Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala's Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. The term savarna refers to the privileged caste-communities that, from pre-colonial times, controlled land and other material resources and ritual practices, and continued to do so to a large extent even later. Avarna refers to those oppressed groups that laboured for the savarna and were subjected to degradation through such practices as untouchability and unseeability, and whose exclusion from social power continues in different ways despite these groups having achieved economic presence and education. Following a Supreme Court verdict in September 2018, which struck down the Sabarimala taboo, Kerala was shaken by violent protests led by neo-savarna and SanghParivar organisations. Through a close reading of the Facebook engagement of a Right to Wait campaigner, I seek to make sense of the particular sorts of 'dissonance' these organisations seem to be creating within the male-defined space of Hindutva, the specific caste politics they represent, as well as their articulation and disarticulation with a discourse on women's empowerment and feminism. I argue that it is time that we seriously theorise the power relations between the savarna and avarna women under brahminical patriarchy, instead of focusing singularly on the subordination of upper-caste women by the male brahminical elite.

This article focuses on two sites in late 20th to early 21st century Malayali society to examine the transformative effects of global flows on the gender dynamics of each—labour and feminist interventions—to reflect on the shape of, and resistance to, post-liberalisation patriarchy in Kerala. As is well known, labour migration to the Persian Gulf from Kerala from the 1970s has been a decisive flow that has impacted all aspects of life in the state. Its impact on the family as a procreative unit has, however, been only probed superficially. I argue that the opening of the global job market, combined with other features of contemporary Malayali society, has transformed the very functioning of the nuclear family unit. In feminist politics, global flows have led to the surfacing of several 'regulative universals', and these flows take place through a variety of channels. The clash now is no longer between the indigenous and the foreign, but between 'glocally generated' hybrids.

AbstractThis article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism also contains a strand which is underpinned by nationalist biopolitics. While we find his writings deeply entrenched in racist colonial stereotypes about native Africans, they are also shaped by nationalist biopolitics that were emerging during decolonization, which led him to strongly condemn prominent groups of Indian immigrants in Africa as well. Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections on the ambiguities of decolonizing discourses provide a useful springboard for a fresh reading. This preliminary reading of Pottekkatt's African travelogues, however, complicates Chakrabarty's observations about both pedagogic and dialogic modes of decolonizing discourses. It also points to the importance of the regional, and not the national, in the possibilities of South-South dialogue—to which Pottekkatt's accounts point, if only in a cursory manner.

ABSTRACTThis article is based on mixed‐method field research in Adimalathura, a coastal village in south Kerala, India, which has been identified as one of the poorest communities in the area. Although this fishing community has been facing severe ecological challenges, including massive resource depletion, it has been able to put up stiff resistance to impending dispossession in the face of a large port project actively promoted by the government, most major political parties and globalized capital. This article traces the history of public action and work in Adimalathura since the early 20th century, and reflects on its significance in the context of the present resistance. It examines the role of women in bolstering the community in times of severe challenges to men's livelihoods, and highlights the importance of women's provisioning work. Ultimately, the author cautions against exaggerating community strength and the capacities of the women even when they are able to utilize available resources competently.

This paper reflects on women's presence in politics in Kerala where neoliberalised welfare now targets a very large number of women and inducts them into local governance. Offering a brief sketch of the shifts in the region in women's roles and responsibilities from the pre-liberalisation period to the 1990s and after, the paper draws upon two spells of field- work to probe the unintended consequences that neoliberalised welfare has generated, the possibilities thrown up by institutional change in women's self-help groups. This paper also attempts to view the commonalities and departures between the figure of the 'Kerala Model Woman', shaped in the laudatory literature on the 'Kerala Model' of development, and the emerging, apparently more troublesome, figure of the 'Kudumbashree woman'.

This article seeks to make sense of a widely acclaimed political experiment in decentralisation and people-centred development in Kerala of the 1990s, the People's Planning Campaign, by placing it within a wider contemporary history of politics in the region. Much celebratory literature on this experiment has tended to view it as essentially an extension of pre-existing political initiatives in the state associated with mainstream left parties. Moving away from this view, the present analysis views it as a political response of the mainstream left to various challenges it faced in the early 1990s, to throw light on the many contradictions of political decentralisation in Kerala. Further, it reflects on 'glocalisation' of participatory democracy in Kerala and the subject-positions it has produced.

This article probes the intersection of spatial, caste, and gender axes of power in shaping contemporary inequalities in Kerala, through mixed-method research in an urban slum. Relying largely on qualitative data, it constructs a history of work in the slum for lower caste men and women against the backdrop of Kerala politics from the 1940s until the present. It examines the role of widening gender gaps, the persistence of secularized caste, and flagging working-class politics and discourse in shaping contemporary socioeconomic exclusion in urban areas. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid-1990s, when decentralisation and women's self-help groups began a new phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the specific form of marginalisation that the residents of this pocket of extreme disadvantage have suffered since its earliest days, in the mid-twentieth century, which I refer to as 'marginalisation by abjection'. It also examines the usefulness of widely used concepts such as 'political society' to make sense of politics there, and concludes by cautioning against the perfunctory use of concepts such as political society and clientelism.