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Making Space for Feminist Social Critique in
Contemporary Kerala
Article in Economic and political weekly · January 2006
DOI: 10.2307/4418838
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Making Space for Feminist Social
Critique in Contemporary Kerala
Women’s literary writing in Kerala has gained a fairly wide market. Even as younger
women authors have succeeded in breaking earlier stereotypes and frameworks of
depiction, the category of ‘pennezhuthu’ has come to be questioned as a defining term that
limits, instead of enabling. Incisive feminist critiques of contemporary patriarchy now
draw upon a variety of disciplines, with the result that long held notions defining
Malayalee womanhood are being questioned with increasing regularity. Concomitantly,
stereotyped frameworks and the pulls of the market continue to exercise a powerful
influence. It makes it all the more necessary to foster independent initiatives in feminist
knowledge generation in Kerala. “Women’s Imprint”, a women’s publishing venture in
Malayalam is involved in such efforts to help create new networks of resistance and towards
ensuring that gender remains a contested category in public debate.
J DEVIKA, MINI SUKUMAR
I
T
hese are times in which the marginality of women to public
life in Kerala is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny. The issue, it appears, is not really the invisibility of
women in public arenas. Indeed, the vast expansion of the media
since the early 1990s has assured that the “sites of enunciation”
have increased phenomenally as far as gender issues are concerned:
we have now, an ever-increasing number of talk shows, discussions
and special slots for gender issues on TV. The attention that the
mainstream media pays to such issues is also not negligible. In
the discourse of development, a dominant presence in the Malayalee
cultural sphere since the mid-20th century, “women” have always
been a significant presence, especially as a way to represent Kerala
as the utopia of social development. This continues with telling
variations in the present era of “gender mainstreaming”. However,
we question glib readings that interpret the greater visibility of
women as evidence for the widening of their access to the public.
The decade of the 1990s also saw the firming of the feminist
presence in the arena of politics in Kerala. The implementation of
the 33 per cent reservation of seats for women in local bodies has
brought a considerable number of women into these bodies. “Gender
mainstreaming” has also proceeded apace, and now “gender
training” is an eminently familiar, technical and mostly nonthreatening term. The Kerala government’s “women-oriented
poverty mission” has been lauded as a successful innovation in
women’s empowerment. Yet, the extent to which these initiatives
have been successful in politicising women is still doubtful; the
possibilities they offer, too, appear mixed. It is also important to
remember that the government’s efforts to mainstream gender took
place precisely in a period of accentuated confrontation between
the feminist movement in Kerala and almost all sections of
entrenched political society, which was certainly a major way
in which feminists grabbed the attention of the mainstream media.
In these struggles, the feminist movement relied heavily upon the
judiciary and the media, which did bring certain gains.1 However,
the fatal flaws in this strategy were all too evident in the wake
of adverse legal judgments, particularly, the recent high court
judgment in the infamous Suryanelli serial rape case. Indeed, this
Economic and Political Weekly October 21, 2006
reminds us that the media visibility women have gained, and the
new possibilities opened up by gender mainstreaming cannot in
any way replace feminist activism or intellectual work in the public.
Yet the 1990s and after have also opened up unmistakable
possibilities. The twists and turns of feminist politics in this period
have alerted us to the need for greater reflection on the challenges
of building genuinely pluralist politics.2 These critical insights
offer hope for complex and incisive forms of feminist social
critique and activism. Secondly, the 1990s and after have also
seen a greater number of Malayalee women migrating to universities and research institutions in the national metropolises
and abroad, attaining higher levels of competence in the social
sciences and humanities. Today, the possibility of extending the
scope, sophistication and sensitivity of feminist social critique
in Kerala seems to have grown in unprecedented ways. Within
Kerala’s own university system, critical spaces – such as in the
women’s studies units and centres – are being slowly cleared.3
This reflects in the relative rise of scholarly writings by women
and in the number of active women participants in public debates
in the 1990s and after. Thirdly, though women are still in the
lower rungs of the media in Kerala, more women now work in
the media than ever before. Lastly, though an explicitly feminist
position in literary writing – ‘pennezhuthu’ in Malayalam – has
faced considerable hostile criticism both from masculinist critics
and women authors to whom it appeared to be yet another form
of labelling or ghettoisation, women writers continue to produce
powerful critiques of everyday patriarchy in Kerala.
Against this backdrop, we wish to reflect upon the history of
gender difference in Kerala’s public sphere and its contemporary
shape. Also, we would like to put forward a few thoughts on the
link between feminist political and intellectual work in Kerala
in the present.
