“Via And Border-Making in Karikkottakkari: Landscapes of Migration and Exile in The Light of Viapolitics”

Abstract

In this seminar paper I explore the interlocking arenas of migration, exile and border-making in Vinoy Thomas’s Malayalam novel Karikkottakkari, situating its narrative of north Kerala settlement and migrant communities within the wider framework of landscapes of mobility. The novel’s depiction of a remote village in Malabar, populated by migrants from central and southern Kerala, reveals how migration is not simply a spatial relocation but a re-shaping of territory, identity and belonging. I argue that the concept of Viapolitics—as developed by William Walters, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani—provides an incisive theoretical lens to read this text: by foregrounding the “via” (vehicles, routes, infrastructures, geophysical trajectories) and the politics of movement and bordering that govern migrant pathways, the novel may be read as both a chronicle of settlement and a critique of the spatial regimes it invokes. The migrants’ journey into Karikkottakkari entails not only physical movement but the creation of new social and symbolic borders: between old homeland and new land, between insiders and outsiders, between origin and exile. The landscape of settlement becomes a border-zone—a space of belonging and otherness. Through close reading of key passages, I examine how mobility infrastructures (roads, dialects, settlement plots), geophysical terrain (hills, forests, fringe territory) and community practices in the novel enact viapolitical logics: the “via” is not neutral, it is governed, policed, shaped by power relations, and in turn shapes migrant identity and exile. I also show how the novel portrays a persistent longing for roots—racial, geographical, ritualistic and religious—that motivates migration and settlement, and gives rise to border-making as much as border-crossing. In conclusion, I suggest that human beings’ enduring tendency to search for their roots drives the formation of borders—territorial, cultural and symbolic—and that migration, exile and settlement must be understood as processes of root-seeking and border-making, not solely as displacement.