sashene

So when I transplanted the Silm characters into 1970s small town Kerala, I wasn't asking and nor did I really care to ask, whether the Fëanorian brothers in this setting and context, act exactly as they did in Beleriand. Because of course they wouldn't! The social structures/power dynamics/cultural frameworks are entirely different: Comrade Maedhros is an extremely powerful man in his small regional context, but he is a small fish in the ocean, speaking globally. Instead, I was mostly exploring how the characters and narrative’s fundamental drives (eg. generational harm and pride, bloodlines as corrosive agent, self-disgust, historiography, voyeurism, complicity, nationbuilding and, with the setting itself, Muslim-majority Kozhikode in a soon to be openly Hindu nationalist country, taken as an insular enclave attritionally ravaged by The Long Defeat, the 1970s period setting paralleling the ‘ruins’ the main LotR narrative was built upon) would manifest in such a radically different world. Which is to say a character defined by his valour would still be valiant in an AU, even if the setting and context gives that valour a completely different shape and meaning. 

From Prayers:

Every insurrection is kindled by private grievance, dressed in doctrine and remembered in the language of redemption. The revolutionary Fëanorians had never been a united collective, at least not for most of their lives. Instead, they were frantic shrapnel from whichever vital part of Fëanor had been demolished by the day his ceremonial swords were thrown into the salt pond. They ricocheted in various directions: some ignited, some burned to dust, a couple fizzled out. They shared no common ideology but were all unsettled by order and estranged from stasis, all carrying a pathological compulsion to excoriate, to pick at corrosion, be it within themselves or out in the world. 

To them, disruption was the only true way of survival, writhing and thrashing their only means of locomotion. Like Maglor and Elrond who repeatedly consumed and regurgitated parts of themselves into lyric and prose, Nerdanel who swallowed herself whole to make a point which never hit its mark, Celebrimbor and Celegorm who focused their energies on perfecting parochial politics, giving no thought to what such obsessions did to their own psyches. Maedhros the firstborn, the relic who had all his best ideas whilst beating himself bloody in the masjid. Elros Tar-Minyatur, who could not change the world and Arwen Undómiel, who did not outlive them all. The historians, who would one day reduce and redeem them, would note how despite the Fëanorians’ failure as individual revolutionaries, they had, in a way, made a collective success out of symbolic failure.

I also tend to roll my eyes a bit at the idea I’ve seen floating around a couple of times recently, ie that AUs are ‘lesser’ forms of fanfiction because it apparently exclusively means writing an original story using character names for shits and giggles (which is also fine if that is your thing obviously). But that isn’t true at all, and is a rather rude and lazy generalisation. 

Which is to say, setting isn't just backdrop but actively shapes character… the phrase “symptoms of their environment” is repeated multiple times in Prayers itself precisely for this reason.

There was very little else to it. It was only ever a little part of the gestures that made a man. A gentle, non-malignant symptom of his environment, an unconscious extension of respect as natural to him as split-second fury. A symptom Maedhros broke through, deliberately and only this once, simply because Elwing had needed a moment of comfort, a hand to hold in the lonesome dark. Who could blame Elrond? she wonders.

“Do we think of our dead as symptoms of our environment?” Celebrimbor opens his hands.

Of course he is afraid. Maedhros has spent his life afraid. He had been afraid to go into the building because if he went into the building then it would no longer be just Elros and Maedhros. If it is no longer just Elros and Maedhros, then it means he is wrong. That it is not him that is wrong, that is misaligned with the world, that it is no longer just Fëanor’s Fault. That Fëanor had been a malignant symptom, not the true cause. That the disease had never been cured and so there would continue to be symptoms. That he is not collateral damage but a continuing symptom. That he might be like Fëanor. That there would always be Fëanors.

What is Empire if not a long incision, and what is Arwen Undomiel if not a tiny, distant symptom of lingering infection? Was the tragicomedy, that total fucking joke known as Elrond Peredhel’s life, written in large part because of Maedhros Fëanorian? Certainly. But was it the shadow of his father’s despair that blistered him, or the fiery actions of the man? Was it the collision course of an inevitable act of suicide to come, or the collision of the kidnapping that brought them to each other? Was Elrond Peredhel a symptom of Empire? Certainly. But which strain? The clawed up continent? The towering institution? Viceroy House or cliff-house?