II
Something in the shape of a “public sphere” began to concretise
in Malayalee society only around the second half of the 19th
century. In this arena, ‘public interest” became the key concern,
and issues came to be debated in its terms. By this we mean the
4469
formation of many fora of discussion, in which participants who
had acquired certain sorts of skills attempted rational deliberations on issues and themes that were identified as “public”.4 The
earliest journals were brought out by the missionaries in Malabar
and Travancore,5 which were concerned both with proselytising
as well as introducing western -Christian ideas of society, morality
and modern science. Soon, however, newspapers and journals
began to articulate the “public interest”. Governments began to
be criticised sharply enough to provoke retaliation [Raghavan
1985: 61]. This field was shaped in and through the confluence
of several elements of change in the socio-cultural environment
in the highly charged political situation of late 19th and early
20th century Kerala: the solidifying of the politico-administrative
machinery of modern government with its effects upon the social
organisation and the distribution of power and authority; mission
establishments with their increasing dissemination of western
knowledge; new notions of religion, faith and ritual; new technologies like printing; the emergence of new modes, techniques
and ethics of economic production, and new ideals of individual
achievement; the formation of a reading public; the emergence
of the modern literary institution; the emergence of new forms
of social interaction such as debating societies, reading clubs and
women’s associations; the appearance of new institutions like
those of community formation/reform. The public sphere had by
these times certainly emerged as the space in which new forces
contended with established socio-cultural and political forces for
hegemony. The privileged groups who seemed able to harness
public life to their ends were largely the modern educated or those
who had gained early access to and familiarity with modern ideas
and institutions, for example, sections of the nairs or the Tamil
brahmins. Later other groups joined them, which were much
lower down in the local caste hierarchy, like the ezhavas. Those
excluded were generally far away from contact with modern ideas
and institutions – for example, both ‘antarjanams’ (Malayala
brahmin women, who were obviously upper caste, but strictly
forbidden from any form of public exposure), and most of
the poor labouring classes were equally excluded from the
public sphere.
Significantly, this emergent institution was an already-gendered
space (in its assigning of “special slots” for women in women’s
associations or magazines) and a gendering one as well (in the
very circulation of new ideals of gendered subjectivity within
it). Early discussions on the established order of caste in Malayalee
society frequently put forth, directly and indirectly, the ideal of
a society based on gender difference as the alternative. This ideal
society, it was often claimed, would be rooted in what appeared
ordained by nature/god-gender difference. It was and projected
as characterised by the broad division of social space into the
public and the domestic, deemed appropriate for men and women,
respectively. Thus, publications that focused on “general”/“public” issues assumed the presence of a “general reader” defined
in male terms, and as someone capable of participating in public
debates on equal terms with all others. However, “women’s
magazines”, starting from the later 19th century publication
Keraleeya Sugunabodhini onwards, largely identified as their
reader the woman seeking advice about transforming herself in
the shape of the ideal womanly self, ensconced in the modern
domestic domain. Precisely because of the preponderance of
pedagogic concerns and the overwhelming direction of their
critical gaze towards “tradition” and “superstition”, the public
appeared in them as largely ‘lokaparichayam’ (familiarity with
the world) or a thoroughly apolitical ‘pothuvijnanam’ (general
4470
knowledge). This is not to ignore that there were some powerful
efforts to shake this idea up in the 1930s. This was evident in
the writings, for instance, of first-generation Malayalee feminists
like Anna Chandy, Parvati Nenminimangalam and Kochattil
Kalyanikutty Amma, or in magazines like the Mahila, which tried
to attain a balance between critique and pedagogy. Women also
continued to write critical articles on a range of social issues that
directly or indirectly touched them, for instance, in women’s
columns in magazines like Kaumudi in the 1950s. However, these
have largely left the predominance of pedagogy untouched: it
continues to define the print media that addresses a female
readership to a very considerable extent even today.
The interventions of the first generation feminists indeed deserve
greater attention. These women belonged to the early generation
of modern educated women in Malayalee society, many of them
were employed in modern institutions that continued to expand
in these times. They did not question the solidity of the “natural”
divide between men and women that allegedly assigned to them
specific sets of qualities, dispositions and preferences, which in
turn made them suitable for the public and domestic domains,
respectively. Indeed, their strategy was to blur the boundaries
between the public and the domestic, to point out that there were
emergent institutions in the public, such as schools, hospitals,
reformatories – even the police – and so on, where “womanly
qualities” seemed absolutely at home.6 But they did make significant effort to alter the pedagogic mode of addressing women
dominant in the Malayalee public sphere, and limiting such
discussions to women’s magazines and associations. For instance,
Anna Chandy, a prominent early feminist in Kerala and Kerala’s
first woman lawyer, literally barged into a public meeting in
Thiruvananthapuram in 1928, to make a long speech that brilliantly refuted the arguments made by Sadasyatilakam T K Velu
Pillai, a powerful intellectual in Travancore in those times, against
the government’s decision to employ a few women [Chandy
(1929) 2005:113-29]. In 1932, another prominent woman intellectual, B Bhageeraty Amma, protested in the Sahitya Parishad
conference held at Ernakulam against the organisers’ decision
to allow women speakers only in the session set apart for them,
and not allow them into the general sessions (reported in
‘Mahilabhashanam’, The Mahila 12 (4,5) 1933: 158). These
authors were also careful not to direct their critical gaze exclusively towards traditional forms of patriarchy and engage with
emergent modern forms as well – such as dowry [see Amma
(1912) 2005: 67-74].
