The Manglore-style of violence against women is clearly not the style of the politically powerful guardians of sexual morality in Kerala. But maybe the style is more or less redundant over here: there are very few pub-going local (or local-looking) women over here. How convenient for us women of Kerala that we Malayalees live in social arrangements that insist on sexual segregation in public spaces and institutions.
This is of course related to the particular history of gender and spatiality that unfolded between the mid-19th and 20th centuries in Kerala.Spatial categories have always underwritten caste and gender exclusion in Malayalee society. Take for instance, the derogatory term chanthapennungal (‘market women’) that refers to women who get their way through loud and vociferous argument – who work for their livelihood in market-space and reject feminine modesty. The chanthapennu is the very antithesis of taravattil pirannaval (‘she who was born in an aristocratic homestead’). Thus the woman whose daily life and labours involves traversing spaces outside the domestic and the familial is forever poised at the brink — she is who may, at any instant, collapse into being chantappennu.In traditional Malayalee society, family spaces were named by caste and constructed through caste practices and gender norms. For instance, the Brahmin home was referred to as Illam or Mana; the Nair homestead as Taravadu or Idam.In other words, a generalized notion of domestic space housing the family was absent. Indeed, the observance of spatial regulations was often taken to be crucial in shaping feminine moral qualities found characteristic of the aristocracy — and hardly vice-versa.
The new domestic space – the grham – idealised in late 19th and early 20th century social reformisms was thought as crucially different from traditional domestic spaces. This space was imagined as essentially unconnected to traditional caste practices (even as it ‘modernised’ caste in Kerala) and positively informed by modern techniques and concerns regarding health, hygiene, aesthetics, thrift, and order.Importantly, it was imagined as the space generated and maintained by the modern housewifely woman — the grhini — defined by her space, the grham. The grham was, of course, imagined to be as distanced from the chantha or the teruvu (the street) as it supposedly was from the Illam or Taravad.The upper caste woman who stepped out — or had to step out — into these latter spaces was therefore, in strict terms, out of place/space.
A combination of forces led more and more women from upper caste or new elite backgrounds to enter the labour market in Kerala from the 1920s onwards, and it is not surprising that many of the early women employees were chaperoned to the workplace and back by their male relatives. Not surprising too, is the amount of ‘humorous’ writing on women in government jobs in magazines and journals in Malayalam of the 1930s and 40s which cast sly aspersions either on their sexual morality or ‘mannishness’. Gradually, we saw the emergence of forms of silent gender surveillance in public places, especially the segregation of men and women, something that often strikes a first-time visitor to Kerala as particularly odd. Each visitor often has a unique story about its workings — the most hilarious one I’ve heard was from a non-Malayalee left intellectual, working in the US, on holiday in Kerala when the DYFI had planned a massive ‘human chain’ stretching for kilometers in response to some international issue of grave importance. It was stupendous sight, he told me, but when he tried to join it at a point where the links in the chain were all women, he was asked to walk ahead until he could find a place between two men!Good women, especially the politically correct ones, don’t hold hands with men, whatever the cause may be! And they are everywhere — they have a hundred ways to teach you how to be good. For instance, they don’t watch ‘dirty’ movies – I remember a bunch of the most-politically-correct women in Trivandrum, the willing (but ‘decently’-clad) cheerwomen of the party bigwigs, and the custodians of the CPM’s ossified feminism, stomping out of a Pedro Almodavar film during the IFFK in 2007, leaving behing them a cloud of moral indignation!Ladies of the same breed took a lead,in March 2008, to ‘ritually purify'(yes, indeed, by sprinkling cowdung water on the road and sweeping it with brooms!) Kerala of women who smoke and couples who touch each other. This was after the CPM-sponsored Kairali channel aired footage from a night-vigil organised in Trivandrum in support of the Chengara land struggles, which showed young women light cigarettes and a young couple lean upon each other, as evidence for the ‘depravities’ of those who supported the protesters at Chengara!Thus we do not need the Sreeram Sene to do the moral policing; we have much more effective (because they are ‘decent’ and do not usually resort to physical violence) and cheaper alternatives. Surely, the ‘decency’ may decrease when the women subject to moral policing are not of the upper castes and new elite. In Kozhikode,efforts of progressives to ‘cleanse’ a poor neighbourhood of ‘immoral women’ involved considerable amounts of violence — forcible displacement of sex workers from their homes and not merely threats. Dalit women and non-heterosexual others abjected from Kerala’s social democratic utopia have never been strangers to sexual violence from the moral police.
