J.

Devika

= ?
 Contents

About the Author

1. The Triumph (and the Harrumph) of the Malayalee Male Critic

2. Womanwriting = Manreading?

3. Swimming against Many Tides

4. Beyond Heroine-Worship

Notes

References

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Copyright Page
 ZUBAAN–PENGUIN BOOKS
WOMANWRITING = MANREADING?

J. Devika has written on the intertwined histories of gender, culture,

politics and development in her home state, Kerala. She is bilingual
and translates both fiction and non-fiction between Malayalam and
English, and also writes on contemporary Kerala on www.kafila.org.
She currently teaches and researches in the Centre for Development
Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
 1
The Triumph (and the Harrumph) of the
Malayalee Male Critic

SEIZING AN OPPORTUNITY
The present is a strategically important time for feminist literary
criticism in Malayalam. Since the 1990s, the concept of the ‘national-
popular’ forged by the mainstream political left in the 1950s has
been under severe strain.1 This was not only because of
liberalization and the rise of consumerism precipitated by the
migration of Malayalees (speakers of Malayalam, the language of
Kerala) to the Gulf since the early 1970s, but also because of the
increasingly strident voices of excluded social groups—Dalits,
Adivasis, women and others. Feminism, however, has increasingly
faced rough weather. The reservation of 33 per cent seats for
women in the three-tier Panchayati Raj system and the special focus
on women as agents of development in local-level planning in the
mid-1990s ensured the hegemony of a certain version of liberal
feminism by the state; in the same period, feminists in Kerala fought
long, tiring battles over sexual violence against powerful members
and adherents of political parties (Devika and Kodoth 2001).
Feminism was increasingly pluralized in the 1990s, but mainstream
feminists remained suspicious of criticisms of elitism among
feminists.
Perhaps the only field in which the feminist perspective made
steady gains was literature. The rise of women authors writing
against patriarchy in Malayalam was paralleled by the slow but
steady loss of intellectual legitimacy suffered by liberal humanist
literary criticism since the 1990s. In the past three decades, the
numbers of women authors have gone up in the major genres. They
have also won many of the most important literary prizes; many are
bestselling authors. Not surprisingly, we find that in surveys of
contemporary Malayalam literature, women’s anti-patriarchal writing
(much of which is explicitly feminist) is frequently hailed as a
promising development—from different political perspectives. Thus
the well-known poet and radical left critic Satchidanandan referred to
it as the ‘most powerful avant-garde in contemporary Malayalam
literature’ (2002:817); the essays in the volume Pennezhuthu
(Womanwriting) (Jayakrishnan 2002) try to reconcile it with liberal
humanism. It has received acceptance within standard literary
history too (for example, Pillai 2009). There is also acceptance of the
relevance of feminist literary criticism in Malayalam among leading
male literary critics (Vijayan 1992; Raveendran 1997, 2002;
Prabhakaran 2002; Pokker 2002; Rajakrishnan 2006; Tharamel
2008).
However, it seems that more has to be done, and urgently, if we
want to preserve the mileage gained. This became apparent to me
while taking part in a TV talk show in 2009 on the proposed
reservation of 50 per cent seats in the Panchayati Raj system for
women in Kerala, to which I had been invited as one of four guest
speakers. I had been invited as a feminist researcher writing on
politics and gender in contemporary Kerala. The other female guest
was a young woman politician, associated with the Communist Party
of India (Marxist) who had been active in Kerala’s political
decentralization. There were two male guests too, who, however,
displayed no direct interest in the topic to be discussed. Indeed, as
we soon learned, they had no views at all on it. However, they
possessed a passport of a different sort which allowed them
immediate entry into any kind of public discussion in Kerala—one of
them was a well-known literary author, the winner of prestigious
literary prizes in Malayalam, and the other, an ‘aesthete’. In other
words, direct or indirect participation in the literary world is a magic
talisman that opens the doors of the public—mostly to men, though
women in the past few decades have fought for and sometimes
gained (partial and/or gendered) entry. And it is well known by now
that Kerala’s public is emphatically masculinist and mostly male.2
What set me thinking was not so much their vulgar display of
masculine hubris in the discussion, as their apparently unshakeable
sense of entitlement as possessors of refined aesthetic sensibilities
to issue true statements on ‘women’—on women’s ostensibly
essential natures, social condition, abilities, inclinations, preferences
and weaknesses. Persistent efforts to point out empirical errors,
logical fallacies and the effects of rhetoric in their argument about
‘women’s essential incapacity for public life’ did not even make a
dent in their confidence about their ‘knowledge’ of women. The
contrast between the woman politician and woman researcher on
one side, and the male literary ‘genius’ and male aesthete on the
other, could not be more glaring: the former clearly struggling for full
citizenship and voice and the latter, convinced of their superior
refinement, determined to exclude women in general from full
citizenship. The members of the Purushapeedhana Parihaara Vedi
(Forum to Resolve the Oppression of Men) in the audience turned
out to be the most ardent supporters of the genius and his
companion; their misogyny blended with such seamless perfection
that it almost echoed the intensely masculine insecurities of
Malayalee modernism which the genius represented.
My earlier research into the history of modern gender in early-
twentieth-century Kerala allowed me to connect this unshakeable
sense of masculine power with a key feature of the early history of
social and community reformism in Kerala—the power of Reformer-
Man (Devika 2007). There was broad consensus among the
advocates of social change of this period that reconstituting social
life in terms of modern gender relations3 required the institution of a
non-reversible relation of power between those who came into
contact with the norms and mores of modern society earlier and
those who could not. The former were of course more likely to be
men and the latter, women. The Reformer-Man’s power was widely
accepted by the early twentieth century as an indispensable
condition for the realization of the projected alternative to the
prevailing social order based on caste difference and inequality: a
society organized by modern gender. To me, the privileged male
members of the upper echelons of the contemporary literary field
seem to be claiming, very comfortably, Reformer-Man’s authority
over women and their matters, in full confidence of the non-
reversibility of that relationship.
Indeed, this took me back to fairly recent debates in Kerala over
the significance of marginal people’s writing and their claim to the
status of ‘literary author’. The most heated of these was around the
autobiography of a sex worker, Nalini Jameela, which appeared in
2005 and became an all-time bestseller in Malayalam. Many leading
writers—not necessarily bearers of conservative political labels—
expressed outrage against the media attention the book received,
expressing explicit concern about the ‘danger’ it posed. The book,
they claimed, would hamper Malayalee people’s ‘aesthetic
education’ and disrupt the social function of literature. That is, books
like Jameela’s would not, apparently, achieve the aesthetic culturing
of readers, the transformation of readers into self-governing liberal
subjects.
Here the fear that the non-reversible relation of power between the
privileged literary elite (who readily appropriate for themselves the
power of Reformer-Man irrespective of their gender) and readers
(the objects of their ‘refinement’ work, but who now appear
recalcitrant) came into full view: for instance in the leading modernist
author M. Mukundan’s tirade against Jameela. He lamented that the
future bestseller will not be ‘written by a great [male] author
[ezhuthukaaran] of our language, but by a sex worker or [female] sex
trafficker [penvanibhakkaari]’ (Mukundan 2005). It was the gender
elitism of Kerala’s literary public which surfaced in Mukundan’s
characterization of the ‘great author’ as male—worth noting, given
the fact that women authors and feminist writing are unmistakable
presences in contemporary Malayalam literature, to the extent that it
can hardly be imagined without them. And the absence of women
writers in Mukundan’s reckoning indicated that his anxiety involves
the reaffirmation of ‘literary masculinity’ and not just the
condemnation of writing by the marginalized and sexualized. The
Reformer-Man’s sense of authority and entitlement illuminates both
Mukundan’s posture in this debate (in the literary public) and the
behaviour of the two male guests in the above-mentioned TV show
(in the political public).4 Inside and outside the literary field, the male
author possesses the authority of reformist patriarchy.
It appears to me that to challenge the male literary elite, we need
feminist writing that is not only devoted to locating foremothers, but
will also unearth and question the sources of masculine privilege in
the literary field. Given the fact that the literary public in Kerala is a
site of most intense and audible debate within the Malayalee public
sphere, the gains made within the former have a considerable
bearing on feminist gains in the latter. And securing a public voice for
feminisms that puncture the hegemony of state-centric liberal
feminism is crucial to the larger project of gender democratization. In
her article on the controversy around women’s writing of the 1990s,
G. Arunima points out the lack of a significant political culture among
Malayalee women as an important reason for their marginalization
within the intermingled spheres of politics and culture in Kerala
(Arunima 2003).
This book takes forward such reflections in greater detail. And I do
feel that this challenge, in its broader sense, is relevant not only in
this particular regional context, but also to other Indian literatures.
For it has been noted that liberal humanist criticism is indeed on the
decline elsewhere as well, and regional literatures are increasingly
becoming vehicles for the self-assertion of hitherto marginalized
identities and voices (Padma 2009).
This book aspires to reflect on the possibilities of renewing
feminist literary criticism in the Malayalam literary public. It seeks to
unseat entrenched notions and debates in both mainstream and
feminist literary criticism, indicate possibilities of alternate readings of
women writers and point towards new ways of critical history-writing.
It is necessarily partial and indeed, fragmentary, as its aims are
limited to indicating new avenues of inquiry. So that political
understanding of the key issues that may be at stake for the gender
democratization of the literary field, the larger literary field and the
larger political public may be possible.

GETTING PAST HOMOAESTHETIC CIRCLES

The dominant integrative strategy by which women writers in
Malayalam have been disarmed has been that of ‘consecration’. But
what is the woman writer’s ‘consecration’ in the first place? The
metaphor of ‘consecration’—the ritual process by which elemental
forces are supposedly drawn into a stone idol, made immobile,
awakened only through regular, routinized worship by priests with
recognized knowledge and legitimate authority—is certainly useful to
make sense of the ways in which Malayalam women writers who
strove to make independent aesthetic and political choices were
‘tamed’ effectively. That is, the way in which those of them who
raised the sharpest challenge to masculinist literary authorities were
retained as adored and valued figures but drained of political charge,
and routinely invoked through acts of ‘worship’.
Since its earliest days, the field of Malayalam literature has been
characterized by the presence of what may be called the male
‘homoaesthetic circles’: informal but hierarchical intellectual-cultural
networks of literary communication in which (almost exclusively)
male critics, authors, readers, publishers and others participate. To
borrow from Susan Winnett (1990), these involve a certain form of
male bonding linked to a masculinist mode of critical pleasure, one
which is also relentlessly heteronormative. Beginning with the liberal
humanists of the late nineteenth century (who have produced
several homoaesthetic circles across successive generations till the
end of the twentieth century), many different groups have formed
such circles, which were often powerful. For instance, the
progressive realists around Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai, the Stalinists
who declared allegiance to official communist parties, the early
modernists around M. Govindan, the later modernists around figures
like K.P. Appan, the radical left critics and so on. Women writers who
have gained literary recognition in Malayalam have always had a
troubled relationship with these circles. It is no exaggeration to say
that the four major women writers of Malayalam fiction—Lalitambika,
K. Saraswati Amma, Madhavikkutty (Kamala Das to her English
readers) and Sarah Joseph—carved a space for themselves in the
Malayalam literary public not because they were ‘true’ geniuses or
because they conformed to the prescriptions for ‘truly Womanly
literature’ dished out by homoaesthetic circles. Indeed, all four are
marked by their determined rejection of all such prescriptions by the
dominant circles of their times, by their efforts to complicate the
boundaries of the public and the literary public, by their zeal to
represent ‘women’ as a group in both spaces. Indeed what is
probably the most exciting part of the yet-to-be-fully-elaborated
history of this tradition of anti-patriarchal writing is the manner in
which these women fought to sculpt specific resistant aesthetic
strategies. However, it is precisely within these circles that women
writers were ‘consecrated’ as respectable ‘women authors’.
‘Consecration’, nevertheless, should not be taken to involve
deliberate malevolent conspiracy. Rather, it may be understood as
the manifestation in the literary field of reformist patriarchy which set
the terms of ‘women’s liberation’ in the early-twentieth-century
project of Malayalee modernity. The power of the homoaesthetic
circle was certainly rooted in the ‘Schillerian project’ that framed the
formation of the nascent literary public of late-nineteenth-century
Malayalee society. The ideal writer and the ideal critic were to
cooperate in producing literature capable of elevating readers to the
refinement expected of ideal liberal citizens—and both these figures
were unquestionably elite-masculine. The power of the literary critic
over readers, not surprisingly, resembled the power of the Reformer-
Man over the women he was expected to reform in and through
community reform in the early twentieth century. Both were assumed
to possess final and perfect moral-intellectual judgment, which
justified the non-reciprocal relation of power that bound them to
those subjected to reform. The critic was bound in such a relation
(which proved to be a tense one) to the writer as well, though the
non-reciprocality of this power relation is perhaps less visible when
both happen to be elite men. It, however, is writ large when the critic
is male and the writer female. Deliberately or not, the shadow of the
Reformer-Man of early-twentieth-century Malayalee social
reformism, who reserves for himself the power to pronounce and
actualize the ‘truth’ of Woman, loomed over the critic–writer
relationship of the latter kind.
If the history of women’s writing in Malayalam as constructed in
distinct battles against modernized and secularized brahminical
reformist patriarchy has remained hidden from view until very
recently, that is surely because of the fact that the ‘strategies of
consecration’ through which these women writers have been
petrified in their status as authors have remained largely
unchallenged. Specifically, ‘consecration’ happened through two
major ‘rituals’. The first involved the grant of ‘genius status’.5 Within
the terms of Romantic authorship, to appear too autobiographical or
too directly engaged with immediate power structures signifies
reduced creative powers. The woman writer could claim genius,
provided she produced enough evidence that her writing was of
‘universal significance’, that is, sufficiently removed from her
immediate life-world and struggles in it even when she drew upon it.
For instance, the recognition of Lalitambika and Madhavikkutty as
‘geniuses’ by dominant homoaesthetic circles in Malayalam involved
a reading of their work that mostly emptied it of their lives and even
their subjectivity, and saw them as representative of the universal
‘feminine’. This is despite the fact that all four major women authors
in Malayalam who have been frequent candidates for ‘genius status’
wrote intensively, even obsessively, of and around their lives as
women of their times and social positions in Malayalee society, and
openly admitted to doing so.
The second ritual of consecration involved the generation of
dominant interpretations of the work of women writers who raise
challenges which elevate them to the respectable status of authors
within prominent homoaesthetic circles. These then gain circulation
in the literary public and through pedagogy. That is, within such
interpretations, women writers were often understood to exemplify
the central recommendations of particular homoaesthetic circles
from specifically universal gendered (‘Womanly’) perspectives.
These effectively closed off other possibilities of reading. For
example, the liberal humanist circle consecrated Lalitambika
Antarjanam’s writings, reading in them either the voice bewailing the
‘Tragedy of Woman’ in the traditional Malayalee brahmin community,
the voice of the ‘Motherly Muse’, or that of ‘Fundamental Human
Values’. The Stalinist homoaesthetic circle associated with the
mainstream left consecrated her as the ‘female voice of progressive
social reform’. Madhavikkutty’s writing was consecrated in the late
1960s and early 1970s as the voice of the ‘eternal desiring feminine’
by the late modernists; or, by the Stalinist homoaesthetic circle, as
‘the champion of gender equality’. Saraswati Amma, interestingly,
was initially appropriated by the progressive realist avant-garde
homoaesthetic circle of the 1930s. The influential critic Kesari A.
Balakrishna Pillai, the guiding light of this group, had counted her as
one of the avant-garde realists but she was more or less forgotten
later. Later literary history and criticism mention her as an important
writer of the mid twentieth century, but hardly discuss her specific
place in that canon. Perhaps this omission was due to the fact that
her writing was not easily amenable to interpretations of the
dominant homoaesthetic circles of her times: specifically, they stirred
up a certain degree of ‘gender trouble’ by demanding a gender-
neutral public and a female homosocial private for women.
However, much of the recent feminist rediscovery of her writings
does not probe such exclusions. These efforts limit themselves to
securing her ‘genius status’ within Malayalam feminist writing as its
‘founder’ (Chandrika 2000; Geetha 1999). These critics argue that
the focus on the intensely personal should not be a disqualification
for genius and that ‘… for women, this is not a limitation of the work,
but a fruitful possibility’ (Geetha 1999:41). The other trend has been
to think of a feminist canon and styles of writing identifiable as
‘feminine’. The earliest efforts in this direction were made by the
(male) members of the radical left homoaesthetic circle of the 1980s
which was open to European Marxism and anti-humanist thought.
Some of this work highlighted the early history of intense
masculinism of the Malayalee literary field (Ravindran, not dated),
but it also placed considerable weight on unearthing specifically
‘feminine’, resistant modes of writing in the work of women writers
(Satchidanandan 1990). Thus in Satchidanandan’s reading (1990) of
Sarah Joseph, Helene Cixous’s notion of ecriture feminine went
along with admiration for ‘gynocritics’, especially Elaine Showalter
and others, making a simultaneous case for both the ‘woman author’
and ‘feminine language’. Since then, efforts of varying degrees of
rigour to recover and reread women’s writing have been underway
both in the Malayalam literary public and in feminist academics that
straddles the literary public, and in the national academia which
communicates in English here (Ravindran 1992; James 1995;
Chandrika 2000; Geetha 1999, 2002; Pillai 2008; Devika 2003, 2005,
2007a, 2007; Arunima 2005). The publishing industry and male
scholars have also been interested in the recovery project—DC
Books, the leading publisher in Malayalam, made the effort to bring
out K. Saraswati Amma’s collected works in 1999, explicitly stating
that they were prepared to suffer commercial loss in the venture if it
did not sell (Amma 1999, prefatory note). A senior male scholar,
introducing his collection of the earliest short stories with female
signatures, justifies his efforts by pointing out that ‘women’s writing’
is no more looked down upon as an inferior object of inquiry
(Basheer 2004:9).
It is worth noting, however, that this interest need not promote anti-
patriarchal politics. For example, the effort of the noted critic M.
Leelavati to build a canon of women’s writing in Malayalam actually
works to entrench Romantic authorship and the masculinized culture
of the literary public. She employs too broad a notion of ‘feminist’
and thus manages to count as ‘feminist authors’ even the pillars of
reformist patriarchy within the literary public (Leelavati 2000);
elsewhere, she argues for the legitimate space for feminist writing
within the canon but is wary of ‘separatism’ (Leelavati 2002). Or,
consider the manner in which many critics who contributed to the
volume of essays Pennezhuthu (Jayakrishnan 2002) display great
enthusiasm to establish the literary value of ‘feminine writing’ and an
almost Matthew Arnoldian zeal for ‘reconciliation’ of the ‘male’ and
‘female’ within literary writing. Also, the simplistic version of the
feminist retrieval project can actually promote forms of exclusion that
may in fact privilege the present-day feminist and leave her social
position unquestioned. In their introduction to Women Writing in
India, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (1993) remark about Elaine
Showalter’s proposal for ‘gynocriticism’6 that what it ‘actually locates
as it raids the past or picks its way through other cultural wares (and
even the histories of other peoples) are the scattered fragments of its
own dream,’ and therefore, the present-day concerns of Western
feminists ‘are writ large to encompass the world, and the world
collapses into the West’ (pp. 26–27). Such a danger of the elite
feminist critic’s projection of her dreams onto the past is quite
palpable in the present moment in Kerala.
Authorship has been a vexed issue in feminist literary theory since
the early 1980s. Post-structuralist feminists have harboured the
suspicion that the efforts to retrieve the ‘woman writer’ and set up an
alternate canon by feminist critics add up to merely sustaining or at
best extending the normative, male-centred institution of Romantic
authorship (Kamuf 1982; Jacobus 1982). Rejecting the category of
‘women’s experience’ as irretrievably empiricist, they urged feminist
critics to seek not the ‘sexuality of the text, but the textuality of sex’.
In other words, they recommended the move from the empirical
study of, the search for, women authors to the analysis of the
gendered nature of texts. Further, this involved the search for
‘feminine text’ (which was not necessarily produced by a woman
author) that is an ‘elusive, phantasmal inhabitant of phallocentric
discourse’ (Jacobus 1982:138–39). Feminist critics interested in the
retrieval project have responded passionately to such fears,
sometimes even arguing that this is politically dangerous
methodological quibbling: studying ‘women writers’ may be
methodologically wrong, but politically right (Miller 1982). As Carla
Hesse (1989) notes, with hindsight, the debate appears to have
been rather unhelpfully polarized. It was as if all empirical and
historical work on women’s authorship would inevitably be wedded to
setting up a universal, essential and normative ‘woman author’, and
that any questioning of ‘woman author’ as an object of study was
disabling of feminist inquiry. And one had to choose, unequivocally,
between the ‘hermeneutics of trust’ and the ‘hermeneutics of
suspicion’.
Post-structuralist feminist history has resisted this polarized
opposition. On the one hand it insists that such categories as
authorship, aesthetics, identity and so on remain important for critical
analysis because they mediate access to power crucially and are not
equally available to all—it is not yet time to forget the sex of the
author. On the other, it destabilizes the givenness of such categories
as the ‘woman-author’, seeking to historicize them and deprive them
of the aura of transhistorical identity. More importantly, post-
structuralist feminist history helps to take serious cognizance of the
differences among women, to recognize the limits of the anti-
patriarchal resistance offered by elite women authors. It demands
attention to both the discourses and institutions of gendering
operating in the broader political and cultural contexts, as well as the
distinct ways in which women writers engaged with them. They
engaged as intellectuals in the literary public and participants in the
political currents of their times, producing different sorts of alternate
readings of dominant categories and frameworks, and making
political and literary interventions that challenged reigning
patriarchies. Also, the exploration of apparent intertextual references
between women authors need not always be devoted to the creation
of a seamless ‘feminist tradition’; it could well reveal the differences
and shifts.
Indeed, this book aims to get past the effects of the ideology of
Romantic authorship and its inverted version, Modernist ‘impersonal
authorship’. It is not a quest for an alternate feminist canon, a
specifically female style of writing, or a unified tradition useful in itself
—these moves may well serve to erase the specificity of these
authors’ writings and lump them together. Clearly, the effects of the
author have been waning since the 1990s, a phenomenon deeply
mourned by liberal humanist and modernist critics. In his polemic
against writers who sought to be public intellectuals, well-known
Malayalam dramatist and critic Narendra Prasad argued in 1999 that
authors, by very definition, cannot aspire to be public intellectuals
because they are necessarily alienated, voluntarily at the margins of
society. ‘Authors are not people who are models for human beings.
They may often be negative models,’ he claimed. For Prasad, there
is no distinction between (a) ‘being a model’ to be emulated, (b)
throwing the weight of one’s cultural authority as a respected author
behind a cause and (c) trying to harness fiction’s charge of affect to
specific political ends! Indeed, for him, the aspiration to be public
intellectuals on the part of authors can stem only from their desire for
cheap publicity; if their causes were being taken seriously, that was,
perhaps, because ‘this land has a tradition of worshipping poets …’
(Prasad 2000:142).
Such anxieties have been especially evident among modernist
authors. For example, M. Mukundan lamented in a conversation with
the well-known champion of Malayalee modernism, the critic K.P.
Appan, that ‘people’ were pressurizing authors to take positions on
social and political issues, fearing that this may reduce the ‘depth of
their voice’—to which a sympathetic Appan responded in the
affirmative that authors who stood up for public issues ‘all the time’
were unknowingly ‘dissolving their genius-capital in the waters’
(Mukundan 2010:114–15).
Feminist efforts to reinstate genius, I fear, do not constitute a
sufficient critique of this entrenched patriarchal notion. This book
therefore aims at reversing the effects of genius status conferred on
major women authors in Malayalam by dominant patriarchal criticism
while resisting the pull of simplistic tradition-building. It makes a case
for reading their writings as constructed in battles against dominant
local patriarchies, especially the modernized and secularized
brahminical patriarchy centred upon the figure of Reformer-Man,
steadily ascendant in Kerala since the early twentieth century. It
does not seek the upgradation of more women writers to ‘first-class
genius’ status, but to open up the question of their exclusion-in-
inclusion through the strategies of consecration that have frozen the
possibility of alternate readings of their writing. This cannot merely
be feminist restoration work, for that would leave the foundations of
the elite literary canon and public entirely untouched.
In other words, I argue that the renewed feminist critical project
proposed here would view women authors not as ‘geniuses’, feminist
or otherwise, but as historical actors. It also moves decisively away
from gendering aesthetic strategies, glibly attributing to them ‘male’
or ‘female’ natures.7 Instead, the focus would be on the strategies of
women authors as shaped in and against the discourses on modern
gender and the debates on the sources, relevance and standards of
literary and aesthetic creation that raged between different
homoaesthetic circles which constituted the literary public sphere in
twentieth-century Kerala, and the possibilities they offered of
representing ‘women’. This is to start viewing them not as ‘universal’
geniuses but as historical actors located in twentieth-century Kerala.
This book is concerned mainly with four major women writers of the
twentieth century in Malayalam—Lalitambika Antarjanam, K.
Saraswati Amma, Madhavikkutty (Kamala Das in English) and Sarah
Joseph—who have advanced, in distinct ways, the claim to be
representing ‘women’ in their writings. These four have been most
often put up as candidates for ‘genius status’. For this reason, and
also because this book merely points at a larger possibility for
inquiry, it may be useful to keep its focus largely on their writings.
This implies that the proposed critical project would be prepared to
concede that these women authors who sought to represent ‘women’
did so in their distinct ways. That is, ‘women’ or the ‘feminine’ in their
writings does not perhaps have the same point of reference. Indeed,
the brief reflections I offer on their writings later in this book support
such a thesis. However, their differences cannot be exaggerated.
There are, of course, similarities in their biographies. First, all of
them share the common social location of the Malayalee new elite
(i.e. the social groups, largely the caste elite, which benefited from
the modernization of Malayalee economy and society since the mid-
nineteenth century), though this does not automatically allow
lumping their writing together. Second, entry into the literary field was
a hard-won victory for all four—against the nagging opposition, direct
and indirect, of relatives and sometimes even immediate family
members. Third, their confrontations with Reformer-Patriarchs—
male intellectuals and authors prominent in these circles—are part of
the (recorded and unrecorded) folklore of the Malayalee literary field.
However, intertextual references that seem apparent in their writings
may reveal not so much continuity and sharing, as discontinuity and
difference.
The subsequent chapters in the book present fragmentary
reflections that will hopefully trigger new questions for feminist
inquiry about gender, authorship and writing in the Malayalee literary
field. The next chapter takes up the common-sense view on feminist
literature in Malayalam: it is widely believed to have finally arrived in
the 1980s with the publication of Sarah Joseph’s collection of short
stories, Paapathara (1990). Since then, the feasibility of
pennezhuthu (‘Womanwriting’) in Malayalam has been one of the
prominent threads of furious debate in Kerala’s literary public sphere.
The radical left poet and critic K. Satchidanandan, who wrote the
introduction to the collection, argued that Sarah Joseph’s short
stories achieved a subversion of phallocentric language akin to that
idealized by the French feminists as ecriture feminine. He coined the
Malayalam word pennezhuthu for ecriture feminine. Perhaps more
important was the impression he evoked, that pennezhuthu
epitomized the first serious critical reflection on and elaboration of
feminism in Malayalam literature that spoke on behalf of the invoked
collectivity of ‘women’, arguably recognizable as ‘feminist’. I believe
that both these claims, which rendered all the more invisible the
critical work of earlier women authors and actually removed Sarah
Joseph’s writing from its immediate contexts, should be interrogated;
questions about the relevance of feminist psychoanalytic theory to
studying the writings of these authors need to be asked.
The third chapter tries to counter the popular teleological
perception of the ‘development’ of women’s writing in Malayalam
from ‘lower levels of consciousness’ to ‘higher’: from Lalitambika to
Sarah Joseph (Joseph, Jayasri, and Nair 2003), now commonly
reiterated in popular literary histories (Pillai 2009:557). It seeks to re-
view the writings of Lalitambika, K. Saraswati Amma, Madhavikkutty
and Sarah Joseph within their specific intellectual and sociopolitical
contexts and reflects on intertextual elements in their writing. The
chapter offers a preliminary view of what a history of the specific
sorts of challenges they raised to dominant reformist patriarchy
might look like. The last chapter reflects on the limits of these
challenges to reformist patriarchy mounted by relatively privileged
upper-caste women writers, and on alternate models of literary
communication which could arguably be called ‘feminist’. These
chapters do not offer comprehensive analysis or extensive empirical
work; they are only meant to open fresh possibilities in feminist
criticism and to provoke more detailed and rigorous empirical
historical work on gender and writing in Malayalam.
But before that, it may be useful to take a brief look at the
historical shaping of the modern literary public in Kerala as a
gendered and gendering institution from the late nineteenth century
onwards. This may give us a sense of the hurdles that the first
women aspirants like Lalitambika and Saraswati Amma faced when
they tried to establish themselves as authors.