These women also sought to politicise the category of “women”,
projecting “women” as a group that faced common forms of
oppression despite their differences in location and social endowment. This was evident in their demands for greater representation of women in the new political institutions such as
legislatures, and reservation for women in government employment. In the 1930s when communal politics gained extraordinary
significance and presence in Travancore, Cochin and Malabar
[Rangaswamy 1981; Ouwerkerk 1994; Menon 1994], these
arguments were either rejected or accepted with strong qualifications. Attempts by women members in the legislatures of
Travancore and Kochi to introduce legislation on behalf of
“women’” met with considerable suspicion. For instance, in the
discussion on the Child Marriage Restraint Bill introduced in the
Cochin legislative council by Thankamma N Menon in 1940,
the well known reformer Sahodaran K Ayappan argued that since
the bill would affect Tamil brahmins most, it should not be passed
without their approval. To this, Menon argued that it affected
Economic and Political Weekly
October 21, 2006
women most directly, and as a women she was well within rights
to have introduced the bill.7
Male intellectuals, “modern” and “traditional”, seem to have
been wary of these moves. Their responses ranged from outright
hostility to highly qualified acceptance. Hostility, bordering on
misogyny, was evident in the hugely popular writings of prominent male intellectuals known for their humour – the latter
becoming a vehicle for the expression of thoroughly misogynist
fears. There were shades of these, of course, which ranged from
E V Krishna Pillai’s exhortation through his male character in
his play Pennarashunaadu (The land were women rule) to the
(shamed and tamed) feminist wife that she should “… go straight
to the kitchen, you must attend to the children. You must guide
the formation of my character. You must help, serve, nurse me,
as my queen, my servant, my mother, my teacher” [Pillai (1936)
1980: 400], to less pronounced or cryptic forms. Thus the well
known author Sanjayan (pseudonym for M R Nair) commented
in the 1930s about Kochattil Kalyanikutty Amma’s travelogue
Njan Kanda Europe (The Europe I saw) that the only change
it required was a change in the title. His suggestion that it be
changed to Europe Kanda Kalyanikutty Amma (Kalyanikutty
Amma, who saw Europe) reflected his fear of female individuation and public presence. Sanjayan’s sigh over the quarrelsome
women speakers of “these days” in his obituary of the author
Teravath Ammalu Amma who he celebrates as the paragon of
female virtue that consolidates itself in “legitimate space”
and desires nothing more is also telling [Sanjayan (1936) 1970:
163-64]. Women who ventured to seek a place in the emergent
political institutions faced even greater troubles: Anna Chandy
who contested the elections in Travancore in 1931 had to face
indecent posters in Thiruvananthapuram (editorial, Nazrani
Deepika, 1931). The editorial she wrote in the journal Shreemati
when she lost, protesting against unfair tactics evoked a clearly
misogynist response from a leading newspaper, the
Malayalarajyam [Beemar 1931].
After the 1940s, however, this generation seems to have gone
into decline. Some of these women did figure in development
activism (like, for instance, Parvaty Ayyappan and Konniyur
Meenakshi Amma), but have remained largely unnoticed or even
unremembered. Later the public debate on gender difference
deteriorated considerably; the projection of the ideal homemaker
as the ultimate goal of women’s self-fashioning became steadily
entrenched in public discussions. Not least among the reasons
for this decline, it appears, were the by-now well-charted shifts
in the advancement of demands on behalf of “women” as the
national movement intensified at the national level, and the
strengthening of the left forces at the local level. It has been
pointed out that the decade of the 1940s, which made visible
the huge social and economic divides between women, had a
definite impact upon the efforts to secure demands on behalf of
“women”. Women who entered the public largely entered the
political – nationalist or communist – mainstream, and gender,
in various ways, came to be regarded as secondary to “national”
interests, or questions of nation, class and community [Forbes
2000, Roy 2002]. The first generation feminists in Kerala failed
to respond creatively to changing political circumstances. Their
political conservatism, combined with their intense elitism which
prevented them from regarding working class women as anything
more than “raw material” that needed to be moulded into ideal
womanly selves, under the guidance of more “enlightened” women,
probably contributed hugely to their marginalisation.8 This, we
feel, should be taken fully into account, even as we criticise the
Economic and Political Weekly October 21, 2006
intense masculinism of all powerful political movements in mid20th century Kerala, including the left.
