Essays on Politics, Matriliny and the Media in Kerala

Praveena Kodoth

his collection of 12 essays is organ ised in two parts around the stated themes of (a) modernity, politics, women and Kerala, and (b) media, capita lism and communications. The essays in Part One are concerned in one way or the other with development and politics as the key processes that have shaped modern Kerala and the curious position of women within them. Jeffrey identifies matriliny, protestant missionaries and enlightened governance as contributing to the specific trajectory of development in Kerala, but it is matriliny that holds his fascination. Its role is invoked repeatedly in these essays, whether it be in enabling womens access to modernity (through literacy, education, employment in the formal sector and d emographic transition), or in paving the way for a politics influenced by commu nism. Five of these six essays were first published between 1978 and 1990 and r emain unaltered; and one that seeks to examine the legacies of matriliny was published in 2007. The essays in Part Two are of more r ecent vintage, published between 1994 and 2009. These essays are concerned with r estrictive state policies and the late blooming of the media in India, the threats posed by the mass media to language groups and cultures that do not present large enough markets to beckon those that have gained control over the media in its mass media phase, and the caste-based exclusions that have been silently rampant in the media. The essays in the two parts reflect d ifferent phases of the authors research; and the effort to make connections, in terms of an organic progression of ideas, is rather strained. Jeffrey notes that his i nterest in the media in India grew out of his fascination with Keralas literacy o w ing to its ability to influence significant changes in social and political life. What

book review
Media and Modernity: Communications, Women and the State in India by Robin Jeffrey (New Delhi: Permanent Black), 2010; pp 320, Rs 695.

does the r ealistic morning prayer that is reading ones newspaper tell us about modernity and more specifically about modern I ndia and its politics? (p xii). It is suggestive, however, that in the preface of the book, he discusses an essay dealing with the historical experience of printing, newspapers and politics in Kerala, placed in Part Two of the book, along with the e ssays in Part One. This works well as the section e mphasises the interconnections among literacy, newspapers, politics and development that distinguish Kerala. The remaining essays in Part Two stand apart for the questions that animate them. As they deal with the emergence and broad transformation of the media in India, the implications of mass media for society and politics at varying levels of literacy can only be speculated upon. Nevertheless, the essays abound in interesting detail.

Politics in Kerala
Part One begins with the essay that links the collapse of matriliny to the beginnings of communism in Kerala. Jeffrey notes that by the early decades of the 20th cen tury, the scale of social disintegration in Kerala was unmatched anywhere else in India, generating conditions comparable to China and Vietnam, but narrows down his argument to the collapse of the matri lineal joint family and the undermining of the caste system, which by the early 1900s produced a generation of deracine casteHindus from whose ranks came the l eaders of the Communist Party (p 7). In contrast, the state of the family systems of the Muslims and Syrian Christians was

undisturbed, providing infertile soil for young leftists in the 1930s. The argument renders communism, in the first instance, to be a cultural substitute to matriliny, subsuming the economic and political d imensions of both. It also diminishes the scale of transformation for far from b eing undisturbed in the early 20th century, the Syrian Christian community was re sponding to challenges posed by largescale commercial expansion through a cquisition of new land and migration to culturally different territories. An impor tant move, that has received little atten tion, was the redefinition of its family sys tem. We need to bear in mind that people took to communism despite the presence of caste organisations, set up explicitly to address problems arising from caste status or changes in it and in the family system. In the preface of the book, Jeffrey seals the argument of this essay with a remark used by communists that the party is my wife, ironically a remark that is sympto matic of a shift to a conjugal sensibility, very much a part of the embedding of communism in Kerala. A second essay also concerned with poli tics focuses on its influence on the quality of life in a central Kerala village, Anthikad, over 40 years from independ ence onwards. It weaves together skilfully the findings of several previous studies with fieldwork into a narrative anchored to the fortunes of one family that of a Nair man, who returns from Ceylon in the 1920s to invest his savings in a transport business. The key processes that mark the socio-political landscape of Kerala are all there left-agitational politics, organisa tion of trade unions (in this case the toddy tappers union), the setting up of coopera tives, schools and health infrastructure and the second generation resorting to m igration to Bombay, the Gulf and the west. A survey in the 1980s showed that two-thirds of the families lived in houses built over the last 20 years and most of them had tiled roofs and electricity. D ependence on agriculture for a liveli hood was on the decline since the 1960s. In this context of change, the essay poses the c ollapse of old hierarchies against the emergence of new forms of exclusion.

