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A unique book on Kerala's cultural history and impact of women's education as seen in their writings (1898-1938).
This book explores how, in early modern Malayalee society, the emerging notion of the individual (as distinct from an identity based on jati, region etc.) was linked to the vision of a society based on gender differences. The process of individualizing thus also became a process of en-gendering. Social reform claimed to set `free people, to make them free individuals. In fact this process of individualization was implicated in institutions (education, home-making, parenting, political work etc) that were seen to be gender specific. As such men and women came to occupy separate, complementary domains, that were seen as `natural while education was seen, paradoxically, as a way to realize these `naturally gendered selves. The book explores how social reform, notions of the individual, and the creation of a `gendered individual came together in early modern Kerala.
‘[Devika] brings to the reader the delight of reading a book rich in concepts and sources’ Contributions to Indian Sociology The Malayalam literary public is one of the most vibrant in India, and thrives on the long history of widespread literacy in the state of Kerala. It is well described as the ‘beating heart’ of Kerala’s publiclife. Historically, it has been the space in which entrenched power structures encountered their earliest challenges. Not surprisingly, then, critiques of patriarchy in twentieth-century Kerala were first heard and continued to be raised there, even when they had become muffled in wider public discussion. Womanwriting = Manreading? is a provocative take on some of the raging debates in Malayalam literature, which surely resonate elsewhere. But it also raises the important question: can we tell the story of women’s anti-patriarchal writing in Malayalam in a way that highlights the force and drama of their confrontations with the male-dominated literary establishment?
Based on a large number of interviews with women politicians of many generations and women who have entered the three-tier Panchayati Raj institutions since the mid-1990s in Kerala, this book tries to initiate fresh debate on the impact of the large-scale induction of women into the institutions of local self-government in India. The State of Kerala has been hailed as a success story in accommodating gender concerns in local-level planning and political decentralisation; this conclusion has been based on relatively simple evaluative exercises that ask whether women of diverse backgrounds have gained entry into formal institutions of governance or not. This book seeks to place political decen...
This collection reveals the vigorous debate over modern gender relations that was taking place in this period. The authors hailed mostly from those groups which had obtained access to modern education and ways of life like the Nairs, Syrian Christians and Ezhavas. There are other voices too, a few women from the Nambutiri Brahmin caste and two Muslim women. Women reflected on what was Womanly' on education, duties, vocation and civil roles, first influenced by reformism and later by nationalist and communist ideas. The Editor also points to the need to define what is non-Womanly.
The Grddha Mullick family bursts with marvellous tales of hangmen and hangings in which they figure as eyewitnesses to the momentous events that have shaped the history of the subcontinent. When twenty-two-year-old Chetna Grddha Mullick is appointed the first woman executioner in India, assistant and successor to her father, her life explodes under the harsh lights of television cameras. When the day of the execution arrives, will she bring herself to take a life? Meera’s spectacular imagination turns the story of Chetna’s life into an epic and perverse coming-of-age tale. The lurid pleasures of voyeurism and the punishing ironies of violence are kept in agile balance as the drama hurtles to its inevitable climax.
Contributed articles with reference to the state of Kerala, India.
Hindu Nationalism in South India engages with a range of factors that shapes the trajectory of Hindu nationalism in Kerala, the southern state of India. Until recently, Kerala was considered a socio-political exception which had no room for Hindu nationalism. This book questions such Panglossian prognosis and shows the need to map the ideological and political growth of Hindu nationalism which has been downplayed in the academic discourse as temporary aberrations. The introduction to the book places Kerala in the context of South India. Arguing that Hindutva is a real force which needs to be contended within theoretical and empirical terms, the chapters in this book examine Hindu nationalism in Kerala in relation to themes such as history, caste, culture, post-truth, ideology, gender, politics, and the Indian national space. Considering the rise of Hindu nationalism in the recent years, this pioneering book will be of interest to a students and academics studying Politics, in particular Nationalism, Asian Politics and Religion and Politics and South Asian Studies.
Feminist Subversion and Complicity interrogates a specific form of feminist practice, that which has involved engaging with state and international institutions to insert gender knowledge in their development interventions. Bringing together contributions from eight feminists located in very different kinds of institutions and spaces from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, this book is the outcome of a deeply reflexive process to produce a critique from within of this present day feminist practice. An array of experiences and encounters are scrutinised - from bringing feminist perspectives to governmental projects on education, health, and legal reform to transformations in the discourses and practices of women's movements and feminisms as they encountered developmentalisms. The writers show that feminist politics is not merely assimilated in governmental projects but that it interrupts these projects even as it is assimilated; a feminist politics in which complicity is often a subversive activity, is destabilizing and contesting of meaning.
Migrant Encounters examines what happens when migrants across Asia encounter both the restrictions and opportunities presented by state actors and policies, some that leave deep marks on migrants' own life trajectories and others that produce fragmentary, uneven traces. With a focus on those who migrate to perform intimate labor—domestic, care, and sex work—or whose own intimate and familial lives are redefined through migration, marriage, and sometimes parenthood, this volume argues that such encounters transform both migrants and the states between which they move. Written by an international group of anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, these essays offer richly detailed an...