Chapter 1 Introduction: the Sexual Figures of Kerala
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Chapter 1 Introduction: The Sexual Figures of Kerala In the last two decades, with economic liberalization and the cultural impact of globalization, there has been much celebrating of India‟s new status as an ambitious, confident nation ready to take on the global stage. Both in the national and global realm there have been debates on the many markers of India‟s „progress‟. The agreement that post-90s India has finally moved from the era of the “prohibition of the kiss” to the era of sexual liberation fits into this progress narrative. Many well-known Indian news magazines and newspapers reiterate that the new generation of globalized India is sexually permissive and does not share the prudery of the pre-90s period. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam in Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, argue that the new economies of desire and fluidity of sexuality are linked to the “unshackling of the imagination” (Nigam and Menon 2007: 85) due to the economic, technological, political and media-related shifts in the post-90s period. A 2006 print advertisement for tourism projects Kerala, a state in Southern India, as the ideal backdrop to kindle the fire of passion. This glossy packaging of sexual desire participates in the new liberatory aesthetics of sexualized images in global India. 1 Figure 1. Kerala Tourism Development Corporation advertisement: “Showers of Passion, Monsoon Honeymoon Holidays” (http://adoholik.com/2008/02/18/kerala-tourism-monsoon/) „Kerala, God‟s Own Country‟, as the blurb in the right-hand corner proclaims, beckons the urban tourist to discover sexual passion within its scenic landscape. The couple in the advertisement, their „cool‟ clothes and intimate body language, mark them as part of a mobile, global economy. A consumable form of heterosexual romance is transposed onto a picture-perfect landscape. Here the regional is packaged in such a way that it can travel and appeal to a global audience through the trope of conjugal passion. I disrupt the broad brushstrokes of narratives of globalization and sexual progress by demonstrating that regional contexts in India have long and complex histories of sexuality. In this dissertation, I undertake an in-depth examination of regional cultural formations. This disrupts the homogeneous packaging of „India‟ and shows how different sexual histories co-exist in the space of the nation. The cultural sphere is a site of sedimentation where traces of the past remain and haunt the present. In analyzing it, I 2 illuminate a more enmeshed, non-linear relationship between the post-90s and pre-90s period. Kerala came into existence as a political entity in 1956 with the passing of the States Reorganization Act. That act brought together areas where Malayalam was the dominant language.1 My dissertation looks at cultural production from the late 1940s, when the regional identity of Kerala begins to get consolidated, to the present. Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey in the introduction to a special issue of GLQ, titled “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally,” criticize the tendency of scholarship on globalization “to read social life off external social forms – flows, circuits, circulation of people, capital, and culture without any model of subjective mediation” (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999: 445). Contrary to this tendency, my project takes on the task of examining cultural circuits within a regional context and how this is central to the „subjective mediations‟ by non-normative sexual actors. Cultural practices such as reading and viewing films create the public sphere of Kerala, a public sphere in which sexuality is formative. Through governmental processes, mass cultural production and political movements, sexuality is central to the production of Kerala as a region. This dissertation argues that one can arrive at a critical understanding of its politics of sexuality by tracking the mobile trajectories of cultural representation in Kerala and how it is interlinked to technologies of subject formation. I argue that for non-normative sexual subjects to claim embodied presence in the public sphere, they draw on the long, complex history of cultural practices in Kerala. While the state attempts to produce a rational, self-governing subject through sexual health discourses, what are the everyday vocabulary and tools through which sexual 1 Most of the texts I analyze in this dissertation are in Malayalam. All the translations from Malayalam in the dissertation are mine, unless otherwise mentioned. 