A Kerala Studies Blog
An editorial from 1909 published in The Svadeshabhimani gives us perspectives on a changing judicial order. The excerpt also offers a critical lens to think about morality and constitutional law–themes that are as relevant today as they were then.
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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 Svadeshabhimani was an influential newspaper of the Kerala Renaissance that was banned. Thought to be lost, its archives have been partially recovered over a century later. Sajitha Bashir presents us a glimpse into the recently digitised archives and the labour that went into making the archives accessible for all.
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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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Urmila Unnikrishnan delves into the obscure history of the science popularisation movement in Kerala, tracing the activities of the Travancore Public Lecture Committee, which educted the common public through lectures, demonstrations, and exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Historian and writer Uma Maheswari shares selected excerpts of a speech delivered by Sir. C.P. Ramaswami Aiyer in 1942 about Sree Narayana Guru, his teachings, and caste reforms.
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As cinema halls in Kerala emerge as sites of pandemic control, Bindu Menon explores a longer history of how moralized notions of public health and contagion played out in Kerala’s cinema halls, and through film as medium.
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Sarath Pillai writes about private collections of land-deeds and official records of Malayalees, and how they could be valuable sources[…]
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In part two of the interview by P. C. Saidalavi, Robin Jeffrey speaks about his body of work on Kerala, and his recent work on South and Southeast Asia.
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Drawing our attention to a largely unexplored, and incredibly vast, archive of Travancorean history, Dr. Vysakh A. S. presents a few intriguing snippets from Uma Maheshwari’s book on the eponymous archive, Mathilakom Records.
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