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Before the Break of Dawn
Before the Break of Dawn: Secrets of the Namboodiri Women is a celebration of life in a Kerala Brahmin household. Most of the narratives start before dawn. The ordinary business of having a bath, the almost compulsory visit to the temple, the task of caring for the unapologetically patriarchal male Namboodiris, the retiring ladies of the house and the Irikkanammas, all following a strict code of conduct. One can smell the lazy smoke of the kitchen fires, the clatter of vessels being cleaned as the household gradually comes awake, brass lamps burnished to look like gold, the chill of the sleeping waters of the pond, the subtle fragrances of blooms easily identifiable by their smell alone, the simple but wholesome and highly repetitive meals of the day, interspersed with rare festival days, the highlight of which is obviously the feast, with the winding down of the day into soft nights where birdsong and fireflies are very much part of life.
Antharjanam
Autobiography of a leader of the women's right movement in Kerala, India.
From Canon to Covid
This multi-genre collection of chapters presents the dramatic transformation of English Studies in India since the early 1990s. It showcases the shift from the study of mainly British literature and language to a more versatile terrain of multilingualism, culture, performance, theory, and the literary Global South. Tracing this transition, the volume discusses themes like Indian literary history, postcolonial theory, post-pandemic challenges to literary studies, the state of Indian English drama, vernacular literature in English Studies and pedagogy, translations of feminist writers from South Asia, caste, and othering in literature, among other key themes. The volume, with contributions fro...
Borders and Beyond: Orient-Occident Crossings in Literature
The work presents articles discussing various subjects relating to literary, cultural borders and borderlands as well as their crossings with the Orient and the Occident. A broad, multifaceted scope of the volume draws the attention of readers to the problem of liminal spaces between cultures, genres, codes and languages of literary and artistic communication. The perspective of borderness proposed by orientalists, literary specialists, culture experts provide insights into multi-dimensional and heterogenic subjects and methods of consideration. The authors referring to, inter alia, comparative studies, theory of reception, intertextuality, transculturality of the East and West works touch u...
Social Spaces and the Public Sphere
What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms, and libraries reify—or subvert—dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that this book explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation, and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how "modernity" has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading rooms, and libraries have al...
The Fall of Gods
Interrogating the cultural roots of contemporary Malayali middle classes, especially the upper caste Nambudiri community, The Fall of Gods is based on a decade-long ethnography and historico-sociological analyses of the interconnections between colonial history, family memories, and class mobility in twentieth-century south India. It traces the transformation of normative structures of kinship networks as the community moves from colonial to neo-liberal modernity across generations. The author demonstrates how past family experiences of class and geographical mobility (or immobility) are retrieved and reshaped in the present as alternative ways of conceiving kinship, transforming the idea of collective suffering and sacrifice, and strengthening the felt necessity of territorial, caste, and religious mingling. Rich in anthropological detail and incisive analyses, the book makes original contributions to the understanding of connection between gendered family relations and class mobility, and foregrounds the complex linkages between political history, memory, and the ‘private’ domain of kinship relations in the making of India’s middle classes.
Cultures of Learning
This book looks at educational institutions and their role as sites of learning in times of moral and political chaos. It highlights the erosion of critical pedagogical traditions in universities in India and registers the ongoing responses and struggles as educational experiences. This book develops a critical approach by redefining education from the perspective of learning as a political act to experience the complex network of learning activities beyond the confines of educational institutions. It also locates caste, gender and religious hierarchies in schools and universities in India. The book explores the extremely contradictory experiences of academic spaces that have resulted in the...
In as Out
The ordinariness of a womans life, drawing a path for new histories, a shift from an objective analysis of facts to a subjective reinterpretation of the humdrum of three womens lives, encapsulating the personal and the political. In as Out defamiliarises ordinary undertakings, stimulating more avenues for reconstructing history through women. It is an exploration of the persistent human tendency to treat everything that happened as a repetition of another incident or a familiar one without hairsplitting the preordained power relations that have gone into its formulation.
Shadow Princess
Critically acclaimed author Indu Sundaresan picks up where she left off in The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, returning to seventeenth-century India as two princesses struggle for supremacy of their father’s kingdom. Trapped in the shadow of the magnificent tomb their grief-stricken father is building for his beloved deceased wife, the emperor’s daughters compete for everything: control over the imperial harem, their father’s affection, and the future of their country. They are forbidden to marry and instead choose to back different brothers in the fight for ultimate power over the throne. But only one of the sisters will succeed. With an enthusiasm for history and a flair for rich detail, Indu Sundaresan brings readers deep into the complicated lives of Indian women of the time period and highlights the profound history of one of the most celebrated works of architecture in the world, the Taj Mahal.