AESTHETIC EDUCATION FOR MALAYALEES

The parallel between the aesthetic and political publics in Kerala was
tellingly revealed by noted literary critic M. Leelavati, who wrote that
dividing the world into male and female—as in and through
pennezhuthu—was like demanding ‘reservation’ (Leelavati
2002:778). She was arguing that demands for ‘reservation’
(obviously referring to affirmative action in favour of marginalized
social groups) were invalid in the literary public, where the sole
criterion for inclusion would be ‘merit’, admitting indirectly that there
were indeed clear standards of ‘merit’ at work in the literary field.
However, this was hardly news: women had received the same
edifying instruction in the 1890s from the most respected literary
critic of the time, C.P. Achyuta Menon. Reviewing a play written by
Tottaikkat Ikkavamma in 1891, he remarked that women and kings
always received exaggerated attention as writers, but in the
emergent modern literary public, this was not to be so. He observed
that women’s gender decreed that they gain fame in specific social
spheres through beauty and good character. But if this left them
dissatisfied and eager for (more) fame in the literary public, they had
to conform to the highest standards of aesthetic merit like anyone
else (Menon 1994). These were of course set by privileged members
of the literary public like him. The shaping of the critic, the author and
the reader in strikingly masculine terms and of the specific power
relations between them is thus a story that we must consider before
we retell that of women’s entry into the literary public.
At the outset, it is worth emphasizing that it was only women of the
high-Hindu upper-caste elite who could even bid for entry into the
Malayalam literary public. It was not as though women of other social
groups had no literary pursuits, but for many other communities,
women’s literary activity was closely entwined with their everyday
social life. They were part of the literary field perhaps, but not of the
modern literary public. For example, among the Mappila Muslims of
Malabar, there were many women songwriters (Hussain 2009:23–
25); women of other Hindu castes often wrote songs for the
kaikottikkali dances which happened within families.8 However, it
was the upper-caste women, especially those belonging to
matrilineal communities, who often had considerable access to
‘higher’ learning and literature. Many did compose extensively in the
traditional high-literary genres (James 1995). Yet the ‘informed
minority’ that was to oversee the modern literary public was
exclusively of men who enjoyed access to modern knowledge and
institutions. The literary achievements of elite women were
traditionally considered embellishments to their femininity. The
approval of the work of such women as Kuttikunhu Tangachi and
others in the late nineteenth century presented a modernized version
of such approval, congratulating them for having achieved so much
without marring the excellence of their domestic lives (James 1995;
Joseph 2000). But to C.P. Achyuta Menon, the literary public was not
a forum for individuals to assert themselves through the display of
traditional literary skills.
 It is important to understand the power of the early critics—the
Patriarchs. The Malayalee literary public expanded parallel to the
modernization of the state in the two Hindu princely states of Kochi
and Travancore, and to the entry of the modern-educated local elite
into the colonial civil service in Malabar, which was under direct
British rule. These states attempted to refurbish their traditional
sources of legitimacy through the expansion of strategies of
government. The state funded a network of modern schools and
hospitals in Travancore; a class of peasant proprietors was created
through tenancy reform; the nascent public sphere was largely
perceived to be fulfilling the pedagogic function of shaping ideal
industrious subjects for the nation (Jeffrey 2003). In this new domain
thus opened up the Hindu state could renew its legitimacy—as the
modern nation assumed to be in the making, promising a unified
community animated by love and care in the future. A new relation
came to be posited between the state and the citizen. Individual
citizens were not to be simply treated as born into modern nations;
they must fashion themselves as industrious subjects and self-
governing agents. In turn, the state ought to bestow benevolent care
on citizens, creating ideal conditions for their functioning as hard-
working and obedient subjects. In Malabar, a growing group of local
elite intellectuals began to deliberate on colonial rule and its political
and cultural consequences for society.
The significance of the modern literary public in twentieth-century
Malayalee society should be understood within this specific context.
It was not merely a realm in which the public could develop a taste
for beauty. Reading the founding Patriarchs of the Malayalee literary
public—Kerala Varma, C.P. Achyuta Menon, A.R. Rajaraja Varma,
and others—it is possible to argue that what may be called a
‘Schillerian project’ was being launched. In broad terms, the
‘Schillerian project’ sought to exploit the possibilities of the aesthetic
to produce a self-governing liberal subject capable of functioning in
the emergent modern political order. It would produce a form of
‘aesthetic culturing’ of the individual mind to bring harmony into an
emergent society of bourgeois individuals. Aesthetic culturing in the
literary public, it was hoped, would enable both the freedom of
individuals and their functioning as a community, the community of
taste. This is similar to the process of building bourgeois hegemony
that David Lloyd (1985–86) and others have described for the West.
Thus, speaking at the Bhashaposhini Sabha in 1891 about the new
literature that Malayalees needed, Kerala Varma remarked that
literary writing would have to move away from its dependence on
Hindu myths and legends. He reminded his audience that only
‘general themes would give pleasure to the people of Kerala who
belong to different religious faiths’ (quoted in Azhikode 1998:58); to
work as a unifying and harmonizing force, literature had to appeal
across religious communities. Commentators have also noticed
Varma’s stress on the importance of consent in successful rule, citing
essays in which he notes that tyrannical rulers who deny their
subjects just rights face the threat of rebellion, and classifies such
countries as ‘lacking in culture’ (Ramakanthan 1995).
The late-nineteenth-century ideal of the ethical nation-state based
on the consent and participation of self-governing subjects was
always imagined to be in the future; so also, aesthetic culturing or
education was imagined within the framework of the modernizing
state. Aesthetic culturing required its ‘informed minority’—those who
would mediate between local culture and that filtering in from the
West through colonial institutions. They were to set up and supervise
a ‘selection process’ which would generate a realm of aesthetic
culture. As David Lloyd points out for Matthew Arnold’s England,
here too, ‘the right to judgment or taste and the realization of
autonomy are displaced onto the aesthetic individual who embodies
the archetype of the species’ (Lloyd 1985–86:167). No wonder, then,
that the late-nineteenth-century Patriarchs who presided over the
Malayalee literary public in its formative years were all located at the
interfaces of the modernizing state, its pedagogic and knowledge-
generating machinery, traditional learning and literature, and
traditional upper-caste masculine authority (Menon 1994;
Sankaranunni 2006; Azhikode 1998).
No wonder, too, that this generation of critics was keenly
committed to reforming traditional literary modes and genres to suit
the purposes of ‘aesthetic culturing’. They were quick to emphasize
the equal importance of the aesthetic pleasure a text was to
generate and the ‘moral uplift’ it was to effect—evident, for example,
in C.P. Achyuta Menon’s much-valued reviews of new writing. By the
late nineteenth century, the popularization of print technology and
the burgeoning of journalism and literary magazines also led to a
huge upswing in the numbers of aspiring authors.9 Writing rhyming
verse was, traditionally, the mark of the poet, and the numbers of
versifiers who aspired to appear in print could also stake claims to
being fully individuated citizens in the literary public. ‘[One can see]
young poets lining up before the post office on the day the
Manorama arrived, who would sleep soundly even if they had to
starve the whole day, as long as they had the good luck to hear
others read their verses printed in the Manorama’s poetry column,’
wrote Koonezhathu Parameswara Menon (quoted, Nair 2003:120–
21). Together, the major critics of this period worked hard to set up
standards such that only those authors who conformed to these
standards would be considered citizens of the literary public. This,
precisely, was the enormous power that they wielded. The work of
the critic, thus, was to set up and apply standards whereby ‘good’
literature could be discerned and separated from the ‘bad’ (and thus
to separate ‘real’ authors from pretenders), and to ensure that they
were evenly applied. Further, the critic was to instruct the ‘general
reader’ on how to exercise discerning judgment in matters of literary
taste (Menon 1994:37–40). These views reverberated through the
twentieth century right up to the present, and in the debates about
the standards and social functions of literature that raged among the
major homoaesthetic circles shaping up in the course of the century.
However, the ideal model of the critic in these times—perhaps
more rightly referred to as the ‘great critic’—was not to merely be a
scholar or a judge. The Romantic critic’s discernment seemed to flow
from an innate ability to appreciate beauty, which did not really arise
only from his training. Celebrated dramatist and critic C.J. Thomas
reiterated the ‘great critic’ when he wrote in 1951 that the ideal critic
was not simply a careful reader or a technical expert. He must
possess wide-ranging knowledge of the literary field, the ability to tell
the good from the bad, and instruct readers about the same. But
above all, he must be able to discern the beautiful beyond formal
concerns and techniques (Thomas 2005:66–67). Kesari A.
Balakrishna Pillai, the critic who revolutionized modern Malayalam
literature by turning it towards European literature and away from
English, seemed to mark a break with the ‘great critic’ in both his
‘anti-aesthetic criticism’ and his effacement of the critic’s presence in
criticism. He argued that the critic’s role was not to voice his
personal opinion but to wear the shoes of the ‘ideal reader’ and offer
‘objective’, ‘neutral’ criticism—the better he evacuated his
subjectivity, the more effective he would be (quoted, Sukumaran
1987:99). This, however, did not get him past the ‘great critic’. And
as has been recently argued, this ‘impersonal author’ of modernism
only revises the Romantic author; the disappearance of the author in
the modernist text only affirms his centrality to the text (Bennett
2006:67–68). This applies, one could argue, to the critic too—he
becomes all-powerful precisely when he seems to disappear. M.N.
Vijayan, widely accepted as continuing Kesari’s critical lineage,
seemed to be moving away from humanism in his (rudimentary) use
of psychoanalysis in literary criticism which provoked much irritation
in the liberal humanist homoaesthetic circles. However, by the end of
the twentieth century, he too seemed to conform largely to the model
of the ‘great critic’. So also, the well-known modernist critic in
Malayalam, K.P. Appan, who claimed that the modernist critic
resembled the alienated modernist hero (Appan 2003:88–91). And of
course, like the Romantic author, the ‘great critic’ is emphatically and
triumphantly male, an understanding latent in the affirmations of this
figure through the twentieth century. There is a story in the literary-
public folklore of the early twentieth century about how in the 1940s
M. Leelavati, who was a new entrant to literary criticism, wrote
against the assessment of G. Sankara Kurup’s poetry by the
influential critic Kuttikrishna Marar. Marar apparently refused to
believe that it was a young woman who had written such a sharp
retort; he decided that either the poet had written it himself under a
pseudonym, or had got some other man to write for him!
(Bhaskaranunny 1987:40).
 The male bonding between Author and Critic is even more firmly
supported by Appan who conceives of their relationship as similar to
that between God the Creator and the ‘specially ordained’ in his
Creation—a Blessed Priestly Class—who interprets His Creation for
the commoner. Therefore, critical work is a form of meditation;
criticism is a kind of theology (Soman 2009). Appan also bluntly
reveals the possibility of violence latent in the figure of the male
critic, declaring in an extraordinary fit of misogynist megalomania:
The critic’s pen is a gun that does not rest. In his writings he appears
as both the attacker and the defending soldier. Endowed with the
strength of glowing faith he reveals the voice of intellectual
domination in his writings. With the help of sturdy observation that
resembles physical strength, he conquers the works of art that stand
provocatively before him … Criticism is fundamentally the art of Male
Nature. It echoes the male character. This literary form which raises
thought and language to the level of physical strength is really the art
of the masculine gender. (Appan 2003:128)10

Interestingly, as women authors in Malayalam from Lalitambika in

the early twentieth century to Gita Hiranyan in the late twentieth
century have complained, women who write are never granted
plurality of self permanently. They are never granted, once and for
all, the critical distance between the woman who lives her life in
other capacities and the woman who writes. Identifying the
characteristics of the ‘author-function’, Foucault in his well-known
essay ‘What is an Author?’ notes that ‘… it would be wrong to equate
the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious
speaker’, and that the author-function ‘operates in the scission itself,
in this division and this distance’ (Foucault 1979:152). This, alas, has
been a privilege of male authors in Malayalam. Women’s writing,
however sophisticated, has often been read as a direct reflection of
the writer’s personal life. This smothering has had distressing
consequences: Rajalakshmy, one of the most promising women
writers of the twentieth century, committed suicide unable to
withstand accusations by acquaintances.
In other words, women writers have always been poised rather
uneasily at the very brink—at the very edges of the literary public
where it abuts the social world—where the risk of being pushed into
the social was enormously high. The raising of women authors to
‘genius status’ involves granting them precisely such distance. But
as is clear from the experience of writers from Lalitambika onwards,
the grant of distance is always precarious, always likely to be
reversed. This also hints at their marginality to homoaesthetic
circles, even to those that consecrated them. Perhaps because of
this, women authors have tended to view criticism rather differently—
it could never be purely text-oriented reading and interpretation but
also had to include the judgments passed on them as individual
persons with private lives. Thus they have been harsh in their
evaluations of dominant literary criticism—Madhavikkutty even went
to the extent of calling this socio-literary evaluation of women’s
writing ‘phallocentric sadism’ (Ravindran 2009:22).
However, we do know now that the ‘great critic’ is a fiction—his
‘discerning intellect’ and ‘standards’ are derived from reigning
ideologies and wedded to dominant institutions or remain in tension
with these. It is quite evident that these relations could vary between
specific critics, but in the late-nineteenth-century literary public in
Kerala there was general approval of well-crafted work (with a
rational, believable plot, well-defined and unique protagonists and
minor characters and so on) that affirmed Victorian morality
effectively in local society. They differed, however, on the specific
weights assigned to each of these elements. For example, though
Achyuta Menon approved of Ikkavamma’s play without granting any
‘concession’ to her sex, another prominent critic, C. Anthappayi
wrote a scathing review in 1902, arguing that she had indeed
received too much attention because of her sex. Anthappayi found
the scenes in which women characters engaged in private talk most
unrealistic because they sounded too ‘public’; ‘[they sound like]
lawyers replying to questions in court or like middlemen in wholesale
markets talking privately to buyers and sellers’ (quoted,
Sankaranunni 2006:95). Further, the female protagonist was too
unfeminine, not at all like a ‘good and modest well-born woman’, but
‘shameless and immodest’ (ibid.:108). Clearly the moral standards
expected of authors were inflected deeply by the new ideals of
femininity and masculinity and the notion of spaces appropriate to
them. This was to be a fairly persistent feature of the Malayalee
literary public—the requirement that authors depict women
‘respectably’—in compliance with a certain prim Victorian modesty.
Thus P.K. Narayana Pillai found fault with Kunjan Nambiar’s
depiction of women (that it lacked the ‘tenderness inherent in
femininity’) (Pillai 1964:13); in the heated debates between the
conservative critics of the liberal humanist homoaesthetic circle, the
members of the Stalinist homoaesthetic circle and the Progressivist
circle associated with Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai since the 1930s
and 1940s, the latter were accused of depicting women immodestly
(for instance Devadas 1991:45–49); the same charge would be
levelled against the modernist writers later (for example, Mundassery
1981; Pavanan 1988c:96–100).
The new Author too, was conceived as male. As early as the
1890s, women writers were aware that they were aspiring to enter a
male domain, as evident in Kuttikunhu Tangachi’s play
Ajnaatavaasam and Ikkavamma’s Subhadrarjunam, both of which
pleaded that women’s work may be no less worthy of public attention
than men’s and hoped that other women may be encouraged to
enter the literary field (Tangachi 1979:240; James 1995:101). As
K.M. Kunhulakshmi Kettilamma pointed out in 1915, there were
sociological reasons as to why more men than women were able to
aspire for authorship in the new dispensation. A Sanskrit scholar
who wrote in the traditional genres, Kettilamma recognized that there
were serious hurdles in the way of women seeking to write in the
modern genres. Indirectly evoking the fact that knowledge of the
Hindu myths and skill in composing traditional forms of verse were
not sufficient to produce modern literature, she remarked:
Literary efforts, especially, are fully dependent on genuine, self-
acquired experience. This sort of experience is not available to all
women today. The freedom enjoyed by men endows all their
endeavours with strength. The restrictions on women’s freedom are
responsible for the infrequency of their efforts. They must possess at
least the social freedom that will permit them to reshape, classify, and
refine experience. (Kettilamma 2005:50)
 That this was a harrowing question to women authors is perhaps
most evocatively revealed in an early short story, ‘Talacchorillaatha
Streekal’ (Brainless Women) (1911) written by M. Saraswati Bhayi
(Basheer 2003:34–47). The story is that of an aspiring author, a
useless wastrel who constantly taunts his intelligent and educated
wife, Kalyani Amma, that women are brainless creatures. She was to
keep the house in such a way that his creative efforts were entirely
secured—and she managed the house despite the fact that he rarely
had any income: ‘If the creditors arrived, she would send them away
with some excuse … the poor thing, she would stay in the kitchen all
day, ensuring that the children didn’t cry. She wasn’t seen outside
the house at all …’ (p. 43). The man works hard to write a novel
hoping to win a prestigious prize, only to see the prize snatched
away by an unknown rival—who in the end turns out to be his wife!
The story thus not only secures authorship for women but also points
to the porousness of the literary public into which women could enter
through pseudonyms, and escape discrimination within this field and
opposition without. This throws considerable light on the fact that for
women, the literary public remained, throughout the twentieth
century, the preferred domain to assert their individuated selves.11
Aspiring women authors frequently tried to pitch their claims within
the terms of the emergent modern discourse of gender, holding up
the promise of ‘Womanly writing’ that would share the purported
qualities of nurture, care and the specific sort of ‘gentle power’, of
shaping subjectivity, attributed to ‘properly gendered women’ (Devika
2007). Ambady Karthyayani Amma and B. Bhageeraty Amma who
spoke at the Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishad’s meetings in 1927
and 1931 raised this possibility. Karthyayani Amma connected the
‘intrinsic capacities’ for gentle persuasion attributed to women to the
power of the aesthetic to shape subjectivities and made a case for
better training in letters which would allow them to realize these
capacities to the fullest. Predictably, women’s writing was expected
to be most numerous in children’s literature and other forms of
morally edifying writing. In this sense, women’s literary activities
could be viewed as an intrinsic part of their domestic responsibilities:
‘Great men opine that just as a home must be kept beautiful,
decorated with pretty things, it is necessary, too, to adorn it with
gentle and noble thoughts’ (Amma 1993:165). However, the use of
these arguments could also be read as strategic when one considers
the fact that she remarked at the beginning of her speech that there
was not a single woman other than her in that august gathering. She
then issued an emphatic warning to the male-dominated literary
world that it would have much to lose if it shut out women: ‘Just as
women have lost the world of literature, the world has lost a different
literature authored by women. Only a few rare works … have
presented instances of women’s unique state of mind and
experiences to the world’ (p. 166). Bhageeraty Amma too argued
that Woman and literature shared certain valuable qualities and
hence the progress of one was bound to the progress of the other
(Amma 2005). But she protested angrily while speaking at the
‘women’s meeting’ organized in connection with the Samastha
Kerala Sahitya Parishad at Ernakulam that this was tantamount to
dividing literature into ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ sections and unfairly
disallowing women from speaking in the men’s meetings (reported in
the Mahila 12 [4 & 5]: 158; 1935).
The interaction between women and men in literary circles was
also difficult. The poet G. Sankara Kurup in his autobiography
remembers how difficult it was to be meeting openly with someone
as well known as B. Bhageeraty Amma in the 1930s (Kurup
1983:180–82). This is despite the fact that she was not by any
chance the only woman who spoke at the Parishad meetings. There
were others like Draupadi Amma and Mrs C. Kuttan Nair, in 1935,
whose views were important enough to be mentioned by the leading
literary critic of the times, Balakrishna Pillai, in his Kesari editorials
(Pillai 1984a, 1984b).
Indeed, the expectation about women writers, very frequently, was
that they would produce ‘moral’ literature, edifying tales. Thus B.
Kalyani Amma’s Vyaazhavattasmaranakal was hailed by Taravathu
Ammalu Amma in her preface to its first edition in 1916 as a great
work expressing the purity of this woman author’s devotion to her
husband (Amma 1958). P.G. Ramaiyyer who wrote the preface to
Taravathu Ammalu Amma saw in her book of edifying tales evidence
of her refined culture, explicitly setting her against the ‘westernized
women who pretend to be scholarly and refined’ (Amma 1913:5). By
the 1930s, even after Lalitambika, Balamani Amma and others had
broken with this insistence on limiting women’s aesthetic production
to directly pedagogical material, such praise continued to be
showered on Kalyani Amma and Ammalu Amma by leading male
authors and critics (Pillai 1958; Sanjayan 1970). And the intense
hostility towards women asserting themselves through writing
continued to elicit immense discomfort especially if their writing
appeared to be affirming the self. Such discomfiture is evident in the
comment made by the literary critic and well-known humour
specialist Sanjayan in the 1930s, on a travelogue by a prominent
first-generation feminist, Kochattil Kalyanikkutty Amma, titled Njaan
Kanda Europe (The Europe I Saw). It is a fine book, he chuckled.
Only, the title ought to be changed—to Europe Kanda Njaan (I Who
Saw Europe).
Not just the critic and the author, but also the reader was imagined
to be male. Nowhere was this more evident than in the evocation of
the shared qualities of literature and women which continued to be
regularly modified through the twentieth century. The text was
imagined as a woman and the reader, by implication, a man, bound
together in a relationship of pleasure in which the text gave and the
reader enjoyed. Modern literary criticism struggled hard to abandon
aspects of Sanskrit poetics. Even as liberal humanists from C.P.
Achyuta Menon to M.P. Paul to Joseph Mundassery sought, in a very
Arnoldian fashion, to create a synthesis of the ‘East and West’, they
did not give up the Sanskritic practice of gendering literature female.
Thus C.P. Achyuta Menon compared ideal literature to the ‘favourite
wife’ (ishtabhaarya) who coaxed her husband towards a life of
discipline and morality through pleasure and gentle persuasion
(science, however, was like the friend—it persuaded through rational
argument) (Menon 1994:38).
Later, the liberal humanist critic M.P. Paul, a major figure in the
Progressive Writers’ Movement of the 1940s, reaffirmed the
comparison remarking that trying to bind literature to fixed norms of
writing and reading was like ‘another person telling a man that he
could only talk with his wife at such-and-such a time, that they could
talk only about such-and-such a thing, and that they could talk only
for so much time’ (quoted, Onakkoor 1994:56). And women
participants in these debates, such as B. Bhageeraty Amma
mentioned earlier, tried to utilize the kavita-vanita comparison to
women’s advantage but without problematizing the reader’s
masculinity. In his well-known work Kaavyapeedhika (1945), Joseph
Mundassery set up Woman, Nature and the literary work as the
quintessential objects of beauty (Mundassery 2004:165). Defending
Jeevalsahityam (Literature that Addresses Life) in the 1930s, a
leading light of those times, P. Sankaran Nambiar, mused:
There was a time in the past when women were regarded as roses,
sweetmeats, or toys. It was not the ability to face reality that was
expected from Woman those days. Rather, she was regarded as a
place of rest and pleasure to which one escaped from the real world.
That is gone now. What is the condition of present-day women? Are
not women ready to fight the war of life standing shoulder to shoulder
with men? The Woman, who is the fount of beauty, comeliness,
loveliness, she does not turn back from the toils of real life, but takes
them on directly, helping to find solutions … the Kavyangana [the
Muse], too, should descend to the world of the helpless [but] without
damaging her tender qualities such as beauty … Literature is a fine
art. Thus it has to be of aesthetically pleasing form, always. In sum,
whichever the field of action Woman happens to be in, she better not
lose her Womanliness. But that does not mean that her growth
should be prevented for the sake of beauty … (Nambiar 1993:28–29,
34)
And the reverse would also apply: in an article attacking the slogan
‘art for art’s sake’ in the 1930s, K.N. Ezhuthacchan, later to be a
noteworthy member of the Stalinist homoaesthetic circle, remarked
that aesthetically pleasing poetry that is not morally edifying can only
be ‘prostitute-like’ (Ezhuthacchan 1990). However, by the 1950s, the
literary text could be portrayed as the subtle seductress who knew
that to reveal all her charms directly to her lover was fatal to love.
The writer K. Surendran depicted the pleasing text as a woman who
revealed herself slowly, coyly, giving her lover the pleasure of the
conquest. Those texts which hurried or clamoured for attention like
‘cheap women’ were bound to be aesthetic failures (1951:23).
The experience of reading was thus analogous to heterosexual
interaction and pleasure-giving. These were times in which the
number of women readers was on the rise due to the increasing
spread of female literacy; the number of journals and magazines for
women was also increasing. However, in the late nineteenth century,
it was specified that the woman reader should focus on reading
edifying materials and desist from paying too much attention to the
‘prurient tales’ that were apparently common in traditional literature.
Equally, they were to desist from reading too much on such topics as
politics and religion, as the first women’s magazine in Malayalam,
Keraleeya Sugunabodhini, indicated back in 1892 (Raghavan
1985:141). It was only at the height of community reformism that
women were urged to keep track of what was happening in the
public by reformers like V.T. Bhattatiripad (Bhattatiripad 1988). Yet
women readers seem to have been considered inferior, too easily
swayed by the ‘lower’ text, like the rural lower classes, as Surendran
would argue later (1951:18). In Rajarajante Maatoli, Mundassery
recounted an anecdote from his childhood about a language teacher
who would discuss only such historical novels as Marthandavarma
or Dharmaraja when they studied the novel. When a student asked
him why he did not discuss O. Chandu Menon’s celebrated novel
Indulekha (which dwelt on immediate social concerns), he apparently
replied that Indulekha and Kundalata are ‘merely novels, for women
to read and enjoy’ (2004:562). In short, the ideal reader is the elite
male who will be seduced only by the most skilful—and morally
superior—text and who will not be swayed by texts that make crude
displays (unlike women and the lower classes).

‘WOMAN’ ENTERS THE NASCENT MALAYALEE PUBLIC

Above, I have roughly sketched the gendered-ness of the Malayalee
literary public into which Lalitambika Antarjanam and, a little later,
Saraswati Amma gained entry and established niches for
themselves. It may also be useful for us to gain a sense of women’s
presence in the public sphere during this time. In these years we find
instances of appeals being made more frequently on behalf of
‘Women’ that invariably drew upon a certain notion of Womanhood
as a distinct collectivity with identifiable interests, problems and
capacities, not reducible to community or class positioning. Despite
references to national or community affiliations, such appeals were
addressed to a general readership in the Malayalee public sphere.
The issue of gendered subjectivities did not burst into modern
discourse for the first time through women commentators. In almost
all the critical alternatives proposed to the older caste-order in late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Malayalee society, gender
difference was taken to be fundamental and stable unlike other
differences, such as those of wealth or blood. It is not surprising,
then, that debates about the nature of ideal gendered subjectivities
came to be consecrated at the heart of almost all projects of social
and community reform. The spread of modern education among
women, markedly among Nair, Ezhava and Syrian Christian women
(Jeffrey 2003), ensured that the discourse on Womanly subjectivity
would have an expanded reach.
The dominant version of gender difference circulating within
different kinds of reformism in early-twentieth-century Malayalee
society attributed to women an inherent capacity to exercise non-
coercive forms of power which was to be developed through a
modern culturing of the mind (Devika 2007). Women aspirants to the
public domain often seized upon the argument that such power was
essential and desirable in modern society, not just within the modern
domestic but outside as well, to justify their endeavours. Legislative
activity facilitating new systems of alliances and redistribution of
property and the active struggles by community movements to
establish new family relations (Namboodiri 1999) were among the
conditions that aided the consolidation of the modern patrilineal
nuclear family. A range of institutions purportedly reliant on non-
coercive forms of control, which included the literary public, was
rapidly spreading—schools, hospitals, reformatories and so on. One
important question that first-generation feminists of these times were
trying to answer was how women could find niches in this
proliferation of disciplinary space, which was beginning to refigure
the domestic–public divide and establish non-coercive power as
suitable for managing human beings everywhere. Indeed, this is
partly what Ambady Karthyayani Amma and B. Bhageeraty Amma
were doing (mentioned in the earlier section) in the literary public.
The writings of three women authors I wish to focus on in this work
—Lalitambika, Saraswati Amma and Madhavikkutty—I believe, may
be read as engagements with the debates around nascent modern
gender mentioned above. For our purposes it is important to note
that most of the literary and non-literary writings produced by women
around the 1920s were questionings, to a greater or lesser extent,
within modernity as it took shape in this region (Ravindran 1992).
This included an intense engagement with the key terms in the
discursive construction of gender in early modern Kerala, including
the new ideas about putative universal gendered ‘essences’ like
‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, modern marriage and domesticity.
Several women, including Lalitambika and Saraswati Amma, were
publicists and intellectuals reflecting on gender and its significance in
emergent modern society (Devika 2007).
The ideas of creativity and aesthetic value that surfaced in the
debates among the homoaesthetic circles were crucial points against
which these authors shaped their own work and resistance. Equally
important is the fact that the broad contours and possibilities of
heterosexual gender difference presented in and through the
discourse of modern gender provided them their broad terms of
reference and set the limits of their imagination. Suffice, then, to say
for now that this was no meek reiteration of modern gender. Rather,
their writings reworked and explored the possibilities of modern
gender, often straining its very seams, and challenging the specific
sorts of masculine power that it authorized.
 2
Womanwriting = Manreading?

‘A GATE BIGGER THAN THE HOUSE’

Women’s writing figured as a central topic of concern in the
Malayalam literary public for the first time in the early 1990s. This
was around the forty-eight-page introduction written by the well-
known radical left critic and poet Satchidanandan for Paapathara
(1990), a slim collection of short stories (it was about one-third of the
whole volume) by Sarah Joseph, who by then was a well-known
feminist activist besides being a writer. The furore was mostly about
his coinage of pennezhuthu which described a subversion of
masculine language that he detected in her writing. This led to an
extraordinary commotion, which continued in fits and starts through
the 1990s, especially from members of liberal homoaesthetic circles.
Critics like M. Krishnan Nair and Guptan Nair, and eminent authors
like T. Padmanabhan, G.N. Panikkar and N.S. Madhavan declared
the votaries of ‘Womanwriting’ to be guilty of conspiring to lower the
aesthetic standards of literary creation of Malayalam literature and
admit into its hallowed portals the cheap and prurient feelings of
‘women of low creativity’ (Chandrika 2008: 15; Shifa 2002:19–20).
And of course, that they were demanding ‘reservation’
(Padmanabhan 2000). Though a few prominent critics like V.
Rajakrishnan welcomed it as a resurrection of women’s writing,
Sarah Joseph, who endorsed Satchidanandan’s reading of her short
stories, was caught in the eye of the storm. This barrage of
accusations against impostors defiling the sacred shrine of literary
creation was matched later by the furore that broke out around
Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things (1997),1 and the
controversy over Nalini Jameela’s autobiography, Njaan,
Laingikattozhilali (I, a Sex Worker).
The subtitle of the introduction described it as ‘a meditation on
feminist aesthetics based on some short stories by Sarah Joseph’ (p.
9). It saw these stories as fulfilling the two vital liberatory tasks of
feminism: ‘one, the deconstruction of the structures of patriarchy that
inhere in thought and discourse; two, the reconstruction of feminine
experience hidden, repressed, or ignored in the past’ (p. 10). The
essay then reflects on the enormous social hurdles that lie in the
path of the woman aspiring to become an author. Becoming an
author, however, does not mean that the woman gains sufficient
distance from the world which, Satchidanandan feels, is necessary
to ‘reveal it to others’ (p. 14). And ‘total revolt’ alone can produce
‘great literary work’ (p. 14). This also leads him to make a distinction
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature in women’s writing in Malayalam.
He admits that many a time literary writing is just another ‘hobby’ and
women’s writings turn out to be ‘popular romances’ (p. 15)—but
conservative criticism condemns both ‘high’ and ‘low’ writing by
women. He finds Sarah Joseph’s stories in Paapathara exciting
because they take such efforts at erasure head-on. So far,
Satchidanandan seems to be making a liberalist case—for full entry
of women as authors in the literary public and their equal potential
for ‘genius’ provided socio-political restrictions that disallow women
the conditions of aesthetic literary production are removed.
In the second section he presents a reading of a short story from
the collection, which traces its subversive use of local motifs of
femininity. He remarks that both the linguistic structure and the
images of the story ‘advance a concept of pennezhuthu’—translating
ecriture feminine thus, citing Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray (p.
21). He then goes on to cite or quote a number of feminist theorists
and literary historians from France, the UK and the US—crucially,
without working out and reflecting on the differences between them
and placing both his reading and Sarah Joseph’s work itself within
those circuits. Here he seems to be calling upon several different
strands of feminist literary criticism, both humanist and anti-
humanist, in the same breath.
Curiously, the third section of the essay leaves behind the feminist
theory invoked earlier to highlight the pervasive presence of the
maternal in many of the stories. Here he slips into the appreciation of
what he perceives to be sacrificial/suffering motherhood in these
stories (pp. 31–38) and of their celebration of what appears to be the
feminine pole of the familiar masculine–feminine binary of
Enlightenment. Conceived in his terms, this move is quite out of step
with all the feminist theorists—who are quite sceptical about the
romanticization of the feminine in literature—summoned up in the
earlier section of the essay! Indeed, one would wonder how, if this is
the case, these stories may be regarded as making a major break in
women authors’ thematization of gender in Malayalam. In the last
section, however, we return to feminist theory, specifically to Elaine
Showalter’s teleological classification of women’s writing into
‘feminine’, ‘feminist’ and ‘female’ and the effort to build a
classificatory scheme for women’s writing in Malayalam. The first
category is of ‘women’s writing that has accepted masculine
ideologies’. Romantic novels that women write in popular magazines
are said to largely fall within this category (p. 44). The second is of
‘writing that responsibly articulates social and community issues’
which includes women’s issues as well. The work of Lalitambika and
P. Valsala belongs here (p. 44). The third is ‘writing that only women
can write and which displays the sense of freedom in various ways’.
Madhavikkutty, Saraswati Amma and Sarah Joseph belong here (p.
45). Of these, Sarah Joseph’s writing is classified as belonging to the
postmodern moment of Malayalam literature (p. 45) and she is
placed as ‘more progressive’ than the other two by her ‘clear
recognition that if Woman must break the silence imposed on her
since centuries, [she must] forge a new language’ (p. 47).
 Despite all its problems (which will be considered below), the
essay, along with other writings from the radical left homoaesthetic
circle (for example, Ravindran, not dated) in the 1980s, marked a
break in the standard manner in which women writers were
assessed—mainly as women primarily situated within the domestic
circle and then as authors—by liberal humanists and even the
Stalinists (for example, Pavanan 1988, 1988a). A good instance is
Vakkom Abdulkhadar’s highly admiring account of Lalitambika’s
creative work, which he immediately qualifies by saying, ‘But still,
Lalitambika believes that a woman’s creative skill lies in her
fashioning of her children’s desires and imagination’ (Abdulkhadar
1946:88–89). Some modernist criticism which scoffed at the
obsession with authorial biography did try to point in another
direction. For example, the modernist poet and critic Ayyappa
Panikkar, writing about the poetry of Balamani Amma who was
consecrated by liberal humanist critics as the ‘paragon of
motherliness’, noted:
Foraging for feminine qualities in the writing of any woman who has
chosen to attempt literary writing has become an incurable evil in
Malayalam criticism. They won’t let the poet go unless [she] has been
decked up as the Beloved, the Bride, the Wife, the Housewife,
Mother, Grandmother and so on. Male authors are granted release
from such biological or physiological considerations. (Panikkar
1969/1985:96)
His reading of her work, however, stripped it of gender concerns
altogether. He noted that she did project herself as the motherly poet
—a fact he did not consider worth lingering on. Rather, he wanted to
stress that she was not just a poet of motherliness but also a poet of
human greatness (p. 100). The consideration of women’s writing by
the radical left critics in the 1980s was critical of both these
tendencies. Even as they failed to question the division of literary
writing into ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, they located women authors as
implicated in patriarchal social relations and insisted that their texts
contained the marks of resistance to patriarchy. Satchidanandan’s
essay went further to draw upon feminist theory as the primary tool
in reading Sarah Joseph’s writing. And for all its limitations, it firmly
established ‘women’s writing’ as a valid object for critical analysis.
Pennezhuthu was a disturbing coinage for almost all the major
homoaesthetic circles other than that of the radical left—they had to
either reject it (the liberal humanists and the modernists) or move
swiftly to discipline and contain it within manageable terms (the ex-
Stalinists of the 1990s). The intense discussion on women’s writing
that happened all over Kerala in the early 1990s around
pennezhuthu permanently altered the place of women’s writing in the
Malayalam literary field, bringing it out from the periphery into the
centre.
Given such lumbering in and out of different strands of feminist
theory in the essay, it is no wonder that pennezhuthu ended up being
the softest of targets for anyone longing to take a potshot at feminist
writing in general. No wonder, too, that it generated discussion of
extraordinary mediocrity in which the concept became an analytically
unhelpful catch-all. In fact, the timing of the essay might also have
been as important as its ambiguous use of feminist theory. The
manner in which pennezhuthu came to be perceived in the 1990s
and after as a feminist version of socialist realism is interesting. This
was contrary to what the evocation of ecriture feminine in
Satchidanandan’s essay had gestured towards—since ecriture
feminine is closer to modernist experiments in writing than to
socialist realism. Nor did Sarah Joseph’s writing deploy such narrow
and exclusive realist aesthetics. Part of this representation was of
course the result of the flagrant misrepresentations perpetrated by
the liberal humanist mainstream critics and authors. However, how
the concept came to be largely of interest to critics and authors
connected directly or indirectly to the now-defunct project of socialist
realism (in the context of the outright failure of really existing
socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s–early 1990s) is a
matter that deserves more rigorous investigation. Many of these
critics did not (or could not) root any more for a strict adherence to
socialist realism but were still unclear about what an alternative
could be. They were, nevertheless, convinced of the need for
socially committed literature. This, I feel, could explain the striking
lack of clarity in the way pennezhuthu came to be projected. It
emerges as socially committed literature centred on women, but also
on oppressed humanity in general. Strikingly, there is very little
reflection available on its aesthetics.2
Thus an amazing variety of interpretations of pennezhuthu has
cropped up in Malayalam literary criticism after it gained a degree of
respectability, especially among the abovementioned set of critics,
and following the commercial success and institutional acceptance of
pennezhuthu. If Vellayani Arjunan, a noted Malayalam scholar,
described it as ‘the honest rendering of women’s struggles from
Woman’s viewpoint … and the solutions [to them]’ (Arjunan 2002:vii),
to a woman critic, K.S. Sushamakumari, it is: ‘… the syntax of
feminine essence. The beauty of the feminine essence is present in
pennezhuthu’ (Sushamakumari 2002:1). Another scholar, S. Shifa
(2002:34), claims that pennezhuthu is a subset of streevadasahityam
(feminist literature) that includes writing by men, which is a subset of
streerachana referring to all writing by women. Yet another observer
calls it ‘[the] writing produced by Woman who stands in the position
of the subject shattering masculine systems and conditions’ (Kurian
2007:128). Geetha, an admirer of pennezhuthu, argues that like
feminism, pennezhuthu too is concerned about women’s identity and
freedom, and the survival of the human race. She stresses that it
contains a political vision that encompasses all of humanity:
‘Pennezhuthu will be the first step towards the complete culturing of
all human progress that has hitherto accumulated’ (Geetha
1999:20).3 Sarah Joseph herself had a more modest and clear
understanding of pennezhuthu as writing that placed women’s
experience at its centre and developed an anti-sexist, pro-women
idiom (quoted, Shifa 2002:17; Hiranyan 2002), but even this
continued to provoke the wrath of the Patriarchs for many years. It is
not surprising, then, that Satchidanandan himself dropped the
concept in his later writing, even as he hailed new women’s writing
as avant-garde in Malayalam (Satchidanandan 2002). Serious
attempts to explore the challenge offered to patriarchy in women
writers’ work began to bypass the concept altogether as early as
1993 (Raveendran 1993/1997a:66–75).
 But this perhaps was the least of the problems of the essay. For
example, the divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ writing by women that it
perpetuated blocked out a huge body of writing by women from
feminist critical scrutiny and replicated the elitism of the Malayalam
literary public. The classificatory scheme deployed in the essay set
up an implicit standard of assessment in which women authors were
placed in specific categories according to the ‘levels of progress’
attained by their ‘consciousness’—popular writings by women (no
progressive consciousness); Lalitambika and Valsala (good
progressive consciousness); Madhavikkutty, Saraswati Amma (better
progressive consciousness) and Sarah Joseph (best progressive
consciousness). Though Satchidanandan did not set up any
universal model for feminist literature explicitly, this classificatory
scheme in which Sarah Joseph’s writing represents the pinnacle of
feminist progressive consciousness lends itself to the interpretation
that it is the model for feminist writing in Malayalam. More
importantly, the subsequent readings of the essay did not treat it as a
tentative, if fruitful, beginning, to be revised and refined, but as the
final word on women’s writing. In that sense, with hindsight, the
pennezhuthu debate did not open up a path for a feminist literary
criticism that was as oppositional as feminist literary writings by
women. As G. Arunima astutely observes about T. Padmanabhan’s
fulminations against pennezhuthu (2000) that subsume it under
‘postmodernism’ and which indirectly target the radical left
homoaesthetic circle: ‘The real adversaries here are the men within
the literary establishment—women’s writing really becomes a site for
contestation—not about feminism or women’s rights, but about what
constitutes masculinity itself’ (2003:119).
Also, even though the essay does not directly assimilate women’s
writing into the political projects of the radical left homoaesthetic
circle, it still consecrated Sarah Joseph as a radical left idol. The
radical left critics were unconcerned with destabilizing the liberal
humanist Malayalam literary canon; they sought to simultaneously
revise the canon radically into one that reflected a truly Malayalee
national-popular, shedding the elitist standards of liberal humanism
and implicating it in the international resistance to capitalism from the
political left (Raveendran 2000:462; Satchidanandan 1989). They
also resisted the Stalinist critics’ insistence on the political
correctness of socialist realist aesthetics and attributed aesthetic
subversion of modernist literary experiments (Satchidanandan
1983:51). The experience of the Naxalite insurgency and its
repression in the 1970s and the experience of the national
Emergency had led many to turn towards politicizing the many
different oppressed groups—women, Dalits, Adivasis—so as to
integrate them into a larger radical left (Kumar 1989). In Kerala, this
turn was taken by the radical left intellectuals (Sreejith 2005)—which
was of course dominated by male intellectuals and activists—and
extended with varying fortunes. Their project was thus ridden with
tensions. It sought to simultaneously create a truly ‘radical-national’
oppositional canon and place it within broader left resistance. Again,
in keeping with its aim of politicizing women as a major oppressed
group, it sought to both release and contain feminist political charge
(so that it would remain within the broad ambit of the radical left,
which was undeniably masculinist). Moreover, striving to forge a non-
Stalinist left aesthetics, it sought to endorse modernist styles and
experimentation while remaining concerned about harnessing it to
progressive political ends.
The reverberations of these tensions are to be found in
Satchidanandan’s essay. They are palpable in the efforts to identify
Sarah Joseph as both Malayalee—as evident in her subversive
deployment of gender motifs from the local culture—and a
representative of international feminism. It also surfaces in the
essay’s simultaneous endorsement of the feminist ‘recovery project’
of women authors ignored by the mainstream canon and of ecriture
feminine which celebrates the ‘feminine text’ that does not
necessarily require a woman author—and its insistence that Sarah
Joseph’s writing is relevant to both of these. Also, her writing is
idealized precisely through representing it as the ideal combination
of radical political goals and experimental styles of writing (ecriture
feminine has been identified as close to precisely modernist
experimentations). In short, Sarah Joseph was consecrated surely if
not conspicuously within the radical left homoaesthetic circle.
 Thus the fears voiced in the debate—that pennezhuthu was yet
another prescription for politically correct aesthetic activity, that
Sarah Joseph’s writing was being assimilated into the radical left—
were not entirely off the mark, though the larger chunk of protests
voiced by liberal humanist critics was elitist, misogynist and anxiety-
ridden. Most important perhaps, were the vehement objections
raised by other women authors whose writing was equally
challenging of patriarchy: notably, Chandramathy and Gracy. Both
these authors categorically rejected pennezhuthu and on a
superficial reading, they seem to be endorsing the fury of the
Patriarchs. Chandramathy was particularly vehement in attacking its
adherents as ‘echo-critics’—critics whose ideas were but empty
echoes of First World literary critical discussions—whose labours
would end up ghettoizing and marginalizing women’s writing,
curtailing aesthetic freedom and encouraging a class of writers who
would mechanically follow the prescriptions of pennezhuthu (quoted,
Shifa 2002:18).
However, Chandramathy’s writing has also been noted for its
strong anti-patriarchal thrust. But there are other reasons why we
may not dismiss her misgivings as a straightforward concession to
the mainstream view despite the fact that she does often rely upon
liberal humanist elitism in voicing her objections to pennezhuthu.
Many years after the debate, she referred to Satchidanandan’s
essay as ‘a gate bigger than a house’—a description that hinted at
not only the size of the essay but also the manner in which the
interpretation was somehow prioritized over the text—and declared
her discomfort with the ‘Man-made word’ and the mechanical
utilization of theory from First World contexts (Sreenath 2002:347).
Her objections to the application of Western theory to writings
produced in Kerala have been read as essentially conservative.
However, one needs to take into account the context which frames
her argument—the Malayalee literary public in which access to
theory and the very status of the literary critic was (and continues to
be) pre-eminently masculine. The non-reciprocality of the power
relation between the critic and the author, less visible when both
happen to be elite men, is writ large when the critic is male and the
author female. Deliberately or not, the shadow of the Reformer-Man
of early-twentieth-century Malayalee social reformism, who reserves
for himself the power to pronounce and actualize the ‘truth’ of
Woman, loomed over the critic–author relationship of the latter kind.
Satchidanandan, perhaps, was being fought off as the new avatar of
Reformer-Man. Chandramathy’s account of her own struggles to
reach authorship indicates she is not unaware that the liberal
humanist critic also bears precisely such power. However, liberal
humanism still beckons with the promise of ‘aesthetic freedom’ with
which one could counter Reformer-Man’s (aesthetic) prescriptions.
No wonder, then, that her unease appears to have been forced into
apparently contradictory assertions—the endorsement of a critical
aesthetic for women’s writing on the one hand, gripping hard the
aesthetic freedom (falsely) promised by the liberal humanist
mainstream on the other.
Her more recent interviews too seem to indicate that the
discomfort, even if it was articulated in mainstream terms, was not so
much about the feminist aesthetic that was being advanced as the
disturbing sense of prescription it carried and the very masculinism
of the homoaesthetic circle itself—of its internal hierarchies, modes
of functioning, obligations. The objection appears to be a
fundamental one: in Chandramathy’s responses, one senses the
deep unease at the very form of the homoaesthetic circle, at the
double-edged consequences of the woman author’s consecration
within any one of these. In a very recent interview she reiterates her
point that the discourse around critical women’s writings ought to
have been inaugurated by women themselves and that her objection
to the whole discourse around pennezhuthu was that it revolved
around Man (Chandrika 2010:46). She claims that the late 1980s
and early 1990s were a time when women were
… [b]reaking the fences and coming out. The times in which [one]
wrote poems on pieces of paper and hid them under the pillow, to be
discovered after [one’s] death and published by heirs, were gone. We
had begun to publish our writings. We would have written on a large
scale even if we didn’t receive enough attention from the critics.
Women readers were beginning to recognize [in the writings of the
 women authors]—‘This is my experience! This is my pain!’ A
consciousness that was more alert was slowly taking shape in those
times. I feel, even if Satchidanandan hadn’t downloaded such a term
and introduced it, women’s collectives would have formed. Maybe
such a term would have been forged by a woman. If so, it would have
been accepted. Welcomed. (Chandrika 2010:48–49)
Chandramathy’s reference to the possibility of a new connection that
could have emerged between women writers and readers is worth
noting. It may be that the spurt in women’s writing that
Chandramathy mentions pertains to the more privileged new elite
women with greater access to modern education. It is also the case
that no alternate model to the masculinist homoaesthetic circle has
emerged as yet, despite women authors’ attainment of considerable
success in recent years. And as Chandramathy points out, ‘… the
name is gone, but the idea has become strong’ (p. 49), indicating
that the critical aesthetics proposed then has grown and does not
function now as a straightjacket. In fact we need to acknowledge the
full political significance of the resistance put up by Chandramathy,
Gita Hiranyan and other women authors to pennezhuthu as the
rejection of consecration/silencing within the radical left
homoaesthetic circle—and to the very form of the homoaesthetic
circle itself. It may also be possible to argue that the remarkable rise
of women’s critical writing since the early 1990s owes much to this
willingness to strike it out alone. However, this alone cannot
dismantle the iniquitous relations that structure the literary public. It
then behooves feminist literary criticism to think of new models for
collective assertion and new modes of communication among
women as authors, critics, readers, editors and publishers in the
literary public, of claiming full citizenship within it, that reject
unequivocally both the masculinist elitist-collective mode of the
homoaesthetic circle and the apolitical individualist mode which is
equally masculinist and elitist. Besides developing more adequate
critical frameworks, the question of forging new relations between
authors, critics, readers, editors and publishers that ward off
Reformer-Man’s remaining powers (that survive through the genius,
the Romantic/Modernist critic and other such figures) is all the more
important in the present time.

