subtle resistance against linguistic assimilation into English, asserting the validity of Santali in literature. Drawing upon recent theories of linguistic resistance by scholars like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Adivasi cultural theorists such as G.N. Devy, the paper argues that Shekhar’s strategic code-switching, narrative ambiguity, and vernacular embeddedness serve as acts of linguistic decolonization. Writing, in his fiction, becomes a battleground where cultural survival is not just thematized but actively performed. Through this lens, Shekhar’s work can be read as an insurgent archive, challenging the coloniality of Indian English literature and re-centering Adivasi epistemologies.