Interestingly,all the moral surveillance works parallel to, and hardly against, sexual harassment of women in public places in Kerala. In fact,if there is one form of sexual violence upper caste and new elite women discuss freely and almost constantly, it is sexual harassment in public places, especially in public transport where male and female bodies do come into close contact.However, these complaints have surfaced rarely and have been largely treated as something to joke about. Only very recently has it attained the status of a serious complaint — through a recent book in Malayalam by a young woman-commuter, Tissy Mariam,about such experiences, which hits hard against both sexual harassment, and its flip side, moral surveillance. Tissy’s book also gives us interesting hints of the class anxieties generated by sexual attacks in public places (even when they are often silent ones) in women commuters. Such attacks push ‘decent’ women to the brink of class membership, reminding them that they may be readily reduced to nothing but chanthapennungal and such instability seems to generate an active, anxiety-driven discourse from them on sexual harassment, which rarely translates into a formal complaint or an effort to secure justice. Tissy’s book generated quite a controversy when it was serialised in a newspaper, and she tells me that after it became a book, a number of male friends have been acting rather distant! The reaction she faced only confirmed how women are allowed to complain in private but will face consequences if they do so in public — as the whole sordid story of the left’s attack on P E Usha, an activist and employee in the University of Calicut, who dared to take on sexual slander at her workplace, reveals. Her story began from seeking justice against sexual harassment in a bus at nighttime. No doubt, she was handicapped right from the start. In a bus? Alone? At night? A decent woman?!
Perhaps this explains a peculiar sort of smirk that emerges on the lips of some of the ‘progressives'(women included, which surfaces immediately after they have publicly condemned Hindu communalism and violence against women in a very standard, familiar way — but which somehow conveys the impression that incidents of this sort happen faraway from Kerala protected by its ‘left culture’. Below the paternalistic concern lies the I-told-you-so wisdom about ‘loose women getting what they deserve’. Well, perhaps our own version of Blairite social democracy is speeding us towards the Harmonious Utopia of Market, Civil Society, and State (in that order). But Valentine’s Day is a hundred years away.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Even among the elite, women that are sexually harassed do not find much support from peers unless their harassers have political relevance.
In 1999, a lady officer of a Kerala PSB had to flee to Mumbai on a Transfer to escape sexual harassment by her MD at Trivandrum. Even there, she was not spared and she had to file a Case at the Mumbai High Court because even her Union did not help her. The enlightened Kerala media was suitably influenced and they did not even report the Case. That Kerala feminists did not help her at all is another matter.The petitioner was later forced into a compromise after the Bank spent lakhs from public funds to defeat her at the Court. A lonely spinster, she had no other go because her Bank is based in progressive Kerala; and she had to work to live.
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To Kafila
Sorry for posting it here… this is for your kind information only.
It was with enthusiasm that I read this discussion group and I must congratulate the earnestness with which it disciplines opinions. In this regard I would like to point out some thing about the construction of troll in cyber sphere. The liberal and democratic possibilities of cyber sphere have caused discomfort for many. That is understandable as it will take time for them to adjust to a democratized sphere. The construction of troll has a background that could be traced back historically. I may not take much space to deliberate on it here, as I will leave it for another space to articulate it in detail. But would like to point out some pit-falls with which we maintain law and order. Human right violations in cyber sphere can also form another public service message.
The construction of ‘Asura’ in puranas could be equated with that of ‘troll’ in cyber yug. The nomadic aboriginals whom the civilized world feared were picturised as a violent gigantic figure with oversized ears and nose practicing magic and believed to possess supernatural power (see the picture in the post). The stereotypical ‘elitist’ construction of ‘asura’ and ‘troll’ continues even in cyber world as the perpetuators of violence remain the same and authoritatively maintain and control ‘law and order’. The historical synonyms for the same could be seen in various historical juntures as ‘deviants’. Many revolutionaries and reformers were accused as ‘deviants’ and disciplined for the sake of ‘maintaining order’ thereby averting and cleverly ignoring discomforting questions. The symbolic violence of such constructions has been historically resisted and questioned.
Here, it should be remembered that a troll is constructed out of Tissy and Nalini Jameela by moralist kerala society. and the same violence has been perpetuated by us– the self proclaimed saviours of cyber space. It s pity that we refuse to see this visible facet of our acts.
Best regards
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I think this is a crucial (even if, irrelevant, talking-back, causing-discomfort) intervention made by thetroll.