3 subjects negotiate their life-worlds? What is the relation between sexual figures as idealized, sedimented forms and the technologies of subjectification? How are these processes embedded and shaped by the specific history and politics of Kerala as a region? Let me begin by answering the last question. For that I need to introduce the reader to aspects of Kerala as a region that are central to my analysis. Public Imaginations Whenever I travel by train in India, one of the noticeable features that mark railway stations in Kerala is a wide-ranging, exhaustive selection in the bookshops on railway platforms. These small box-shaped bookshops are packed with different kinds of publications and magazines dangled before us in an enticing fashion. Recent Malayalam fiction, high-culture magazines such as Mathrubhumi, sensational Malayalam weeklies such as Fire, film magazines and screenplays, Malayalam translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Milan Kundera, writings by Communist leaders – multiple genres and eye- catching book covers jostle for one‟s attention. You do not have to go in search of a well- stocked bookshop; it meets you on your way and becomes part of the journey itself. The routine practice of train travel is inter-woven with cultural practices of reading, pointing to one of the significant aspects of Kerala as a state – its avid, everyday consumption of print and visual culture. Kerala has the largest per-capita circulation of newspapers and magazines in India (Parayil 2000: ii) and The National Family Health Survey-3, conducted in 2007, ranked Kerala as the state with the most media exposure in India.2 As proof of Kerala‟s public 2 Information from http://www.nfhsindia.org/NFHS-3%20Data/ke_state_report_for_website.pdf. Accessed on May 27, 2010. 4 alertness and political involvement, cultural historian Robin Jeffrey offers the statistics of Kerala‟s passion for newspapers, unrivalled in India: In the mid-1980s, though Kerala accounted for only 3.5 per cent of India‟s population, 8.5 per cent of all daily newspapers were in Malayalam language. After English and Hindi, the national language, Malayalam ranked third in the number of newspapers produced each day (Jeffrey 1993: 3). He provides us with ethnographic accounts of community reading practices in teashops where people read newspapers aloud and discussed the contents (Jeffrey 1992: 210). Other scholars have pointed to how the establishment of reading rooms and libraries in multiple locations in the state had happened well before Kerala became a political unit in 1956 (Menon 1994, Radhakrishnan 2005). This pervasive reach and saturation of media forms has continued in post-90s Kerala. The state has a thriving film culture with the first film production studio being established in 1948. Ashish Rajadhyaksha draws attention to how “Malayalam film production reached 123 in 1978, exceeding the Hindi cinema, partly because of Kerala government‟s Chitranjali film studio and other subsidies” (Rajadhyaksha 1999: 28). This is still a highly popular cultural form, in spite of some of the drawbacks the film industry has faced in the last two decades.3 There has also been a boom in regional television channels in the post-90s period. The public in Kerala is a unit bound together by ties created through cultural practices like reading newspapers, fiction and viewing films. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan observes that print in Kerala, along with other cultural forms such as theater and cinema “at once made possible a spatially organized public and a 3 T. Muraleedharan (2005) provides a historical analysis of the regional concerns of Malayalam cinema as distinct to the national framework. 5 narratively constituted one” (Radhakrishnan 2005: 190). Udaya Kumar argues that since the late nineteenth century “Janam or people are transformed into pothujnam or public through a process of address and education” (Kumar 2007: 417). The public is often created through an interpellative hail by being addressed as the „people‟ of Kerala in governmental campaigns or by the media. Michael Warner conceptualizes the public as a formation mediated through cultural forms and by being addressed in discourse: “without the idea of texts that can be picked up at different times and in different places by otherwise unrelated people, we would not imagine a public as an entity that embraces all the users of that text, whoever they might be” (Warner 2002: 51). Visual and literary cultural forms circulate widely and provide the fabric for a shifting, contested public imagination. This dissertation looks closely at the web of the production, circulation and reception of cultural texts and events and how different modes of accessing cultural production are crucial to technologies of subject production. Shadows of Progress The cultural practices of Kerala are linked to its status as an „advanced‟ state in India. Jenny Rowena and Carmel Christy argue that the notion of Kerala and its culture as always/already progressive, in comparison to other states of India, is often