‘GALLIC ATTITUDINIZING’?
The question of using First World feminist literary theory, one of the
central issues raised in the debate around pennezhuthu, would also
be of prime importance when we seek to renew the project of
feminist literary criticism in Malayalam. Surely, we cannot uphold a
regressive culturalism that would deny the significance of any form of
First World-produced theory for other societies. This would not only
be homogenizing ‘First World feminist theory’ in an unacceptable
way, but also denying the Third World feminist’s agency in the
process of producing critical feminist knowledge of relevance to her
context, by implying that she cannot ever short-circuit theoretical
imperialism. Freudian theory has historically been used in a
regressive way against women in Malayalam as another radical left
critic, N.K. Ravindran, has reminded us (Ravindran, not dated).
There is nothing that requires us to set up feminist readings and
redeployments of psychoanalysis as our central theoretical resource,
but neither does this mean that it is entirely irrelevant to our efforts to
produce fresh, political, empowering readings from Malayalee
women writers’ texts. After all, psychoanalytic feminism, even
‘French feminism’, is certainly not reducible to the proponents of
ecriture feminine. French psychoanalytic feminism, in a broader
sense, may allow us to pose a number of new questions that may
free women authors both from ossified consecrated status and from
equally petrifying teleological literary history. In other words, all of it
may not lead to the ‘Gallic attitudinizing’ of French feminism that
Gayatri Spivak warned us of (1981:176). However, first, it seems
necessary to take up Satchidanandan’s cue about Sarah Joseph’s
writing and ecriture feminine. I contend that his claim needs to be
examined and qualified.
As indicated in the previous section, Sarah Joseph’s commitment
appears to be towards the creation of a non-sexist language which is
rather different from the subversion of phallocentrism in language
that theorists cited by Satchidanandan—Cixous and Irigaray—
champion.4 Though it is commonly reiterated that the former
conforms to the latter, I am yet to come across a single work that
grounds its claims on a close analysis of both kinds of texts. This is a
task that may be worth undertaking for the new feminist criticism in
Malayalam, worthy not only for the insight it may produce but also as
a gesture of clearing space. From my own preliminary and
admittedly inexpert reading, too much seems to be interpreted from
the superficial similarity between the bodily metaphors of the
Paapathara stories and the fluid linguistic styles of the French
feminists. But there are several interesting halfway meetings and
contrasts. To mention six such points:

Cixous delights in the split writerly subject—there is no more a

coherent ‘I’ who is writing. The characters of ‘feminine writing’,
according to her, are always multiple; the writerly subject oscillates
between different personal pronouns. In her much-debated ‘The Laugh
of the Medusa’ (1975), she begins by addressing the reader as ‘you’,
but soon it shifts fluidly between first, second, and third person
feminine pronouns. Admirers like Leslie Rabine find this destabilizing of
phallocentrism: ‘I, you, she, they, and we merge into each other,
change places, give each other to each other, and generally deny the
stable positionality of the phallic subject’ (1987–88:31). Irigaray, too,
has been credited with a style in which ‘[S]ubjects are frequently
omitted or indicated with pronouns whose gender and antecedents are
ambiguous’ (Irigaray and Speidel 1983:93). But Sarah Joseph’s ‘Oro
Ezhuthukariyude Ullilum’ (Inside Every Woman Writer) (Joseph
1990/forthcoming:51–57), which directly addresses the question of the
subject of writing, seems to be doing exactly the reverse: it seems to
be retrieving ‘Woman’ through freeing up her silenced and subjugated
fragments from the confines of community and domesticity to forge
them into a unified sense of ‘Woman author’. The only split that these
stories allow seems to be that between mundane everyday existence
as women and the writerly autonomy of the woman author—which is
precisely what allows for the consolidation of the writerly subject.
Carolyn Burke remarks of Irigaray’s experiments with ‘feminine
language’: ‘[The] “plural” style that she forges tries to emerge from the
mystifications of writing, to take off its own veils and appear naked on
the stage’ (1980:67). Cixous’s feminine can speak only in the ‘language
of nudity’, stripped of the clothing of phallocentric language—but this
veil, this ‘tissue’, which is language itself, cannot ever be totally
discarded for the reason that the subject, too, would not live if that
happens. Nudity in Cixous also signifies vulnerability, defencelessness,
the possibility of being totally engulfed by the other (Duren 1981:45);
the feminine writer does not totally expose herself but plays with the
veils of language, with the logic of phallocentrism, to expose and
disrupt the illusion of its power. If the body-covering metaphors in the
Paapathara stories are taken to stand for resistance in language as
well, they seem both similar and different to me. The use of long, black,
thick tresses as a metaphor for feminine energy in some of these texts
certainly refers to the body—it springs from the body and forms an
armour against patriarchal gaze. Lalita’s abundant hair that signifies
her feminine power which unsettles masculine power in
‘Muditheyyamurayunnu’ (Joseph 1990/forthcoming:212–17), conceals,
blocks out masculine vision. She arms herself with the opacity of her
long dark mane: such tresses are a local symbol of feminine sexual
energy and in Lalita’s transformation into the goddess, sexual energy
itself turns into political energy. Thereby the symbolic power of the
Hindu goddess, which contrasts with the Indian woman’s lack of
agency (Kishwar 1984), is now harnessed to the latter. But this signifies
a pre-linguistic energy that springs out of the body itself. Her clothes
are borrowed from the Mother Goddess: they are of red silk bordered
with gold, the same as the drapery of the goddess-idol. The body is not
retrieved; it is removed from the real and elevated as the source of the
symbolic power of the Mother Goddess, now draped with the
goddess’s garments. The female body, then, becomes the (un)real
source of the infinite feminine energy attributed to the Mother Goddess.
In ‘Oro Ezhuthukariyude Ullilum’, the female narrator triumphantly
escapes stifling conventional marriage and domesticity, and declares:
‘The winged breeze eased my locks and teased the hem of my dress.
My tresses fell loose; they flew right up to touch the sky. And the
swirling circle of my skirt covered the earth …’ (p. 211). The real body
gives way to a mythical one endowed with layers that may fly up and
also fall back and render the body opaque to prying patriarchal vision.
In ‘Muditheyyam …’ too, Lalita’s dark locks fly up towards the sky and
dance like cobras, threatening the sorcerers—the representatives of
the male order. It is not just the exposure of the body beneath the long
cascade of hair that happens here; the locks themselves are
threatening to the male order. ‘Playing with the veil’ in this text
therefore involves not playful or strategic covering and exposure of the
body but the direct evocation of a certain pre-linguistic feminine energy
at the culmination of combat. In ‘Prakashiniyude Makkal’ (pp. 106–12),
however, the naked female body is part of a pre-patriarchal (but
markedly heterosexual and procreative) state of blissful unity which is
disrupted and destroyed by patriarchy, but it does not itself signify the
resistance to patriarchy.
The space of writing for Cixous is a dark interior realm—‘a black,
interior softness’ from which writing emerges playfully, beyond her
control. She writes of the book emerging from this interior space: ‘[in]
my black interior softness the rapid footsteps of an arriving book print
themselves. Catch me it says. The race begins. In front of me. My book
writes itself. Creates itself. Secret. With jubilation and play. […] It turns
back to see if I am (following) it. It makes a fool of me while creating
itself. This too is its secret: the proof of creation is laughter’ (Cixous
1998:141). A different sense of non-ideal and ideal space of writing,
strikingly non-metaphorical, marks Sarah Joseph’s ‘Oro …’ First, there
is the explicit demarcation of non-ideal and ideal physical spaces of
writing: ‘In the obscurities of the corridor, vague shadows lurk. That
made me uneasy! … The walls shook loose and began to move …
Before I could be afraid, they hauled themselves close, stifling me! Air
and light were cut off …’ (p. 205). The ideal space of writing is not the
dark interior but ‘a room with three windows through which the horizons
for reading and writing are visible’ (p. 206). The ‘dark interior’, however,
is evoked—as the only space where the woman writer may deliver her
words under patriarchy—in deep secrecy, in a room that has no
connection to anything outside (p. 206). And writing does not flow from
the sensuous ‘soft’, dark, inner space but from the woman writer’s
‘simmering brain’.
For Cixous and Irigaray, words are beings in their own right, and their
writing is poetic. Their writing aspires to overcome language in which
words merely designate things mechanically, simply name objects;
instead, they stress on the play of multiple meanings. Rabine claims
that Cixous’s writing is replete with the ‘maternal metaphor’ as against
the ‘paternal metaphor’ which merely involves mechanical substitution,
reducing signifiers to interchangeable identities. The ‘maternal
metaphor’, in contrast, condenses several meanings, invokes several
chains of substitution, thus confounding unity of meaning (1987–
88:35). Irigaray too revels in the play of metaphors and puns. Maggie
Berg observes that her title ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ is
deliberately chosen for its ambiguity, referring to both the production of
textuality (the lips that speak) and sexuality (the genital labia). ‘[T]he
point is that the two should not be separated because one implies the
other’ (Berg 1991:56). These strategies which supposedly promote
anti-humanist resistance to patriarchy are not to be seen in the
Paapathara stories. The ‘paternal metaphor’ is abundantly in evidence
too. There is an effort to invert or revise their meanings, for example, to
refuse the interpretation of the woman’s long dark mane as the signifier
of the beauty of the passive, elite feminine and to reinvoke in its place
the subversive opacity of long, lush, black tresses celebrated in
Malayalam folklore—specifically the sexual power of the warrior
woman Unniaarcha who hid her lover under her tresses. This chain,
however, constitutes only a string of meanings that adds up to what
Rabine has called the ‘paternal metaphor’. The concern about
language itself seems to be different in Sarah Joseph’s writings. In
‘Kanyakayude Pullingam’ in which the question is advanced with
particular poignancy (in another collection Nilavu Ariyunnu, Joseph
1994/2012:351–58), it is about a strategy of power in language that
operates by refusing to name: ‘virgin’, thus, has no masculine form in
Malayalam. Woman has been named, pinned down by words; male
power however, remains untouched, unnamed and unfixed.
Cixous conceives of the relationship between the reader and the writer
as an erotic one, an erotic dialogue involving the body. ‘Poetic writing’
does not issue instructions to the reader but must go deeper,
‘intoxicating’, ‘astonishing’ the reader. ‘I too believe we should only
read those books that “wound” us and “stab” us, “wake us up with a
blow on the head” or strike us like terrible events …’ (Cixous 1993:17).
Reading must invoke the body. At the same time it demands closeness
between reader and writer, for the text is also like a labyrinth, and the
reader reading, like the writer writing, according to Cixous, must be
willing to suspend agency (Cixous 1998:105) and expose their
vulnerability to each other. This, for her, is the only way to experience
the pleasure of reading. Now, in ‘Kanyakayude Pullingam’, this
relationship is presented very differently: ‘Readers may not like a
subplot of this sort taking shape within the main plot of this story. Nor is
this development an ornament to a well-formed short story. The critics
are not going to be quiet if they get to know that close narration and
suspense have been sacrificed. But the readers must know … I have
nothing to hide. It is best that we throw out pretensions in our story-
telling. We must begin to tell our tales with warmed tongues, sitting
face-to-face around a fire, warming our frozen bones’ (p. 334). Here a
new closeness of reader and writer is being called for in which each
must give up their usual demands and positions; yet far from giving up
 each other’s agency, each must first ‘warm up’ frozen bones, numb and
immobile, around a common fire so that communication becomes
possible in the first place.
Irigaray (1985) celebrates feminine language as analogical to feminine
pleasure: it is not linear or singular. Spivak has called this position
‘clitorally ex-centric from the reproductive orbit’ (1981:181).
Commentators like Jane Gallop (1983) have elaborated extensively on
this dimension of their writing. Susan Suleiman traces Cixous’s journey
from seeing allies in male writers like Kleist and Joyce to the
celebration of ‘feminine language’ modelled on the female body and
eroticism, understood as pivoted on pleasure and away from the
patriarchal economies of procreation (1985:54). The celebration of
such non-procreative female eroticism is conspicuously absent in the
Paapathara stories—in ‘Prakashiniyude Makkal’, the clitoral is present
but clearly subordinate to the uterine, procreation—and even in Sarah
Joseph’s later writing.

The above exercise is meant to reveal the differences between the

two projects compared. Nevertheless, I do think that we need to be
careful about comparison since texts from far-flung places or times
cannot be brought into dialogue easily. One of the pitfalls of
Satchidanandan’s essay is that it assumes such a comparison is
easily possible (as Arunima [2003] points out in her critique of his
essay). Such comparisons, when attempted, must reveal
connections and disconnections and not merely assimilate the less
powerful text into the more powerful one. And ecriture feminine is far
from being the only or best tool with which we may produce fresh
and more political readings. Spivak’s warning is worth heeding: ‘… a
deliberate application of the doctrines of French High “Feminism” to
a different situation of political specificity might misfire’ (1981:164).
The double quote marks around feminism are especially worth
heeding for French feminism’s anti-humanism did sometimes lead on
to anti-feminism itself (Cavallaro 2003:17). The neo-Orientalism of
Cixous and Julia Kristeva has been heavily criticized; and (Spivak
1980; Bharucha 1997) Spivak deflates the claims of their admirers
when she unflatteringly characterizes the writing of Cixous and
Monique Wittig as ‘feminist fiction’ or the ‘familiar essay-cum-prose-
poem’, which represents a ‘coalition with the continuing tradition of
the French avant-garde’ and is more politically significant for the
producer than for the consumer (1981:166–67).
This is not to say that local feminist experimentation with language
is impossible.5 It may be true, as Susan Suleiman argues, that ‘[I]n a
system in which the marginal, the avant-garde, the subversive, all
that disturbs and “undoes the whole” is endowed with positive value,
a woman artist who can identify those concepts with her own
practice and metaphorically with her own family can find in them a
source of strength and self-legitimation’ (1988:154). She thus argues
that Cixous’s avant-garde may be empowering for women—but
surely, of Europe, as Spivak astutely reminds. While it still may be
called the avant-garde in Malayalam, Sarah Joseph’s challenge is
quite different from the ecriture feminine project; while all French
feminist writing tends to flaunt the prose-poetic form, Sarah Joseph’s
non-fictional writings have been very much the discourse of the
radical public intellectual and use standard public language of
debate and polemics. Whatever (localized) ecriture feminine is
espied in her writing may be a purely literary strategy, not a means to
undo the literary–non-literary distinction, which also speaks of the
difference of her project from that of French feminism.
Nevertheless, retaining my scepticism, I would still not entirely
reject the possibility of utilizing the French feminists’ subversive
reading of Freudian psychoanalysis which uncovers the cracks and
fissures in its edifice and releases female figures resistant to
patriarchy. Certainly, there can be no readymade recipes—
theoretical or disciplinary mixes—for any sort of literary criticism,
including the feminist. Psychoanalytic criticism is not a novel
enterprise in Malayalam; it has been used by male critics. The
question is whether and how we may utilize it to produce feminist
readings that are not reductive. Certainly, it is a general tool whose
effectiveness is not solely or even mainly limited to women’s writing,
though here I would limit myself to considering its effectiveness in
studying the four major women writers of interest for the specific
purposes of this book. I believe that psychoanalytic feminist literary
criticism may encourage us to abandon the unhelpful teleological
classification of women authors into those with ‘worse-developed
consciousness’, and others with ‘better-developed consciousness’; it
may also help to undermine the elitist division of women’s writing into
‘low’ and ‘high’ types. Also, it may help us to come to terms with the
complexities of women’s writing. Much criticism in Malayalam at
present, which calls itself ‘feminist’, offers flat, bland, simplistic
analysis that separates ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ elements in
writing, where the ground rules continue to be set by realism
(strongly reminiscent of the practices of the Stalinist homoaesthetic
circle that was powerful in Kerala till the 1970s). Below I want to
think aloud on how feminist psychoanalytic theory (which is more
than ecriture feminine) may be of help through some possible
questions we could investigate. Again, no promises are being made
about the random and fragmentary thoughts offered; the hope is that
we will be provoked into a more rigorous formulation of questions
and choice of tools.
For example, how may we understand the writings of, say,
Madhavikkutty, whose positions on gender and women’s
emancipation have been fluctuating notoriously? Or the writings of
Saraswati Amma which appear strangely masculinist at times, but
not always? Maybe an interesting beginning could be made by
asking whether it is possible to utilize the figure of the resistant
woman, the ‘female fetishist’ who refuses castration, released by
Sarah Kofman in her The Enigma of Woman (1985) from Freudian
analysis—through her ‘symptomatic’ reading of Freud’s writing on
narcissism—to take a fresh look at these writings which in their
distinct ways have remained eminently ‘undecidable’, apparently
both ‘for’ and ‘against’ Man? Kofman argues that female fetishism is
not an obsessional neurosis like male fetishism—rather the female
fetishist gets beyond both the logic of identity and the logic of
contradiction and plays on all registers; she oscillates undecidably
among all of these. It may also be interesting to see whether these
authors go beyond the heterosexual matrix and if they do, what that
would imply for theory.
It may also be that the differing readings of the same figure by
different practitioners of psychoanalytic criticism may bring to light
deeper complexities in the texts of interest to us. For example, would
it be profitable to read Madhavikkutty’s texts, especially her short
stories that thematize transgressive and intensely painful love
relationships, in the light of feminist psychoanalytic theorizing around
the figure of Echo in the myth of Narcissus, who has suffered
singular neglect by psychoanalysis? Different practitioners have
indeed interpreted Echo differently. Susan C. Fischman, for instance
argues that the ‘Echoic Woman’ internalizes the image imposed on
her—her obsession is actually an echo of the obsession of the Man
who, Narcissus-like, seeks out his own lost self ‘while her despair at
the limitations on her life, at the lost parts of herself, go unheeded,
unless one shifts one’s listening expectations’ (Fischman 1992:98).
Polona Petek, however, sees other possibilities:
… Echo’s doubling offers itself as a possible means for
conceptualizing representation which neither fixes the self nor tricks it
into misrecognizing itself in an external image … Echo establishes
and recognizes herself in ‘echoes’, in fluid, shifting, always
negotiating discursive replications, indeed replicating her interlocutors
but also replying, responding, to them. These replications offer a
‘discursive mirror’; however, while offering a temporary confirmation
or anchorage of one’s identity, this mirror does not facilitate
misrecognition but rather foregrounds the fact that one’s identity is
never innate, fixed, or unstable. (2003)
Similarly, is it possible that the subversive psychoanalytic feminist
readings of Freud’s female hysteric will be of help in probing the
complexities of the hysterical figures which appear so frequently in
Sarah Joseph’s early short stories and who disappear completely
after her explicit turn towards feminism in the 1980s? Maria Ramas,
for instance, remarks that the hysteria of Ida Bauer, who was treated
by Freud and referred to by him as ‘Dora’, ‘sought to preserve pre-
oedipal love for the mother/woman, and retain access to the
maternal/female body … [it was] a protest against the post-oedipal
femininity’ (Ramas 1980:476). And maybe use Kristeva’s claim—that
motherhood is a model for discourse which challenges identity—to
analyse the writings of Lalitambika and Sarah Joseph’s Mother-
centric stories? Perhaps Judith Butler’s criticism of Kristeva’s
celebration of the maternal, which points out that poetic-maternal
practice cannot entirely displace paternal law and that it must always
remain tenuously tethered to that law, can be the opening gambit in
a discussion on the political limits of their Mother-centric writings?
And maybe we could even examine the strategies of consecration
perpetrated by the powerful homoaesthetic circles in the Malayalee
literary public, for example, through Kofman’s interrogation of the
Kantian notion of ‘respect’ for women? (Kofman 1982).
Surely such deployment will produce more than the simple
valorization of these authors as figures of anti-patriarchal resistance.
However, there is no reason why we need to necessarily work within
a heterosexual framework that French psychoanalytic theory often
relies upon. Indeed, the autoeroticism and lesbian tendencies that do
appear in Madhavikkutty’s and Saraswati Amma’s writings make
them open to a queer reading—a question already explored for
Madhavikkutty by Rosemary George (2000). The queer critiques of
the French psychoanalytic feminists will certainly be of relevance in
our own critical explorations of heterosexism in Malayalee women
authors. For instance, Judith Butler’s very convincing critique of
Kristeva’s celebration of poetic-maternal linguistic practice (Butler
1989) would considerably undermine the resistance that may be
read in their work, which may not entirely be a bad thing, since it
would remind us of the limits of maternalist politics.
However, here too, in order to avoid being unfairly reductive, there
is the need to re-view such maternalisms in the specific contexts and
patriarchies within which they took shape, rather than judge outright.
In other words, attentiveness to history is a necessary corrective to
the fairly compulsive habit of viewing criticism as a sort of measuring
of the text with certain standards we hold to be desirable. It is thus
not simply a matter of applying Kristeva’s or Butler’s standards non-
mechanically, but also of exploring all writing as taking shape within
very specific historical, social and political contexts of hegemony,
against specific sorts of challenges from specific configurations of
patriarchy.
Thus it is necessary that these readings should be complementary
to anti-teleological feminist literary history. Surely, psychoanalytic
feminist ‘symptomatic reading’ may itself lead to significant changes
in what is currently accepted as a tentative feminist literary canon.
However, historical investigation in its own right is essential if the
differences between authors are not to be ignored. For instance, it
may be possible to read specific Matro-centric orders in the writings
of two women authors separated in time, Lalitambika and Sarah
Joseph. Perhaps Kristeva’s re-vision of the maternal body as
embodying the subject-in-process, alterity within, a model for a
subversive ethics—‘herethics’—(p. 263) in Tales of Love (1987),
which binds the subject to the other through love, and not through
law is of use here. Indeed, it does seem to resonate with the intense
desire in both Lalitambika and Sarah Joseph to build a new ethics
around maternality. This would of course do away with the
teleological literary history that classifies Lalitambika as an earlier,
less-developed feminist consciousness, and Sarah Joseph as a
later, more-developed feminist consciousness. Nevertheless, this
exercise would conceal the important differences between
Lalitambika and Sarah Joseph as authors writing in very different
historical contexts. While the former wrote in the earlier part of the
twentieth century when the significance of gender difference was
being debated seriously in the Malayalee public sphere and hopes
for the creation of a new society were fresh, the latter began to write
when such debate had either died down or turned ritualistic and such
hopes were definitely dead. While Lalitambika’s Matro-centric order
is nothing short of an alternate hegemonic order to the new
patriarchy, Sarah Joseph’s maternalism seems to be a non-
hegemonic strategy, a ‘permanent opposition’. Similarly, while both
Saraswati Amma’s and Madhavikkutty’s ‘undecidability’ (if it may be
so demonstrated) will undermine teleological literary history, simply
highlighting it will not bring to our attention the difference in the
socio-political environments within which they wrote. Saraswati
Amma was a contemporary of Lalitambika and the vision of an
alternate social world nascent in her work, comprising a gender-
neutral public and a female homosocial private, was imagined as a
full-fledged alternative to the prevailing order. This is in contrast to
Madhavikkutty’s writing which is non-hegemonic and in permanent
opposition to the patriarchal order. These differences are vital and
cannot be ignored.
In conclusion, what I’m suggesting is that we take a more
pragmatic stance when it comes to theoretical choices, given that we
live in what Susan S. Friedman (1991) has called the times of
‘post/poststructuralist feminist criticism’. Such criticism, she argues,
is remarkably free from being bound to the ‘truth’ of any single
theoretical paradigm. It also remains self-reflexive in its construction
of a literary historical narrative and allows for a plurality of such
narratives. In other words, it historicizes theory and theorizes history.
Thus historicized, theory becomes a generalization with explanatory
power subject to the test of usefulness, and ‘Instead of being
mastered by the hegemonic power of master discourses, the critic
exercises agency—her or his own subjectivity, expressive of a
specific positionality within a culture—in relation to “theory”’ (p. 486).
This also means that the transdisciplinary nature of women’s
literary criticism as an emergent field is worth defending (Pryse
2000). Given that women’s writing is a complex, not simply
complicated, object which no single discipline can completely
encompass, the work of feminist literary criticism calls for a fresh set
of interdisciplinary tools for every instance of criticism and
encourages productive methodological instability. Thus it is not a
matter of finding some appropriate combinatory formula that would
acknowledge women authors as both desiring subjects and historical
actors, but of risking it, each time.
 3
Swimming against Many Tides

‘WOMANLY’ NORMS IN WRITING

Here, I explore the possibility of reading the four women authors
mentioned in the first chapter using a historical lens to offer a sense
of what may be gained through viewing them as historical actors. It
takes forward the thread of narrative paused there. It will, hopefully,
produce a non-teleological historical understanding of the specific
challenges faced by these writers who put themselves forth into the
public as women, speaking and acting for ‘Women’ as a group. This
may help us to avoid a simplistic celebration or rejection of their
writings as either confirming or refuting/bypassing our own particular
views on the question of gender, but without ignoring the limits of
their proposals or critiques. Again, this is a very preliminary exercise.
I do not cover their writings or the debates and the contexts
exhaustively. This exploration, however, will throw up certain
questions that may renew feminist literary criticism focused on
Malayalam literature.
To quickly recall some of the earlier discussions: if the study and
appreciation of literature was promoted in late-nineteenth-century
Malayalee society as an instrument of modern self-building, writing
modern literature, as elsewhere, was often a ‘practice of the self’, of
shaping the modern self. As mentioned in the first chapter, the early
critics interested in the ‘Schillerian project’ (who formed the earliest
homoaesthetic circles in Malayalam) generally agreed that the same
criteria should be applied to the work of women and men to assess
whether their work reflected the presence of a mature self or not.
Nevertheless, it appeared that the gender endowments of women
and men, understood as essential and fixed by Nature, did matter.
Thus the idea that women were ‘naturally’ disposed towards both
beauty and order, which was a given in the modern gendered ideals
that were now circulating among the modern-educated in Malayalee
society, did not really give them a superior claim to the literary
enterprise. Rather it was interpreted as implying a neat bifurcation of
literary merit: while all good literature was to combine aesthetic
merit, high ideals and pedagogic value, women were to ideally
elaborate on the modern domestic and later, the ‘social’ (as distinct
from the public and politics), aiming their writing at other women and
children framed within the ‘social’.1 And this latter branch of ‘good
literature’ was hardly of any interest to the various homoaesthetic
circles that took shape in early-twentieth-century Malayalee society.
In these decades, there were many women who were known and
feted for having discharged their literary obligations in ways that
befitted their putative Womanly natures. However, most of them are
either forgotten or only vaguely remembered. This is true of even the
more well-known figures like B. Kalyani Amma whose ‘memoir of
marriage’ (Arunima 2005) is better known and read than her writings
(Amma 1958). This chapter tries to examine the specific contexts of
debates against which Lalitambika, Saraswati Amma, Madhavikkutty
and Sarah Joseph, women authors all, and interested in
representing ‘Women’ in the public, wrote. Crucially, they ignored
‘Womanly’ norms in writing, crafting their specific aesthetic strategies
so as to both challenge the prescriptions of homoaesthetic circles
and subvert and reinterpret the ‘social’ against its elaboration within
the dominant strains of social reformism. The following section briefly
sketches the dominant homoaesthetic circles in the early-twentieth-
century Malayalee literary public when the first women authors
achieved recognition there. The subsequent sections examine the
work of the aforementioned authors within the histories of reformism
and of the literary public. Hopefully, this too may provoke us to more
detailed and rigorous historical investigation.

