The Global Ballad: Kuyili, Female Militancy, and Romantic Untranslatability

This article examines the revival of the Romantic Ballad in contemporary anglophone writing through Vanavil K. Ravi’s The Ballad of the Warrior-Girl, which reimagines the Tamil folk figure, Kuyili and her role in the Sivagangai rebellion, a Romantic-era anti-colonial uprising in South India. In retelling this folk memory, Ravi mobilizes a Romantic-era form to recast an instance of a local uprising, rife with caste dynamics, into a national and globalized narrative aligned with neo-nationalist storytelling conventions. By transforming a lower-caste, female militant in a local language into a Hindu, pan-Indian icon of patriotic martyrdom, Ravi’s ballad participates in a larger trend of globalized translations. I situate the text within intersecting histories of Romanticisms, balladic traditions, and the global circulation of literary forms. Through this, I outline what I call the ‘global ballad’ as distinct from the ‘globalized ballad’. While the latter flattens cultural difference into consumable cosmopolitanism, the former centers opacity and untranslatability across rhizomatic relationalities. I show how reading literary texts alongside different critical traditions is a productive way to counter the exoticized, neoliberal circulation of literature in translation.