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The contrast is drawn perceptively between toddy tappers, who were able to use o rganisational strength to aspire to the status of formal sector workers, and agricultural labourers, who despite the small gains from the land reforms, r emained desperately poor. However, exclusion is constituted entirely in eco nomic terms, r evealing a more general problem with the essays in this section, which elide over the subordination of caste and gender to the dominant politics of class in modern Kerala. A brief essay is devoted to the folly of scholarship that cites references without directly consulting the source. A mistake arising from a typographical error that turned 1898 into 1868, as the year a l egislation was enacted, and confusion b etween two legislations only two years apart was multiplied because of repetition by successive scholars. The legislations i nvolved the earliest interventions into matriliny in Malabar, which the error brought forward by nearly three decades.

Matriliny, Women and Development

Three essays in the section deal with the centrality of women to the experience of development in Kerala and go over much shared ground. Here, the author elabo rates one of his key propositions with re spect to Kerala, that womens remarkable independence or relative freedom of manoeuvre preceded and produced de velopment, and in turn was enabled by Keralas culture rather than by govern ment policy or enhanced literacy through other means. What caused which? For me the answer seems clear: the unusual position of matrilineal Hindu women, and of Christian women, influenced by aggres sive Protestantism (Catholics responded to the Protestant challenge), made Kerala unique (p x). One of these essays mobi lises contrasts in education policy among Travancore, Cochin and Malabar to show that they only illustrate differences in tim ing and that it was culture that played the defining role in enabling literacy. In this context, Jeffrey also underscores the i mportance of matriliny in opening up new space for women: It needs to be e mphasised, however, that until the early 20th century matrilineal caste Hindu

women experienced greater freedom and a larger proportion of them was liter ate (p 132). He contends that matriliny underwrote another crucial factor in the position of women in Kerala their access to salaried employment. Two of the three essays allude to the costs women have had to pay for a new framework of development restrictions on sexuality, loss of primacy in inherit ance and exclusion from politics. The sec ond essay profiles four women whose lives span the period since the 1870s and sums up the ambivalence of Kerala society t owards women if they had access to e ducation earlier than in other parts of I ndia and have been able to scale the peak of salaried employment, public politics is not cut out for them, the price of seeking to enter it being ridicule and stinging criticism. Two of the profiles are of Syrian Christian women Mary Poonen, who graduated in medicine from Britain in 1915 and went on to head Travancores medical service in 1924, and Akkamma Varkey, who married at the age of 43 (in 1952) and a year later fought and lost an election to Parliament. A profile of K R Gouri, the s enior former Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader who came tantalisingly close to becoming the chief minister, shows the difficult negotiations that fall to the part of women in mainstream left politics. The continuing relevance of matriliny is mobilised in terms of legal, sentimental and structural legacies in the third essay, also the most recent in Part One. As legal legacies, Jeffrey documents the rare cir cumstances of matriliny continuing to d etermine descent of property. He cites the applicability of matrilineal descent to land traced to grants made to previously matrilineal families under a specific t enure for services to a temple and to the loose ends of matriliny (that) still crop up (p 97) in the courts. Among the others mentioned, a concession granted to matri lineal people under Section 17 of the H indu Succession Act, 1956, in the priority a ccorded to the mother as a first order of heir of a woman, represents a drastic w atering down of the initial exemption of matrilineal communities from the Hindu code. The Kerala High Court restriction of the provision, more recently, to those born