I wanted to say such things (which I could hardly express as eloquently as above) in response the thetroll post above. Since the troll post has gagged the reader, I follow thetroll’s innovative strategy to negotiate censoring state apparatus. Much like being told at a govt office “This window is now shut for lunch. Please wait for your turn”, at which point you know you have to find a way to buy the peon his daily quota of bidis so he sneaks your application in.
I want to bring to this rather daunting forum (where one can speak only when one has something illuminating to say, only when one is not quick and simplistic, only when can prove a genuine certification of investment in blah avenue of heartbleeding) my humble thoughts on a Healthy Debate. I am sure what I am about to say is frivolous, uneducated, simplistic, un-illluminating but will take the risk of trollification again.
Health, I have read in various literatures on the development discourse, is deeply entrenched in
colonial ‘civilising’ baggage. Inextricably tied up with notions of ‘modernity’, ‘civilisation’. I wonder what the terms of a healthy debate might be in light of the history of the word ‘health’. The description of a ‘healthy debate’ in terms of autonomus, well-read, educated, passionate citizens reads in again the notion of the Enlightenment subject, who thinks and acts, in pursuit of his rationality of being. He is taken in petty quarrels, name-calling, pointless banter.
In a desperate attempt to sound enlightened, let me quote my current hero:
“…it suffices to show that the language of authority is only the limiting case of the legitimate language, whose authority does not reside, as the racism of social class would have it, in the set of prosodic and articulatory variations which define distinguished pronunciation, r int he complexity of the syntax or richness of vocabulary, in other words in the intrinsic properties of discourse itself, but rather in the social conditions of production and reproductionof the distribution between the classes of the knowledge ad recognition of the legitimate language”.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. The Social Institution of Symbolic Power (Part II). In Language and Symbolic Power.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 113.
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The troll and Atreyee,
There is something very disingenuous going on here. And it is couched in social theory. Let me make myself clear. I have no difficulty with challenging authoritarianism and disciplinarian power. I have no intention of defending the admins of kafila. But I do find it annoying when claims to authenticity, claims to experience and and such other sources of legitimacy are deployed in internet communication.
On the web, we cannot see each other. Here we have neither the accountability that is attendant upon face to face interactions, nor the advantage of prior knowledges of the other…. afterall, we are just names without faces on the web.
But, by that same token, I am also quite impatient with trolling. The above is only one of the ways to think about trolling. There are a lot of other ways to think about trolling. Flaming and trolling are both fairly well researched and documented. They are not mere representations with no material basis. But before coming to that, I must say that the above comment is actually a very trollish argument and let me explain what I mean by that.
Look at the chain of equivalences that are set up in the above argument.
Deviants=Revolutionaries=Resistance=Trolls=Tissy=nalini Jameela
These equivalences are not explicitly stated. But they are suggested. This is typical troll style where you set up an argument such that anyone who walks and picks up on any of the equivalances and challenges can be attacked from an alternative position. ( I dont even want to go into the weirdness of conflating revolution and resistance)
Then there is another chain of equivalence here
Kafila=violence=moralistic kerala society=writers of mythologies about asuras.
And then there is an ahistoric, ageographic antagonism that is set up between these two chains of equivalences. kafila x revolutionaries.
Anyone who steps into this swamp is deadfish.
Of course, it could be that this is a strategic approach as in trolling is the only strategy that is available to anyone who wants to break the stranglehold of the uppercaste males (and upper caste females and upper caste male feminists and female malists) on the internet.
That would be like saying that hacking, writing malaware programs and spreading computer viruses is the only way to break the undemocratic nature of the internet networks. And I am not entirely opposed to a position like that.The trouble is that every hacker and virus program writer is not by default a democratic force. Just as every deviant is not a revolutionary. Every troll is not by definition contributing something useful. Is not doing something radical. Some trolls are just trolls. Some viruses are just viruses. They make systems crash indiscriminately. And they are not accountable to anyone.
This is why no hacker would ever think of firing up his or her computer without adequate virus protection. Setting up an anti virus program on your computer is not undemocratic. It is not reactionary. It is not to spite the hacker who might be hacking in the cause of democracy.
As far as the specific details at hand are concerned: I am sure Aaarti acted on her own counsel, but since she closed the thread shortly after I suggested that it should be closed, let me take part of the blame and explain.
