Valli by Sheela Tomy

Valli: A Novel [SHORTLISTED FOR THE JCB PRIZE 2022] by Sheela Tomy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book suffers from poor translation – the amount of suffixes pertaining to relatives – achchis, attans – is a big irritant for non-Malayalam readers. The temporal jumps in the narrative add to the disorientation.
This is an account of the exploitation of the aadivasi (aboriginal) tribes living harmoniously with their surroundings since antiquity in the hills of Kerala. Their forests were cut down by greedy rapacious timber merchants – thus ruining a finely balanced ecological niche, leading to either catastrophic flooding or droughts. Large scale building of tourist resorts, blasting of mountains for roads and bridges, introducing alien cash crops like coffee and rubber further contributed to the degradation in the lives of the tribals. Their culture, folk-lore, language, traditional food crops were destroyed. Migrants from other parts of the country added insult to injury. Communists exploited the natives for their political gains.
All this is mentioned in the book, but what is glaring in its omission is mention of the reprehensible role of Christian missionaries in destroying the benevolent and affable animistic/natural religious beliefs of the natives and imposing an alien creed, out of sync with the hills, rives, trees, animals, plants etc.

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