before 1976, the year the Kerala Joint F amily Abolition Act was passed, means that its days are numbered. It is puzzling that Jeffrey considers these to be legacies rather than vestiges. The only instance that seems to qualify as legacies are the setting up of trusts to administer temples and other ritual observances of previously matrilineal families, a practice that wields symbolic capital and has grown in the context of upward economic mobility. Sentimental legacies refer mostly to invo cations of matrilineal identity in a selec tion of literature but here the narrative falters as it does not engage with the pre dicament of matrilineal identity posed in an unequal struggle with a dominantly conjugal imaginary. All three essays reflect a disconnect be tween Jeffreys core proposition linking matriliny, women and development, which appears also as the structural legacies of matriliny, and the modernising processes that both paved the way for a conjugal i maginary and constituted new gendered identities. Crucially, the latter have set the terms on which women have accessed e ducation and employment since the early 20th century. As against this, Jeffrey con cludes that [i]n Kerala, girls are regarded as potential earning members in much the same way as boys (p 43), emphasising in particular womens significantly higher share of organised sector employment. It bears mention that this statistic is in an overall context of work participation rates for women that are among the lowest in India. Only a quarter of women in Kerala are employed; and protected salaried e mployment, a small subset of this, is a ccessible only to a few, disproportionately from privileged social and economic back grounds. On the other hand, manual work, work that involves proximity to men and requires mobility are subject to stigma even when the e conomic returns are con siderable as in the case of nursing. Not sur prisingly, in s urveying the structural lega cies of matriliny, Jeffrey is faced with the significant r egional and class based varia tions in womens ability to access higher education and jobs. Even so, more gener ally, the record of forward caste matrilineal w omen would pale before the important strides made by women of S yrian C hristian and marginal communities/poor families

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since the 1960s, tapping routes considered h azardous for women, such as migration, to take up work as nurses and domestic workers.

Newspapers and Nationalism

Two of the essays in Part Two focus on the expansion of the newspaper industry in India underpinned by commercial inter ests, whereas a third considers the atti tudes and policies that virtually throttled the broadcast sector until the rise of satel lite television in the 1990s a colonial leg acy, a puritan streak emerging from the concerns of the nationalist movement and fear of exacerbating social conflict. Packed with interesting detail, these essays probe the quirks of state policy linked to the i mportance of personalities and ponder over the implications of the sudden and forced breaking away from restrictions. Jeffrey also links the failures of broadcast policy to the slow pace of social develop ment, e specially in north India as also to the slow progress on a national language. The essays on the newspaper industry survey its transition from a regime of tight government controls to relaxations that set off aggressive efforts to widen markets. One of the essays traces this transition through the fortunes of three sets of news paper monitoring agencies (or processes). The Registrar of Newspapers in India (RNI), which epitomised the control r egime, breeding a corrupt bureaucracy, has been reduced to insignificance, w hereas the A udit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), which served alongside, catered better to the need for credible and timely information on circulation, so instrumental to d ecisionmaking on where to place a dvertisements. Yet, the ABCs procedures were too exact ing for smaller and mostly Indian language newspapers. The National R eadership Sur veys (NRS) conducted successively since 1970 gradually provided impetus for the weakening of restrictive state control on newspapers and, by u nderscoring the p otential of the Indian language dailies and rural markets, it also signalled new directions for the news paper industry. The second essay explores further the growing edge of the regional language press, but in a broader context of the p ower of newspapers (print) to shape the future of languages, threatening the