There are times when conversations simply turn neurotic. The quality of communication and confrontation is reduced to nothing more than tu tu main main. It becomes a never ending cycle. In real life conversations, you can go away from the encounter and come back to it with a fresh mind. In real life conversations mostly, you know who is likely to pitch in. On unmoderated internet forums, it doesnt work like that. Here things fester and rankle. Other people step into conversations randomly and change the entire course of the conversations. Things can get abusive and neurotic very easily. When something like that happens, it is best to close the thread and pick up the threads again later in a new context. what is the great virtue in letting people go on telling each other to look into mirrors ?
Second, and this is the most important thing. I have seen trolls in all sorts of forums. I can think of only one forum where, the mod. kicked out someone for trolling. It was a unilateral decision by a single mod. of a very large political discussion list. Other than that, mostly, the advice to the posters is simple:
dont respond to the troll. It only makes things worse. i.e. it is advice to discipline oneself. Not an attempt to discipline the troll. That advice is given on the basis of experience which shows that there simply is no way to reason, argue, persuade, or even learn from trolls. Every exchange with the troll, leaves you feeling frustrated and angry. And this is because the troll really has no stake. No accountability.
Is this what had happened in this instance ? No accountability and no stake ? It is not just me saying so. if I am accountable to you, I wd make sure that if i disagree with you, I would challenge you. I will quarrel with you. But at the end of the day, we are friends and we have shared ground.We walk on the same earth. We have to move towards something together.
If I am not accountable to you, I dont care what you think of my reasoning. I dont care whether you agree or disagree with me. I dont care if I am honest or dishonest with you. You and I are worse than sworn enemies. We dont even share the same planet. I hate you and I expect you to hate me. If you dont hate me, I will create situations where you will end up looking as if you do hate me. I will trap you into all sorts of arguments in which I really have no major investments. I think a lot of that has gone on here before the caution about trolling went up.
I like the caution. I practice it myself. I ignore the troll.
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‘Fairly Seeing’ the Ankles
There was a report that came in a Malayalam Newspaper, Kerala Kaumudi an year ago, about women’s gathering and the demonstration and street play conducted by women on 8 March, 2008 at Kottayam, Kerala under the title “Police’ beating that came before Women’s beating”. It came in one of their regular columns, mukham nokkathe, the meaning of which could be translated as ‘fairly seeing’ (irrespective of the face). I was one among the women who participated in that gathering. I wasn’t a member of the women’s group that organized the event but I participated like many other women who have been subjected to the sexual harassment in public places and in public transport, ranging from male gaze, sexual gesturing, pushing, touching and pulling body parts etc. irrespective of age, or what kind of clothes women wear and whether one travels in the daytime or night. Anyone who complains against such practices is faced with smartha vicharam (morality inquisition and excommunication), as we have seen in any number of cases, such as that of P E Usha.
Women of different age group and vocations did participate in the demonstration. Right to safe travel, particularly in the nights was one of the slogans that women raised. Women’s group performed a street play where a man who tried to sexually assault a woman traveler was chased and caught by the women. Seeing this, few policemen who were standing by the side of the gathering came up and started actually beating up the male actor, without realizing that this was a play enacted to convey a message. Such criss-crossing of the ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ contexts are areas of enormous performance potential for social issues. And of course the reporter of the above mentioned newspaper item, “Police beating that came before Women’s beating” also got the sarcastic title from this point, for the media spectacle that he created out of this event.
The report went on to describe the women present there as wearing ‘tight jeans and kurtas’, ‘women who wore lunkis’ (malayali version for the wrap-around skirts), and ‘showing their ankles’. (Would it be okay when the stomach, navels or upper back are revealed by saris, since sari is the ‘honorable Indian dress’, for both elite and non-elite women? I remember Kamala Das who wrote about how she kept pictures of nude women in her son’s room so that, she thought, he would not stare into any woman’s body, out of starvation of sorts. I don’t know whether this had actually worked as she imagined but it was amazing the way she considered the issue in her own son’s upbringing)
While the reporter, the new-age Lakshmana ‘fairly saw’ ‘the ankles of the dozen women who danced in the night’ ‘in front of the bus stand’, he lost his eyesight completely in the case of men who participated except the male actor and the policemen whom, according to him, were ‘fooled by the entire event’. As a testimony to the fairness of Lakshmana’s character in the epic Ramayana, it was said that Lakshmana, during the search for Sita could not recognize the earrings and necklaces dropped from her, as he had only seen her anklets.