HOMOAESTHETIC CIRCLES IN THE EARLY MALAYALAM LITERARY

PUBLIC
By the 1920s, liberal humanism was a powerful presence in the
Malayalam literary public and, Romantic poetry, which it favoured,
was maturing. The battle against classicism was still on, but there
was growing assent for the liberal humanists’ demand for the
achievement of aesthetic and social harmony through literature
which was both aesthetically pleasing and morally elevating. This is
evident, for example, in the speeches made by leading and rising
critics at forums like the Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishad, which
inevitably reiterated such a notion of literature and argued that this
ideal was indeed truly universal, informing ‘Indian’ and Western
poetics alike (Report of the Sahitya Parishad, Edappally 1927).
Liberal humanists insisted on strict harmony between content and
form in art and were against ‘excessive embellishment’. C.P. Achyuta
Menon wrote in 1890 that similes and metaphors in poetry are ‘…
like ornaments for women’. Ornaments may highlight the good looks
of beautiful women; in the same way, similes and metaphors may
accentuate beautiful poetry. And just as ornaments on a woman
devoid of beauty look awkward, so do similes and metaphors on
mediocre poetry (Menon 1994:42). Heated and prolonged debates
between the classicists who insisted on traditional poetic forms and
the liberal humanists punctuated the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century decades, which the latter won decisively (Pillai
2009:236–39). The other insistence was on the achievement of
harmony between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ poetics by blending them
seamlessly. The liberal humanist critic Sukumar Azhikode claims that
this was a task that literary critics have undertaken since A.R.
Rajaraja Varma in the early twentieth century. He goes to the extent
of saying that it is those critics who achieved that harmony effectively
who have been recognized as great literary critics in Malayalam
(Azhikode 1998:263). These ideas were elaborated and propagated
extensively by many leading lights who became centres of powerful
homoaesthetic circles like M.P. Paul and Joseph Mundassery in the
middle decades of the twentieth century—for instance, in
Mundassery’s Kaavyapeedhika (1945) (Mundassery 2004:151–230;
Azhikode 1998:194–95; Raveendran 2009) and in a more qualified
manner by others like Kuttikrishna Marar.
The concern with bourgeois morality was central to these aesthetic
reflections echoed across generations of liberal humanist critics.
Thus, reviewing the play Kalyaninatakam, Achyuta Menon found it
aesthetically pleasing but abhorrent to morality because it seemed to
justify adultery. ‘Since this evil practice is common as it is among
Malayalees, [the author] should have been especially vigilant …
some verses and sentences have been too explicit. We do not feel
that it is useful to be so explicit about some matters in books that
may be read by many people,’ he admonished (Menon 1994:89). At
the same time, Kundalatha was recommended as ideal reading for
‘women and young men’ because it contained no uncouth characters
or words (p. 129).2 The concern with ‘harmony’ thus worked to
integrate elements of high Hindu poetics and morality with liberal
humanist aesthetics in Malayalam; for this reason the boundaries
between the ‘classicists’ and the liberal humanists were quite fuzzy.3
However, even as these critics were setting standards to ensure
the balance between aesthetic value and moral content in the late
nineteenth century, literature was being put to use by forces other
than the state—by missionaries, anti-caste intellectuals like Pandit
Karuppan and Sahodaran K. Ayappan and emergent community
reformists (Rajeevan 1983). These instrumentalized literature for a
variety of causes—the propagation of the Christian faith, the fight
against caste oppression, against the power of the traditional elite
within specific communities and even against the abuse of power by
the state bureaucracy (Udayakumar 2007). While they were loosely
committed to liberal humanist views on literature, they were quite
willing to tilt the balance between aesthetic merit and pedagogic
usefulness in favour of the latter. Indeed, the radical male reformers
of the Malayalee brahmin community reformist movement with which
Lalitambika came to be closely associated in the 1930s—V.T.
Bhattatiripad, M.R. Bhattatiripad and others—formed a
homoaesthetic circle that was writing short stories, plays, novels and
poems sharply critical of the Malayalee brahmin orthodoxy and
pointing the way to what they construed as the civilized, modern
existence (Babu 2003). Often, these authors were clearly apologetic
about the lack of aesthetic merit they perceived in their writings and
declared that these were mere instruments of social change
(Bhattatiripad 1990). By the 1940s, the communist authors began to
move beyond such apologies, entering into direct confrontation with
the liberal humanists despite the mediatory efforts of Joseph
Mundassery (which proved to be short-lived, ending acrimoniously)
and advancing Stalinist aesthetics that upheld socialist realism as
supreme (Chandrasekharan 1999). This homoaesthetic circle to
which powerful political leaders like E.M.S. Nambutiripad and C.
Unny Raja belonged was to engage in long debates with all others
from the mid-twentieth century onwards.
The other powerful homoaesthetic circle emergent in the 1930s
and 1940s was that of the progressive realists, around the critic
Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai. Pillai differed significantly from the
liberal humanists in his understanding of literature and its functions.
Dilip Menon has described him as a ‘local cosmopolitan’ whose
prescription for the revival of art and culture in India required the
jettisoning of India’s ‘obsession with spirituality’ and dependence on
Britain for inspiration of modernity (Menon 2007). Pillai believed that
a turn towards science, materialism and European modernity was
necessary to end the servitude of Malayalam to Sanskrit and English
sources. Romantic poetry in Malayalam had come of age in the
1920s but Pillai strongly felt that it was inadequate for the purposes
of reviving cultural life. Instead he proposed a version of ‘futurism’—
only, unlike in Europe, where it was anti-realist, here it was to take
the shape of anti-Romantic realist avant-garde (Pillai 1984:37–45).
Finding the modernism of T.S. Eliot quite inadequate for local
purposes, he strongly advocated social commitment among authors
(p. 330), urging them to be vishamteenikal (poison-eaters) who
would put themselves at risk so that society would be renewed (pp.
230–31). The Stalinists shared many of the fundamental propositions
of the liberal humanists but were bound to the Communist Party and
Stalinist socialist realist aesthetic prescriptions. Importantly, they
sought to bind literary production exclusively not just to the long-term
interests, but also the short-term interests of the Communist Party.
The Malayalam literary public of the mid-twentieth century
resounded with intense, heated debates between all these different
groups. Balakrishna Pillai was widely criticized by the liberal
humanists on a number of counts: he imported ‘foreign ideas’ and
rejected the need for harmony between ‘East’ and ‘West’; his
criticism was anti-aesthetic, too attentive to the larger stream of
ideas within which a work of art could be situated and too negligent
of its ‘soul’ or ‘essential message’; he legitimized ‘moral depravity’
and ‘sexual excess’. The Stalinist homoaesthetic circle also
launched heavy attacks on Pillai, deploring his alleged propensity
towards ‘anarchy’, promotion of ‘sexual profligacy’ and disregard of
romantic love. While Pillai was critical of liberal humanism he did
agree with their criticism of the Stalinists’ negation of the
autonomous pole of artistic creation; at the same time he disagreed
with those liberal humanists who were opposed to writers’
commitment to social and political progressiveness. Among the
many liberal humanist homoaesthetic circles themselves, there were
huge differences. Kuttikrishna Marar, who located himself within
Sanskrit poetics, was, however, quite close to the liberal humanists.
He differed vociferously with the progressive writers’ project of
exposing the sexual hypocrisy of bourgeois society and with many
liberal humanists’ support for the idea that writers should be
committed to progressive ideals—though with hindsight their
differences appear to be less than the sharing.
The Progressive Writers’ Movement of the 1940s (Gopalakrishnan
1987) was the result of a collaboration between the liberal humanists
who were committed to progressive social change, avant-garde
authors like Changampuzha Krishna Pillai and Vaikom Muhammed
Basheer, who were not readily classified, and the Stalinists. This
effort was successful initially but woefully short-lived. While it did
witness one of the most fruitful periods of literary production in
Malayalam, it ended acrimoniously by the 1950s when the Stalinists’
bid for control was staunchly resisted by the others. However, by the
1940s, the major figures of the early modernist homoaesthetic
circles, which gained considerable strength in the 1950s and after,
M. Govindan, C.J. Thomas and others were also active in the literary
public.

A WOMAN AMONG THE REFORMERS

Lalitambika Antarjanam (1909–89), who was born and raised in a
progressive and aristocratic Malayalee brahmin family amidst
constant debates over political and literary issues, is widely accepted
as the first woman to have successfully entered the galaxy of
modern fiction in Malayalam.4 She disregarded ‘Womanly’ norms of
writing. Not only that, as a young woman intervening actively in the
gender politics in Travancore in the 1920s and 1930s and writing
stories that fed into ongoing public debates, she was perhaps putting
at risk the modest reputation she had earned as a poet in
Malayalam’s burgeoning Romantic tradition. She is no longer known
widely as a poet but as the first woman who published widely
acclaimed short stories in Malayalam. In the 1920s, she was already
using literature to make public statements on contemporary issues
involving women: her ‘Bhedagaty Kondulla Bhedagaty’ (Amendment
with an Amendment) was apparently directed against T.K. Velu
Pillai’s proposed amendment to the Nair Bill (1924) which seemed to
legitimize polygamy (Antarjanam 1991:92) and it set off a furious
debate. As a young Malayalee brahmin woman who was active in
the ongoing articulations of demands on behalf of ‘Women’ in
Travancore, mostly by those who could be called ‘first-generation
feminists’, Lalitambika’s particular position in the 1920s and 1930s
was more or less at the very fringes of both the powerful liberal
humanist homoaesthetic circles. She was accepted within Malayalee
brahmin community reformism as a woman writer who used
literature in the common struggle against orthodoxy—this group, as
mentioned before, did not make serious claims to literary merit. By
the 1930s, she had risen to fame as a passionate votary of
reformism within her community, speaking especially on behalf of the
women members who were traditionally subjected to extraordinary
restrictions and disempowerment (Devika 2007). However, at least in
this period, despite the fact that her writings had already been
granted literary merit, she seems to have been marginal to the group
that was bidding to revise dominant norms in aesthetics and politics
—the emergent homoaesthetic circle of the ‘progressive writers’ of
the 1930s which took shape around Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai.
Her stories of the 1930s which speak of the struggles of women
within the community won her the title of the ‘voice of the hapless
Antarjanams’ (Malayalee brahmin women). They combined a
realistic depiction of women’s lives within households with Romantic
meditations on their plight and exhortations to freedom. Her
aesthetic preferences, then, were evident. As she remarked in many
interviews and in her autobiographical writings: ‘There is no other art
form that permits one to combine integrally emotions and ideas, like
the short story. Especially for those who aim at achieving certain
other goals in the midst of the pursuit of art’ (quoted, Ravikumar
2009:xxix). She does not reject aesthetic goals: ‘[I] have no
propagandist intentions—but the ideas, desires, goals which have
come to be mine—they are propagated through art. Good literature
has such a facet … I believe that it is the duty of the [male] artist—
and the [female] artist as well—to bring together materials to raise a
new building, a more civilized and healthier one, along with taking
apart the narrow and decayed rafters of community life. The novel,
the short-story, the poem—all artistic creation is the instrument of
this [process]’ (p. xxxii).
However, Lalitambika’s acceptance of community reformism was
certainly not unquestioning—rather, the contrary. Her writing in the
1930s expresses definite unease with the non-reciprocal relationship
posited between the Reformer-Man and the Woman he was to
reform, authorized by community reformism. Early-twentieth-century
reformisms in Malayalee society, it may be recalled, put forth an
‘order of gender’ as the ideal alternative to the existing oppressive
order of caste or janmabhedam (difference-by-birth). The
individualism they espoused entailed a vision of gender difference
which was immediately organized in terms of a complementary
sexual exchange. Ideally, men were to remain within the public
domain, and women within the domestic, exercising different sorts of
authority and power. Both domains were to be shaped in such a way
that they would be spaces in which individual qualities may thrive
and these were found to be crucially determined by the sexual
endowments of the body. Women, it was argued, ought to exercise
supervisory authority within the home, assuming responsibility for the
management of materials and bodies within the domestic space, so
that their unique and positive dispositions, capacities and inclinations
may be well developed. However, within contemporary reform
movements—especially the Malayalee brahmin reform movement
with which Lalitambika was intimately associated—complementary
sexual exchange seemed indefinitely postponed to the future.
Moreover, this seemed to require the setting up of a non-reciprocal
relationship between the Reformer and the object to be reformed.
Lalitambika’s writings, read in the light of the debates over
individualization and community reform in the 1930s, appear to be
strongly critical both of individualism and of the particular order of
gender relations that it is supposed to entail (described above). It is
also unconvinced of the need to entrust the Woman to the Reformer-
Man’s supervision, an idea that was hegemonic within Malayalee
brahmin reformism. Thus the criticism of the Nambutiri-Reformer’s
power over Antarjanam figures more stringently in some short stories
by her written in the 1930s, notably ‘Itu Ashasyamano?’
(1935/2009:333–37) and ‘Prasadam’ (1939/2009:127–80). The
former mocks at the Reformer-Husband’s blind faith that his wife
must necessarily be his inferior and demonstrates how the non-
reciprocal relation between the Reformer and those who were to be
reformed by him actually cancels out the establishment of the ideal
complementary sexual exchange in the family. In the latter, the male
Reformers’ expectation of gratitude from the women whom they
‘rescue’ and turn into reform-workers, receives a sharp and biting
retort. Instead of the full-blooded view of the individual advanced by
reformisms, Lalitambika puts forth a moderate view of the individual
as located within social bonds fortified by ‘giving’ to each other with
no reformist intent.
This ‘pure giving’ is strictly non-instrumental and importantly,
women are identified as the chief agents of such ‘giving’. The
Woman-Giver, it seems, does not enter instrumentalist exchange.
But in many texts, especially those in which the mother–son
relationship represents the Woman–Man relationship
(‘Pancharayumma’ [1947/2009:134–37], ‘Nakshatram’
[1969/2009:566–67], ‘Kulabharadevatayute Tirumumbil’ [1941–
50/2009:165–69] and ‘Ormayute Appurattu’ [1960/2009:394–96]),
considerable stress is placed upon the male response to ‘giving’.
There is no calculation regarding what should come in return—male
response gets translated at the personal level to a simple recognition
of Woman’s difference, her role as Giver, essentially beyond Man’s
control. Nothing more seems to be expected.
It is crucial to note that setting up Woman as the Giver and Man as
mere recipient fundamentally alters their relation, putting
Lalitambika’s Woman beyond the reformist project. In ‘Itu
Ashasyamano?’ and ‘Realism’ (1937/2009:302–06) the husbands
are fully immersed in Man’s world—that of reformist work in the
former and of the literary institution in the latter. Further, they are fully
convinced of the superiority of these worlds and their power over
Women. However, the wives, in both these texts, are sources of
solace who make their activities possible in the first place, but their
husbands have to be made to overcome their arrogance and
recognize this in their wives. The plots of these texts are constructed
to this ‘end’—‘end’ in the sense of the ending of the text, and in the
sense of being a goal, an aim. In ‘Itu Ashasyamano?’ the wife proves
herself to be her husband’s equal in intellectual combat, yet prepares
to renounce victory, announcing that she was asserting the dignity of
Antarjanams and not competing with him. In ‘Realism’, the wife rids
her husband of his mistaken view of her passivity. In both texts,
Lalitambika’s Woman asserts her non-dependence on Man. Both
texts end in the male character’s recognition of this, which prompts
his willing submission to her, and a scene of harmony is established
in the ‘end’. It is the re-forming imperative (in ‘Itu Ashasyamano?’) or
false knowledge (and not just lack of knowledge in the simple sense)
on the part of Man (in ‘Realism’) that stands in the way of blissful
communion. For these to be overcome, Woman must reveal her
difference, her non-dependence on Man, so that she may be able to
establish herself as beyond Man’s control as Re-former or
Possessor.
What is also important is the manner in which Lalitambika’s
reworking of motherhood retrieves the pleasure in the mother–child
bond. This is directly in defiance of reformism which clearly
subordinates and disciplines such pleasure to the end of rational
procreation. Thus the body—rather, certain bodily processes—
seems to be more important than education or training in domestic
management for becoming a Woman in this projection. Gestation, for
example, is reinterpreted as a process of ‘Giving’:
She could still remember the first movements that tickled her very
soul. Those priceless days, hope-filled months of holding dearer than
one’s soul, something hidden from sight, known only by touch; giving
blood from one’s own blood; soul from one’s own soul; desires from
one’s desires. That load was no load. That fatigue, no fatigue. And
then, the great pain … Only if one goes as far as the gates of Death
may one receive the new life. (‘Kulabharadevatayute Tirumumbil’,
2009:166)
This, however, is not the same as ecriture feminine’s celebration of
the plurality and irreducibility of the body. Rather, the Mother’s body
is being celebrated, re-evaluated and reconstructed as the source of
origination. Giving birth becomes a moment in which the most
terrible pain is transformed into great joy and tremendous strength
(‘Vayalvakkil’ [1941–50/2000:153–56]); a process endowed with the
power to effect mental transformation, changing anger and violence
to love and tenderness (‘Kodungattilpetta Oru Ila’ [1947/2009:480–
88]); giving birth inspires ‘Giving’ (‘Mulappalinte Manam’
[1960/2009:402–09]) and vice-versa (‘Avivahita’ [2009:467–74]); it
becomes a means of recreating oneself, freeing oneself of one’s
lacks (‘Karuttavavinte Narum Chandrika’ [1950–51/2009:292–301]).
Motherhood becomes a basis on which the collectivity of Women
may be imagined. In ‘Snehayachaki’ (1939/2009:345–57), it is
identified as strong enough a basis upon which communication
becomes possible between the coarse and uncouth old beggar
woman and the young wife of a rich man; so also in ‘Churanna Mula’
(1951–52/2009:274–79), the untouchable Kuratti Kali’s maternity
strengthens the affectionate relations between her and her childless
mistress. Re-evaluation of bodily processes sometimes happens
indirectly, as in Lalitambika’s description of the process of creative
writing in the preface to Agnisakshi (1980:10) in which she makes it
resemble the maternal bodily processes of gestation on the one
hand, and the transformation of blood to breast milk on the other,
rather than view it as a cerebral process.
At work here is a grounding of Womanhood that appears less
vulnerable to construction and conformation to norms, based on
something that seems ‘natural’, not ‘cultural’. What happens is a
cultural reinscription of bodily processes, a reinterpretation that
wears the appearance of a dis-covery. And this writing does deserve
to be called feminist precisely because it contains a political
interpretation on behalf of Woman.
This reading of Lalitambika’s writing as a re-visioning of the order
of gender beyond patriarchal reformist versions by a woman-
intellectual committed to speaking for Women, perhaps, makes her
unwillingness to let go of Romanticism understandable. Indeed,
many of the features that Ann Mellor (1993) identifies as
characteristic of a ‘female Romanticism’, and Claire Moses and
Leslie Rabine (1993) identify in a Romanticism which is also
feminist, are readily recognizable in Lalitambika’s writing. For
instance, the location of the individual self that is fluid and
responsive, which eschews hard individualism and locates itself
within non-instrumental, non-repressive social bonds, which is
essentially pacifist, devoted to an ‘ethic of care’ and possessing
divine creative power. This ideal is arrayed against patriarchy as a
project of recuperating the feminine from the grip of masculine power
that exploits, devalues and demeans it. Lalitambika’s
‘Pancharayumma’ exhibits the strengths of this strategy. In
‘Pancharayumma’, the male infant’s effort to raise himself up on his
own is made to evoke the image of a life-force pushing its way
ahead in a trajectory of progress that appears risky and
unpredictable:
Experiment. Experiment. Life’s progress is through unceasing
experimentation. No failure is failure there. No victory complete. From
one point on to another. And from there, to yet another. Human life is
but a chain of such movements … He first laughed in the ecstasy of
success. But then, bawled in the fear of failure. (2009:137)
His activity takes place under the loving eye of his mother, and this is
what marks her: ‘That beloved form, the source of all solace, who
prides in his actions, who is considerate of his failings, in whom each
of his movements evoked a smile’ (2009:137). As in many other of
Lalitambika’s stories, here too, the mother–child bond may be read
as representing the Woman–Man relationship and the narrative as
unveiling its ‘truth’ effaced by patriarchy—which is the possibility of
blissful communion between Woman and Man that patriarchy
renders impossible. If only all men were like the male infant of
‘Pancharayumma’ acknowledging women to be their sole source of
solace and pleasure naturally and unhesitatingly, society would be
rid of the bane of patriarchy (the lesson that the husbands of ‘Itu
Ashasyamano?’ and ‘Realism’ learn). The story ends in a scene of
blissful communion: ‘Clinging on to that bosom filled with Amritham,
he could sense only one thing: life is a river of milk. And he, but a
sugary kiss that melted in it’ (2009:137). Lalitambika’s Romanticism,
then, is an important element that allows her to build a critique of the
intense instrumental rationalism characteristic of reformist proposals
for changing gender relations and social institutions, and deserves to
be called ‘feminist’, at least in the sense that it is an argument on
behalf of ‘Women’ as an invoked category—with all its problems.
Lalitambika’s use of refined sentimentalism as an aesthetic
strategy, too, makes sense when viewed in the light of her struggle
outlined above. It could well be viewed as a strategy that sought to
have the same effects as those produced by the progressive writers
but without following their aesthetic prescriptions. The rising
progressive realist homoaesthetic circle of the 1930s sought to
redefine aesthetic experience not as a process of gradual culturing
of the mind but as a process of shocking the reader out of
complacency. Balakrishna Pillai quoted the futurists approvingly,
saying that they were determined to shock readers into wakefulness
instead of making them delight in the ecstasy of thought (quoted,
Achyutan 1985:5–6); he also echoes the modernist critics T.S. Eliot
and I.A. Richards who, in the 1920s, were recommending ‘the direct
shock of poetic intensity’ (Eliot 1978:200) as a cure for the stultifying
effects of mass culture, but without subscribing to Eliot’s stance
against commitment. As has been argued about Eliot’s criticism,
here too, there is a shift in understanding aesthetic experience as
fostering not ‘taste’, which is quite Kantian in that it involves a
disinterested contemplation, but its opposite—‘sensibility’, which
involves sensuous interest (Pease 2000). By suggesting that
aesthetic strategies produce ‘invigorating shock’, Eliot and Richards
hope to evoke ‘… a reader’s full mental and sensual dialogic relation
with a text … [in which] aesthetic judgment is not confined to the
cognitive faculties but to a rather more complex “sensibility”’ (p. 85).
Here, the progressive writers’ homoaesthetic circle agreed that the
best way to produce such shock was to attack the sexual repression
of the quiescent traditional classes and the emergent bourgeoisie by
‘unveiling’ their ‘excesses’ and hidden ‘sexual hungers’. Pillai’s
admiration for the scientific temper had led him to celebrate Freudian
psychoanalysis, its misogyny intact, as the key to fundamental
‘human nature’; there was a flurry of writing by progressivists who
sought to deliver their mandate, the ‘uncovering of the ugly truths of
social life’, through the mechanical application of Freudian gender
types in their writing. The texts that they produced struck right at the
heart of the ideals of Womanhood propagated by reformisms,
including the critical versions of Womanhood that Lalitambika and
other first-generation feminists were striving to establish as socially
valuable. In other words, all these were lumped together as
instances of ‘sexual repression’ which concealed Woman’s
uncontrollable nature. As Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai exclaimed in
one of his stories: ‘Who knows! Who knows how Woman’s emotions
work! Once she defies the law, she will spring towards breaking it,
again and again [always]. [She will] defile all that was considered
sacred until then’ (quoted, Panikkar 1992:60). From now on,
misogyny and/or male insecurity was well explained: as the ‘truth’ of
Woman as revealed by Freud. A good example was the discussion
around N. Krishna Pillai’s adaptation of Ibsen’s plays in the 1940s
(again, something recommended by Balakrishna Pillai in the 1930s),
which displays intense anxieties about maternal control and female
sexuality. Writing about Pillai’s Kanyaka, (1943) playwright and early
modernist critic C.J. Thomas remarked that those who think that the
play is trivializing the achievements of women should also note that
the unsatisfied sexual needs of unmarried independent women can
be a problem—and testified that the play does bring out the ‘sexual
repression’ of unmarried working women (Thomas 1987:247).
Lalitambika did display considerable interest in and enthusiasm
about the progressivist realist socially committed avant-garde
(Ravindran n.d.: 81), even as she retained her Romanticist
inclinations. Indeed she even wrote ‘socially committed realist’
stories in this period, which focus on women’s plight, and made
direct reference to immediate incidents of oppression—for example,
‘Takaranna Jeevitam’ (1938/2009:107–12), which draws on
newspaper reports of the terrible losses suffered by the poorest from
the state’s plague-eradication efforts at Alappuzha (Editorial,
Deepika 1936). Kesari Balakrishna Pillai who did not dismiss
Romantic humanism (even when he was a foe of Romanticism)
classified her as a major figure among the Romantic humanist
writers in Malayalam (Sukumaran 1987:71).
Nevertheless, as she soon discovered, the progressive realist
homoaesthetic circle provided no space for women who sought to
debate its axioms. Lalitambika sought to raise questions to the
champions of Freud’s gender types through her short story ‘Realism’
(1937/2009:302–06), in which she portrayed the ‘progressive realist’
author as becoming nervous, suspicious and insecure when his
young wife begins to applaud his writing against sexual repression,
unable to stomach the possible consequences of his ‘realism’. The
story ends with the wife shaking him out of his illusion, his mistaken
idea that she is something that can be exchanged between men, a
passive object of male desire. A leading author of the progressive
realist circle, Takazhi, responded with another short story,
‘Adarsatmakatvam’ (Idealism), directly targeting Lalitambika and
implying that she was sexually repressed and in need of release
(Ravindran n.d.: 82).5
Irrespective of whether she adapted it deliberately or not, the
refined sentimentalism of Lalitambika’s writing allowed her to
produce effects similar to the ‘shaking up’ that the progressive
realists sought to achieve in the reader. And this is no surprise.
Indeed, sentimentalism has been associated with the ‘awakening of
the senses’. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, sentimentalism ‘…
contracts the distance between narrated events and the moment of
their reading as the feelings in the story are made tangibly present in
the flesh of the reader—it seeks to evoke tears from the reader’
(1993:26–27). In other words, it evokes an embodied reader.
Marianne Noble argues that this has the effect of producing a strong
sense of subjective identity, as the material nature of the affect
allows for a capacity of self-definition and freedom from the
repressive definitions of the self (1997:302).
Critics have hitherto seen in her refined sentimentalism
Romanticism that seeks to link the public and domestic worlds, the
reflection of her ‘truly feminine’ self, one incapable of being a real
revolutionary. Like many of her female contemporaries, Lalitambika
too expressed unease with modern domesticity—even while
admitting that she was within more or less an ideal domestic setting.
A friend remembers her words to him: ‘Some unnameable
discontent, a terrible desire, is constantly gnawing at my heart. A
feeling that God had entrusted me with some noble responsibility,
that I had not yet fulfilled even the smallest part of it’ (Abdulkhadar
1946:88–89). Indeed, Lalitambika has frequently described her life’s
struggle as one to attain balance between domestic and public
existences, between motherhood and career as creative writer
(Antarjanam 1991:101–07). About herself, she wrote: ‘She
stubbornly strove to engage in domestic, social and literary duties all
at the same time. All these were components of her existence. She
could not refuse any of them …’ (Antarjanam—Oru Padhanam
1969:100), and, ‘Before the prime of youth was over, before turning
forty-five, to become useless …’ (Antarjanam 1960:9–10). From her
autobiographical writings it is clear that the ‘responsibility’ she
identifies in grandiose terms as ‘God-entrusted’ and ‘noble’ was
linked to a perception of ‘social responsibility’ to be fulfilled through
the historically contingent institution of modern literature (Antarjanam
1991:54–55). Thus drawn to a different subject position, yet not
moving out of her chosen world of modern domesticity, she could not
but seek a re-evaluation and a revisioning of both. Her recuperation
into the liberal humanist canon as the ‘Muse of Motherhood’ is
possible only because this tension that drove her life-project has
been ignored despite the fact that she articulated it so frequently in
her interviews and writings.
In her novel Agnisakshi (1980), she articulates the dream of a
public life informed by a non-instrumental motherhood and
motherhood informed by public life through tracing the life
trajectories of Devaki Manamballi and Thankam Nair. In Agnisakshi,
Lalitambika gives an account of the historical experiences of the
upper-caste Malayalee women of the twentieth century, seeking to
link women of different generations through bonds of understanding,
reworking their past made into history, re-presented to them.
Needless to say, such a history reaffirms the group ‘Malayalee
Women’ (with the entire attendant risks of homogenizing and
obfuscation of intra-group differentials). She describes Agnisakshi as
a sort of ‘Her-story’:
[I will be satisfied] … if this serves to help women of the younger
generation to understand their mothers and grandmothers; [if it will
help] … members of the older generation to conduct a self-
examination; and others, to bring together and study the tears and
dreams of a past time. (1980:9)
The pursuit of different trajectories by these women breaks up an
original unity, an intimate friendship, characterized by openness to
each other and complete knowledge of each other’s internal lives. It
makes impossible the keeping of a promise to maintain this unity by
sharing their children—that is, the dream of building a bond between
women not restricted by the boundaries of patrifocal families. Devaki
and Thankam come to occupy spaces they had not originally desired
and are somehow ranged in opposition to one another. They are
isolated from each other and more or less absorbed in the pursuit of
their narrow goals. Through this critical component, the novel
distances itself from the commonplace view of this period as an era
of ‘liberation’ for women. In fact, it is precisely the discontents of
such a project that are highlighted here. The entry of women into
public roles as well as their integration into the modern family as
domestic managers is seen to have led women into the spaces of
the ‘hard’ Individual, locking them away from each other into
seemingly watertight social boxes. It is asserted that this has denied
them self-fulfilment despite social recognition and personal
happiness. It is faulted for having obstructed the formation of a
collectivity of women based on sharing. The imagining of this
collectivity is never explicit but remains an abiding presence
throughout. It seems highly informed by Lalitambika’s conception of
motherhood as elaborated in ‘Mulappalinte Manam’. Thankam and
Devaki are seen to belong to it in equal measure, as ‘Mothers’,
hinting at a vision of motherhood that does not shun public life, and
of public life that does not shun motherhood but rather draws energy
from it. The reunion of Thankam and Devaki, so it seems, would
bring the sundered halves together: ‘Devaki Manamballi has no
escape from Thankam Nair. We are the two faces of an era. The
new generation has two mothers, will you not accept our children?’
(p. 99).
Clearly, Lalitambika’s critique was effective only when the reformist
vision of a gendered world was not yet hegemonic, still at the centre
of debate. Her effort to endow the terms of the discourse—such as
Woman or Man—with different content and value was visible only
under such conditions. Since she did not challenge the terms of
discourse, once the discourse attained a hegemonic presence, it
was probably far easier to ‘tame’ Lalitambika by setting her up on a
pedestal either as the ‘Eternal Mother’ or as the ‘voice of
(oppressed) Antarjanams’, as entrenched literary criticism in
Malayalam has done.6 It is of course true that present-day feminists
in Kerala may find little ‘feminism’ in her writing. The marks of
Lalitambika’s caste and class, her elite social location, are all over
her work; it stays within the limits of a heterosexual framework
(though the possibility of an all-woman family is alluded to in
Agnisakshi). This is what allowed her consecration within major
homoaesthetic circles and the canon. Does that make her ‘less
feminist’, or worse, a ‘traitor’?
It must be remembered that ‘feminism’ is not a stable category any
more and that it has been thoroughly contextualized. There is no
reason why Lalitambika’s feminism should be ours. Besides the
inspiring ‘fantasy echoes’ which Joan Scott (2001) talks of, there is
little to seek. It would be a pity, then, to either embrace her
uncritically seeking ‘true feminism’ or dismiss her as ‘anti-feminist’,
especially when one notes that the uncompromising rejection of
gender difference meant living death in the literary public of the early
twentieth century—as the fortunes of Lalitambika’s brilliant
contemporary, K. Saraswati Amma, revealed.