s urvival of those that do not command m arkets or state patronage but also, going against the grain of the western experi ence, to hold together Indian nationalism in several (not one) languages. The r egio nal language newspapers homogenised language in the print forms they advanced. They widened their reach through two significant moves. Powered by technologi cal change (the arrival of offset printing) and the potential of raising advertising revenues, they restructured their organi sations to reflect the importance of m arketing, even creating a new breed of small local advertisers. They also tuned in to local issues and sought to respond to culture specific interests. In this context, Jeffrey contends that the weakness of u rban capitalism is a condition that pro pels newspapers towards advancing seces sion, taking the instances of Punjab and Kashmir. He shows that newspapers could be punished for flirting with secessionism, but there is only a passing mention of the social/cultural boundaries of nationhood that they may cement without inviting suppression. Though relevant to Jeffreys question why multiple language-cultures have not subverted the idea of an Indian nation the specific social alignments that hold together the Indian nation are sub sumed under the primacy accorded to capitalist interests in shaping the robust ness of the media. Thus, when Jeffrey takes up the ques tion of dalit exclusion from the newspaper industry in a separate essay, he does not consider whether commercial interests and the terms of state patronage too are implicated in it. Nevertheless, he under scores the structural and ideological b arriers faced by dalits including sub- division on the basis of caste, region and language, their distribution across the country but in relatively smaller numbers, poverty and deep-seated Hindu prejudice that make it difficult for them to mobi lise around identity and to advance claims. He shows that these are conditions that made it difficult to get dalit perspectives into the mainstream media even after a dalit leadership had emerged in main stream politics in north India. Jeffrey r eflects on his 10-year experience of stud ying newspapers to infer, shockingly, that there must have been few salaried dalit

journalists in 1999, virtually none in s enior positions and no substantial dalit run publication. He contrasts the predic ament of dalits with the experience of the blacks in the United States through the development of black newspapers and journalism.

Mass and Print Media

Over two essays, Jeffrey seeks to demon strate that print has rather different impli cations for society and politics in its differ ent phases of evolution. He defines the shifts in the modes of communication over 1750-2010, which culminated in the emer gence of the mass media since the 1980s. Characterised by mass circulation of r egional language dailies and magazines and the widening reach of television, the mass media challenged the print elite mode, where newspapers catered to a small and disproportionately urban elite, but in the early 21st century, coexists with it and with what Jeffrey calls the peasant mode, where writing and print were rare and valued not only for information but also as objects. In this context, he raises the significance of the arrival of mass m edia in a society with high levels of illit eracy in terms of moulding peoples per ceptions and shaping social and political events in the anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhis assassination, the Punjab conflict and N T Rama Raos rise to power in 1983. He also outlines the changes in the potency of print from being feared by governments and subject to suppression as a scarce medium, with small circula tions, to the ability of the few big newspa pers to flourish, dependent on commercial interests and the State and at the cost of diversity of character.

Anderson, Habermas and a Critique

The story of newspapers and print in K erala has been quite distinct. Jeffrey con tends that it was neither technology nor commerce that spurred print into a mass m edium in Kerala but mass politics, hence mass media arrived in the 1960s with cir culations increasing by an unsurpassed three times between 1957 and 1967. He uses the experience of print in Kerala to con clude that the concept of print-capitalism, a dvanced by Benedict Anderson, has little

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explanatory value whereas the concept of public sphere advanced by Habermas has considerable salience. He discounts the applicability of print-capitalism on the grounds that [s]ubstantial investment of the kind we could comfortably call capi talist arrived [in Kerala] only after inde pendence whereas print came in the 19th century as a handicraft and remained so well into the 20th century (p 277). He goes on to argue that even if we accept a broader understanding of capitalism that underpinned the spread of print in the 19th century, this process did not lead to an intense movement based on Malay alam (p 277). These are precarious grounds. Even by the terms Jeffrey accepts, it is difficult to understand why a newspa per established by a Syrian Christian busi ness family in the late 19th century and which actively fostered capitalist expan sion by the community should be consid ered a handicraft rather than a form of industry carried on by machinery. Further,

while Malayalam undergirded a broader notion of region, even before the British era, it would be hazardous to suggest that this should have provided a ready base for a strong Kerala nationalism with the a rrival of print. Contrary to what Jeffrey suggests, mar riages and social relations were regulated not only along caste lines but also along smaller regions. Well into the early dec ades of the 20th century, women from north Malabar were ostracised for cross ing its boundaries. The late 19th and early 20th century marked the effort to develop a sense of community across the broader region. Jeffrey makes no reference to the strong subnational identities that print has contributed to without fuelling secessio nism. On the contrary, his narrative a ssumes questionably that the salience of print capitalism lies more n arrowly in a process of imagining community on the basis of print-language c orresponding to the western experience.

