A Kerala Studies Blog
‘Nadodi nruttham’ is an omnipresent cultural form in Kerala’s arts festival spaces. Drawing from her ongoing research into youth festivals in Kerala, Rajashree Raju delves into the caste dynamics behind a form that represents itself as ‘folk’.
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Editorials about women in public theatre in The Svadeshabhimani give us important clues about am emerging caste-gender order.
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The idea that education should be free in Kerala was in circulation as early as 1904. Although a significant majority were in agreement with this proposal, the excerpt below shows how the idea of free education in State-owned schools was identified as a hindrance to the vision of good education. The prefatory note below is a reading of the editorial published on December 10, 1909.
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Ala speaks to Ruchi Chaturvedi, whose book, Violence of Democracy, published this year, draws on years of engagement with political violence in north Kerala to think about the forms of violence produced by the very practice of democracy.
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We wrap up this season of our podcasts with Malavika Binny and Rekha Raj. In this episode, we explore how clothing, and by extension, the body itself, have been both sites of violence and protest in Kerala, and closely tied to questions of class and caste.
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Renovated ancestral homes have become a mainstay of tourism in Kerala. Soumithra investigates how ancestral homestays not only draw from existing caste and class hierarchies, but also play a role in sustaining these in the era of the supposedly free market.
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K J Baby’s 1991 novel, Mavelimantam, is the story of the resistance of the Adiyor community against centuries-old slavery at a historical point where feudalism was joining hands with emerging colonial forces in India. Mileena re-reads the novel with reference to the concept of Dalitisation by Kancha Ilaiah.
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കെ ആർ നാരായണൻ ഇൻസ്റ്റിറ്റിയൂട്ടിൽ നടന്ന വിദ്യാർത്ഥി സമരം എങ്ങനെയാണു ഒരു ബദൽ ജ്ഞാനരൂപം നിർമിക്കുന്നതെന്നു കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി സജീവ് എഴുതുന്നു.
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Muhammed Anees delves into the recent “kuzhimanthi debate” in Kerala, focusing on the political economy of language, and analyses the role of social media as a space for contested meanings and meaning-making
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Focussing on two Malayalam films from the last decade—22 Female Kottayam (Aashiq Abu, 2012) and Varathan (Amal Neerad, 2018)—Arun Ramesh argues that despite their apparently progressive politics, new-generation films continue to be influenced by feudal norms and practices.
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