HARSH REALISM
K. Saraswati Amma’s writings were also shaped on the one hand by
the debates in the literary public and on the other, by debates around
gender and reform in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike Lalitambika, she
has been a completely marginal, almost elusive figure—a working
woman who stayed unmarried and fiercely independent, pursuing
her own hobbies and disregarding the strictures on male–female
intellectual friendships. She stopped writing around the 1960s and
was virtually forgotten at the time of her death in 1971—quite unlike
Lalitambika who continued to be honoured till her death and after,
and continued to write well into her eighties. While like Lalitambika
she shared the scepticism of reformist patriarchy, her response was
completely different, marked by intense suspicion of sentiment and
the valorization of motherhood, and the very space of the feminine
domestic itself. Her aesthetic preferences too were remarkably
different: her style was, most often, a particularly strident sort of
realism which (unlike many progressive writers) allowed no quarter
to Romanticism at all—except perhaps in her novel, Premabhajanam
(Amma 1955/2001:859–93).7
Recollections by a college-mate—the critic Guptan Nair (Amma
2001:9–12) whom she considered a close friend—mention that she
was considered eccentric, nicknamed ‘Vattu Saraswati’—‘Crazy
Saraswati’—by her classmates. Nair then sketches a picture of an
outspoken, bubbly and free-spirited young woman who mingled
freely with male students and engaged them in debate. He
particularly recalls an incident at a meeting of the Malayalam literary
club in which he was speaking. After his speech she came on stage
uninvited, declaring, ‘I too have written some short stories, I too want
to speak’. She made a speech which ‘… the audience enjoyed as if it
were a dramatic performance’ (p. 9). Such selective remembrances
by her male friends (she does not seem to have had any women
friends, though she was apparently friendly with Lalitambika, and her
stories are often about intimate friendships between women) have
contributed to the impression that she was an ‘isolated phenomenon’
(Surendran 1983a) (this representation has recently been given a
radical turn by feminists who consider her a ‘feminist genius’).
This impression, however, may not be true. It might have been a
product of our collective amnesia about Kerala’s first-generation
feminists, many of whom lived life as defiantly and independently as
her; who have been derided or forgotten—for example, Kochattil
Kalyanikkutty Amma (who won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award
for best autobiography at the age of 91 in 1993) and Vengalil
Chinnammalu Amma (Devika 2005). Indeed it is interesting that the
recovery of Saraswati Amma’s writings was possible only because
she was a literary writer. Trying to reconstruct the work of the latter
figures has proved far more difficult because they wrote in non-
literary genres. Like Lalitambika, Saraswati Amma also engaged
closely with issues in public debate through her short stories; she
also wrote articles for magazines and many seem to be under
pseudonyms. She was even more marginal to the major
homoaesthetic circles than Lalitambika was. The liberal humanists’
discomfort with her uncompromising rejection of their harmonizing
project and the gendered norms for literary production are of course
quite to be expected. However, she also kept her distance from the
Stalinists and the progressive realists. The latter group was perhaps
most open to her, given her preference of aesthetic style, and
indeed, Balakrishna Pillai had included her as a ‘great poet’ of the
realist political-literary programme that he warmly approved of
(Sukumaran 1987:130). Nevertheless, she was wary: in a letter to
Guptan Nair written in 1944, she wrote ‘… I have not yet read
Kadatthuvanchi. [If I] hear the very mention of Balakrishna Pillai’s
great poets, I am unable to read that book’ (Amma 1999:102). She
was apparently interested in the progressive writers’ project.
Surendran, who claims to have been close to her, reports that she
told him of a bitter experience which prompted her to keep off this
circle. She told him that she had become friendly with one of the
members of this circle and had visited his family. His attempt to
make a sexual advance upset her badly and, since then, she kept a
distance. Surendran promptly dismisses this story remarking that
she was rather irrational towards the end of her life (1983a:364).
The general frame of ideas within which thinking on gender
difference develops in Saraswati Amma’s writings owes much to
radical reformisms of the 1930s and 1940s such as those of
Sahodaran Ayappan. These streams broke with milder versions on
several points, of which the conceptualization of gender difference
was one. Without necessarily rejecting gender difference in
inclinations, abilities and so on, and without dismissing the role of
Reformer-Man, they maintained that women needed to be actively
integrated into modern spheres of life, public and domestic, in order
to be liberated. It appears that Saraswati Amma’s strategy was to
radically reappropriate and develop specific elements of radical
reformism rather than reject it entirely. For example, she seems to be
in agreement with the radical reformers that women’s minds should
be trained to match their husbands’ refined intellects (Amma
1958/2001:983–90). However, in other texts she spells out the
radical reformist ideal of male–female relationship in ever more
precise terms, by presenting, in a range of situations, what it should
not be—for instance, in ‘Drohattinte Phalam Chaita Sneham’ (Amma
1958/2001:753–58). Such guardianship that would humiliate or
suppress women is strictly differentiated from the ideal of
marriage/guardianship outlined above. The Reformer-Husband’s role
is thus given a critical twist, indicating that the reform of the wife was
also in the interest of the Reformer-Husband. This is, of course, in
sharp contrast with the profound distrust of Reformer-Man in much of
Lalitambika’s writing. Or, to take another instance of critical
reappropriation, Saraswati Amma agrees with the mind-centredness
of radical reformism which emphasized the culturing of women’s
minds as the central pathway to their realization of their ‘truly natural
self’, their ‘true Womanhood’. However, this very reformism brought
back women’s bodies—through aestheticizing them. That is, the
reformers demanded that women not only cover their bodies
properly but also keep them beautiful—as a means of retaining
men’s interest in marriage, thus ensuring the stability of the modern
conjugal bond. Many of Saraswati Amma’s texts attack this aspect of
radical reformism as disabling of the potential of mind-centred
culturing for women. Indeed, a beautiful body seems to aid the
reduction of the woman to a passive object exchanged for economic
gain. Such commodification is made to echo in the titles of such texts
as ‘Ratnam Vilayunna Bhoomi’ (Land which Produces Diamonds)
and ‘Mudakkumutal’ (Investment Capital) (Amma 1959/2001:265–71,
1955/2001:524–35), (Amma 1959:83–93, 1955 d.:19–30). In the
short essay ‘Purushanmarillatha Lokam’ (A Manless World), the
disappearance of cumbersome female aesthetic dress codes is
counted as a key advantage in a world without men (Amma
1958/2001:973–78). In ‘Orukkathinte Oduvil’ (At the End of Make-
up), the possibility of aesthetic female dressing freed from the
compulsion to be Womanly is hinted at (Amma 1951/2001:453–64).
Also, she frees the culturing of the female mind from being the
means to produce women capable of rational procreation—women’s
education thus is not just an instrument to produce good mothers but
also to induct them into the public and neutralize male domination
there (Devika 2003). This is an implicit critique of reformism, which,
even in its radical versions, did not really get over tying women’s
education to their status as wives and homemakers.
Indeed, the critique of reformist goals is further extended in her
writings. They often lay out with merciless precision the very
impossibility of the high ideals of love and marriage espoused by
radical reformism in a world in which feudal advantages to men had
not ended, and in which capitalist values had already begun to
inform intimate spheres. Thus in many of her texts that depict
modern marriage, the wife and husband appear as two full-fledged
rational agents engaged in calculation of their interest against each
other. Such couples are often depicted as equals in their
endowments. However, strategizing is made necessary precisely
because one of the two agents (the man) enjoys a superior
advantage by virtue of his sex thanks to persisting feudal values, and
the other is then forced to construct strategies from all sources
available to her. Thus elements from traditional satitvam (chaste
wifehood) and the modern Womanly ideal may be reduced to just
strategy, or so it seems (‘Bhartrtvam’ [Amma 1958/2001:765–74];
‘Vaividhyam Vende?’ [Amma 1958/2001:775–80]). In ‘Pavangal!’
(Amma 1946/2001:151–60), the wife counters the husband by lying
and shedding false tears of innocence. This is a planned move: ‘That
was my will. Did I come to you, begging you to accept such a
woman? Her sense of freedom told her to give such sharp retorts.
But familiarity with the world advised her to craftily wait and eliminate
displeasure tactfully’ (pp. 75–76). On the other hand, the rise of
dowry which turns marriage into another form of economic
transaction makes all glorification of its ‘sacredness’ hollow. Wiser
women, then, evoke ‘self-interest’ to stay out of this institution. The
female protagonist of ‘Swarthata’ (Amma 1958/2001:759–64)
correctly assesses her lover’s inability to withstand the pressures of
economic aspirations and withdraws coolly from the love affair,
claiming that this was an act of ‘selfishness’ on her part. And women
who were not wise, who still suffered from the illusion that romantic
love would lead to marriage, are bound to suffer. A delightfully ironic
text titled ‘Premadhanam’ (Amma 1959/2001:272–80) deftly depicts
how the woman who took a safe course away from such betrayal
and personal disaster is labelled ‘evil’ but she who bore her lover’s
betrayal passively (her life comes to a standstill there, in madness) is
hailed as the paragon of goodness.
It also leads her to a sophisticated understanding of ‘man-hating’.
Indeed, it is a theme humorously treated in several texts like
‘Vishramamuriyil’ (Amma 1958/2001:804–9), ‘Ramani’ (Amma
1945/2001:35–56) and ‘Streejanmam’ (Amma 1946/2001:139–50).
All these figure young women seething with disappointment from the
collapse of their frivolous affections, who are juxtaposed with a
female character Shanti, who provides a sharp contrast to them. The
socio-economic aspirations that shape modern marriage are too
much for weak intimacies; they easily collapse. Unable to see these
structural aspects, the woman directs her anger towards her lover,
whom she accuses of betrayal. This gets vented as ‘man-hating’.
However, Shanti is unable to conceive of modern marriage as the
ultimate aim of romance. Therefore, her anger at patriarchal control
does not descend to whining man-hatred. Precisely because she
does not expect ‘too much’ of herself or of men, in ‘Streejanmam’,
Shanti says, ‘I have no seething emotions, crushing thoughts or
impossible desires; I live my life from day to day …’ (Amma
1946/2001:147).
Not associated with those of the progressive writers, Saraswati
Amma’s stories have been widely understood as arguments on
behalf of women, poised dangerously on the border between the
literary and the non-literary (Ravikumar 2001:23–24). And as
mentioned before, she did evince an interest in the project itself. Like
Lalitambika, her own investment in ‘Women’ as a first-generation
feminist probably made her reject the misogynist frameworks of
understanding human nature employed by many prominent
progressivists, but led her to seek other aesthetic strategies that
would produce ‘shock effects’ in readers. If Lalitambika’s writing
employs Romanticism and sentimentalism, deliberately or not,
Saraswati Amma’s writing resorts to a kind of ‘factualist realism’ on
the one hand and humour on the other. The former sets her apart
from many authors who are considered progressive realists but
whose realism is intermingled intimately with Romanticism; the latter
is precisely the aesthetic strategy that evokes a ‘sensibility’ in the
reader instead of merely appealing to or modifying her/his ‘taste’.
Saraswati Amma’s realism resembles that of the novelist and
political activist Mary McCarthy who broke with the realism of the
socialist realists. McCarthy was known for her strident anti-
sentimentalism, her apparent lack of ‘kindness’ and empathy with
suffering (Brightman 1992).8 In On the Contrary (1961) she proposes
a literary aesthetics based on ‘fact’, and on what she called
‘factualism’ as opposed to ‘realism’. She argues that realism was
increasingly turning into ‘irrealism’, and that even the greatest
realists betray the genre with the grandiosity of unearned universality
or the sordidness of pornography. Instead she calls for moral
courage that would allow writers to believe ‘in reality, the factuality, of
the world’ (p. 311). Unlike socialist realism which deals in mass-
produced ‘plastic facts’, ‘real facts’ are singular and marked by their
ability to alter the observer. About American realist playwrights, she
says: ‘[T]he individual in the realist drama is regarded as a cog or a
statistic; he commits the uniform crime that sociologically he might
be expected to commit’ (p. 297). Such statistical realism may well
please the readers/audience and affirm their beliefs—they may see
what they want to see, but it cannot be a force of social change.
The commonplace reduction of Saraswati Amma’s writing to a
feminist version of socialist realism, full of fixed ‘types’ valorizing
women and pulverizing men, is simply false. In fact her best stories
are full of the most unpredictable characters, men and women who
upset the reader’s expectation, strategize and draw upon tradition
and modernity with aplomb. The only types that we might find are of
subaltern women, who are depicted as drained of agency (Devika
2003). Indeed, her elitism is often directly in the reader’s face in the
form of subtle racism. This reminds us of the limits of her feminism
and that it is wise not to set up feminist heroines too glibly.
McCarthy and Saraswati Amma were far removed in time and
space. Yet the concern that ‘reality’ as they conceived it must be
faced, and that self-delusion (provoked by quite different historical
events for each—for the latter, the spread of new, seductive,
misleading promises of sexual complementarity, romantic love and
companionate marriage in the emergent order in mid-twentieth-
century Malayalee society, and for the former, the traumatic events
of war and genocide of the mid-twentieth century) must be avoided
for freedom to be attained runs through their writing—explicitly stated
by the former. The change induced by facing such reality would be
painful. Saraswati Amma’s realist aesthetics may then be viewed as
such an effort which shares and differs from the realisms advanced
by the progressivist realist homoaesthetic circles and the Stalinists.
For her, Lalitambika’s writing would not be unaesthetic but
anaesthetic. Opening up oneself to the reality of pain, alone, would
be aesthetic.
At the same time, the remarkable presence of humour in her
writing appeals to sensibility. Several critics have noted this feature
of Saraswati Amma’s aesthetics (Ravikumar 2001:25) and remarked
that humour may have been perceived as masculine rather than
feminine (Leelavati 2002:651). Saraswati Amma’s humour deserves
to be studied carefully. A lot of it qualifies to be what has been called
‘feminist humor’—which can be both overtly and covertly challenging
of patriarchal stereotypes (Walker 1988). However, much of it also
seems to be what Katherine Streip calls ‘ressentiment humor’ which
she finds common in women, ‘… an initial sense of injury and rage
becomes transformed into comedy by self-laceration’ (1994:118).
Precisely because it involves self-laceration—the joke is not about
the other—it is hardly aggressive and the joker is not the innocuous
comedienne who makes everyone laugh. While we recognize it as
humour, it does not make us laugh. Streip’s comment about humour
in Jean Rhys’s writing applies to much of Saraswati Amma’s writing
as well: ‘… it defuses unhappiness by compounding it through a
ressentiment that … implicates the laughers in the muck’ (p. 120). As
she points out, this laughter cannot be ‘the best medicine’, self-
preservation, catharsis or positive assault on power (p. 139). It
evokes ‘sensibility’ as defined earlier—it disturbs the reader.
However, the trouble her writing stirs up for gender in her many
texts that speak of the pleasures of female homosociality was
perhaps more threatening to the patriarchal order than her challenge
to reformism or independence in aesthetic choices. Very many of her
autobiographical statements (2001:1010) as well short stories like
‘Swargadwaram’ (2001:713–26) defend sakhitvam or female
friendship ardently. She uses words like ‘praanasakhi’, which have
strong romantic connotations, yet are ambiguous enough, to refer to
female friendships. And it is well known that female homosocial
bonding poses nothing short of a fatal challenge to the patriarchal
social order. As Lynda Hart observes about the implied female
homosociality of women ‘who act together’ in the so-called ‘killer-
women films’:
If homosociality is the necessary but unseen ground of the patriarchal
symbolic, homosociality between women would seem to be
impossible in reality but always threatening to erupt from the Real. It
falls outside of symbolization, drops out of discourse, but occasionally
emerges as a destabilizing rupture in the margins of a dominant order
that cannot quite banish it. It is not surprising then that when women
enter representation ineluctably together, they do so as criminals. (p.
83)
Saraswati Amma’s female friendships are not like those of the killer-
women representations that Hart discusses; neither are they the
conventional sakhitvam in which the woman friend is a go-between
for the heroine and her male lover. In her stories featuring the
character Shanti, the happy-go-lucky college student whose cheerful
awareness of the workings of patriarchy allows her to happily stay
away from the psychic damage that it inflicts, female friendships
present a non-hierarchical, light-hearted, happy togetherness, which
also involves the bodies of friends touching freely though not
sexually. In fact, touch is integral to her descriptions of female
intimacy. In Premabhajanam (1955/2001), Louisa and her sister, who
argue constantly with each other, are also constantly trying to
eliminate the mutual distancing that their clashes of thought create.
The labour that goes into establishing rational communication is
tremendous. Louisa tries to convince her sister not only by argument
but also by demonstration and even by play-acting, dressing up as a
man. When appeasing words do not suffice, physical touch—
hugging, holding hands and stroking hair—is used to restore
closeness. Here the body, which is excluded in the process of
rational communication, reappears, offering the only means of
mitigating the tensions between full-fledged individuals.
Thus an alternative to reformist patriarchy on behalf of ‘Women’
does emerge in her writings, as it does in Lalitambika’s, albeit with
less clarity. This order is not really fully heterosexual—rather, it is of
a world divided into a homosocial private of women and a gender-
neutral public. Lalitambika’s effort to reconstruct rather than reject
gender difference was all too easily ‘tamed’ into a Romantic
affirmation of rationalized motherhood, which fitted the liberal
humanists’ aesthetic education very well indeed. But Saraswati
Amma’s rejection of gender difference and her strident claims to
androgyny, which were useless to the project of gendered aesthetic
education, provoked a horror that abjected her. And therefore the
most negative of all techniques of marginalization was applied to her
writing—that of simply pretending that it did not exist. Yet we should
desist from setting her up as the feminist heroine for she too did not
escape the marks of her caste and class locations. She was not
more feminist than Lalitambika; but she was perhaps more
dangerous to the heterosexual order.

FEMALE MODERNISM
Madhavikkutty (her other names were Nalappat Kamala, Ami,
Kamala Das and Kamala Surayya) emerged as one of the stellar
figures in Malayalam literature in a literary public and social world
that were significantly different from the ones that Lalitambika or
Saraswati Amma had negotiated to enter as young women. Known
as Kamala Das in her English writings, she had won fame in both
languages by the 1960s and kept winning key literary awards,
including a Nobel Prize nomination in 1984. Her simultaneous
location on two linguistic registers is probably an important reason
for the extraordinary fame and prestige that she was able to acquire
and which lasted through her entire writing career. Throughout her
career, she was perceived as a spirited representative of ‘Women’ in
the literary field and outside. Her own perception of ‘Women’ was of
a class that was betrayed by men in love and condemned to
unaesthetic lives, and which was in need of representation and a
voice. Thus even as she remained wary of rationalistic feminism in a
Romantic-sentimentalist fashion, she also passionately sought to be
the public voice of ‘Women’. Speaking of the writer’s social
commitment, she once said, ‘The poem should never be a sermon.
Because poets often tend to speak from a height, poetry does not
receive the [superior] place it deserves in the world. Poetry is the
voice of our people. It should be the voice of those who desired,
those who loved, those who were betrayed, those who were
deceived’ (quoted, Bhaskaranunny 1987:252). In her writing, it is the
women who love and are deceived, mostly.
New homoaesthetic circles had appeared in the post-
Independence literary public: the early modernists were active
around author and literary activist M. Govindan. But most
importantly, the peaking of Madhavikkutty’s writing career in
Malayalam roughly coincided with the ascendancy of the late
modernists in Malayalam—a formidable all-male galaxy of writers
and critics, including O.V. Vijayan, M. Mukundan, Kakkanadan,
Sethu, Anand and others—who inaugurated another project of
‘radical unveiling’ of bourgeois hypocrisy. In the 1970s, many of the
late modernists broke off to form the radical left homoaesthetic circle,
which found political value in the stylistic experiments of the late
modernists (echoing the debates on modernism within the European
left). But this did not affect their influence much. A leading member
of this circle, the poet and critic Ayyappa Panikkar, attributed the rise
of modernism to the ‘efforts of a new generation that tried to create a
new vision of life after being convinced that the idealism fostered by
the national renaissance over the [past] decades was merely
superficial and that even realism could be presented only in an
overblown fashion, clad in Romanticist trappings’ (quoted, Joseph
1990:58). The late modernists threw a serious challenge to realist
aesthetics, rubbished social realism and questioned all accepted
morality, especially sexual. Mukundan announced this project thus in
1970:
 … the new generation does not live atop an ivory-tower. Therefore
they have no desires. They don’t speechify about socialist realism.
They don’t tilt their swords against the windmills uttering fearful cries.
They break the chains of ideals and norms and fling aside their egos
to enter the inner realm of life with a spirit of inquiry. The sorrow,
helplessness, and sense of futility that arises in them as they see
what others have not yet seen or have refused to see, is the essence
of their writings … (p. 10)
Naturally, this provoked severe criticism from both liberal humanists
and socialist realists. The former were worried about its foreignness
and apparent promotion of sexual explicitness; the latter, about their
apparent contempt towards ‘social commitment’. Heated discussions
between these homoaesthetic circles and the late modernist
homoaesthetic circle, which could boast of critics interested in New
Criticism like K.P. Appan, have been the stuff of debate since then,
until rather recently. What is interesting about the modernists is their
flaunting of masculinity, even as they claim ‘impersonality’. Indeed,
admiring critics have found the rise of late modernism in Malayalam
to be directly connected to a crisis of masculinity in Malayalee
society, linked to the persisting problems of economic stagnation,
unemployment and disintegration of traditional social norms.
Augustine Joseph writes: ‘If the sense of futility in western modernist
literature was to some extent a product of the lack of responsibilities,
the angst that flowed [in Malayalam] was often a product of the
excess of responsibilities. Where the western [man] reeled without
responsibility of sustaining parents and family, the Malayalee’s
tragedy lay in the isolation he suffered as a result of his inability to
support them’ (Joseph 1997:82). Indeed, this looks like a particularly
male crisis given that the householder-norm—of masculinity as tied
to the ability to support one’s wife and family—was becoming
entrenched in these decades (Devika 2008).9
This, however, draws our attention to yet another context
especially relevant to Madhavikkutty’s writings—the social. The
decades of the 1950s and 1960s were also times in which the
transition to the nuclear family and conjugal marriage was fairly
complete at least among the educated classes. The promises of
community reformism regarding sexual complementarity and
marriage as the ‘union of internalities’ were by then revealed to be
clearly futile. Radical reformism in the 1930s articulated by V.T.
Bhattatiripad and others had made pleasure central to the conjugal
bond and added an aesthetic element to the conception of ideal
femininity. The ideal Woman was imagined to be not so much a
unity, as the union of two distinct figures, which may be called the
‘Domestic Woman’ and the ‘Aesthetic Woman’. While the former was
the provider of progeny, the manager of materials and the guardian
of souls in the modern home, the latter had a function which was
almost in antipathy to this. The Aesthetic Woman was the provider of
pleasure, she who cemented modern conjugality through ensuring
pleasure (Devika 2007). The ideal Woman, in whom these figures
are seen to combine harmoniously, is expected to remain strictly
self-controlled and provide aesthetic pleasure to the husband. In this
sense, this ideal Woman differs sharply from the Kulina [the well-
bred woman, of ‘good family’] of the classical texts. One may view
the discursive construction of the modern Kulina as a long and
ongoing process in which the classical Veshya’s [the ‘Vessel of
Culture’] aesthetic attributes were slowly and steadily transferred on
to the classical Kulina, after ‘de-eroticizing’ them. Letters, music,
painting and so on were no longer instruments of sexual seduction
but of assuring modern conjugal bliss.
However, within the ideal Woman, the aesthetic element was to
remain strictly subordinated to the domestic element. This fault line
has ever since plagued the construct incessantly. One could never
be sure how the subordination of the aesthetic element to the
domestic element was ensured; indeed, it seemed to erupt too
frequently, disturbing the Domestic Woman’s self-discipline—for
instance, in women’s penchant for dressing up. While it was
admitted that a well-dressed woman would be more successful as a
modern wife, delineating ‘aesthetic’ ways of dressing from
‘eroticizing’ ones seemed difficult. Thus, in the mid- and late
twentieth century, women’s magazines and women’s columns in
journals in Kerala continuously negotiated between Woman-as-
Reproducer and Woman-as-Vessel-of-Culture, shuttling between
advice on culturing one’s mind and beauty tips. By the 1960s, this
notion of femininity was hegemonic: domestic femininity (or primarily
committed to the domestic) was slightly, but not excessively,
aestheticized (Devika 2007).
Madhavikkutty’s aesthetic strategies were quite complex—not
readily reducible to any particular style, they often were tantalizing
mixes. P.P. Raveendran, assessing her story ‘Kalyani’, argues that its
simple realistic structure does not work well with the surrealistic
content of the story (1997:117); others have felt that she combines
classic realistic content with bizarre narrative forms which produces
explosive effects (Ramakrishnan 2001:30). Still others have pointed
to the essentially Romanticist inclination in her writing.
Madhavikkutty did not place herself among the late modernists. In
1962 she identified an ‘unreasonable melancholy’ to be the chief
demerit of the new generation, which ‘sticks to their writing like a bad
smell’ (quoted, Achyutan 1985:10). Yet late modernist critics have
often identified her work as a female version of late modernism or as
one of its precursors—in a strikingly simplistic sense. As Kalarkodu
Vasudevan Nair argued, it is equally possible to claim that she is a
realist (even though not a socialist or critical realist) or a Romantic,
and indeed, it can easily be demonstrated that she does not follow
any of the eccentric styles of the late modernists (Nair 1971).
Nevertheless, it is also true that while she did not subscribe to any
specific later modernist prescription regarding aesthetics, her
experimental styles certainly placed her writing outside liberal
humanist and realist aesthetics. Yet this cannot be read as
sanctioning her automatic absorption into late modernism.
The publication of her autobiography Ente Katha (1973) (which
she later claimed to have been fiction), serialized in 1970–71,
became an occasion in which she was firmly—or rather forcibly—
consecrated within late modernism. As soon as the first chapter of
Ente Katha appeared, a flood of letters in Malayalanadu
congratulated Madhavikkutty, often comparing her to the Bronte
sisters, and exulting that she was superior to Simone de Beauvoir.
For the first time, a Malayalee woman writer seemed to have
achieved ‘world-standards’.10 Indeed the constant comparison with
Beauvoir was significant, since late modernism in Malayalam was
thought to be heavily influenced by Sartrean existentialism and
Beauvoir was regarded as the major female figure in existentialism.
The letter writers applaud both her formidable literary talents and
courage.11 The ‘truth’ she revealed, however, was read as not just
pertaining to her own individual life, but to all women’s lives. Also,
this ‘truth’ was perceived to be remarkably close to what was
perceived widely as the late modernist portrayal of the feminine12:
she had, apparently, revealed that sexual hunger was fundamental
to Woman; all pretence otherwise was hypocrisy. Domesticity was
dull, elitist and sexually repressive; within this shell there would be
found the ‘real’ Woman with unending sexual cravings.
And this was not merely because of the openness about sex and
extramarital relationships described in Ente Katha. Firstly,
Madhavikkutty’s own vision of the writer’s responsibility
(Madhavikkutty 2006:69–70) seemed similar to statements by late
modernists (for instance, Mukundan 1970). Secondly, there was a
superficial similarity between Madhavikkutty’s redrawing of femininity
as distanced from the male world of public debate, questioning and
rational-intellectual activity and the dominant mode of depicting the
feminine in late modernist writing. In Ente Katha, she portrayed
herself as an ‘ordinary woman’, vulnerable, prone to all ‘feminine
weaknesses’, eminently distanced from and hardly ever aspiring to
equality with men and the life of rational-intellectual debate and
questioning. She is commended for, first, acknowledging the ‘truth’ of
sexual difference in her acceptance of the ‘need’ for the male.
Second, she is commended for accepting the ‘truth’ of permissive
(male) sexuality. An admiring critic, Shanmughadas, who read a
critique of modern elite existence in Ente Katha, counted this as
evidence of her honesty, finding her depiction of male–female
relationships to be ‘flawless from the point of view of psychology’.
She is praised for admitting her desire for the Worldly, but her claim
to have ‘overcome’ it is doubted (Shanmughadas 1972:50):
 Madhavikkutty, who is the Woman among women, has no contempt
for Man; she has no illusion that it is possible to live in a world without
men. Even the most ‘pure-hearted man is a mischievous child
searching for the ‘magic’ toys of Woman’s body … She has realised
this from her own experience very early—what is there to forgive,
after that shocking knowledge? In a recent article written in English
she firmly states this: ‘The easy way into a man’s heart is through his
sexual organs’. (Shanmughadas 1972:63)
The reference to ‘a world without men’ is interesting, for it was the
title of an essay by Saraswati Amma (mentioned in the earlier
section) where women would be free of patriarchal constraints!
Oblique criticism of Ente Katha as ‘insane sensuality’ by a prominent
member of the progressivist realist circle of the 1940s and 1950s,
Kesavadev, well known for his sexually explicit themes (Kesavadev
1972), was rebutted as jealous outpourings at being outdone by
readers writing in the ‘letters to the editor’ column (Janayugam, 1
May 1972; 21 May 1972:3, 21) at his own game. Stalinist critics were
also eager to represent Ente Katha’s treatment of sex as evidence of
the lack of ‘political purpose’ in her rebellion, which they found
characteristic of late modernism (Pavanan 1972:5). The liberal critic
M. Krishnan Nair bemoaned how late modernism was ‘destroying
young lives’, using a letter written to him by a young woman student,
who voiced her admiration of Ente Katha, remarking that ‘it appears
all women are alike in their heart of hearts, however much they act
as good women outside’ (Nair 1971:15).
The biggest loss that this reading entailed was of the visibility of
the powerful attack which Ente Katha launches against the
entrenched feminine ideal. For this to be revealed, we need to read it
against the prevailing, dominant norms of femininity. Indeed, Ente
Katha effectively broke open the fine fault line in the entrenched
feminine ideal. In it, Madhavikkutty uses the Romantic notion of the
self brilliantly to critique the entrenched Womanly ideal of Malayalee
modernity. This autobiography (and indeed, much of her other
writings) cuts loose the two figures joined together in the dominant
Womanly ideal, signalling the revolt of the Aesthetic Woman. First,
she rejects the housewife’s centring upon domestic labour as drab,
demeaning, unhappy and unbeautiful (for instance, Madhavikkutty
2006:58), projecting an alternate maternal figure defined by
playfulness, storytelling, laughter and the willingness to listen to and
empathize with children (Madhavikkutty 2006:65, 100–03). Secondly,
she brings back the body—marginalized and de-eroticized in
dominant reformist discourse—into her re-vision of the Womanly.
Madhavikkutty’s intense homoeroticism, observed about her
autobiography in English, My Story (George 2000), is striking in Ente
Katha as well. In her open admission of her love for ‘female frivolity’,
in her insistence on the pleasures of beautifying the (admittedly
ephemeral) body (Madhavikkutty 2006:39, 44–48), the Aesthetic
Woman not only cuts loose, but also positions herself against the
Domestic Woman. The aesthetic female body, adorned, fostered
tenderly under the non-objectifying touch/gaze of the loving male
beyond patriarchy is contrasted with the female body imprisoned in
domesticity and self-control, a mere instrument for procreation and
domestic labour, objectified by the dominating husband’s lust. This is
entirely compatible with her repeated reference to the ‘level of the
spirit’, which she identifies as ‘truly her-self’. The desire to bedeck
the body is an ‘ordinary human weakness’ which is God-given and
not to be ashamed of (Madhavikkutty 2006:46). The Aesthetic
Woman, unashamed to admit this, may claim a fulfilled soul, but not
the Domestic Woman, who tries to dupe God.
However, in the patriarchal present, the Aesthetic Woman is
doomed to be perceived as a mere consumable body, and Ente
Katha is Madhavikkutty’s lament for her. She insists that it is not a
crude and titillating account of her body’s sexual adventures, but
‘spiritual striptease’ (Madhavikkutty 2006:70). Thirdly, she rejects
both romantic love and depersonalized sex, refusing to acknowledge
the romantic love–bodily lust divide—a point missed by critics who
see her obsession with sexuality as often ‘completely self-absorbed’
(Katrak 1996:288). Love, for her, is intensely physical, yet not pinned
on penetrative sex; touch is revalued as a fundamental mode of
blurring boundaries between individuals (Madhavikkutty 2006:46).
Same-sex love is thus valued (Madhavikkutty 2006:46–47),
rendering her work open to a queer reading (George 2000).
 Fourthly, she resoundingly rejects the central figure of Malayalee
social reformism, the Manly Reformer. The (admittedly elusive)
loving masculine figure of Ente Katha whom the narrator keeps
yearning for effectively displaces the pedagogic reformer. The
pedagogic relationship between Man and Woman idealized by
reformism is replaced with that of the couple loving beyond
patriarchy—exemplified in the Radha–Krishna ideal. Her sexual
wanderings then become her search for the ideal masculine beyond
patriarchy, and not just ‘revenge’ on her husband, as some have
claimed (Harish 1995:44–53). Madhavikkutty thus reveals that the
housewife may have a domain beyond the domestic, a ‘private’ in
which the body’s pleasures are not forbidden: the Aesthetic Woman
bound to the domestic longs to be free, not to be in the public (which
is a frightening and alien space to her) but to reorder domestic space
on her own terms.
Thus disillusionment does underpin Ente Katha, but it is not of a
sort that justifies the objectification of women as with the late
modernists. K.P. Appan’s explication of the late modernists’
obsession with sex (which more often than not objectified women)
makes for an interesting contrast:
In truth, the explicit description of sexual feeling is linked to the
[universal-male] writer’s isolation. As a form of protest against the
helplessness that tightens around his genius [the writer] … exiles
himself from society out of his intense aloneness and embarks on the
quest for the ultimate truth of existence … he then relates to the
temporary reality that is sex. (Quoted, Pavanan 1988b:103)
The abhorrence of depersonalized sex, the claims to possess a
‘soul’ that wilted under male lust, the longing for male–female love
beyond patriarchy—all striking features of Madhavikkutty’s imagining
of the Aesthetic Woman in Ente Katha—are reinterpreted in late
modernist terms. The fine line that divides ‘carnal hunger’ from the
Aesthetic Woman’s passionate plea for communion with Man beyond
patriarchy is ignored. But perhaps we need to do more than question
the reduction of Madhavikkutty’s rebellious Aesthetic Woman swiftly
to the sexually carnal Woman-type of late modernism. Perhaps we
must raise the question of a female modernism afresh from a
feminist perspective, whether women authors in Malayalam have
created a ‘female or feminist modernism’ and how it differs from the
male version.
While this thesis may be firmed up (or given up) only through a
more rigorous reading of many women authors’ writings, including
Madhavikkutty’s, Ente Katha appears to differ in significant ways
from the masculine late modernism. In fact, the writings of
Rajalakshmy who wrote around these years and ended her career
prematurely by committing suicide in 1965, might be read as another
female-modernist response. If Madhavikkutty’s writing represents the
disillusionment with the promise of harmonious conjugal love held
out by community reformisms to women in the 1930s, in many ways,
Rajalakshmy’s writing is informed by a deep disillusionment with the
promise held out to women by political forces in the 1940s and
1950s, that they would be freed by entry into employment and the
public. In her writing, the spaces of intellectual debate, of politics and
the public are incorrigibly male and inhospitable to women. Her
female protagonists are all office-goers, teachers, lawyers or
researchers—who are in the public and even mobile, but carry
gendered burdens, trapped in domestic responsibilities and
obligations and have no language to articulate their plight. The shift
away from Lalitambika’s hopeful reconstruction is palpable. For
example, Rajalakshmy’s ‘Parajita’ (2003:31–46) resembles
Lalitambika’s ‘Viswaroopam’ (Antarjanam 2009:545–51) in that
protagonists of both stories are ‘incomplete mothers’ drawn towards
institutions outside the domestic. But while Madame Talat in
‘Viswaroopam’ is an ambitious woman who chooses this path,
Nirmala of ‘Parajita’ seems to be a victim shuttling between the two
worlds with no control over either—and no revelation seems to await
her, unlike Madame Talat. In Rajalakshmy’s ‘Makal’ (2003:47–65),
the ‘daughter’ is forced to carry the burdens of ‘progressive
liberation’ (she is a lawyer but would have rather been a poet); of
politics and journalism (she is a total misfit in both); of the visible
signs of mobility (she rides a bicycle but feels helpless before social
stigma towards women riding bicycles); of family sustenance, on top
of it all. The women in these texts have no language to express
desire; the futile promise of rationalistic liberation in which they are
trapped has not fructified and it does not allow them such a
language.12
A great deal of work on ‘female modernisms’ has been undertaken
by feminist literary criticism in Europe and the Anglo-American world,
which probes the differences between male mainstream modernisms
and the modernisms that women authors wrought. It has also been
established that women authors were equally important in the project
of ‘making it new’, thus considerably undermining the masculine self-
representation of modernism by authors and critics (DuPlessis 1985;
Marcus 1989; Scott 1990). Very many critics in Malayalam, radical
left and feminist, have been troubled by the apparent inability of
Madhavikkutty and Rajalakshmy to ‘take a firm stand’ on the
question of patriarchy. Perhaps this very feature characterizes
female modernism in Malayalam. Marianne DeKoven, writing about
Charlotte Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening, remarks that if male modernism displayed disgust with
the immediate literary and cultural past which drove it towards the
impulse to ‘make it new’, it was also coupled with a fear of the ‘new’,
projected as a fear of disintegration of the self. Women, however,
‘desired the freedom that only the new could offer. Yet they were
afraid of the still-ascendant patriarchal power that punished that
desire, whether that power was lodged in male dominance itself or
its enforced female self-repression’ (1989:35). She notes that these
texts are ambivalent on the question of women’s freedom: Chopin’s
narrative stance is shifting and self-cancelling; Gilman’s narrative
contradicts itself in complex ways. But does this mean that more
unequivocal, straightforward narratives will be more effective?
DeKoven points out that this is not so: ‘… given the depth and
intractability of the fear of punishment for female anger and desire in
these narratives, the inherent doubleness of the modernist form is
what allows the expression of feminist content at all. Cast more
straightforwardly in realist narrative it could have been too
threatening at that time …’ (p. 36). Indeed, this seems to be relevant
when we read Madhavikkutty’s work—in many of her texts of those
times as well as in Rajalakshmy’s, there is a fear ‘… accompanying
a set of feelings so threatening that the author herself must inscribe
in her central fictional structures a denial of them’ as DeKoven points
out (p. 36). This means, then, that if Madhavikkutty and Rajalakshmy
brought forth a modernism—which we need to explore more
rigorously, at greater depth—it may turn out to be a very different
modernism indeed.