With respect to the notion of the public sphere, he argues that in Kerala, the social turbulence of the 20th century happened in a public sphere, which was made possi ble partly by the spread of print, p ublishing and newspapers (p 279). This a ssertion helps illustrate a problem that straddles the two parts of the book, i e, the separa tion and inability to reconcile two aspects that are posed as critical to the shaping of modern Kerala politics, which was played out importantly in the public sphere, and the position of women, emerging from cul ture (and family) but with i mplications for their public profile. D ebates in the public sphere in the early 20th century, when print was still in its scarce mode, contrib uted to shaping new ideals and norms of gender that are not only far removed from those sustained by m atriliny but also ren dered politics hostile to women.
Praveena Kodoth (praveena@cds.ac.in) is at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.

Filling Historical Gaps

Meher Fatima Hussain

apiya Ghoshs last book, released posthumously almost three years after her tragic death in 2006 is a work of great acumen involving tireless research, impeccable originality of argu ments and findings based on an exhaus tive exploration of sources. The valuable manuscript was almost lost but for its r etrieval from the stolen computer held in police custody by the authors younger sis ter Tuktuk Kumar who on behalf of Papiya, makes poignant acknowledgement to all associated with the effort that helped in the final publication of the book. Kumar also reveals that the author had planned a trilogy but unfortunately that was not to be in her lifetime. The introduction written by Papiya is es sentially the summary wherein the out lines of the proposed six chapters are d elineated. The sixth chapter remained un finished and hence unpublished. The book carries an elucidative foreword by Kamran Asdar Ali (teacher of anthropo logy at the

Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 1940s by Papiya Ghosh (New Delhi: Routledge), 2010; pp i-xxx+140, Rs 495 (hardback).

University of Texas) who gives a contextual introduction to the theme of identity poli tics as taken up by Papiya. Ali discusses the incongruent political articulations shared by individuals and political parties on the issue of nationa lity and community identity. He explains the d ifferences of opinion within the C ommunist Party of In dia (CPI) on the Partition which in the con clusive decade of the 1940s f avoured the Muslims right to self-determination as a distinct nationality, but a fter the creation of Pakistan dubbed it a result of the Muslim Leagues reactionary politics.

Homeless Migrants
Though focused on Bihars politics during the 1940s, Papiya successfully attempts to unravel the larger issues dominating the history of south Asia that led to the m aking

of the homeless m uhajirs (migrants). The exposition entails diverse political articula tions premised along concerns of identity, religion, class and community with several points of symmetry and divergence. The first chapter begins with a thrust on the mobilisation sought by the Congress M uslim mass contact initiative popularly called the Rabita-e-Awam, in order to wean the Muslims away from the separatist Mus lim League in the 1930s. The C ongress and the League contested at the popular level, each seeking Muslim m embership, and desperately wanting to broaden their base in Bihar. The Leagues argument was that the community rights of the putative M uslim community faced a threat from the Congress, who it felt was responsible for the Hindu Raj during the 1937-39 minis try. The Congress defended the swaraj (self-rule) agenda in the pre- and postministry phase by claiming that it hinged on Hindu Muslim unity. The Congress also attempted to enlist the s upport of the M omins (a community of Muslim weav ers) in this regard. The M omins formed a formidable section of B ihars Muslim popu lation, primarily e nter taining a nationalist agenda with equal concerns for the biradari (community) as enumerated in their

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