Like elsewhere in India, in Kerala too, women activists in the
nationalist and on the left came to be increasingly sidelined. Even
where they survived, the anti-patriarchal agenda of these movements gradually receded, and increasingly became part of statesponsored “social welfare” activity. Gandhian women activists
retreated into “social work”, often after bitter experiences (a good
instance being the firebrand of the anti-Dewan movement in
Travancore, Akkamma Cheriyan). In 1951, the president of the
Travancore-Cochin congress committee, Kumbalathu Sanku Pillai,
stated publicly, in response to questions about the huge gender
gap in the Congress candidates’ list, that women in Kerala were
“empresses of the home”, who have property rights, that they
do not desire anything more, and that politics was not their space,
anyhow. However, during the infamous “liberation struggle”
against the first elected communist government (1959), the same
“empresses”, rich and poor ones, were mobilised for public
protest in an unprecedented way [Gopalakrishnan 1994]. But
once the struggle attained its goal, these women were promptly
forgotten. Indira Gandhi’s appeal to reward the women protestors
by granting them more representation in the candidates’ list for
the elections in 1960 fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile women were
gently shooed back into either the home or at most, into “social
work” (editorials, Nazrani Deepika, 1959).
In the post-independence period, unlike in the earlier legislatures, women’s interests were to be represented by particular
political parties. Women workers were strongly organised by the
left in the 1930s itself – the first strike by women agricultural
workers took place in Kuttanad in the 1930s, and also the first
trade union of women workers, among the coir workers of
Ambalappuzha [Devayani 1995], issues of gender were strongly
subordinated to issues of class. And the communists were no
better than others, when it came to encouraging women in fullfledged political activity. In elections to the state legislature in
1960, for instance, there were but 14 women candidates in all,
of whom four were communists, three were independents supported by communists and seven were Congress candidates
(Nazrani Deepika, January 10, 1960). Women workers, excluded
from elite womanhood, were being organised as workers, with
gender struggles being circumscribed, largely subsumed under
class struggle [Velayudhan 1999; Lindberg 2001]. Indeed, as an
astute observer noted in the 1950s, speeches in women’s associations in those times seemed to be addressing not gender but
class [Saraswati 1955]. However, the general absence of women
in the early trade-union leadership has been noted, though they
were active in agitation [Rammohan 1996: 158-59; Lindberg
2001]. This is despite the fact that separate factory committees
were organised in many places for women workers, with fulltime women activists. They were also given special representation
in union management committees. Along with annual union
conferences, women’s meetings were also held. It was in such
a conference, that the Mahila Sanghom was formed [Cheriyan
1993: 332-35]. However, in general, the move was towards what
Lindberg has termed “effeminisation” of women workers: while the
family wage, which relegated women to the status of “secondary
workers” was upheld, maternity benefits were strongly fought
for [Lindberg 2001].
Thus neither the attempted politicisation of the category of
“women” by the first generation feminists, nor the leftist
mobilisation of working class women in trade unions seriously
challenged modern gender ideology. It is, therefore, hardly
4471
surprising that the dominant construction of womanhood in
Kerala has been wholly agreeable to state interventions in the
name of social welfare and the general good, while remaining
mostly inimical to any radical politicisation. Indeed, the female
agency celebrated by the Kerala model resembles what Kumkum
Sangari calls “women’s agency derived from consent”, a product
of a certain “bargain” struck with patriarchy, which should clearly
be distinguished from a “politically interventionist feminist
agency” [Sangari 1999: 365]. As she argues, such agency, far
from being a favourable condition for the growth of feminist
consciousness, can function as a great impediment [Sangari 1999:
364]. Indeed, the experience of feminist political mobilisation
in Kerala testifies to this [Devika and Kodoth 2001; Erwer 2003].
We would even argue that patriarchy in Kerala partly rests upon
the agency of the “Kerala Model Woman” – the better-educated,
more healthy, less fertile, new elite woman.