FEMINISM AS PERMANENT OPPOSITION

Sarah Joseph’s work matured in the 1980s, when the socio-political
scenario had changed considerably. The 1980s in Kerala saw the
rise of an oppositional civil society that questioned many of the
fundamental truths of the leftist national-popular which had
sanctioned the exclusion and marginalization of many social groups
from the gains of democratization. Feminist groups began to be
formed from the mid-1980s and she herself entered feminist activism
in a visible way. The change this brought to her writing is too explicit:
the hysterics in her stories began to gain voice to talk back against
patriarchal power. The radical left homoaesthetic circle, which was
prominent during these years, represented a shift away from the
explicit or implicit denial of a public voice to women. Members of this
circle were the first to publish theoretical reflections on feminism in
Malayalam and think about a feminist aesthetic. Much of that story,
and of her consecration by the radical left homoaesthetic circle, has
been recounted earlier in this chapter.
One of the effects of such consecration has been particularly
deleterious to the possibility of multiple readings of Sarah Joseph’s
texts. Representing her writing as full-fledged feminism breaking out
for the first time, and as politically superior to all the other women
authors who wrote before her, had the effect of granting it a certain
singularity. It blocked inquiry into the manner in which her writing
both builds on and transforms the politics and aesthetics of her
precursors. Indeed, perhaps this is the most exciting aspect of this
writing: the political concerns of all her precursors as well as their
aesthetics are present in her writing, yet are completely transformed,
resonating with the intensified struggles of the late twentieth century,
precipitated by the increasing presence of predatory global
capitalism, elitisms of caste, religious fundamentalisms, and new
processes and forms of patriarchal control.
Take, for instance, the maternalism that is very prominent in the
stories of the Paapathara collection (1990/2012:205–75).
‘Chaavunilam’ (1990/2012:218–22) makes intertextual reference to
Lalitambika’s ‘Mulappalinte Manam’ (The Scent of Breast Milk)
(1960/2009:402–09). Indeed, at the end of the story, when the
Mother makes Unny (a pet name for a little boy) plant ‘the tree of
bread’ (appamaram), ‘the scent of breast milk wafted [in the air]’ (p.
221). The metaphor of breast milk for life-giving and sustaining
feminine energy has obviously survived across two generations of
women authors. However, Sarah Joseph’s maternal figures offer a
kind of ‘permanent opposition’ to power, unlike Lalitambika’s mothers
who bear in themselves a full-fledged alternative to the patriarchal
order that may well bid for hegemony. If Lalitambika’s mothers are
centres of (the possibility of) a Matro-centric order of gender, Sarah
Joseph’s mothers inhabit the very margins of a ruthlessly exploitative
capitalist-casteist patriarchy, carrying in themselves the seeds of
resistance and hope, and bear unblinking witness to its
depredations. The hope about the nation therefore is totally absent in
Sarah Joseph’s writing unlike in Lalitambika’s. Her mothers are
anguished and inconsolable figures of mourning. Many of her stories
refuse to talk about ‘real incidents of suffering’ or to historicize, but
spin dream-like narratives populated by characters who have no
names of their own, only metaphors for names. ‘Chaavunilam’, for
example, has a dream-like quality to it which points to a ‘beyond’ of a
terrible history of unrelenting destruction wrought by Sons who have
been borne by Mothers. But there are other stories in which such
glimmers of redemption are not offered, which (equally) refuse a
realism that would have indeed consoled the reader. Writing is not
the space of forgetting, reconciliation or healing, but its reverse—the
retention of the memory of pain, permanently in opposition to the
efforts to reconcile.
 Similarly, the yearning for the communion of the feminine with the
loving masculine beyond patriarchy, so prominent in Madhavikkutty’s
writing, takes a different turn in Sarah Joseph’s writing. If
Lalitambika’s stories imagined the joyful reunion of Woman and Man
through his return to the domestic after his realization of the futility of
Reformer-Man’s power and project, Madhavikkutty laments its
impossibility within the patriarchal conjugality that has taken shape in
this society. In Sarah Joseph’s writing, the space of the domestic
itself has to be abandoned if such communion is to be possible—the
Man driven mad by capitalist urbanism must run out of the home, out
of the arms of mother and wife, and merge with Nature. In ‘Nilavu
Ariyunnu’ (1994/2012:351–58) the loving wife cannot save her
husband who has been driven mad by capitalist urban existence.
She watches, as helpless as his mother—who is blind—as he seeks
water that will wash away the evil he feels has afflicted him. He has
returned to his matrilineal family—where women are indeed present.
However, the water trapped in the joint-family’s well cannot satisfy
him. He is missing and the search party looks for him in the well,
first:
… The lights and torches bent towards the cavernous depth.
Thankamani shuddered. The well-water lay still—a relentless, hard,
black. The moonlight fell on it and laughed. (p. 352)

He seeks out the river—the river that has been dammed, reduced to
subterranean streams. Here is where true communion takes place,
and where he must die in ecstasy:
The water in the sand-hole began to rise. It drenched Unnikrishnan’s
feet. He jumped around in the water in wild joy. Splashed about in it.
Threw up in delight the sand soaked with the cool water. Held out the
water to the stray cows and thirsty blades of grass. The river’s
breasts overflowed. There it was, bursting forth, a rivulet of amritham,
divine ambrosia! The water reached Unnikrishnan’s knees. The sides
of the sand-hole began to collapse. The hole was wider now. The
silent streams flowing beneath the river now congregated at his feet.
The sand below his feet sank and sank. Unnikrishnan splashed about
blithely in water that had reached his chest.
 … ‘Don’t come near me …’ he shouted. He stretched out his arms
and embraced the water. The edges and the bank of the water-hole
gave away some more. The River, the Giver of Infinite Love. Her
merciful gifts flowed towards him; they collected below his feet. The
water climbed to his neck. (pp. 357–58)
Sarah Joseph’s retelling of the Ramayana in several of her stories
(Joseph, G.S. Jayasri, and S.K. Nair 2003) revisits the tragedy that
has befallen Man which she etches in ‘Nilavu Ariyunnu’. This is
distinct from her stories that open up the patriarchal relations that
simultaneously bind together and separate women and men in
families, in which the men suddenly and painfully, if only
momentarily, awaken to the fact of their distance from the women
whom they were bound up with in family life.
The humour in Sarah Joseph’s writing has shades of both ‘feminist
humour’ and the ‘humour of ressentiment’. It is not surprising,
perhaps, that the feminist humour seems directed mostly at the
Syrian Christian community’s specific combination of restrictive
social norms and a no-holds-barred approach towards wealth
accumulation. Laughing at a community may affirm the authorial
position since it implies that the satirist has a definite position outside
from which the object of humour appears funny; it also evokes a
community of laughers that is contingent but extends further than
those who may share the position from which the joke is made.
Umberto Eco observes that unlike the comic, humour does not lead
us beyond limits, but rather gives us ‘a picture of the structure of our
own limits’, and ‘warns about the impossibility of global liberation,
reminding us of the pressure of a law that we have no longer reason
to obey. It makes us feel the uneasiness of living under a law—any
law’ (Eco 1984:8). The community of laughter is formed because ‘[I]n
humor we smile because of the contradictions between the character
and the frame the character cannot comply with. But we are no
longer sure that it is the character who is at fault. Maybe the frame is
wrong’ (p. 7). The ‘humour of ressentiment’, which is funny but does
not make us laugh, is found in her earlier stories on entrenched
conjugality like ‘Scooter’ (1990/2012:247–53) and ‘Dambathyam’
(1990/2012:240–47). Perhaps her writing has less of the humour of
ressentiment than Saraswati Amma’s. In any case it appears that it
may be profitable to rethink the strong connections that critics in
Malayalam have assumed (rather than demonstrated) between
Sarah Joseph and her.
Nevertheless, according to mainstream assessments until the
1990s, both these authors were often judged as marginal to the
canon because their writing seemed to stem forth from the particular,
the diverse, rather than the universal. However, the major difference
between their writings is crucial—it may appear to be a fine one, but
cannot be stressed enough. To my mind, Sarah Joseph’s writing
alerts us to the possibilities of ‘minoritarian feminism’ (even though it
does not achieve it) in a way that Saraswati Amma’s does not.
Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s critique of what
they call the ‘arborescent’ or ‘majoritarian scheme’, which is a
punctual system of five points—Man, Male, Adult, Woman and Child,
in that order—Pelagia Goulimari (1999) points out that:
From the point of view of the ‘arborescent’ or the ‘majoritarian’
schema of identity, feminism is self-expression and a critique of
domination, coming from one of its own subordinate points. From the
point of view of feminism, the ‘arborescent’ or ‘majoritarian’ schema
of identity provides it with a ready-made referent or political
constituency, ‘woman’—in spite of ‘her’ diversity and multiplicity. To
the extent that feminism relies on this universal referent to support
the validity of its claims, it corroborates the ‘arborescent’ or
‘majoritarian’ schema of identity and blocks the way to the desire of
becoming other. (p. 102)
She points out that a ‘minoritarian feminism’ should be critical of the
‘arborescent’ schema and stresses that ‘… feminism’s historic
responsibility [is] to keep this way open to its own and other
minoritarian movements, to its own and other subordinate points, so
that “woman” sheds its quality of being a universal referent and
becomes a multiplicity of collective reference-machines and
machines of expression’ (p. 103). It may be possible, I feel, to argue
that Saraswati Amma’s writing does not allow us to think of
minoritarian feminism at all, but Sarah Joseph’s writing does gesture
towards such a possibility—though it is a very tentative and even
problematic gesture.
And her writing does hint at the possibilities of what Deleuze and
Guattari (1983) have called ‘minor writing’. According to them, minor
writing has three distinctive features: it ‘deterritorializes’ the dominant
language, bringing up the many repressed dialects and variations
over which the dominant language was imposed, its representation
of the world is thoroughly politicized and it tends to articulate the
collective consciousness. Sarah Joseph’s much-acclaimed novel
Alahayude Penmakkal (1999) uses a local dialect of Malayalam
spoken in a part of Thrissur district by Syrian Christians and draws
upon cultural materials that have remained spoken, not written
(Joseph, Jayasri, and Nair 2003:64). It has also been read as
decentring the nation through thematizing the collective experience
of a provincial, disenfranchised people (Sudhakaran 2006). But the
glimmers of such possibility were evident even in her short stories of
the 1990s in which she tried to craft a new politicizing language,
precisely making use of marginalized meanings and dialects on
behalf of ‘Women’.
What makes one regard her writing as not minor writing, but
perhaps only a gesture towards it, is not the commonly voiced
anxiety about the recognition that she has been receiving from the
mainstream literary establishment. Preventing the effects of such
neutralizing pressures of the hegemonic is the job of ‘minoritarian
criticism’. As Abdul JanMohamed has argued, if minority texts are to
be effective as rhetorical practices, ‘a minority critical discourse
should articulate them as such’ (JanMohamed 1984:298). Rather the
caution stems from the fact that literary writing is a possibility largely
open to women of class and caste privilege all through the twentieth
century—a situation that remains largely unaltered today.
‘Minoritarian’ criticism, then, must remain open to the fact that all
of these writers are indeed limited by their specific upper-caste
locations. Take Lalitambika, for instance. While it is evident that
Lalitambika needs to be read within her specific context, we should
still ask, for example, how did her evocation of a motherhood that
effaces all boundaries of class and caste work then, and how does it
work now? How would we understand her much-admired short story
‘Manikkan’ (1939/2009:87–97), for example, which narrates the
subaltern’s immense capacity for love even towards beasts of
burden? I would think that it perhaps contests the dehumanization of
Dalit people by endowing them with sentiment, feeling—and
importantly, the capacity to be aesthetic, to love for its own sake and
not to some end—in the manner of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Merish
1996). Nevertheless, it is not clear that this strategic inversion of
representation—i.e. one which contests the common representation
of Dalit people, especially Dalit men as inhuman brutes—will
necessarily benefit Dalit people. It involves a certain feminization of
their representation and thus could also mean potential
disempowerment and denial of agency. It may also be possible to
ask what might have been the effects of Madhavikkutty’s inclusion of
minor voices in her writing and of her own claim that she wrote as a
stranger in her own language effectively. As in Lalitambika’s case,
would this too have ambivalent consequences, of both bringing
hitherto-unheard voices into writing and annexing them to the writer’s
cause? Saraswati Amma’s writing, I feel, needs to be strongly
critiqued for the flagrant elitism that is almost part of the agency she
endows many of her ‘heroines’ with.
As for Sarah Joseph’s writing, such questions have been raised by
contemporary Dalit intellectuals like K.K. Kochu and K.K. Baburaj
(2009), who ask whether her experiments in language have not
helped its reterritorialization rather than its deterritorialization. For
instance, what are the risks when we read the experience of
underprivileged Dalit and Adivasi women in Paapathara
(1990/2012:254–60) or ‘Attappady’ (1994/2012:298–304) as the
experience of ‘Woman’? It may render invisible the specific
experience of these women; nevertheless, the bodies of Dalit and
Adivasi women will continue to represent female victimhood devoid
of agency.
The new elite social position of these authors also informs their
representation of sexuality deeply. If Lalitambika accorded sexual
energy a place in the social order by representing it as the
fundamental energy of all creation (which therefore should not and
cannot be repressed) (Devika 2007a), Saraswati Amma remained
suspicious of its benefits within the patriarchal order, and in a way,
subsumes it to female homosociality. Madhavikkutty, who has been
credited with rehabilitating it, actually aestheticizes it. In Sarah
Joseph’s ‘Muditheyyamurayunnu’ (1990/2012:212–17), the female
body’s sexual energy must be transformed into the energy of political
resistance; in other stories, it should be turned into procreation
beyond the terms of patriarchy, for example, in ‘Prakashiniyude
Makkal’ (1990/2012:261–67). However, when nearly the same is
being imagined for the Dalit woman in ‘Veluthanirmithikalum
Karuthakannadikalum’ (1998/2012:383–91), the political effects may
be quite different. Perhaps this apparent unwillingness to deal with
sexuality directly is an indirect consequence of the intense
sexualization of the female body by the modernists. Contemporary
women authors who write against patriarchy, like K.R. Meera, who
entered the literary field after the dominant homoaesthetic circles
had lost much of their influence, display much less anxiety about
representing sexuality in all its ordinariness. It is worth noting that the
subaltern voice in Nalini Jameela’s autobiography (2006) is marked
for the manner in which it refuses to metaphorize sexuality either as
‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than the humdrum of everyday existence. Not
surprisingly, her book brought forth a storm of protest despite the fact
that it had almost no explicit descriptions of the sexual act.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that revisiting the major women
authors in Malayalam, who were also interested in representing
‘Women’ in the public, may yield more than just a non-teleological
literary history of writing that is arguably feminist. First, it may give us
a more specific history of elite women’s resistance to reformist
patriarchy13; second, it may also lead us to a local history of feminist
thought. Perhaps feminist critical practices may also be rethought in
this light. Present-day feminist critical practice in Kerala is often
haunted by the ghost of a certain preference for realism and the very
anxiety about the representation of sexuality mentioned above (as
observed, for example, by Thomas 2007). It is doubtful whether such
criticism even deserves to be called ‘minority criticism’. However, I
have argued that we need to go beyond ‘minority criticism’ to
‘minoritarian criticism’. And if the renewed feminist literary criticism in
Malayalam must work as ‘minoritarian’, then it must necessarily
make visible the limits of the feminisms of the privileged.
 4
Beyond Heroine-Worship

THINKING ABOUT MINORITARIAN CRITICISM

In this concluding chapter, I return to two issues alluded to at the
beginning of this book—the moral authority exercised by important
members of the literary public in debates about public politics and
the problems of the homoaesthetic circle as the dominant mode of
organizing communicative practice in the literary field.1 These
questions, I believe, are important when we consider the implications
of thinking of feminist literary criticism as ‘minoritarian practice’.
Pennezhuthu did not spawn an alternative mode of communicative
practice. One of the reasons for this was probably the fact that it was
often claimed by descendants of the adherents of social realism who
had been thrown into crisis by the end of actually existing socialism
in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s—and these authors and critics
then claimed ownership rights over the domain that it had opened
up. Nor did pennezhuthu challenge, fundamentally, the moral
authority claimed by the author or critic over others beyond the pale
of the literary public. It did go along with both feminist activism and
the work of the public intellectual—as Sarah Joseph’s trajectory in
the 1990s and after has revealed. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of
such practice to what I have been calling ‘minoritarian feminist
criticism’, I think, became evident in the controversy over the
publication and grand success of an autobiography produced by a
sex worker, Nalini Jameela, in 2005–06.
This chapter is concerned with the history of the literary figure’s
moral authority in Malayalee society and the controversy around
Nalini Jameela’s book, which questioned our fundamental
understandings of the very nature of ‘literature’ itself, and also
brought to view the privilege that underpins the figure of the public
intellectual. In the last section, I hope to think through these lessons
towards a mode of communicative practice with the help of feminist
readings of Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on plurality in politics.

BEYOND ROMANTIC REBELS

The moral authority of the literary figure in matters related to the
public and power, as must be evident from the discussion in the
earlier chapters, dates back to the modern Malayalam literary field.
The figure of the samskarikanayakan—‘cultural leader’—came to be
understood, soon, not only as possessing the writer’s authority but
also as the ‘true and unheard voice of the people’. This was asserted
in the 1940s and 1950s in the acrimonious debates between
Stalinists and left-leaning liberal humanists, when the latter insisted
on the independence of civil society against the incursions of politics
and the interests of the state. Responding to the communists’
insistence that writers reveal their political commitments, M.P. Paul
argued passionately that the Cold War situation, in which the world
was divided into two warring camps, called for a different sort of
commitment from ‘writers’:
… Should not at least a few stay at a distance from this vengeful
factional war? Is there not a group of people called intellectuals, and
are they not best suited for the peace mission? There is little doubt
that they will receive the support of the masses … Ordinary people
are peace-loving. But their wishes are hardly made public. We do not
hear their voice. We hear only the horror-inducing voices of a few
political parties and the government. The progressive writer has no
goal other than the uplift of the masses—the lakhs of people,
oppressed and silent … He imagines a world that is united in its
desire for well-being for all … when things are such, it is worth
 thinking about how relevant the question of partisanship is. (Quoted,
Onakkoor 1994:87)
The argument for moral authority, however, was not obscured.
Writing around the same period, the critic Kuttikrishna Marar, who
differed with the left-leaning liberal humanist critics and the
progressive realists but nevertheless shared their anxieties about the
demands that the Stalinists placed on authors, thought that Paul’s
response was inadequate. He thought that writers must simply
refuse to answer this question; otherwise they have no right to call
themselves samskarikanayakanmar. For, Paul’s response that
writers are on the side of peace and humanity will only provoke the
politicians—they will continue to ask, which humanity, of the
oppressor, or the oppressed? Which peace, that of capitalist slavery,
or of freedom? He then remarks:
… [I] take it that there is yet another faction, of the cultural leaders,
their own … It is something like the Red Cross; it should be allowed
to carry on its work unharmed by either side … then each writer must
ask himself [this question] and find an answer to it: ‘am I on the side
of cultural leadership, or on the side of opportunism?’ (Marar
1988:34)
Ever since, the meaning of samskarikanayakan has oscillated
between these two senses. A third sense was developed by the
early modernists, especially through the literary activism of M.
Govindan, in which intellectual-literary activism to shape a new
aesthetic sensibility was inextricably bound to shaping political
resistance to power. Govindan’s ‘friend-circles’ organized all over
Kerala were aimed at producing such a sensibility among the people.
M.K. Sanoo recalls a meeting of writers, artists and intellectuals at
Tavannoor in 1950, in which the leading lights of the times
participated:
The discussions that day reached the conclusion that artists should
strive to foster sensibilities proper to democracy among the people,
reaching out to them through poetry and drama … A specific culture
has to be created among the people if democracy is to flourish. It is
not automatically formed. It must be created through conscious effort.
 One of the media most apt to this task is literature. (Sanoo 2002:83–
84)
This differed from the ‘Schillerian project’ of the late nineteenth
century in that it aimed at shaping subjects who would be resistant to
governmental control of the state.
This continued to echo in the radical left homoaesthetic circle of
the 1970s and after. The short-lived experiment of the Janakeeya
Samskarika Vedi further radicalized the literary activist into the anti-
capitalist, pro-socialist cultural creator seeking to question bourgeois
cultural hegemony (Sreejith 2005). Nevertheless, the members of
this group sometimes faced criticism precisely on the grounds that
such activism conformed to bourgeois models. For example, in their
polemic in the 1980s against the critique of Marxism articulated by
O.V. Vijayan, who was commonly linked with late modernism,
Marxist intellectuals Bhasurendra Babu and Raghu accused
Satchidanandan of not being critical enough of Vijayan’s anti-
Marxism. They link this to the fact that despite being a Marxist
intellectual, his activism was not among the working classes but in
the reading public, which has no specific class character and is
dominated by the market—the publishing industry—and anti-
communists (c. 1986:328). In the 1990s and after, the literary public
intellectual came to prominence, and venerated authors like Paul
Zacharia and Sarah Joseph who aspired to be so, faced enormous
criticism from their liberal humanist and modernist peers (for
example, Prasad 2000).
And this public intellectual was cast more in the mould of Edward
Said’s (2002) understanding of the term rather than Russell Jacoby’s
(1987)—that is, in the French tradition. This referred to intellectuals
who work to challenge power and end an imposed silence. This
means that while the public intellectual articulates a clear political
position, she/he must be non-partisan. Jacoby’s public intellectual
too moves across different domains of knowledge and produces
critical insight in the public but is characterized more by her/his
command over non-specialist language and wide readership. But
perhaps most importantly, the putatively Saidian public intellectual in
contemporary Kerala was not really oppositional to the history of the
power of the literary figure I have sketched here—it still rests upon
the moral authority, the cultural weight, the immunity from partisan
interests, that literary authors have traditionally claimed. And
especially because the homoaesthetic circle has never really
functioned except as a hierarchical, if loose and informal, network
around a major figure, a critic or an author, granted all the above
claims of authority and/or immunity.
Indeed, this is all the more evident in the present in which hitherto
marginalized voices seem to have seized literature as a political
opportunity. Especially the genre of autobiography as the ‘text of the
oppressed and the culturally displaced, forging a right to speak both
for and beyond the individual’ (Swindells 1995:7). At this juncture,
how may we think of public intellectuals in the present effort to
revision feminist literary criticism, especially given the fact that in this
society, it is the privileged who reach the position of the intellectual—
a fact unmitigated by the recent entry of some women, many of
whom are feminists, into their ranks? How do we rethink public
intellectualism so that it does not lend itself to spawning hierarchical
homoaesthetic circles and to reaffirming the concerns and ideas of
the social and political elite in and about literature? I want to briefly
consider the autobiography by Nalini Jameela, a sex worker-activist,
which she chose to rewrite after the book had attained marked
success, and the controversy that broke out in 2005–06 around this
writing in Kerala. This is to reflect on the ways in which literature may
be perceived—differently—by non-hegemonic groups that have
hitherto been utterly marginal as either readers or writers to the
Malayalee literary public and the public sphere itself, and to raise
questions about the relevance of Saidian public intellectualism in this
context.

NEITHER KULINA NOR VESHYA

Njaan, Laingikattozhilali (I, a Sex Worker), by sex worker and activist
Nalini Jameela, was a controversial bestseller. Jameela’s work was
condemned as a ‘prurient money-spinner’ by the Patriarchs of the
literary field (Mukundan 2005), but it became more controversial
when it appeared in two versions (Jameela 2005, 2006). She did not
write both; she spoke. In the first version, and her speech was
transcribed and edited by an activist; she says that ‘friends’ helped
her prepare the second. Jameela belonged to a lower-middle class,
lower-caste (Ezhava) family, was removed from school at nine, and
worked as a labourer and a domestic worker before becoming a sex
worker. Later she became an activist and a filmmaker. The first
version appeared in the highly charged context of debate around the
neo-liberal onslaught and the rise of non-class forms of politics in
Kerala. The second version shares much with the first. Though in the
second she has certainly resisted the merging of her life story with
the liberalist manifesto of sex work, much is shared with the first
version. Indeed, much of the criticism directed against the first may
well be directed against the second: for instance, the direct attack on
feminists is toned down in the second version, but the sex worker
remains unrepentant.
Jameela’s entry into the public was through the attempts of some
NGOs to organize sex workers as part of AIDS-prevention
campaigns. Sex workers began to assert themselves publicly and
culturally, for instance, around the Malayalam film Susanna (2001)
(Bharadwaj and Menon 2002). By doing so, they asserted their right
to interpret a text in their own terms, in public. Indeed, the sex
workers’ identification with Susanna seemed linked to the fact that its
chief protagonist is highly endowed with Womanly qualities and
engages in multi-partner relationships—making a bid for inclusion.2
The differences between them and prominent feminists, already
taking shape then (Menon 2005), worsened. The ‘inadvertent
alliances’ entered into by feminist opponents of the legalization of
sex work (with the traditional moral right) (Rajan 1999) were all the
more evident. Certainly, there were interventions that sought to
complicate the picture. Feminists were reminded that the gap
between wifely and commercial sex is narrow (Raj 2006) and that
depicting sex-worker activism as imperialist conspiracy erases the
force of the self-assertions of marginal subjects (Vimal 2006).
Liberals were reminded that sex work is currently structured by
capitalism (Raveendran 2006), and that ‘male sexual need’ (Mathew
2006) is suspect. Conservatives also (perversely) linked feminists
and sex workers as equally condemnable (Habib 2006; Tiruvalil
2006). However, both sides continued to use the common
methodology of selective citing and quoting of statements by
Jameela.
Jameela’s feminist critics—literary critics, authors, activists—
regarded her narrative as the neo-liberal prostitute’s unacceptable
bid to popularize sex work and legitimize this ‘demeaning activity’
(Geetha 2005:17; Joseph 2005:26–27; Ajitha 2006:55–57). They
thus participate in the reformist construction of the evil/victimized
prostitute. Certainly, Jameela’s liberalist pronouncements on sex
work, the liberal disembodied self that underpins it and her ‘male
sexual need’ argument (Jameela 2006:116–19) may be critiqued.3
But the anti-patriarchal charge in defining the prostitute as a radically
disembodied ego, as not just a body, but its owner (Mukherjee
2002:210) cannot be simply denied. Critics often implied that
Jameela is essentially a saleable body masquerading as the owner
of one. Her salvation from bodily-ness, then, lies in a variant of
reformism, in rescue and rehabilitation to transform her into a mind-
centred Woman under the supervision of superior ‘minds’, possibly
feminists: hence the heavy moralism of Jameela’s feminist
opponents. Nor did they reflect on why commercial domestic work,
which is equally exploitative, onerous and sometimes involves bodily
services, has ‘neither been stigmatised by society nor been the
object of feminist critique in the way that prostitution has been’ (John
2002:245, emphasis in the original). Maybe because commercial
domestic work frees elite women for ‘greater leisure, paid labour
outside the home, or other more fulfilling involvements (including,
possibly, feminist activity)’ (ibid.) and in contrast the sex worker
seems a threat!
Jameela has appeared either as a ‘victim’ (Ajitha 2006:18; Chiryail
2006) or as a passive tool in the hands of neo-liberal reformers
(Ajitha 2006a:18; Devanandan 2006); in contrast, liberals have
emphasized her ‘agency’ (Nair, J.R. 2005). That both her opponents
and supporters are (masculinist) reformers is evident from the fact
that her own ‘scribe’, I. Gopinath, remarked that she may be a
‘puppet’ in the hands of vested interests when she rejected his
version of her life (Gopinath 2006:39). I argue that this obscures the
otherness of the voice which may be heard in Jameela’s writing: the
voice which belongs neither to the ideal Woman, nor her other, the
Prostitute, but a third, for whom either of these terms or their
opposition makes sense. The unflinching focus on Jameela’s sex
work obscures her class position as a poor labouring woman. For
instance, it has been observed that poor labouring women in Kerala
increasingly struggle to ‘marry off’ daughters with substantial
dowries, perceiving this as a ‘survival strategy and a rational
rejection of direct capitalist oppression’ (Lindberg 2001:339).
Jameela’s own planning to ‘marry off’ her daughter has close
similarities with such attitudes that Anna Lindberg captures in her
interviews with female cashew workers (Jameela 2005:127–28).
Secondly, the constant accusation made by her critics in their zeal to
depict Jameela as an ‘unrepentant sex trader’ willing to ‘let her
daughter pursue sex work if she chose it’ may lead to obscuring her
challenge to the prostitute stereotype discussed earlier. It ignores her
admission of intolerable working conditions in sex work and her
reluctance to encourage her daughter to take up sex work. And since
the possibility that the conceptual and moral oppositions that
structure elite society may not make sense to the non-elite remains
unconceded, Jameela’s statement continues to be read within those
very oppositions.
Importantly, the implication is that Jameela allows her family to be
open to the sex trade—and therefore her claims to possess the
domestic may appear annulled. This statement has been culled from
her replies in a pamphlet published by the Sex Workers’ Forum in
2003 (Jameela 2005:138–39), which is clearly impatient, if not
dismissive, of the socialist critique of globalization. Interestingly, this
has been appended to Gopinath’s version of her autobiography to
achieve a seamless unity between her life and the Sex Workers’
Forum’s political statements, in effect effacing her as an individual.
Thirdly, the debate obliterated the valuable implicit point in her
account of the changing institutional arrangements of sex work, that
it is as varied and historically evolved in Malayalee society as family
ties (Jameela 2005:32–34). This holds richer investigative
possibilities compared to both the positing of invariantly exploitative
sex work (Geetha 2005) and the fall-from-eminence narrative that
Jameela offers elsewhere (2005:136). Fourthly, her work has been
condemned as ‘prurient literature’, neo-liberal contagion and bogus
autobiography, supported by both conservative understandings of
autobiography and postmodernist scepticism (Babu 2005), equally
denying the possibilities of self-assertion by marginal subjects, albeit
in different ways. Fifthly, the political implications of Jameela’s
pointing to the possibility of sex workers becoming ‘experts’ in sex
therapy may be missed in the near-hysterical chorus that sees this
as evidence of her advocacy of the sex-tourism industry. This is
accentuated by the appending of the above-mentioned pamphlet in
the first version. Yet her rooting of this claim in ‘subjugated
knowledges’ gained in the course of life as a sex worker rather than
in knowledge acquired through institutions definitely has undeniable
political implications. Lastly, some interesting self-contradictions in
the text were ignored. Jameela implies that sex work can include the
offering of affect and warmth, for instance, in the claim that sex
workers are trying to create ‘a collective of friends who love each
other’ and not ‘husbands and wives who torture each other’
(Jameela 2005:139). Yet she hints that is not easy at all (Jameela
2005:31, 42).4 But for Reformer-Intellectuals, this is evidence of
either her dishonesty or her non-rigorous thinking. This apparently
leaves untouched their neat constructions of Nalini Jameela as the
very embodiment of the liberal position on sex work.
The refusal to accept the image constructed for her by her ‘scribe’
is perhaps the most striking feature of the second version of
Jameela’s autobiography, which she prepared with the help of
‘friends’ (2006). Indeed, the text dismantles the image central to the
first version, of Jameela as a ‘liberated’ woman outside mainstream
society and therefore somehow less subject to patriarchy (contrasted
with feminists who are not). Two male intellectuals (one of whom
happens to be my favourite ‘genius’) introduce Jameela in the first
version, one claiming feminist credentials and espousing ‘male
sexual need’ in the same breath, and the other articulating the late
modernist position of human sexuality with strong reformist
overtones. The second version, in contrast, opens with her note and
a series of highly visual descriptions of childhood and adolescence,
with considerable lingering on the colour, light, mood and texture of
the scenes. The style of argumentation of the first is very much that
of rational intellectual debate in Kerala, drawing upon elite
intellectuals and texts (Jameela 2005:119). The style of argument
changes distinctly in the second, with ample use of analogies,
popular sayings and comparisons (Jameela 2006:117–18). In the
first version, anti-feminism appears almost as a necessary correlate
of her liberal individualism; both are highly toned down in the
second. Also, while the domestic is relatively peripheral in the first
version, it acquires a new visibility in the second. Most crucially, in
the first version, Jameela’s coming into contact with the NGO
organizing sex workers is presented as a major turning point in her
life; the second version posits no such break. Indeed, in the
introduction she says that her decision to rewrite was also driven by
her desire to highlight her ‘strengths before she became an activist’.
And importantly, as is clear from the introduction, her challenge is to
conventional autobiography itself.
The many ‘slips’ in Jameela’s recent text thwart homogenizing or
essentializing descriptions. First, there is no flawless liberal in Njaan
… Definitely, Jameela’s opinions about the nature and conditions of
sex work are shaped within a liberal understanding; however, the
narration of experiences as a sex worker upturns these, bringing into
view undeniably exploitative sex worker–client relations. Indeed,
through this very narration she resists, mocking or infantilizing the
client, even claiming a pedagogic relationship with him (Jameela
2006:37–42, 131–35). Speaking of her own routine ways of
organizing work, she spells out the ‘limits’ she has set to her
liberalism—or there is implicit acknowledgement that conforming to
feudal norms is a condition of successful sex work. She claims to be
‘… insistent that I wouldn’t wiggle my hips and arms to catch anyone;
the client had to come to me’ (Jameela 2006:37). And that she never
quibbles over remuneration (Jameela 2006:121). Nor is a
homogenized image of the ‘sex worker’ presented, though she does
deploy it in specific contexts elsewhere. Here, there is an effort to
make distinctions of location and agency. Importantly, in her
narration, the constraints that shape her agency are amply visible
(for instance, Jameela 2006:124). Indeed, unavailability of the
‘freedom to refuse’, which she identifies as a key component of the
sex workers’ ‘free’ existence, is often implicitly admitted (Jameela
2006:31, 48–49, 77).
Jameela’s response to the furore makes an interesting contrast
with that of Madhavikkutty to the controversy around Ente Katha.
The latter continued to repel the late modernist interpretation of her
work as the narrative of the ‘woman of unending hungers’ until her
last days (Madhavikkutty 2005). Her critique of entrenched feminine
ideals has also continued in her writing and public statements. While
imitations of Ente Katha, and writings depicting her in shockingly
vulgar terms appeared widely,5 she fought back defiantly, defending
the Aesthetic Woman against entrenched middle-class outrage. In
the autobiographical series titled Ente Lokam in the Malayalanadu in
1976, she lashed out against her critics:
When I published the first part of my autobiography in Malayalanadu,
many of my conservative relatives began to hate me intensely.
Especially the women. My individuality, used to and nourished by
freedom, caused their repression to burn all the more. Not even a
leper must have been ready to love them … they would never get a
chance to grow their fingernails long and colour them. Their loosened
hair-locks reeked of onion and fish. The stench of decay from the
kitchen verandah filled their lives. How can one be surprised, at their
hatred … (Madhavikkutty 1976:3)