AND MORE LOL

Anyway, for me the postcolonial Kozhikode setting doesn't just provide exotic scenery for Middle-earth dramas or serve as a stage to closely re-enact the exact plot of The Silmarillion. A modern setting and different context absolutely can still engage with questions of power/kinship/language/legacy central to the Silmarillion. Characters who might have been kings or were at least aristocracy in one way or the other, become something else entirely when filtered through different hierarchies of power. And I may be biased but this kind of transformation absolutely does the source material justice imo and is as ‘linked’ to said source as a fic set in canonverse… because it takes seriously the idea that these characters are real enough to exist across contexts, that their essential conflicts and contradictions would persist (see: the emotional dynamics of ‘kidnap fam’ in Prayers are very similar to the source, ie Elwing as both tragically young victim and ‘posthumous’ scapegoat, Maglor as both loving and complicit, El-twins as both ward and hostage, even though—and a couple of people got aggy with this at the start—the racial and national dynamics of my AU are in fact a complete opposite of the canonverse ones, and actually places Elwing in the colonial administration) even as their circumstances change.

I think what I’ve been circling around is that the thing that makes an AU feel "right" is internal coherence rather than external fidelity, if that makes sense? Which is to say, if a character's decisions follow logically from their established psychology as adapted to this new world, changes that might seem jarring in isolation can actually make perfect sense. The Fëanorians might look nothing like they do in canon when refracted through Kerala's sociopolitical landscape, but if it still captures their self-destructive intensity, externally framed navel gazing and refusal to compromise, then imo it works in a way I’m content with. The real out-of-character moment for me isn't when a character does something new, but when they act in ways that contradict their ‘core’ nature without the narrative earning that change through character development or contextual pressure. 

Finally, I'd actually argue that a well thought out AU has potential to reveal something about the canon that straight retellings may not, at least it has done so for me. By stripping away the familiar trappings and forcing myself to distill what's essentially Fëanorian or Arafinwëan or Noldor/Sindar about these characters, I actually discovered several dimensions of them I'd missed in canon, because placing them in a postcolonial context made certain power dynamics impossible to ignore, and made certain silences newly audible. 

So my primary AU-writing tip would actually be to treat it as a kind of literary experiment: if you change all the variables except the character/narrative/setting’s core psychology, what remains constant? What aspects of a character’s canonical actions were products of circumstance rather than character? Sometimes the distance of an AU provides the clarity to see that a character's canonical cruelty wasn't inevitable but situational, or conversely, that their kindness was harder-won than it appeared. Which is to say, radical AUs can absolutely be analytically valuable as well as creatively satisfying. 

Anupama Rao's The Caste Question and Sharad Chari's Apartheid Remains = approach caste and race not as identity markers but as technologies of labour discipline + statecraft. The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid by Anand Teltumbde is a very, very good read on the modernisation of casteism, and goes into the institutionalisation of Naxalite-accusations as a tactic of the Indian state.

Priya Gopal's Insurgent Empire is quoted in my presentation and is a very good 'intro read' to dissent studies etc, but just a note that Gopal is writing from and to Cambridge, and that is evident in some of her positions. Vijay Prashad's The Karma of Brown Folk critiques the "model minority" myth and directly names class-caste collusions in U.S. South Asian migration patterns. Gaiutra Bahadur's Coolie Woman is an expansive intergenerational account of indentured labour migration from South Asia to the Caribbean.

Meena Kandasamy's The Gypsy Goddess is metafictional and formalistically very interesting, blends Marxist historiography and fiction, confronts the limits of literary form when narrating atrocity, tells of the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre of Dalit labourers in Tamilnadu. Kandasamy is great in general, really nice person too! No Land’s People: The Untold Story of India’s Deported Citizens by Abhishek Saha is a journalistic account of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and its brutal exclusion of Bengali Muslims from citizenship... biting read on how liberal framings of "Indian democracy" erase the violence of the country's border regime and ethno-religious nationalism.

The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present by Jini Kim Watson & Gary Wilder is a collection of essays/articles on how the postcolonial is often used to mask state violence or bourgeois aspiration + calls instead for anticolonialism reckoning with authoritarianism/environmental collapse/neocolonial relations. Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life edited by Robin Jeffrey & Ronojoy Sen, particularly useful in its criticism of how liberal diasporic narratives can often treat Islamophobia as a “silly back home™️ problem", unlike US/UK racism, aka "the Real Problem™️".

Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan, another bit of fiction+non-fiction, presented in fragments, re: absurdity and brutality of South Asian labour diaspora in the UAE, really interesting when it comes to less-considered diasporic narratives. The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Forgotten War edited by Diana Yong, a collection of essays on British counterinsurgency during the Malayan Emergency, the roots of military-industrial practices exported to Vietnam later, and the racialised labour that underpinned them (if you're a British liberal/lefty, get ready to get icked the fuck out by Attlee, sorry).

Finally, The Malaysian Indians: History, Problems and Future by Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, a political history of Indian Malaysians, many descended from indentured labourers... it challenges celebratory economic-diaspora narratives but also Malaysia+Singapore's self-conception as utopian 'melting pots' by showing the structural disenfranchisement, plantation labour exploitation + ongoing marginalisation faced by the Malaysian Tamil community to this day.