Men who participated in the event, though lesser in number compared to women, were of mainly two persuasions. Those who were feminists or had an intellectual-social engagement with the feminist subject and there were also men, often referred to as the common man, but who did relate to the issue because, as one of them commented, ‘we also have sisters’. And then, there was my father who came panicking to pick me up from the demonstration because it was too late at 9 p.m to be out of home. I am sure, there must have been many fathers, brothers, sons and husbands who must have been anxiously or angrily waiting for their women to return home, because it doesn’t happen in one of India’s most literate state to have women moving around after sunset.
But for the media reporter, none of these presences were of any importance to the ticklish tale that he was excited in creating. Some of the women, including me, wrote responses to this report but none of them was published in the newspaper. So, here I am to add this here. Hey, another Women’s Day is coming!
Sreelatha S
Kottayam
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Dear Devika,
I am intrigued by the timing of the emergence of the idea of grham and grhini – late 19th century and early 20th century. I am guessing that you are looking at the surfacing of this idea in the print media of that time, and perhaps fiction – novel ? drama ? . Does this also correspond with changes in employment, housing options and architectural styles available ? I mean, if the illam and the idam were distinct types of houses which anchored the day to day work and leisure activities of men, women and children, what made them unviable at the turn of the century ? If a new generation of people were thinking in terms of grham and grhini – they must have also begun to live in new kinds of places, possibly with new types of monetary transactions as well, right ? rented housing and so on ?
where did these options arise from ? subdividing of the illams and idams ? was there a lot of migration to urban centers ? Such would of course be general explanations that might be equally applicable to the rise of the brahmo samaj in bengal. But what can we learn from the specific experience of Kerala – which clearly did not have anything like urban experience of madras or calcutta ?
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Yes, Anant — indeed, the shift from taravad to grham was indeed a response to a host of changes that affected the upper castes in Kerala, including shifting away from villages to more urbanised areas, which were usually administrative centres and hosted new centres of higher education.
Spatial ordering was central to caste practices here and domestic spaces and practices were indeed shaped by such concerns. The architecture of the Brahmin illam is worth studying indeed — I do not know of much work on this. Gender differentiation of spaces was one key element of such ordering too — and often provided the means and spaces of resistance too, especially for women.
Unlike illam/taravad/chaala etc. the grham has no direct caste connotations — it merely means ‘home’. It was (a) unconnected to specific communities (as was the illam or the taravad), and primarily the handiwork of the ideal woman; (b) it primarily referred to a set of intimate altruistic social ties; while the new grhini was frequently advised on how to rearrange space in the home, these arrangements had to remain strictly subservient to the fostering of altruistic family ties. Following from (a), the ideal grham was to be constituted of a set of family ties, which could be set up well outside caste structures, norms, and spatial regulations. Following from (b) it had to be animated by the ‘gentle’, non-coercive power of subjectification. The ideal woman, it was claimed, was marked by her ability to exercise such power effectively, to manage materials and souls within the household. The predominance of the task of maintaining altruistic family ties in the grham ensured that its material space could be imagined in multiple ways. In practice however, the spaces of modern domesticity have been, and continue to be, informed heavily by upper caste norms, now sifted through the lens of health, hygiene, and other governmental concerns, and of modern consumption.
Thanks, Sreelatha. The other day, a woman friend of mine was driving and an overspeeding car bumped into hers. The time was 7 in the evening, and she was immediately surrounded by a bunch of drunks (the place was wrong — right in front of Mukkadan Wines in Thiruvananthapuram) and ‘questioned’. They wouldn’t let the two parties settle the issue and wanted full details on who she was, why she driving, why she was out ‘so late’ etc. and when she refused to comply, they took out their ire on the vehicle. She managed to get to the traffic police and the flying squad arrived — and the drunks helpfully reported that she was a drunk driver who’d bumped into the other car. The police insisted that she undergo breathe analysis. Meanwhile, press reporters, one from the ocal sleaze paper, arrived on the scene, clicking away, enjoying her distress very much. In the police station, she overheard several calls apparently to confirm whether she’s been drunk or not. And when she refused to answer their question, the sleaze-paper guy waved a menacing finger at her and said, “Edi (which is a rather rude way of referring to a woman when she is a stranger), beware, I’m from the Flash (the name of the sleaze paper). I’ll splash this all over the front page tomorrow!”. The police found nothing in her breath and so she was let off. Well, such fun for all around. All women are fair game after seven in Kerala.
Yes, as you say, another Women’s Day is around the corner.
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