Madhavikkutty has had to face the totally inappropriate question

(as the circumstances of writing were elegantly presented in the very
first chapter): why did she write Ente Katha? In reply she has often
‘disowned’ it as just a story written because her husband wanted her
to write sensational stories and make money (Madhavikkutty
2006a:56–57). While this may well be a ‘retreat’ from feminist
positions (Harish 1995:52), I suggest that we look more closely at it
in the light of the discussion in Chapter Three. This refusal of the late
modernist reading appears to have been done at the cost of the
Aesthetic Woman. Indeed, her citing of domestic and socially
acceptable reasons (irrespective of their truth) may be read as a
‘retreat’ into the good Domestic Woman–bad Public Woman
opposition, when late modernist readings remain supreme, and
when repeated attempts to elaborate Aesthetic Womanhood have
continued to be poorly perceived.
Madhavikkutty, however, had both a literary and social address
before Ente Katha. Her early work appeared under the name
‘Nalappat Kamala’, clearly pointing to her literary legacy, indicative of
her family which included many important contributors to high
Malayalam literature, such as her maternal grand-uncle Nalappat
Narayana Menon and her mother Balamani Amma. Much before
Ente Katha, her critique of entrenched feminine ideals had begun to
be noticed (Nair 1971). It was possible for her to claim that what was
presented as an autobiography was just another piece of literary
writing, another expression of her ‘genius’. It is striking, though, that
she did not claim that it was a work of genius, but rather a crass
commodity produced to be sold. Like ‘peanuts or fried gram sold in
the streets’ as she once remarked. Early enough, admirers argued
that Ente Katha’s literary merit compensated for its omissions or
misrepresentations (for example, Shanmughadas 1972). And so her
‘withdrawal’ of the text as ‘just another story’ was affordable.
Jameela had none of these advantages, yet risked commercial
failure and public disapproval to ‘correct’ her image. This alerts us to
the differing significance of autobiography as a mode of self-
assertion to women differently located in Malayalee society. For
Jameela, a successful autobiography was her way of both
establishing herself as a public person and testifying to the
oppression of sex workers in public. Jameela’s position in the social
and political fields in Kerala, however, forced her to confront
reformers directly and resist their yokes. She could not simply
withdraw the first version; she had to rewrite it.
 THE NEED FOR ‘COLLECTIVE INTELLECTUALS’
I think the story above says much about the possible treatment of
voices rendered marginal and unacceptable within the literary public,
though sex workers are probably worse off than any other
marginalized group. This says much about the strength of patriarchal
sexual norms intact within it; only some of the objections to the
autobiography were around the fact that it was her speech and not
her writing. Clearly what we witnessed was a bid by a member of a
non-hegemonic group to seize certain ‘opportunities’ afforded by this
strange assemblage called ‘literature’ which has caught the
imagination of theorists as diverse as Jacques Derrida and Jurgen
Habermas in diverse ways.
Marianne DeKoven (1996) highlights this quality of literature citing
Derrida’s interview with Derek Attridge. Derrida speaks of literature
as a modern formation closely linked to democracy—seemingly
inseparable from ‘what calls forth a democracy’—and rejects notions
of the ‘inherently literary’. According to him, ‘… [that] a body of texts
called “literary” can, at a certain historical conjuncture, serve
strategic purposes is not the result of any transcendent properties
that these texts possess, any permanent access to the truth. Rather,
it is an opportunity that can be seized’, Attridge observes (quoted,
DeKoven 1996:136–37). And if we are to follow Kevin Pask’s reading
of Habermas, the ‘opportunity’ afforded by literature was already at
the heart of the bourgeois public in its earliest days:
The public sphere was made up of private individuals who worked out
the new form of exchange in salons and coffeehouses—but also,
perhaps even most powerfully, in the family itself. The family of
course describes a considerably broader range of experience than
the salon or the coffeehouse, and it has tended to remain submerged
in the literary reception of Habermas … This was at least in part
ideological: the family’s ‘intimacy, apparently set free from the
constraint of society, was the seal on the truth of a private autonomy
exercised in competition’ (46). But, thus enlarged, the domain of
intimacy and self-clarification was not so easily enclosed, and the
world of letters offered an alternative public sphere that could, and
often did, include women and disenfranchised men. As a result, the
 bourgeois public sphere was from its beginnings riven by the
contradiction between the specious universality represented by male
property holders and the insistent claims of those who constituted a
republic of letters. Habermas emphasizes this point: ‘The fully
developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious
identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who
came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the
role of human beings pure and simple’ (56, emphasis in the original).
Even if the former used the latter as a mere ideological screen, it
could neither simply contain nor co-opt it. (2004:253)
Literature, then, contains seeds of resistance within, which
continually complicate its institutionalization. The bid by non-
hegemonic groups to ‘seize the opportunity’, thus, transforms the
very manner in which literature may be perceived. But, as DeKoven
notes, it is also clear that their empowerment through literature lies in
appropriating ‘precisely that cultural capital which is different from
that made available through access to popular culture’ (1989:138).
There is of course the common argument that such writing now finds
space because ‘great literature’ is in decline which may be indicative
not so much of the decline of genius, as the fact that what one
presented in or was looking for in literature has now changed
somewhat. Perhaps one looks not only for the expressions of
‘genius’ but also for the testimonies of historical actors. And it is also
true that even the most resistant writing gets disarmed through
incorporation into the awards system or through the educational
system. But this need not be a disadvantage as the thrust of critique
has to necessarily and constantly change. How do we rethink
feminist criticism and practices of literary communication that do not
side with the elites and rubbish non-hegemonic voices that do not
consign them to the very abjection which they had successfully
overcome?
Here I find the suggestions of the feminist commentators of
Hannah Arendt very helpful. For example, Joanne Cutting-Gray
(1993) notes, in Arendt, alterity is the historical human condition of
being the other or different—not something that affects only the
marginalized but the human condition itself, integral to human
individuality. Nevertheless, it is not the egocentric modern individual,
who sees all others as hostile to the self, as persistent threats to its
integrity, that can fulfil the need for political community. In fact she
points out that ‘sympathetic sisterhood’ or ‘brotherhood’ tends to
treat the difference of others as a problem to be resolved through
incorporating the other in the self and hence does not make space
for the ‘unique, distinct person’ who neither relinquishes the political
demand for respect of her/his difference, nor allows her/his self to be
assimilated into the mainstream for the sake of social assimilation.
The unique person also cannot be part of the sympathetic sisterhood
that views all others with suspicion. Cutting-Gray notes that the
trouble with sympathetic sisterhood is that ‘what are ties with similar
others are mistaken for the bonds of communicative practice’ (p. 45)
and it is not sufficient for building a political community. Instead, ‘…
seeing the difference of all things through our alteritas opens us to a
plurality of differences, to other perspectives. This insight into
multiplicity sharpens the political edges of our otherness.’ This would
help us to imagine a female political subject who ‘historically reflects
on otherness as contingent and no longer as a totalitarian, hostile
other’ (p. 49). Her reflections on the kind of politics it enables are
worth quoting in full:
First, the politics of alterity radically pluralizes otherness by
recognizing that any attempt to banish, control, or socially engineer
difference implicitly bars us from knowing ourselves and others.
Second, it opens the public space to these differences even among
feminisms by encouraging disagreement and the responsibility to
understand and respect what we reject. That means understanding
and bearing the burden of events, neither denying their existence nor
submitting to their brutality. Third, a genuine feminist politics of
alterity, because it cannot be limited to feminism, implicitly responds
to all who have shared the historical condition of otherness. That is, it
recognizes female alterity not as belonging exclusively to one special
group or human being marked by history but as a political and
therefore locally situated ‘fact’ that temporally outweighs other
questions of who we are. It suggests a philosophy, that is, a
hypothetical structure of the political, suited for a world in which
 respect for rights keeps open innumerable places for the meeting of
theory and practice … (p. 49)
In other words, this allows us to think of a feminist literary
communicative practice that is not a weaker version of the
homoaesthetic circle. In fact the homoaesthetic circle conforms well
to Arendt’s sketch of groups formed by several egocentric individuals
huddling together against the other, spending an immense amount of
energy preoccupied with the purity of their identities (i.e. on who is
qualified to join the group and who isn’t), and less on the question of
forging the coalitional politics of difference.
Finally, what notion of the public intellectual does this entail?
Perhaps we need to creatively draw upon and transform Pierre
Bourdieu’s (2003) notion of the ‘collective intellectual’ which he
proposed in the wake of neo-liberalism sweeping France. The
‘collective intellectual’ hardly refers to her/himself, but to a critical
network of Foucault’s (1977) ‘specific intellectuals’ who possess
expertise in their particular fields and engage politically with her/his
field of specialization. This critical network acts together against neo-
liberalism. The ‘collective intellectual’ is not the Romantic
hero/heroine; nor is he/she a cog in a larger structure of opposition.
Rather, he/she contributes to informed intellectual militancy against
neo-liberalism. It is this model of combined intellectual activism that
may help us resist the relentless depoliticization of critical
intellectuals by the mass media which recuperates them as ‘experts’
or ‘rebels’ to be profitably utilized.
I have, then, argued against Romantic sisterhood as an alternative
to the homoaesthetic circle; instead, I plead for a practice that is
respectful towards otherness. This is not out of anger towards
pennezhuthu and the feminist critics who have become its owner-
defenders; rather the contrary. In fact, I want this book to end
echoing Susan Sontag: ‘[To] name a sensibility, to draw its contours,
and to recount its history, requires deep sympathy modified by
revulsion’ (2000:288).
 Notes

1 THE TRIUMPH (AND THE HARRUMPH) OF THE MALAYALEE MALE

CRITIC
1. This national-popular attained mature shape in the mid-twentieth
century in and through the movement for the formation of a
linguistic state of Kerala out of the three Malayalam-speaking
regions of Malabar, Kochi and Travancore.
2. Robin Jeffrey’s well-known book on the ‘Kerala Model’ of social
development in the absence of sizeable economic growth (2003)
highlights this feature. The title of his work, Politics, Women and
Wellbeing, expresses, almost in formulaic terms, the gendered
nature of social domains in Kerala. It could be perhaps
paraphrased as ‘(Masculinist) Politics + (Domesticated) Women =
Wellbeing’!
3. By ‘modern gender relations’ I mean relations that presuppose the
division of the world into ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ domains deemed
appropriate for men and women respectively and to which they are
to remain committed for life by virtue of their sexual orientation.
They are bound by compulsory heterosexism, and often draw
upon ‘biological foundationalism—i.e. the strong claim to represent
the ‘natural foundations’ of society—but also arguing that for this
‘natural’ aspect to manifest, a great deal of social effort, from legal
institutions to modern education, is necessary. I have written
elsewhere on the unfolding of the ‘order of gender’ in late
nineteenth–early twentieth century Kerala (Devika 2007).
4. However, what was more worrying was the fact that many leading
feminists—including feminist authors and critics—donned the
Reformer-Man’s mantle in this debate.
5. This is the very modern idea of the author as the radically
independent, original, autonomous, self-creating originator of the
literary text, closely associated with the English Romantic poets
(Bennett 2009). It has been argued that the Romantic notion of
‘genius’ is intensely masculine, affirming creativity as a male
attribute—however, as others have argued, femininity is not
foreign to the ‘genius’, who is often credited with emotional
receptivity, while women are excluded from the category itself
(Battersby 1990).
6. ‘Gynocriticism’ is a term coined by Elaine Showalter in 1985 to
refer to a specific mode of feminist literary criticism that was
concerned with women as producers of meaning, and the
implications of this for literary history, themes, genres and
structures. She distinguished it from ‘feminist critique’ which she
understood as concerned with critical analysis of literature
produced by men (Showalter 1986).
7. In her study of the de-canonization of George Sand, Naomi Schor
(1988) points to the manner in which idealism is often mapped
onto femininity, and realism, onto the masculine.
8. This is all the more reason why both a re-reading of women’s
writing in these non-elite genres rendered invisible but located in a
minor part of the literary field and the writing of women authors
from lower castes and other communities, who entered high-
literary culture and public in and through the political and social
shifts of the early twentieth century—for instance, Muthukulam
Parvaty Amma, Mary John Tottam and others—is so necessary for
the renewal of feminist literary criticism.
9. The late nineteenth century saw the publication of Vidyavilasini
(1881), Keralamitram (1881), Keralapatrika (1885), Malayalee
(1886), Nazrani Deepika (1887), Vidyavinodini (1889); Malayala
Manorama (1890), Bhashaposhini (1896) and others. Some of
these focused exclusively on literature, and others devoted
considerable attention to it; they were published from different
parts of Kerala and linked the separate regions in a common
literary public.
10. My translation. All quotes from Malayalam sources in this book
are translations. They are mine, unless indicated otherwise.
11. The use of pseudonyms by women authors in Malayalam is a
topic that deserves attention. Even the successful authors, for
example, Saraswati Amma and Madhavikkutty (‘Madhavikkutty’ is
a pseudonym of Nalappat Kamala), used them, sometimes early
on in their careers to ward off opposition from their families and to
avoid rejection on grounds of gender (see Jayachandran
1986:143; Bhaskaranunny 1987:247) and sometimes to enter
other forms of writing, for instance, newspaper articles on public
issues (for example, Saraswati Amma).

2 WOMANWRITING = MANREADING?
1. Though the novel has been debated, critiqued, and analysed
threadbare, I am yet to see any work that reads it as writing by a
woman author born and raised in an elite community and family in
the politically turbulent years of left hegemony, of the same
generation as other Malayalee women writers like Gita Hiranyan or
Priya A.S. Nor have I seen much rigorous work that looks at her
writing in contrast with the many different major male authors—
O.V. Vijayan, M. Mukundan, Paul Zacharia, Sethu—who wrote
about Kerala while located elsewhere. It may be interesting to
consider the implications of location and gender in writing about
Malayalee national belonging, especially in the writings of
Arundhati Roy whose sense of belonging is complicated from
several different directions.
2. Feminist activists who organized two major women’s literary
camps in the early 1990s—one by the Streepadhan Kendram at
Kudamaloor in 1992 and another at Thrissur later—remember the
interest shown by many individual critics associated with the
organized left as well as by its cultural organizations. Mini
Sukumar, who organized the first of these camps, remembers how,
within months of the camp, the Purogamana Kala Sahitya
Sangham, associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
conducted a camp for women writers. She remembers her unease
 with a major session of the camp, a talk on ‘The Sense of Direction
[appropriate for] Women Writers’ [Ezhuthukarikalude
Dishabodham], given by a leading male literary-cultural critic,
K.E.N. Kunhahammed, which seemed to be setting out clear
political and aesthetic directions for women’s writing. Bindu
Menon, who was one of the organizers of the camp at Thrissur,
also remembers how the discussions in the camp were polarized
around the vague but very real feeling that pennezhuthu involved a
distinct set of requirements for the ‘correct’ representation of
women’s existence reminiscent of, though not the same as, the
demands of socialist realism in earlier decades. Personal
communication with Mini Sukumar and Bindu Menon.
3. This strategy of defence is perhaps not the best one. It will only
facilitate the assimilation and integration of women’s writing into
the humanist or radical left canon too easily. This is evident in
ecological criticism which reads texts by women authors as
echoing ecological concerns. G. Madhusoodanan, a noted
ecological critic in Malayalam, writes: ‘The dispute over whether
pennezhuthu exists in Malayalam or not is totally irrelevant today.
Also, the sphere of Woman’s experience should not be reduced
through such a label. If so [we] will have to call Man’s writing
aanezhuthu (Manwriting) … it does not require a gendered label …
the creative work that ensues from Woman’s experience opens to
us a new domain of experience in literature. Those who call it
porezhuthu (Fightingwriting) forget something—that all writing is
porezhuthu in some sense’ (Madhusoodanan 2000:344).
4. Leslie Rabine describes ecriture feminine as ‘writing that
circulates in the unconscious and precedes the spoken word, that
makes silence and absence speak, or of the feminine as a sexual
undecidability that goes beyond and subverts the opposition
between the male and the female’ (1987–88:19).
5. It is also worth mentioning that modernism in Malayalam has been
credited with such disruption of entrenched language. Augustine
Joseph, for instance, argues that it crafted a ‘naked language’ in
place of the ‘sanitized language’ of the Romantics and the
progressive realists and substituted a connotative language for a
 denotative one. Words that were proscribed in ‘decent’ literary
language, like mula (breast), yoni (vagina), arthavam
(menstruation) and lingam (penis) were used, as also an
‘aesthetics of disgust’ (Joseph 1997:82–88). However, if this
undermined phallocentrism in language, it also further reaffirmed
the masculine gender of the author and entrenched the
objectification of women in modernist texts.

3 SWIMMING AGAINST MANY TIDES

1. The ‘political’ referred to those issues in which power imbalances
seemed to ensue from unequal access to material resources and
state power among individuals/groups. ‘Social’, it appeared,
referred to such issues in which power imbalances could be
remedied through moral education or culturing of
individuals/groups—the whole project of ‘uplift’ (Devika 2007).
2. However, the complexity of the notion of romantic love, its
possibility to exceed institutionalized marriage, was evident from
Palliyil Gopala Menon’s response to Achyuta Menon, that what the
latter took to be ‘adultery’ in the play was actually the
consummation of true love (‘Kalyaninatakam: Athinte
Tatparyaartham’, Vidyavinodini 2 [2] 1891:219–22).
3. Consider the following ‘high Hinduized’ account by the leading
poet, critic and scholar of the early twentieth century Ulloor S.
Parameswara Iyer, who was identified with the conservative
elements in Malayalam literature of those times: ‘In truth, after
some time had elapsed since her Beloved husband [Brahma, the
Creator according to Hindu mythology] had created this world as
an admixture of pleasure and pain, of benign, active and evil
qualities, the benevolent and gentle [Goddess of Learning]
Saraswati felt compassion at the suffering of women and men
steeped in toil and trouble, and hence that Goddess entered the
tongue of Valmiki [to whom the Ramayana is attributed]and began
to dance …’ (Report of the Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishad
1927/1993:66).
4. Though by this time there was a woman writer, J. Parukkutty
Amma, who had published a novel, Sreesakthi Athava
Apalkkaramaaya Maala (1914) (Mentioned in Pillai).
5. It is interesting to note how little this exchange has been
discussed. It is hardly ever mentioned by those who discuss the
writings of these authors or their biographies, or the history of
progressive literature. Gopalakrishnan’s (1987) widely read history
of the Progressive Writers’ Movement absorbs Lalitambika into the
movement readily along with Takazhi and others but does not
mention the conflict between them. K.P. Saratchandran who does
mention it in his essay on Lalitambika’s writings, places the blame
on her—he claims that she was naive, too believing of the canards
that were being spread about the realists by their foes, that they
were advocates of sexual excess (Saratchandran 1983:302). It is
also interesting that Balakrishna Pillai’s admirers have remained
blind to the fact that the emphasis he placed on adapting particular
politico-literary interventions from Europe to suit the local context
seems to have given way when it came to ‘scientific discourses’
like Freudian psychoanalysis (for example, Sreekumar 2006:18).
In some writings, he seems to have read Freud as essentially
describing and not prescribing; nevertheless, in others, Freudian
psychoanalysis was thought to be uncovering the eternal, hence
implicitly prescriptive truths of masculinity and femininity.
6. There have been other readings that do not necessarily employ a
critical-historical perspective (See Alexander 1989; James 1996;
Ravindran 1993).
7. In Louisa of Premabhajanam, she creates the quintessential
Romantic virile heroine in rebellion against the dominant order of
gender with her lonely and painful quest for the impossible. The
true communion of the sexes is declared impossible within the
patriarchal order—and thus Louisa, when she finally finds her true
mate, must escape with him through death.
8. The popular image of Saraswati Amma was apparently of a ‘man-
hater’. Though this is not supported by her friend K. Surendran, he
makes a comment quite similar to those made by many observers
about Mary McCarthy: ‘Saraswati Amma will not give anyone
 anything, she will not take anything from anyone. [I] haven’t seen
an individuality so bent on separateness in any other woman. That
wasn’t conceit, no, not at all! She was a loner by birth’ (Surendran
1983:364).
9. The argument that modernism in Europe was a challenge to the
evolutionary paradigm of human culture and history, which realism
clearly defended, is common enough. Thus modernism is often
perceived as the radical estrangement of the subject. Many
prominent critics in Malayalam share this view. However, more
recent work that insists on going beyond the self-representations
of modernism, on stressing that it be treated as discourse and be
deprivileged as ‘literature’ (somehow exempt from the rules that
govern any other discourse), points out that even for the futurists
and the vorticists, the break from the past was only partial.
Christina Hauck, for example, argues that ‘the formal innovations
so often taken to be the hallmark of modernism contain a set of
rather old-fashioned ideas about men, women, sex, and
reproduction’. Thus modernists were not so much ‘making it new’,
as ‘making it seem new’. The vorticists, for example, failed to
break with evolution when it came to sexual reproduction,
expressing anxieties about abortion (Hauck 2003:234–35).
10. See the answer by well-known journalist and intellectual K.
Balakrishnan to a question in his column in Janayugam 15 (17) 2
January 1972:12; Mutukulam Gangadharan Pillai, in Malayalanadu
3 (40) 27 February 1972:2; A. Sahadevan, Malayalanadu 3 (8) 5
December 1971:48; Subaida Nileswaram, Malayalanadu 3 (29)
December 1971; P.I. Koya, Malayalanadu 3 (3) 31 October
1972:2–3.
11. See M.R. Balakrishnan Nair, Malayalanadu 3 (27) 28 November
1971:2; Augustine, Pala, Malayalanadu 3 (32) 5 December
1971:48; Sanjeevan, Malayalanadu 3 (29) 12 January 1972:2;
Jayaprakash, Malayalanadu 3 (32) 15; Sobha D., Malayalanadu 3
(38) 2; C.K. Sebastian, Malayalanadu 3, (38) 13 February 1972.
12. Whether one may legitimately talk of a singular ‘late modernist
depiction of the feminine’ is a question that remains to be
addressed seriously. But depicting women as passive
 objects/receptacles of desire was quite prominent in late
modernism, if one thinks of it as a movement wider than the iconic
figures. Non-literary statements on late modernism made by
prominent spokespersons like M. Mukundan often blatantly
reduced women to objects of male desire and writing. See,
especially, Mukundan 1970, where he claims that the ‘writer of the
new generation did not touch the food and woman he got in jail,
lost in thought of the gallows that awaited him …’ (p. 13).
Discussing the objects of writing, it is the example of Woman that
he elaborates (ibid.).
13. The feminist critic Geetha (2002:596) suggests that the
writings of P. Valsala, a popular woman author in Malayalam
who has also been granted considerable attention by the literary
mainstream, be read as representing a female modernism.
Other readings have tried to establish her as the feminist version
of socialist realism (Pavanan 1988:384–94).

4 BEYOND HEROINE-WORSHIP
1. The homoaesthetic circle may seem to have gone into a decline,
but this impression may be misleading. It may be mutating—for
example, it seems that new homoaesthetic circles are being
formed across linguistic borders. Some of these, for example, the
new mixed group being formed around the new Malayalam and
Tamil poetry by younger poets, effectively brings together many
perspectives, including those of Dalits and women, thus moving
away from the strict form of the homoaesthetic circle. Recent
developments, however, indicate that this experiment may not be
easy, that all interests may not be smoothly integrated unless the
present form is decisively breached and democratized. The
popularity of the Tamil writer Charu Nivedita and the formation of a
group of writers, readers, publishers and editors around him may
also be mentioned here. I thank S. Sanjeev for pointing out this
latter grouping to me.
2. The director T.V. Chandran said, ‘Susanna does not lose her
inherent femininity, her softness and kindness, despite the
 adversities she suffers’ (Jose 2000). A prominent organizer of sex
workers, A.K. Jayashree, claimed that the film ‘empowered’
women engaged in multi-partner sex (2006).
3. Feminist critical scholarship of women’s ‘ownership’ of their bodies
may be relevant here (Poovey 1992). Projecting women as agents
of rational self-regulation and choice may be tied to greater
subjection to governmental technologies as, for instance, in
discussions of the state’s advocacy of ‘willed pregnancy’ (Ruhl
2002). Indeed, the threat from ‘globalization’ may well not be to
‘decent’/socialist society, but to sex workers, in the institution of
strict self-surveillance among them. This, however, is not to rule
out the possibility of ‘unintended consequences’.
4. She once mentions falling in love with a client (Jameela 2005:35–
36). That pleasure with him begins with his recognition of her as a
person, through sight, through the face beyond blind touch, is
significant. This, it seems, is what makes sex with him non-
alienating.
5. Indeed, in many interviews she has recalled what trying times
those were for her and her family. The highly sensationalized Time
article was translated and published in Malayalanadu 8 (36):6–8,
27 December 1976. It is widely rumoured that there were novels
written targeting her as a nymphomaniac woman author. There
was a spurt of interest in the autobiography of ‘public women’ soon
after: Cinerama carried autobiographies of Shirley Temple and the
popular Malayalee star Ragini (advt., Janayugam 15 [17], 2
January 1972). Janayugam published an ‘autobiographical novel’
by a young woman, Vijayakumari, which promised to be a
‘shocking story’ after seeking its readers’ ‘permission’!
(Janayugam 15 [28]:6–11, 26 March).
 References

