A Kerala Studies Blog
Clerks occupied an ambiguous position in the colonial middle class and left almost no writing of their own, except when a disciplinary charge forced them to explain themselves. This essay reads one such case from the Kozhikode Regional Archives to ask what a colonial clerk’s dismissal file can, and cannot, tell us about his life.
Read more
From satirical humour to violent campus clashes, Malayalam cinema has engaged with youth dissent in various ways to capture what[…]
Read more
What does it mean to call a mosque, church, or synagogue in Kerala “temple-like”? In this essay, Percy Arfeen-Wegner challenges this familiar framing. She explores Kerala’s religious architecture as a shared and contested world shaped by people living in the same landscape, working with the same ecology and climate, while giving different meanings to the world they built together.
Read more
From separate tumblers to inaccessible dining tables, Silpa Anirudhan examines how Malayalam cinema archives the everyday life of caste in Kerala’s domestic spaces. By reading culinary practices across films from different decades, she reveals how untouchability survives not as spectacle but as an ordinary, intimate, and enduring social order.
Read more
Join us for a free two-day writing workshop to work on a popular article, to learn about the fundamentals of research, writing and editing, and to discuss pathways to popular publication!
Read more
How do we make sense of the religious iconography that we increasingly see as part of the CPI(M)’s visual identity in Kerala? Anagha looks at what it means for an atheist-secular political party to turn to religion for its imagery.
Read more
Jubin Abraham explores how the Kochi-Muziris Biennale reimagines Kochi’s colonial edifices as living archives of memory, where contemporary artistic interventions recover suppressed histories and open new possibilities for decolonial remembrance.
Read more
Few writers in Malayalam literature have dared to make heaven smell. U. K. Shamsudheen deconstructs The Divine Dangudungu, a striking short story by Basheer, which stages questions of religion, the body, and language.
Read more
Drawing on the work of the organisation she founded in 1992, the Dalit Women’s Society, Lovely Stephen discusses some of the most pressing challenges faced by the Dalit women living in colonies.
Read more
മലയാളത്തിലെ കാല്പനിക സൃഷ്ടികളിൽ എന്ത് സ്ഥാനമാണ് ഗ്രന്ധശാലകൾക്കുള്ളത്? ഈ പ്രതിനിധാനങ്ങൾ നമ്മുടെ സമൂഹത്തെപ്പറ്റി എന്താണ് നമ്മോടു പറയുന്നത്? വ്യക്തിപരമായ വായനാ-ദൃശ്യാനുഭവങ്ങളുടെ വെളിച്ചത്തിലും, ഒരു ലൈബ്രറി സയൻസ് വിദഗ്ദ്ധനെന്ന രീതിയിലും ഈ ചോദ്യങ്ങളെ വിമർശനാത്മകമായി നോക്കികാണുകയാണ് മുഹമ്മദ് മുനവ്വർ.
Read more