However, critical efforts that sought to question and reframe
modern gender in non-masculinist terms largely happened in
Kerala’s thriving literary public sphere. Even in its early days –
in the late 19th century, the institution of modern Malayalam
literature had opened up more space for women. Reviewing
Tottaikkattu Ikkavu Amma’s play Subhadrarjunam in 1892, the
critic C P Achyuta Menon argued that though women may well
aspire to be literary authors, they should expect no “special
concession” – membership would be granted solely on “literary
merit” [Menon (1892) 1994:106-9]. Soon enough many women
realised that such membership was not easy to secure. Reflecting
on the conditions of such entry for women, K M Kunhulakshmi
Kettilamma, writing in 1915, remarked that to enter the modern
literary scene, women required not just the linguistic abilities
(that helped in composing traditional genres like the ‘kilipattu’
or ‘champu’) but also “life experiences”, which may be acquired
only if women have “social freedom” [Kettilamma (1915) 2005:
48-51]. Women’s membership in the literary institution also
seemed linked with their heightened emotional natures. Indeed,
the best women writers have been hailed to be “super-feminine”
– contrasted, especially, with feminists who are not. Recently,
an advertisement for a collection of short stories by Madhavikutty
waxed thus: “Amidst those who attain contemporary status through
asserting feminism through interviews and public statements, the
feminine mind that reaffirms femininity through writing…Stories
which fathom women’s public and private sorrows better than
anyone else. Creations that reject male authority but do not travel
to the poisonous poles of man-hating…” (Mathrubhumi Weekly,
April 23-29, 2006:49). In fact, the well known feminist literary
intervention in the 1980s in Malayalam, ‘pennezhuthu’, was
frequently faulted precisely for these latter ills.
Entrenched literary criticism in Malayalam has, since the mid20th century developed specific strategies of “taming”, in the
writings of such authors as Lalitambika Antarjanam, K Saraswati
Amma, and Madhavikutty, which systematically reduced to the
terms set by modern gender ideology. Antarjanam’s writings,
which sought to reimagine modern gender in terms favourable
to women, were effectively disarmed when read as a paean to
apolitical and sentimental modern motherhood. Critical efforts
that questioned the foundational claims of gender, like the writings
of K Saraswati Amma, were completely ignored and forgotten
unto the 1990s. Madhavikutty’s rebellion was effectively contained by readings that readily absorbed her into (the highly
masculinist) late modernism in Malayalam. Pennezhuthu, because of its explicit political stance, was less amenable to such
taming, and hence have faced the most hostile criticism both from
4472
conservative critics and many women writers themselves, who
perceive it as yet another form of ghettoisation. More importantly,
pennezhuthu built important links with the nascent feminist
movement in Kerala. Indeed, it may even be claimed that the
Malayalam literary domain was where the explosive power of
the feminist critique made a significant dent early. And as may
be clear from the above account, this is not surprising.
III
Only in the 1990s did feminist non-literary social critique begin
to expand considerably. Of course, there were a few individual
women scholars who made valuable contributions earlier [for
instance Gulati 1984, 1987], but it was only in the 1990s that
the work of several scholars coalesced to form a comprehensive
critique of reigning ideas such as the “Kerala Model”, or “Malayalee
Renaissance”. Early writings on feminism in the 1980s were often
by radical male intellectuals sympathetic to the feminist cause
[Ramakrishnan and Venugopal 1989; Satchidanandan undated].
In the 1990s, more and more research-based feminist writings
began to appear, and towards the late 1990s and early 2000s,
they found space in mainstream Malayalam journals. A large
measure of these were produced by women scholars trained in
metropolitan universities and research institutions, many of whom
had no direct links with the feminist movement in Kerala; some
of it was produced by non-Indian scholars linked to western
universities. Kerala has always been of interest to anthropologists, primarily because of the matriliny factor. In the mid-20th
century decades, political scientists took deep interest in Malayalee
communism. From the 1970s, with international development
institutions taking interest in social development in Kerala,
development studies and allied disciplines like demography became
particularly vibrant. In the 1980s, social scientific research within
Kerala in the 1980s was not remarkably vibrant, except in these
disciplines. Thus it is hardly surprising that the early women’s
studies research, in the 1980s, was focused on the concerns of
these disciplines – something that continues to a sizeable extent,
even today. The 1980s was also the decade in which the
developmentalist ideology that had shored up political society
in Kerala began to face challenges from sections excluded from
the celebrated “Kerala model” of development. In the 1990s, such
challenges were explicitly mounted within academic discourse,
and feminist research has proved particularly effective in this,
not least because of its unmistakable interdisciplinary thrust.