ARTICLES IN ENGLISH
Adorno, Theodor. 1977. ‘Commitment.’ Trans. Francis McDonagh. Aesthetics
and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, 177–95. London: New Left Books.
Alexander, Meena. 1989. ‘Outcast Power: Ritual Displacement and Virile
Maternity in Indian Women Writers.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 19
February, 367–72.
Amma, Bhageeraty. 2005. ‘Women and Literature.’ Trans. J. Devika. Her-Self:
Early Writings on Gender by Malayalee Women, ed. J. Devika, 136–45, first
published in 1931. Kolkata: Stree.
Arunima, G. 2003. ‘Pennezhuthu—“Women’s Writing” and the Politics of
Gender in Contemporary Kerala.’ India in the Age of Globalization:
Contemporary Discourses and Texts, ed. Suman Gupta, Tapan Basu, and
Subarno Chatterjee, 114–43. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library.
——. 2005. ‘Friends and Lovers: Towards a History of Emotions in 19th and
20th Century Kerala.’ Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods,
ed. Bharati Ray. ICPR Series on Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture,
139–58. New Delhi: Sage.
Berg, Maggie. 1991. ‘Luce Irigaray’s “Contradictions”: Postmodernism and
Feminism.’ Signs 17 (1): 50–70.
Bharadwaj, Reshma, and Bindu M. Menon. 2002. ‘Inventing Selves: The Sex
Workers’ Movement in Kerala and the Reception of the Film Susanna.’
Paper presented at Sacred Heart College, Ernakulam, Kerala.
Bharucha, Rustom. 1997. ‘Where “Eternal India” Meets the YPO: Fifty Years of
Dependence.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 21 June, 32 (25): 1458–64.
Burke, Carolyn. 1980. ‘Introduction to Luce Irigaray’s “When Our Lips Speak
Together”.’ Signs 6 (1): 66–68.
Butler, Judith. 1987. ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva.’ Hypatia 3 (3): 104–
18.
Cixous, Helene. 1975. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Feminisms: An Anthology
of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price
Herndl, 347–62. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Cutting-Gray, Joanne. 1993. ‘Hannah Arendt, Feminism, and the Politics of
Alterity: “What Will We Lose if We Win”.’ Hypatia 8 (1): 35–54.
DeKoven, Marianne. 1989. ‘Gendered Doubleness and the “Origins of
Modernist” Form.’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8 (1): 19–42.
——. 1996. ‘Cultural Dreaming and Cultural Studies.’ New Literary History 27
(1): 129–44.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1983. ‘What is a Minor Literature?’ Trans. R.
Brinkley. Mississippi Review 11 (3): 13–33.
Devika, J. 2003. ‘Beyond Kulina and Kulata: The Critique of Gender Difference
in the Writings of K. Saraswati Amma.’ Indian Journal of Gender Studies 10
(2): 201–28.
——. 2006. ‘Housewife, Sex Worker and the Reformer: Controversies over
Women Writing their Lives in Kerala.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 29
April, 1675–83.
——. 2007a. ‘Lust for Life: Desire in Lalitambika Antarjanam’s Writings.’
Sexualities: Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism, ed. Nivedita Menon,
236–54. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Devika, J., and Praveena Kodoth. 2001. ‘Sexual Violence and Predicament of
Feminist Politics in Kerala.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 18 August,
3170–77.
Duren, Brian. 1981. ‘Cixous’ Exorbitant Texts.’ SubStance 10:39–51.
Eco, Umberto, V.V. Ivanov, and Monica Rector. 1984. ‘Frames of Comic
Freedom.’ Carnival, ed. Thomas E. Erickson, 1–9. New York: Mouton.
Fischman, Susan C. 1992. ‘Even As We Speak: Woman’s Voice and the Myth
of Echo.’ Sexuality, the Female Gaze, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and
Society, ed. Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers, 87–102. Selinsgrove:
Susquehanna University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual.’ Radical
Philosophy 17:12–14.
Friedman, Susan S. 1991. ‘Post/Poststructuralist Feminist Criticism: The
Politics of Recuperation and Negotiation.’ New Literary History 22 (2): 465–
90.
Gallop, Jane. 1983. ‘Irigaray’s Body-Politic.’ Romanic Review 74 (1): 77–83.
George, Rosemary M. 2000. ‘Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading My Story.’
Feminist Studies 26 (3): 731–63. Goulimari, Pelagia. 1999. ‘A Minoritarian
Feminism? Things to Do with Deleuze and Guattari.’ Hypatia 14 (2): 97–120.
Harish, Ranjana. 1995. ‘My Story: An Attempt to tell the Female Body’s Truth.’
Perspectives on Kamala Das’ Prose, ed. Iqbal Kaur, 44–53. New Delhi:
Intellectual Publishing House.
Hauck, Christina. 2003. ‘Abortion and Individual Talent.’ ELH 70 (1): 223–66.
Hesse, Carla. 1989. ‘Female Authorship and Revolutionary Law in France,
1750–1850.’ Eighteenth Century Studies 22 (3): 469–87.
Hiranyan, Gita. 2002. ‘Sara Joseph and Gita Hiranyan—A Dialogue.’
Samyukta 2 (1): 188–219.
Irigaray, Luce, and Sara Speidel. 1983. ‘Veiled Lips.’ Mississippi Review 11 (3):
93–232.
Jacobus, Mary. 1982. ‘Is there a Woman in this Text?’ New Literary History 14
(1): 117–41.
James, Jancy. 1995. ‘From Veneration to Virulence: A Case for Women’s
Literary History in Malayalam.’ Social Scientist 23:10–11, 98–111.
——. 1996. ‘Feminism as Social Commitment: The Case of Lalitambika
Antarjanam.’ Indian Literature, May–June, 26–37.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. 1984. ‘Humanism and Minority Literature: Towards a
Definition of Counter-Hegemonic Discourse.’ Boundary 2:12–13, 281–98.
Jayashree, A.K. 2006. ‘Susanna in an “Immoral” World.’ www.thrani.com
(accessed 2 January 2007). John, Mary E. 2002. ‘Response.’ From the
Margins 2 (1): 243–45.
Jose, D. 2000. ‘Unconventional, Daring!’ www.rediff.com, 15 July (accessed 5
January 2007).
Kamuf, Peggy. 1982. ‘Replacing Feminist Criticism.’ Diacritics 12 (2): 42–7.
Katrak, Ketu. 1996. ‘Post-Colonial Women’s Colonised States: Mothering in
Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Kamala Das’ My Story.’ Journal of
Gender Studies 5 (3): 273–91.
Kettilamma, K.M. Kunhulakshmi. 2005. ‘Literature and Womankind.’ Trans. J.
Devika. Her-Self: Early Writings on Gender by Malayalee Women, ed. J.
Devika, 48–51, first published in 1915. Kolkata: Stree.
Kishwar, Madhu. 1984. ‘Indian Women: The Continuing Struggle.’ In Search of
Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi, ed. Madhu Kishwar and
Ruth Vanita, 1–49. London: Zed Press.
Kofman, Sarah. 1982. ‘The Economy of Respect: Kant and Respect for
Women.’ Social Research 49 (2): 385–410.
Kumar, Radha. 1989. ‘Contemporary Indian Feminism.’ Feminist Review
33:20–29.
Lloyd, David. 1985–86. ‘Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller: Aesthetic Culture and the
Politics of Aesthetics.’ Cultural Critique 2:137–69.
Menon, Bindu M. 2005. ‘Identification, Desire, Otherness: Susanna and Its
Public.’ Deep Focus, January–March, 61–69.
Menon, Dilip M. 2007. ‘A Local Cosmopolitan: Kesari Balakrishna Pillai and the
Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala.’ Tapasam 2:3–4, 383–412.
Merish, Lori. 1996. ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Aesthetics of Middle-Class
Ownership.’ American Literary History 8 (1): 1–33.
Miller, Nancy K. 1982. ‘The Feminist Critic and her Fictions.’ Diacritics 12 (2):
48–53.
Mukherjee, Sanjeeb. 2002. ‘The Female Body and the Liberal Self.’ From the
Margins 2 (1): 203–13.
Nair, J. Rajasekharan. 2005. ‘Sex, Lies, and a Book.’ Savvy Online, 4 August
(accessed 21 January 2007).
Namboodiri, D.D. 1999. ‘Caste and Social Change in Colonial India.’
Perspectives on Kerala History, ed. P.J. Cheriyan, 426–55.
Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Gazetteers, Govt of Kerala.
Noble, Marianne. 1997. ‘The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin.’ Yale Journal of Criticism 10:295–320.
Pask, Kevin. 2004. ‘The Bourgeois Public Sphere and the Concept of
Literature.’ Criticism 46 (2): 241–56.
Pease, Allison. 2000. ‘Readers with Bodies: Modernist Criticism’s Bridge
across the Cultural Divide.’ Modernism/Modernity 7(1): 77–97.
Petek, Polona. 1990. ‘Narcissus and Echo at the Movies.’
http://www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au/community/conferences/WLB/petek.html
(accessed 10 March 2010).
Pillai, Meena T. 2008. ‘The Thousand and One Nights of Storytelling.’
Malayalam Literary Survey, January–March, 104–11.
Poovey, Mary. 1992. ‘The Abortion Question and the Death of Man.’ Feminists
Theorize the Political, ed. J. Scott and J. Butler, 239–56. London: Routledge.
Pryse, Marjorie. 2000. ‘Trans/Feminist Methodology: Bridges to
Interdisciplinary Thinking.’ National Women’s Studies Journal 12 (2): 105–
18.
Rabine, Leslie W. 1987–88. ‘Ecriture Feminine as Metaphor.’ Cultural Critique
8:19–44.
Rajan, Rajeshwari Sunder. 1999. ‘The Prostitution Question(s): (Female)
Agency, Sexuality and Work.’ Re/productions 2, April.
Ramas, Maria. 1980. ‘Freud’s Dora, Dora’s Hysteria: The Negation of a
Woman’s Rebellion.’ Feminist Studies 6 (3): 472–510. Ranciere, Jacques.
2002. ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of
Autonomy and Heteronomy.’ New Left Review 14:133–51.
Raveendran, P.P. 2009. ‘A Poet, a Critic, and the Dialectic of the Indian
Renaissance.’ Texts, Histories, Geographies, 99–113. Hyderabad: Orient
Blackswan.
Ruhl, Lealle. 2002. ‘Dilemmas of the Will: Uncertainty, Reproduction and the
Rhetoric of Control.’ Signs 27 (3): 641–63.
Said, Edward. 2002. ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.’ The Public
Intellectual, ed. H. Small, 19–39. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schor, Naomi. 1988. ‘Idealism in the Novel: Recanonizing George Sand.’ Yale
French Studies 75:56–73.
Scott, Joan W. 2001. ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity.’
Critical Inquiry, 284–306.
Showalter, Elaine. 1986. ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics.’ The New Feminist
Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, 125–43. London: Virago.
Sontag, Susan. 2000. ‘Notes on “Camp”.’ The Best American Essays of the
Century, ed. J.C. Oates and R. Atwan, 288–302. New York: Houghton-
Mifflin.
Spivak, G.C. 1981. ‘French Feminism in an International Frame.’ Yale French
Studies 62:154–84.
Sreejith, K. 2005. ‘Naxalite Movement and Cultural Resistance: Experience of
the Janakeeya Samskarika Vedi in Kerala, 1980–82.’ Economic and Political
Weekly, 10 December, 5333–37.
Streip, Katharine. 1994. ‘“Just a Cérébrale”: Jean Rhys, Women’s Humor, and
Ressentiment.’ Representations, 45:117–44.
Sudhakaran, C.B. 2006. ‘Writing the Nation the “Other” Way: Sara Joseph’s
Alahayude Penmakkal.’ ICFAI Journal of English Studies 1 (1): 12–25.
Suleiman, Susan R. 1985. ‘(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of
Female Eroticism.’ Poetics Today 6 (1 & 2): 43–65.
——. 1988. ‘A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-
Garde in France.’ Yale French Studies 75:148–72.
Tharamel, Umar. 2008. ‘Reflections on the New Story Constructs.’ Malayalam
Literary Survey, January–March, 112–16.
Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita. 1993. ‘Introduction.’ Women Writing in India. Vol.
II, 1–40. New York: The Feminist Press.
Toor, Saadia. 2000. ‘Indo-Chic: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Post-
Liberalization India.’ SOAS Literary Review 2.
Udayakumar. 2007. ‘The Public, the State, and New Domains of Writing: On
Ramakrishna Pillai’s Conception of Literary and Political Expression.’
Tapasam 2:3–4, 413–41.
Winnett, Susan. 1990. ‘Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and the
Principles of Pleasure.’ PMLA 105 (3): 505–18.

BOOKS IN ENGLISH
Battersby, Christine. 1990. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic.
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Bennett, Andrew. 2009. The Author. New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Trans.
Loic Wacquant. London: Verso.
Brightman, Carol. 1992. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World.
New York: Clarkson Potter.
Cavallaro, Dani. 2003. French Feminist Theory: An Introduction. London, New
York: Continuum.
Cixous, Helene. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Trans. Sarah
Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press.
——. 1998. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. London, New York: Routledge.
Devika, J. (Trans. and Comp.). 2005. Her-Self: Early Writings on Gender by
Malayalee Women. Kolkata: Stree.
——. 2007. En-Gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early
20th Century Keralam. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
——. 2008. Individuals, Householders, Citizens: Malayalees and Family
Planning. New Delhi: Zubaan.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1985. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies
of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Ellman, Mary. 1979. Thinking about Women. London: Virago.
Hart, Lynda. 1994. Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of
Aggression. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. C. Porter. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Jacoby, Russel. 1987. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of
Academe. New York: Basic Books.
Jeffrey, Robin. 2003. Politics, Women and Wellbeing: How Kerala Became a
Model. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kofman, Sarah. 1985. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1987. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Lindberg, Anna. 2001. Experience and Identity: An Account of Class, Caste
and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, India. Lund: Lund
University Press.
Marcus, Jane. 1987. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McCarthy, Mary. 1961. On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946–1961. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
Mellor, Anne K. 1993. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge.
Moses, Claire Goldberg, and Leslie Wahl Rabine. 1993. Feminism, Socialism,
and French Romanticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nair, N. Srikantan, and Sarah Joseph. 2005. Retelling the Ramayana: Voices
from Kerala. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Padma, V. 2009. Fiction as Window: Critiquing the Indian Literary Cultural
Ethos since 1980s. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. 1993. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the
Politics of the Body. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Scott, Bonnie Kime (Ed.). 1990. The Gender of Modernism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Swindells, Julia. 1995. The Uses of Autobiography. London: Taylor and
Francis.
Walker, Nancy. 1988. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

ARTICLES IN MALAYALAM
Achyutan, M. 1985. ‘Lalitambika Antarjanam.’ Cherukatha, Innale, Innu, 228–
32. Kottayam: Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
Ajitha. 2006. ‘Interview.’ Mathrubhumi Weekly 83 (42): 12–18.
——. 2006a. ‘Dilip Rajinte Feminist Jaadakal.’ Mathrubhumi Weekly 83 (45):
55–57.
Amma, Ambady Karthyayani. 1993. ‘Streekalum Sahityavum.’
Sahityaprabhavam (comp.) 157–67. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Amma, B. Bhageeraty. 1921. ‘Antarjanangal.’ The Mahila 1 (8): 268–70.
Arjunan, Vellayani. 2002. ‘Pennezhuthinu Oru Mukhathezhuthu.’ Pennezhuthu,
v–viii. Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Babu, P.V. Prakash. 2005. ‘Anubhavangalum Aavishkkaravum.’ Mathrubhumi
Weekly 83 (4): 46–48.
Baburaj, K.K. 2008. ‘Deshatheyum Vamshatheyum Ezhuthunnathu Streekalo?’
Mattoru Jeevitam Saadhyamaanu, 28–30. Kottayam: Subject and Language
Press.
Chandrika, C.S. 2010. ‘Kazhinho Pennezhuthinte Kalam?’ [Interview with
Chandramathy]. Madhyamam Weekly, Women’s Day Special Issue, 9
March, 46–51.
Chiryail, Jose. 2006. Letter to the editor. Mathrubhumi Weekly, 4 December,
83 (40): 5–6.
Devadas, M.S. 1991. ‘Premavum Purogmanasahityvum.’ Tiranhedutha
Prabandhangal, 28–82. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Devanandan, K.V. 2006. Letter to the editor. Mathrubhumi Weekly, 8 January,
83 (45): 4.
Deepika. 1936. Editorial. ‘Iniyum Aalochana Avasanichittille?’ 14 August, 2.
Ezhuthacchan, K.N. 1990. ‘Shuddhakalaavaadam.’ Tiranhedutha
Prabandhangal, 11–16. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Geetha. 2002. ‘Malayaaliyude Kudumbaghatana Saahityathil.’ Nammude
Sahityam Nammude Samooham, ed. M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 3, 574–606.
Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
——. 2005. ‘Sadhanavicharana (Navamutalittam Vaka).’ Madhyamam Weekly,
2 September, 16–24.
Gopinath, I. 2006. ‘Ajithaikku Snehapoorvam.’ Mathrubhumi Weekly, 5
February, 83 (49): 36–39.
Habib. 2006. Letter to the editor. Mathrubhumi Weekly, 8 January, 83 (45): 5–
6.
Hussain, Shamshad. 2009. Nyoonapakshathinum Lingapadavikkumidayil.
Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Joseph, Sarah. 2000. ‘“Kanneerum Kinavum”—Vimochanavum.’ Nammude
Sahityam Nammude Samooham, ed. M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 1, 261–94. Thrissur:
Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
——. 2005. ‘Veshyavritti Enna Vargaprasnam.’ Madhayamam Weekly, 2
September, 25–28.
Joseph, Sarah, G.S. Jayasri, and Sridevi K. Nair. 2003. ‘Ezhuthu Bhashayile
Samaramanu.’ Pacchakkutira 3:63–82.
Kesavadev, P. 1972. ‘Enikku Tonnunnatu.’ Janayugam, 23 April, 15 (33): 5–8.
Kurian, Sheeba M. 2007. ‘Streepaksharachanayil Ninnu Streerachanayilekku.’
Tapasam 3 (1 & 2): 126–35.
Leelavati, M. 2000. ‘Feminist Saahityaniroopanam.’ Saahityathile
Dishaabodham, 157–74. Kottayam: Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana
Sangham.
——. 2002. ‘Swatanthryalabdhikku Sheshamulla
Streeswatanthryaavishkaranam Malayalasahityathil.’ Nammude Sahityam
Nammude Samooham, ed. M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 3, 631–778. Thrissur: Kerala
Sahitya Akademi.
——. 2006. ‘Antarjanathinte Swapnam, Snehathiloode Maanavamochanam.’
Kaumudi 8, July–September, 77–81.
Madhavikkutty. 1976. ‘Bahutantreeka.’ Malayalanadu, 19 December, 8 (30): 2–
4.
——. 2005. Interview, Pacchakutira 1 (7): 6–11.
——. 2006a. Interview, M.N. Karassery, Shariat: Chila Varttamanangal, 21–62.
Kozhikode: Pappiyon Books.
‘Madhavikkuttiute Kathaalokathil’. 2002. Malayalam Weekly, 22 March, 26–27.
Madhusoodanan. G. 2000. ‘Ecofeminismavum Kathayum.’ Kathayum
Paristhithiyum, 338–54. Thrissur: Current Books.
Malayala Manorama. Editorial. 1929. ‘Antarjanangalute Unarchcha.’ 8 June, 2.
Marar, Kuttikrishna. 1988. ‘Sahityakaranmar Ethu Cheriyil?’ Charchayogam,
30–34. Kozhikode: Marar Sahitya Prakasham.
Mathew, Binoy. 2006. Letter to the editor. Mathrubhumi Weekly, 8 January, 83
(45): 7.
Menon, C.P. Achyuta. 1994. C.P. Achyuta Menonte Niroopanangal, ed. and
comp. T.T. Prabhakaran. Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Mukundan, M. 1970. ‘Kaalam Njaangalude Koode.’ Malayalanadu 2 (2): 13–
20.
——. 2005. ‘Sahityattile Nava Aasaktikal.’ Mathrubhumi Weekly, 13 November,
83 (37): 34–40.
——. 2009. ‘Interview with K.P. Appan.’ K.P. Appan: Vaayanayute Vasantham,
comp. C. Unnikrishnan, 111–18. Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of
Languages.
Mundassery, Joseph. 1981. ‘Nanayaate Meenpidikkunnavar: Fine Artsum
Useful Artsum.’ Mundassery Kritikal. Vol. 3, 23–33. Thrissur: Current Books.
Nair, Kalarkodu Vasudevan. 1971. ‘Tarishunilattinte Kathakal:
Madhavikkuttiyude Kathaprapanchattiloode Oru Paryadanam.’ Janayugam
15 (4): 8–12.
Nair, M.K. 1971. ‘Sahityavarabhalam.’ Malayalanadu, 2 January, 3 (32): 14–
15.
Nambiar, P. Sankaran. 1993. ‘Jeevalsahityam.’ Sahityanishkudam, 25–35, first
published in 1943. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Padmanabhan, T. 2000. ‘Sahityadarshanam Putiyanootandil.’ Mathrubhumi
Weekly, 14 May, 20.
Panikkar, C. Ayyappa. 1985. ‘Chiramjeevikal.’ Ayyappa Panikkarude
Lekhanangal 1950–80, first published in 1969. Kottayam: DC Books.
Pavanan. 1972. ‘Sahityakarante Darshanam.’ Janayugam, 14 May, 15 (36): 6–
9.
——. 1988. ‘Lalitambika Antarjanam.’ Pavanante Tiranhedutha
Prabandhangal, 347–55, first published in 1985. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
——. 1988a. ‘Kamala Das: Vibhalasnehathinte Kavayitri.’ ibid., 366–74, first
published in 1985.
——. 1988b. ‘Adhunikasahityavum Laingikatayum.’ ibid., 96–100, first
published in 1979.
Pillai, A. Balakrishna. 1984a. ‘Yuvajanasahitya Sammelanam.’ Kesariyude
Sahityavimarshanangal, 742–45, first published in 1935. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
——. 1984b. ‘Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishad.’ ibid., 745–47, first published
in 1935.
Pillai, K.C. Kesava. 1958. ‘Poyi Jagathinnoru Jangamadeeparatnam.’
Appendix to B. Kalyani Amma, Vyaazhavattasmaranakal, first published in
1916. Thrissur: Mangalodayam.
Pillai, M.P. Krishna. 1971. Letter to the editor. Malayalanadu 3 (20): 3–6.
Pillai, P.K. Narayana. 1964. ‘Avataarika.’ Sri Kalakkathu Kunjan Nambiarude
60 Tullal Kathakal, ed. Cheppad K. Achyuta Warrier. Kollam: Sriramavilasam
Press.
Pokker, P.K. 2002. ‘Purogamanasahityathinte Vartamaanam.’ Nammude
Sahityam Nammude Samooham, ed. M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 3, 526–73. Thrissur:
Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Prabhakaran, N. 2002. ‘Puratekkulla (Akatekkulla) Vazhikal.’ Nammude
Sahityam Nammude Samooham, ed. M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 3, 394–434.
Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Raj, Dilip. 2006. ‘Veshyavritti Feministprasnamenna Nilayil.’ Mathrubhumi
Weekly, 18 December, 83 (42): 19–20.
Rajakrishnan, V. 1997. ‘Maranathinte Katha.’ Cherukathayude Chhandass,
72–80. Kottayam: DC Books.
Rajeevan, B. 1983. ‘Kalayum Prathyayasastravum.’ Kalavimarsam: Marxist
Manadandam, ed. Ravindran, 59–99. Kochi: Nila Publications.
Ramakanthan, Kilimanoor. 1995. ‘Upanyaasakaaranaaya Kerala Varma.’
Kerala Varma Smarana, comp. K. Ramachandran Nair, 127–30.
Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 2001. ‘Ezhuthu, Stree, Samooham: Atmanishthatayude
Nihitarathangal Madhavikkuttiyude Kathakalil.’ Aksharavum Adhunikatayum,
23–37. Kottayam: Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
Raveendran, A.K. 2006. ‘Khushboovum Charitryavum.’ Sameeksha, January,
88:15–21.
Raveendran, P.P. 1997. ‘Samakaleenakavita: Oru Moolyavichaaram.’
Idapedalukal: Saahityam, Siddhaantam, Raashtreeyam, 29–37. Kottayam:
DC Books.
——. 1997a. ‘Streerachanayute Charivukal.’ ibid., 66–75, first published in
1993.
——. 2002. ‘Teevra Idatupakshavum Malayaalasaahityavum.’ Nammude
Sahityam Nammude Samooham, ed. M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 3, 435–65. Thrissur:
Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Ravikumar, K.S. 2008. ‘Aamugham.’ Introduction to Lalitambika Antarjanam,
Manikkanum Mattu Kathakalum. Kottayam: DC Books.
——. 2009. ‘Aamugham.’ Introduction to Lalitambika Antarjanathinte Kathakal
Sampoornam, xiii–xxviii. Kottayam: DC Books.
Ravindran, N.K. 1993. ‘Ammamarute Sankatangal.’ Kerala Padhanangal 3:3–
13.
——. 2009. ‘Interview with Madhavikkutty.’ Mathrubhumi Weekly, June 14–20,
87 (14): 20–23, recorded in 1990.
Sanjayan (M.R. Nair, pseud.). 1970. ‘Taravathu Ammalu Amma; Oru
Anusmaranam.’ Sanjayan, 1936 –le Haasyalekhananagal. Vol. 3, 163–64.
Kozhikode: Mathrubhumi.
Saratchandran, K.P. 1983. ‘Ambilikkalayum Anthinakshatravum.’
Aksharakalayude Chaitanyam, 274–314. Kottayam: Sahityapravarthaka
Sahakarana Sangham.
Satchidanandan, K. 1983. ‘Srishti, Swatantryam, Saundaryam:
Vairuddhyatmaka Niroopanathinu Oru Aamugham.’ Kalavimarsham: Marxist
Maanadandam, ed. Raveedran, 1–58. Kochi: Nila Publishers.
——. 1989. Introduction to Nervazhikal, 6–15. Sultan Battery: Modern Books.
——. 1990. ‘Muditheyyangal: Sarah Josephinte Chila Kathakale
Kendreekaricchukondu Malayalasahityathinte Streepakshathekkuricchu Oru
Vichaaram.’ Paapathara by Sarah Joseph, 1–49. Thrissur: Current Books.
——. 2002. ‘Abhinavasaahiti.’ Nammude Sahityam Nammude Samooham, ed.
M.N. Vijayan. Vol. 3, 779–820. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Shanmughadas, A. 1972. ‘Swantham Kathayum Anyakathayum.’
Malayalanadu, 4 June, 4 (3): 4–7.
Shifa, S. 2002. ‘Pennezhuthu: Porulum Prasaktiyum.’ Pennezhuthu, ed. N.
Jayakrishnan, 12–36. Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Soman, P. 2009. ‘Sargaswathanthryattinte Padayaali.’ K.P. Appan:
Vaayanayute Vasanatham, comp. C. Unnikrishnan, 198–205.
Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Surendran, K. 1983. ‘Sahityathile Anchadi Anchinchu.’ Surendrante
Prabandhanangal, 11–32, first published in 1951. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
——. 1983a. ‘Ottappetta Oru Pratibhasam’. ibid., 360–70.
Sushamakumari, K.S. 2002. ‘Prameyavum Bhashayum Pennezhuthil.’
Pennezhuthu, ed. N. Jayakrishnan, 1–11. Thiruvananthapuram: State
Institute of Languages.
Thomas, C.J. 1987. ‘Bhashayile Ibsen Prasnam.’ N. Krishna Pillayum
Sanskarika Rangavum, ed. and comp. V. Chandrababu, Kowdiar
Ramachandran, and Ezhumattoor Rajaraja Varma, 246–49. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
——. 2000. ‘Vimarsanathe Patti.’ Anveshanangal, 64–67. Kochi: Niyogam
Books.
Thomas, Yakob. 2007. ‘Maamsanibadhamalla Ragam.’ Tapasam 3:1–2, 113–
25.
Vimal, T.N. 2006. Letter to the editor. Mathrubhumi Weekly, 1 January, 83 (44):
4
Warrier, N.V. Krishna. 1987. ‘Lalitambika Antarjanam.’ Mananangal
Nigamanangal, 258–62. Kottayam: DC Books.
 BOOKS IN MALAYALAM
Abdulkhadar, Vakkom M. 1946. Chitradarshini. Thrissur: Saraswati Publishing
House.
Amma, B. Kalyani. 1958. Vyaazhavattasmaranakal. Thrissur: Mangalodayam
Press.
Amma, K. Saraswati. 1999. Saraswatiammayude Sampoornakritikal.
Kottayam: DC Books.
Amma, T. Ammalu. 1913. Bhaktamaala. Kollam: Sri Rama Vilasam Press.
Antarjanam, N. Lalitambika. 1960. Agnipushpangal. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
——. 1980. Agnisakshi. Thrissur: Current Books.
——. 1991. Atamakathaikku Oru Amugham. Thrissur: Current Books.
——. 2009. Lalitambika Antarjanathinte Kathakal Sampoornam. Kottayam: DC
Books.
Antarjanam: Oru Padhanam. 1969. Comp. Antarjanam Shashtyabdhapoorty.
Celebrations Committee: Ramapuram.
Azhikode, Sukumar. 1998. Malayala Sahityavimarsanam. Kottayam: DC
Books.
Babu, Bhasurendra, and Raghu C. 1986. Mandabuddhikalude Marxist
Samvadam. Thiruvananthapuram: Pustakaprasadhaka Sangham.
Babu, I.V. 2001. Keraleeyanavoddhanavum Nambutirimarum. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
Basheer, M.M. 2004. Aadyakaala Streekathakal. Kozhikode: Lipi Publications.
Bhaskaranunny, P. 1987. Antarjanam Mutal Madhavikkutty Vare. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
Bhattatiripad, V.T. 1988. Karmavipakam. Thrissur: Best Books.
——. 1990. V.T. Yude Kathakal. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Chandrasekharan, M.R. 1999. Keralathile Purogamanasahityathinte
Charitram. Kozhikode: Olive Books.
Chandrika, C.S. 2000. K. Saraswati Amma. New Delhi: Kendra Sahitya
Akademi.
Geetha. 1999. Devadootikal Maanjupovathu. Kottayam: Sahityapravarthaka
Sahakarana Sangham.
Gopalakrishnan, P.K. 1987. Purogamanasahitya Prasthanam: Nizhalum
Velicchavum. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Jameela, Nalini (retold by I. Gopinath). 2005. Oru Laingikattozhilaliyude
Atmakatha. Kottayam: DC Books.
——. 2006. Njaan, Laingikattozhilali. Kottayam: DC Books.
Joseph, Augustine K. 1997. Adhunikata Malayala Novelil.
Thiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages.
Joseph, Sarah. Forthcoming. Sarah Josephinte Kathakal Sampoornam.
Thrissur: Current Books.
Kerala Sahitya Parishad. Report of the Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishad,
Edappally. 1927/1993. Reprinted as Sahitya Prabhavam. Thrissur: Kerala
Sahitya Akademi.
Kurup, G. Sankara. 1983. Ormayude Olangalil. Kottayam: Sahityapravarthaka
Sahakarana Sangham.
Madhavikkutty. 2006. 28th ed. Ente Katha, first published in 1973. Thrissur:
Current Books.
Mundassery, Joseph. 2004. Kaavyapeedhika, Mundassery Kritikal. Vol. 1,
151–230. Thrissur: Current Books.
Nair, Panmana Ramachandran. 2003. Navayugashilpi Rajaraja Varma.
Thrissur: Current Books.
Onakkoor, George. 1994. M.P. Paul: Kalapathinte Thirusheshippukal. Thrissur:
Current Books.
Panikkar, K. Ayyappa. 1992. Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai. Kottayam: DC Books.
Pillai, A. Balakrishna. 1984. Kesariyude Sahityavimarsanangal. Kottayam:
Sahityapravarthaka Sahakarana Sangham.
Pillai, Erumeli Parameswaran. 2009. Malayalasahityam Kaalaghattangaliloode,
first published in 1966. Thrissur: Current Books.
Pillai, N. Krishna. 2009. Kairaliyude Katha, first published in 1958. Kottayam:
DC Books.
Prasad, Narendra. 2000. Jati Paranhaal Enthu? Kottayam: DC Books.
Raghavan, P. 1985. Kerala Patrapravarthanacharitram. Thrissur: Kerala
Sahitya Akademi.
Rajakrishnan, V. 2006. Maruthira Kaathuninnappol. Kottayam: DC Books.
Rajalakshmy. 2003. Rajalakshmyude Kathakal. Thrissur: Current Books.
Raveendran, P.P. 1997. Idapedalukal: Sahityam Siddhantam Rashtriyam.
Kottayam: DC Books.
Ravindran, N.K. 1992. ‘Streevimochanatinte Prasnangal Malayala Sahityathil’
(Problems of Women’s Liberation in Malayalam Literature). Unpublished
Ph.D. thesis, University of Kerala.
Sankaranunni. 2006. Anthappayiyudeyum Mundasseriyudeyum
Sahityapakshapatangal. Sukapuram: Vallathol Vidyapeetham.
Sanoo, M.K. 2003. M. Govindan. Kottayam: DC Books.
Sreekumar, S.S. 2006. Purogamanasahityam: Kuttapatravum
Kumbasaaravum. Thrissur: Current Books.
Sukumaran, T.P. 1987. Niroopakanaaya Kesari. Kottayam: DC Books.
Tangachi, Kuttikkunhu. 1979. Kuttikkunhu Tangachiyude Kritikal in
Ajnaatavaasam. Ed. S. Guptan Nair. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Vijayan, M.N. 1992. Kaazhcchappaatu. Thiruvananthapuram: Chinta
Publications.
 Acknowledgements

If there is anything to be learned from the life of the late Kamala Das
(Madhavikkutty) it is that women should avoid getting stuck with any
one of the names or places that the patriarchal order assigns them.
This book is inspired by that lesson. My initial impulse was to write
this book in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, this being a book
about the Malayalam literary public and women’s writing in
Malayalam. It is not that this book is therefore irrelevant to non-
Malayalees; rather the contrary. In fact, in the past twenty-five years
or so we have seen a drastic transformation of regional language
literatures in India with the entry of people hitherto marginal to, or
completely denied, the privileges of authorship. Women’s writing is
on the rise all over regional literature and hence the exercise I
undertake here may be relevant elsewhere too.
However, there is another reason why I chose to write this book in
English rather than in Malayalam. Helping women’s literary writing in
Malayalam to ‘flee’ the confines of the highly masculinist Malayalee
literary public has been one of my larger projects in life. This arises
out of my belief that it is in literature that women critical of patriarchy
have achieved major breaks in Kerala and that it is vital for us to
preserve and further these gains. This goes with my conviction that
the only way to revive anti-patriarchal activism in Kerala, which has
been grievously flagging in recent times, is by giving up commitment
to the highly patriarchal Malayalee sub-nationalism and building
active links with women from Kerala in the rest of the world who
have fled the reformist patriarchy that pervades every aspect of life
here. These women are not a small group at all, nor are all of them
first-generation migrants from Kerala who read and write Malayalam.
But many of them evince keen interest in this society. Just as I’m
committed to translating the writings of Malayalee women authors for
them, I would also address my thoughts about the possibilities of
renewing feminist literary criticism to them. I hope to bolster it in the
long term by English translations of women authors of different
generations. However, since it is almost impossible to study the
Malayalee public without reference to the Malayalee literary public,
this book may be of interest to many others as well.
This book is a labour of love, a tribute to the four wonderful women
I discuss in it, who continued to write against tremendous odds. It
has been a pleasure to think over and I have savoured it like
chocolate slowly melting in the warmth of one’s mouth. If it has
indeed taken final shape, the credit, as usual, goes to many friends
and well-wishers: R. Sivapriya at Penguin who urged me to turn it
into a book in the first place; Balachandran Chullikkad, who has kept
up the conversation over the years; Satchidanandan, P.P.
Raveendran and E.V. Ramakrishnan, Paul Zacharia, Chandramathy,
Sarah Joseph and K.K. Baburaj, who patiently answered my queries
and made encouraging suggestions; C.S. Chandrika, who spared
valuable time for a very useful interview; Priya who helped me find
the books I needed, supplied me with vital information. But I wouldn’t
have written a word—life would have been too uninspiring—without
Usha, Gouri, Sajita, Sreedevi, Shahjahan, Bini, Bindu, Meera, Shibu,
Janu, Anita, Ajayan, Meenu, Hassan, NC, Rajasri and many others!
And as I wrote this, I thought back nostalgically to the 1980s when
we were young in Thiruvananthapuram, excited by literary and
political debates, and the air was filled with political hope. I
remember gratefully Asha, Chithra, Vinayan, Alice, Rubin, Walter,
Anvar, Sreedevi, Sajith and others with whom I shared the pleasures
of reading and writing in those years and hope that they will find
some of the fire that we all carried within in those times, in this book.
Rajashree and Sriranjini have been wonderfully patient, as only best
friends and beloved daughters can be; but then thanking them would
be too little.
 THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin...
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@PenguinIndia
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/PenguinIndia
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/PenguinIndia
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at penguinbooksindia.com
PENGUIN BOOKS
UK | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

This collection published 2013

Copyright © J. Devika, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Pallavi Agarwala
ISBN: 978-0-143-06324-7
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18184-2
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.