Wounds Beyond the Flesh: A Psychological Reading of Trauma and Memory in K.A. Gunasekaran’s The Scar

Abstract

K.A. Gunasekaran's autobiographical narrative The Scar (originally published in Tamil as Vadu in 2004 and translated into English by V. Kadambari in 2009) stands as a foundational document in the corpus of Tamil Dalit literature, widely recognised as the first modern Dalit autobiography in that language. The text chronicles the narrator’s childhood and adolescence as a boy from the Parayar caste in the villages of Tamil Nadu, navigating the intersecting violence of untouchability, economic destitution, and psychological humiliation within a social order that structures its cruelties with deliberate, systemic precision. This paper undertakes a psychological reading of the autobiography, deploying the theoretical frameworks of Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory as articulated in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), Judith Herman’s conceptualisation of complex trauma in Trauma and Recovery (1992), and Bessel van der Kolk’s analysis of somatic and neurological trauma in The Body Keeps the Score (2014). The argument advanced here positions the wounds narrated in The Scar as persistent, structurally produced psychic conditions, locating caste as a chronic traumatising apparatus that operates continuously upon the Dalit subject’s interior life and social being. In the text, memory functions as an active and politically charged practice of bearing witness, transforming recollection into a mode of engaging with the unspeakable and the unassimilated. The paper demonstrates how the narrative stages the processes of traumatic repetition, the fragmentation of identity, the internalisation of shame and self-abasement, the body as a site of caste inscription, and ultimately, the transformation of wounded memory into a discourse of resistance and assertion.