These inquiries, however, rarely stemmed directly from the
feminist movement here. The few initiatives that did come up
shrivelled quickly. The attempts of feminists to introduce a
feminist critique of science and technology within Kerala’s
celebrated science movement, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat,
did not blossom significantly. The experience of the Stree Padhana
Kendram at Kudamaloor, Kottayam, which was envisaged as a
forum for critique and intellectual exchange on gender issues,
is telling indeed. The significance of this group was that it was
an attempt to draw women into public debates and writing. It
even had a small library and reading room exclusively for women,
a step that was certainly of significance in Kerala, where village
libraries are overwhelmingly male spaces. This group, which
organised the first women’s literary and theatre workshops in
Kerala in the early 1990s soon fell into lethargy. While the
individuals involved in it certainly had their personal hurdles to
clear, the sheer lack of encouragement of political society created
extraordinary difficulties. Most varieties of the left viewed the
Economic and Political Weekly
October 21, 2006
mobilisation around gender issues with considerable suspicion,
and remained reluctant to concede autonomy to feminist politics.
There was even the reluctance to consider the possibility that the
relevance of pennezhuthu, or of feminist theatre, was not limited to
the institutions of literature or drama. When the People’s Planning
Campaign took off in the mid-1990s, there was the hope that the
shift to local priorities in planning would bring the necessary
support to revive the institution. However, the panchayat rejected
the library project that the Stree Padhana Kendram had proposed,
even though the village assembly approved it for five consecutive
years. There were also a few attempts to present alternatives to the
hugely popular women’s magazines, but with the exception of
Pennu, a little magazine, they were not long-lived. Perhaps
these experiences reflect the strong hostility to feminist social
critique in mainstream Malayalee society. If so, the fact that
women scholars who have produced such criticism were often
either trained or located outside Kerala should come as no
surprise.
The feminist movement in Kerala entered a period of protracted
struggle with Kerala’s immensely powerful political society from
around the mid-1990s [Erwer 2003]. Aided by the steady expansion
of the mass media, its visibility increased dramatically. In the
recent elections, the feminist attack on sexually tainted politicians
seems to have yielded rich rewards to the Left Democratic Front.
Yet the question remains whether this visibility can be substituted
for patient, and steady cultural work, intellectual activism and
opinion building in civil society. Firstly, the absence of serious
theoretical reflection and empirical investigation has left us quite
vulnerable when faced with the massive “governmentalisation”
of the problematic of gender oppression in the 1990s. Often we
have absorbed the liberal-governmental agenda on gender rather
naively, in the absence of adequate intellectual resources to take
a critical, if non-defensive position on it. Secondly, while it is
certainly important to bring the perpetrators of sexual violence
to book, there are a host of other less visible, if equally pernicious
issues that the feminist movement needs to address with utmost
urgency – for instance, the emerging gender differentiation of
work within service sector growth, the alarming gender imbalance
in population management, or the issues facing women migrant
workers. Thirdly, in a society with a burgeoning media-space
it becomes imperative for feminists to create alternate spaces and
networks of political education and critique. This is a necessary
part of a broader effort to revitalise the political in Kerala, which
is not only burdened today by increasingly corrupt party politics,
but also by larger global forces, such as consumerism.
In the absence of any self-reflexive and nuanced critique,
feminists in Kerala may end up building inadvertent alliances
with conservative forces on the sexual right-wing. Or, we may
end up feeding the general eagerness of political society and
conservative forces to “protect” women – which may effectively
deny women agency, confer the authority of the protector to the
former, and indirectly approve of the penalising of women who
do not stay within the protector’s gender ideals. Or, even worse,
we may fail to acknowledge the multiple axes of oppression that
structure particular women’s lives.
However, this is certainly not an easy task. Here the issue of
translation acquires extraordinary importance, and hence we
dwell at some length with it.
The demand that feminist intellectuals should eschew “high
theory” and write in “simple language” is now common enough.
Yet more often than not, such demands rest upon the failure to
acknowledge that feminist activism also includes strenuous effort
Economic and Political Weekly October 21, 2006
to “mainstream” the theoretical vocabulary that feminists use
(which is not the same as “simplifying” it). It also contains the
doubtful assumption that feminist speech, by virtue of its sensitivity to gender oppression, will be somehow transparent. However,
more than translating feminist theoretical terms is at issue here.
We are also talking about translation that draws upon the insights
of feminist theory and on local idiom for naming, critiquing and
countering local versions of oppression and expressing local
strategies of resistance and goals: a sort of “grounded” translation.
We do find some instances of such translation in the efforts of
the first generation Malayalee feminists to give names to gender
oppression and voice to their emergent, for instance, Anna
Chandy’s polemical term, “adukkalavadam” (“kitchenism”)
[Chandy (1929) 2005: 123]. This however is an aspect that did
not figure significantly on the political agenda of Malayalee
feminism in the 1980s: a recent anthropological study on how
Malayalee feminists perceive the “west” has remarked on how
they still feel it difficult to describe patriarchy here, as if it were
somehow in the “air” [Bygnes 2005]. While some such questioning of everyday language in Kerala did happen, more needs
to be done. Indeed the work of naming has been taken over by
the mass media, with ambiguous results – for instance, the concept
‘streepeedhanam’ seems to mean everything from sexist comments and gang rape. We are thus faced with the double task
of being watchful of both new and existent devices of language
in order to probe their political implications, and creating new
terms to express adequately the whole range of presently nameless
female experience in Kerala.
