Koti and Chennaya: Cultural Resistant Symbols of Tulunad Yogitha Shetty Elaborating on D R Nagaraj’s idea that ‘even the oppressed needs a Memory,’ Chinnaiah Jangam brilliantly ruminates over the necessity of a cultural memory for Dalits and other oppressed in his essay on the politics of identity and the project of writing history. i He discusses about Dalits who, resort to reconstructing their own real and imaginary heroes based on folk memory and legend to rally people as inspirational stories of fighting against injustice and demonstration of valour. (68) The socio-political imperative of evoking a positive historical memory that instils hope, self- confidence and ensures ‘recognition,’ ii thus, drives the oppressed communities to fall back upon their social archive of folklore or folk narratives. Through such memorized narratives a resistant democratic imaginary is evoked. The retelling of ‘folk epic’ of Koti-Chennaya is one such attempt by the remembering communities in Tulunad, with heightened significance in the identity-asserting post-colonial Indian context. Tulunad or the land of Tulu people, is an ethno-linguistic minority region in the South-west coast of India, and is predominantly an oral-performative community. It is located within the political boundary of majoritarian Kannada-speaking State of Karnataka, and consists of two districts of South Kanara and Udupi with Tulu language as its lingua-franca. It is in this cultural region of Tuluvas iii that the folk song of Koti Chennaya is preserved, and retold for generations