| Sumario: | The paper argues that the rise of collaborative autobiographies from Kerala entails a misrepresentation rooted in the conception of the marginal exotic. It is triggered by capitalist interests which help produce and disseminate these narratives across the globe, particularly the English translations. Authenticity as construed by the collaborator-translator nexus manifests itself explicitly through paratextual addendums. They exist solely as interpolative superfluities, artistic or critical, which serve to severely limit the epistemological possibilities and subtexts that the life-narrative houses. In this study, Mayilamma's collaborative autobiography, Mayilamma: Oru Jeevitham (MOJ), and its translation, Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (MLTEW), are looked at in detail, exploring the politics of market and authenticity at play in the production and dissemination of the said texts. The paratextual elements, specifically in MLTEW, are analyzed as examples for the production of a marginal exotic tailored to suit the literary framework envisaged by the Western liberal literati and the vernacular elite renderings of authentic tribal culture.
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