The possibilities of retrieval and redeployment of terms that
may serve feminist political ends are certainly not weak, even
if largely unexplored until lately. In genteel Malayalee society,
‘chanthapennungal’, for instance, refers pejoratively to women
who get their way through loud and vociferous argument, with
caste connotations as well. In the literal sense it means “market
women”, women who support themselves through labour, and
reject dominant norms of feminine modesty. We need to do this
work as activists: without the initial impulse from activism there
is little that we may expect from either teaching or research, at
least as far as “political translation” is concerned.
It may be important for us at this juncture to look back at history
self-critically. Like in the 1940s, we are now faced with the
question of how to transform the inherent instability of the
category “women” into a source of strength. The first generation
of feminists in Kerala, it seems, chose to retreat from debate into
narrow and negative positions, which ultimately proved fatal to
the articulation of gender politics. We need to learn from their
failures. The new spaces of political education that we need to
promote now as feminists must be spaces of self-clarification that
help us to change the terms of collective living. Further, mechanisms to watch and critique institutions like the judiciary and
the media will have to be created out of such spaces. The different
voices that now question the solidity of “women” need to be
addressed positively. In any case, in order to address the public
effectively, internal debate within the feminist movement needs
to be strengthened urgently.
Thus it seems urgent to us that we inquire more fervently into
the possibilities of acknowledging and promoting feminist
intellectual work as an important aspect of activism. Our suspicions regarding the masculinism of social theory must not lead
to a retreat; rather, it ought to work as critical armour in our efforts
to use it for feminist purposes. The present, however, seems to
offer greater scope for mutual energising.
4473
The present seems to one that holds possibilities for us. On
the one hand, women’s literary writing has now gained a fairly
wide market. There should be no underestimation of the power
of the market to tame even the most recalcitrant of literatures.
However, younger women authors are managing to break stereotypes: for instance, in the humour that permeates many of the
short stories of contemporary women authors like K R Meera,
Sreebala K Menon and A S Priya. If many of these authors have
rejected the identification of their writing as pennezhuthu, it is
precisely because we have been unable to transform it into an
enabling, rather than limiting category.9 Importantly, this rejection has not deterred these authors from building incisive critiques
of contemporary patriarchy. On the other, feminist social critique
outside literature has grown both in volume and variety: now
it draws upon a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, literary criticism, cultural studies and political
science. Few of these retain notions of homogeneous Malayalee
Womanhood; indeed, much of this work undertakes precisely
to unpack the cultural shaping and the political effects of such
overarching ideas [for instance, Sreekumar 2001]. There is now
increased insight into the workings of gender in everyday life
in Kerala and its material consequences for women at various
levels [for instance, Kumar 1994; Saradamoni 1999; Lukose
2005; den Uyl 1995; Kodoth and Eapen 2005; Erwer 2003; de
Jong 2004]. Anthropologists have generated fresh critical insight
into the mediation of gender in the lives of Malayalee migrants
[George 1999; Gallo 2005; Percot 2006]. Critical investigation
into the historical shaping of gendered subjectivities and
institutions in Kerala has also been considerable in the past
decade [Velayudhan 1999; Devika 1999, 2005; Saradamoni 1999a;
Kodoth 2001; Lindberg 2001; Arunima 2003]. Work that investigates gender in Kerala in cultural studies, especially, cinema,
seem to be a growing field [for instance, Navneetha 2003; Menon
2005; Rowena 2002]. This description, however, does not do
justice to the remarkable inter- and cross- disciplinary effort often
made. Also, gender is now increasingly critiqued from diverse
political positions: masculinity studies are clearly emergent
[Kodoth 2004; Osella and Osella 2004; Radhakrishnan 2005];
gay and lesbian critiques are being articulated (for instance,
Bharadwaj 2004); the ground is being cleared for a dalit
feminist perspective [for instance, Yesudasan 1995]. Together,
these have ensured that the feminist critique remains a powerful
presence in many contemporary debates. It has also won partial
recognition in some: for instance, Kerala’s Human Development
Report (2005) now openly acknowledges “gender unfreedoms”
to be a major lacuna in Kerala’s human development record [CDS
2005: 100-24]. At the same time, there are conspicuous absences:
autobiographical writings by women, for instance, have been
relatively less forthcoming, something that we should actively
try to remedy.
