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 termsavarnarefers 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.Avarnarefers 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.

The present is a peculiar time for feminists in India. On the one hand, debates of over two decades now make us sharply aware of vital importance of the intersecting multiple axes of power in shaping patriarchy and hence of the need to acknowledge mutual differences and inequalities. On the other, the high-tide of Hindutva nationalistic jingoism sweeps us all together as 'anti-nationalist', as equally dangerous to the Hindutvavaadi nation. Not surprisingly then, in no other time has the need to rethink and rebuild feminist solidarities felt so urgent. The question would perhaps be to ask how we could deploy the insights about the end of 'romantic sisterhood' to produce a thorough critique of feminist practice. I contend that for this to happen, intersectional analysis needs to be applied as a tool of feminist self-transformation, acknowledged as integral to lived feminist ethics, and not merely something that figures in the knowledge that we produce. This essay is an attempt to think aloud this challenge and what it entails, from Kerala, a society where feminism is irrevocably pluralized at present, but where feminists do face the Hindutvavaadi threat of exclusion as 'immoral' and 'anti-national'. I propose a new mode of engagement, feminist maitri which may give rise to what Eve Sedgewick has called 'non-paranoid' readings alongside the necessary readings of the ills that hamper trust-building in the field of feminist politics - bringing hopefully a delicate balance.

This paper looks at two governance challenges that sit behind global commitments to deliver ‘cities without slums’: under what conditions can participatory ideals be successfully transferred to housing redevelopment programmes, and under what conditions can participatory slum redevelopment trigger wider shifts towards inclusive urban governance? It does so by examining Indian national slum redevelopment policy and its implementation in Kerala’s capital city, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram). Kerala’s track-record of participatory governance and the lead role given to its women-focused poverty alleviation mission, Kudumbashree, in implementing housing projects make it an ideal place in which to examine these questions, and their gender implications. Primary data focusing on two housing projects are used to contrast intended governance changes featuring female-centred community participation with their actual operation on the ground. Despite moves to foreground women’s engagement, both projects suffered from shortfalls in institutional design, the inevitable administrative complexity of housing delivery, and resistance from local power brokers. Given Kerala’s favourable starting conditions, these outcomes highlight the need for slum redevelopment to be based around a deeper analysis of power dynamics and the explicit articulation of an agenda for inclusion at a city-level if participation is to realise its transformative potential.

This 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 dialogueto which Pottekkatt's accounts point, if only in a cursory manner.

This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holistic housing solutions for the urban poor, and above all empowering Urban Local Bodies to re-balance relationships between State and city-level governments in favour of the latter. Here, we trace Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission’s implementation in Kerala’s capital city, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), where the city’s decentralised urban governance structure and use of ‘pro-poor’ institutions to implement housing upgrade programmes could have made it an exemplar of success. In practice, Trivandrum’s ‘city visioning’ exercises and the housing projects it has undertaken have fallen short of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission’s lofty goals. The contradictions between empowering cities and retaining centralised control embedded within this national programme, and the unintended city-level consequences of striving for Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission funding success, have reshaped urban governance in ways not envisaged within policy. As a result, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission has been important in rescaling governance relationships through three interlinked dynamics of problem framing, technologies of governance and the scalar strategy of driving reform ‘from above’ that together have ensured the national state’s continued influence over the practices of urban governance in India.

"Development and Gender Capital in India: Change, Continuity, and Conflict in Kerala." The Journal of Development Studies, 55(8), pp. 1859–1860

In this paper we offer some tentative reflections on the nature of social connections that self-help groups (SHGs) attached to different organizational bases rest upon, sustain, or build, and their implications for women as citizens – essentially, the kind of public life it allows them to access to – in Kerala. These include the Kudumbashree – the government-sponsored network, and two other networks built by a caste-community organization and a religious community organization respectively. It is based on two sets of data, quantitative and qualitative, which complement each other to offer interesting insights on this theme. We use the idea of social capital as a lens to explore it partly as an opportunity to correct existing research on local governance and the Kudumbashree in Kerala that simply assumes that all dense social networks are unambiguously beneficial to women. We conclude that three networks display mostly an inward, individual, increasingly habit/responsibility-driven personal orientation, and at-best domestic-centred public activism; the social connections generated by these networks are shaped largely by the larger social institutions that they are embedded in. The Kudumbashree network, despite the fact that it is not embedded in a dense social institution compared with the others, does not seem to have the compensatory mechanism of stronger external control and strict hierarchies, rather the contrary. It is also more open to extension compared with other networks, and focused on individual interests – and definitely not driven by political ideologies. It also appears that gendered social expectations interfere in the chances of upward mobility that Kudumbashree leaders may gain through their networks.

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 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.

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 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 paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of 'invited' spaces for female participation within urban governance, both through women's presence within democratically elected municipal councils, and the deliberate linking of its implementation to Kudumbashree, Kerala's network of women-only neighbourhood groups that are responsible for implementing various antipoverty interventions throughout the state. Drawing on oral histories of the slum's evolution, interviews with project participants, and detailed ethnographic observation, we highlight the contests over identifying the list of JNNURM beneficiaries who would ultimately be granted a government-built flat at the project's completion. This key task in the project's implementation has been devolved to the local level, and therefore offers important insights into the practical efficacy of these invited spaces. The contests over this list show how 'actually existing' urban governance unfolds, and in particular highlight the interplay of formal and informal practices at work in 'fixing' a list that had local legitimacy. They also illustrate the ways in which power and authority are contested, and the role gender plays within performances of leadership. Women's political agency and efficacy are hampered both by Kerala's restrictive gender norms and by the high stakes and highly masculinist struggles present within its urban politics. The paper's theoretical contribution is to broaden our conceptualisation of leadership and claims making in the Global South, and within this to pay proper attention to the gendered nature of political space.

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.

This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala’s cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu legacies have been privileged implicitly in these and, as a result, hybrid communities can only be perceived as “miscegenated”. They are, therefore, excluded from the legacies of national culture. Johny Miranda’s recent novella Requiem for the Living (2013), tries to end this invisibility by articulating the present of one such community, the Parankis of Cochin. On the one hand, it both challenges and complicates existing identities such as the “Anglo-Indian” and the “Luso-Indian”, revealing their elite moorings and dualistic conception of hybridity. On the other hand, it departs from the long history of the implications of novel-writing in projects of caste-community identity construction in Malayali society. In doing so, it directs our attention towards the possibilities of unearthing “subaltern cosmopolitanism”, which may indeed be more appropriate for contemporary challenges in the specific postcolonial context that is contemporary Kerala.

This essay argues that the current crisis of feminism in Kerala State, India, has little to do with the hegemony of English. Rather, the difficulty arises partly from the difficulties that feminists encounter in translating feminism between different linguistic layers and partly from local feminism''s relative inability to generate an effective counterlanguage to the depoliticizing vocabulary of gender mainstreaming found in governmentalized feminism. I argue for greater attention to the manner in which feminist political ideas get translated on the ground and to the translation of feminist literary writing, which is currently a very powerful presence in the Malayalam ((the dominant language here)) public sphere, as ways of generating a politically effective feminist idiom and refurbishing feminist thought and politics for Malayali society. Instead, I suggest that part of the crisis in feminism here comes from difficulty in translating between different layers of Malayalambetween high-intellectual Malayalam and its everyday variant.