Merin Simi Raj

This article analyses the early-20th-century Malayalam women’s magazines of Kerala in terms of their politics of representation. These magazines emerged at a time when Kerala was on the cusp of modernity and catered to Malayalee women with the aim of transforming them into “ideal gendered selves”. However, the contributions of these magazines, managed and edited mostly by the early feminists of Kerala, are seldom acknowledged or remembered within the larger discourse of Kerala’s colonial modernity. The magazines can be viewed as principal sites which recorded the responses of the emergent modern Malayalee community, particularly its women, to the notion of the “ideal Malayalee woman”. This article explores the entrenched patriarchal ideology and caste–class nexus that informed the content of these publications, and reveals the politics inherent in their seemingly apolitical stance.

Taking off from Kalyan Das's article "Subaltern Historiography to Dalit Historiography" (EPW, 14 February 2015), this discussion digs up an old debate in the pages of EPW on the presence of caste and its denial in Indian English fiction, which still holds relevance.

This article analyses the politics of the literary canon of the early twentieth century Malayalam novels with particular focus on the impact of the novel Indulekha (1889) in literary history. The inception of novel as a literary genre is widely regarded as a point of departure for Malayalam literature leading to the development of modern Malayalam, thereby shaping a distinct Malayali identity. Interestingly, the literary histories which established the legacy of Malayalam prose tend to trace a linear history of Malayalam novels which favoured the ‘Kerala Renaissance’ narrative, especially while discussing its initial phase. This calls for a perusal of the literary critical tradition in which the overarching presence of Indulekha has led to the eclipsing of several other works written during the turn of the twentieth-century, resulting in a skewed understanding of the evolution of the genre. This article would explicate in detail, on what gets compromised in canon formation when aesthetic criteria overshadow the extraliterary features. It also examines how the literary history of early Malayalam novels shaped the cultural memory of colonial modernity in Kerala.