We harbour no illusions: non-literary writings are not safe from
stereotyped frameworks or exempt from the pulls of the market.
Indeed, today the governmental and international agencies of
development have an influence equal or superior to the market
in the field of social research. Efforts to domesticate “women’s
liberation” as “women’s empowerment”, to tame feminist research
into knowledge useful for governmental intervention, are all on.
We do not deny that interventions in and subversions of these
agendas are possible. However, we do feel that the threat of being
reduced into agencies churning out information for governmental
and non-governmental agencies is a very real one, if we do not
continuously sharpen the critical edge that feminism provides. We
4474
feel that it is necessary to foster independent initiatives
in feminist knowledge generation in Kerala at this particular
juncture.
The present women’s publishing venture in Malayalam,
Women’s Imprint, is implicated in the last-mentioned effort in
complex ways. We do not, for instance, seek to reaffirm the
solidity of “women” in Kerala. Rather, our effort is to see that
gender stays contested in public debate. Our aim is more accurately described as the dispersal and dissipation of gendered
subjectivities, not their solidification. Besides generating the
critical ideas, we also feel that this venture would help that
creation of new networks of resistance. We do feel that it is
necessary at this moment in Kerala’s history, to think of Malayalees
as a people spread all over the world, rather than as a group limited
by the geography of the sub-nationality of Kerala. Thus we hope
that Women’s Imprint grows into a forum that publishes and
circulates ideas that would inform and inspire anti-patriarchal
struggles among Malayalees all over the world; we hope that
it leads to building networks that connect Malayalee feminists
all over the world to feminists within the limited geographical
space of Kerala. EPW
Email: devika@cds.ac.in
minisukumars@gmail.com
Notes
[An earlier version of this essay appeared in Malayalam as an introduction
to a recent collection of feminist essays published by Women’s Imprint, titled
Aanarashunaattile Kazhchakal: Kerala Streepaksha Gaveshanattil
(Sights from ‘Male-dom’: Kerala in Feminist Research, 2006).]
1 No doubt these gains were at best ambiguous: the “dramatisation”of the
confrontation between feminists and Kerala’s powerful political parties
may also have worked as a depoliticising strategy.
2 A dalit intellectual recently pointed to the marked carelessness in references
to dalit struggles in the otherwise empirically sound feminist account of
the dilemmas of feminist activism in mid 1990s in Kerala (M Renu Kumar,
Pacchakutira, April 2005, p 4). Also, prominent feminist positions in
the acrimonious debate on sex work in Kerala have revealed the underbelly
of intolerance, elitism and even casteism among them.
3 A noteworthy recent instance is the founding of the women’s studies
journal Samyukta, started in January 2001 by a group of women scholars
Women’s Initiatives, based in Thiruvananthapuram,
4 We are aware of the criticisms that have been advanced of the Habermasian
notion of the public sphere; we however still find it useful in a descriptive
sense, with significant qualifications. We agree, for instance, with Geoff
Eley that it was “an arena of contested meanings” from the beginning;
more importantly, it did not guarantee equal access to all, and indeed,
excluded many groups [Eley 1992].
5 The Malayalam speaking regions of Malabar (which was part of the
Madras presidency), Cochin (Kochi) and Travancore (Tiruvitamkur), both
princely states, were joined together to form the state of Kerala in 1956.
6 Many of these authors would have contested the statement of the inspector
general of Travancore, Abdul Karim Suhrawady, made in 1942 in answer
to a question regarding the qualities necessary for women in the police,
that the police needed “manly” women (Proceedings of the Travancore
Sree Mulam Assembly, Vol XX, 1942, p 34). But many of the qualities
he mentioned as “manly” ones – courage, endurance, boldness, etc – were
claimed by many earlier to be worthy qualities of the modern woman.
Timidity, for instance, was thought to be forced upon women by the
oppressive older order, and the contrast between the courageous woman
and the timid one often defined the difference between the modern woman
and her unenlightened traditional counterpart, as in the late 19th century
novel, Indulekha.
7 See, Proceedings of the Cochin Legislative Council , Vol IV, 1940,
p 1439.
8 For instance, the writings of Kerala’s foremost rationalist feminist of mid20th century, K Saraswati Amma, do reveal that her extremely powerful
feminist critique of emergent modernity was combined with an equally
Economic and Political Weekly
October 21, 2006
powerful sense of superiority and distance from poor and uneducated
women.
9 However, the role of captious literary criticism that irresponsibly bundled
pennezhuthu into “subjective” or “sexual” experiences in making it thus
limiting should be necessarily recognised.
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