A Quarterly Journal for TAPTAPASAMASAM Kerala Studies Adn-bm\pw in Malayalam - English Adn-bn-°m\pw Vol: II / Issue 3 & 4 / January & April 2007/ Reg. No: M2 11257/ 05 Xm]kw Subjectivity, Self and Marginality Dilip- M. Menon A Local Cosmopolitan : Kesari Balakrishna Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala....... 383 Udaya Kumar The Public, the State and New Domains of Writing: On Ramakrishna Pillai’s Conception of Literary and Kerala is considered as one of the intellectual areas Political Expression......................................................413 that attempts to transcend the limits imposed by the colonial, nationalist and social-reformist frames in the realm of social G. Arunima Shifting Sands: Satire, Selfhood and the Politics of Laughter................................................ 442 science research. There has been considered endeavors in recent times to move away and go beyond the grand Ratheesh Radhakrishnan Of Mice and Men: The Futures of Nair Masculinity narratives of the earlier molds by forging new paradigms and in a Post-Matrilineal Modernity..................................... 455 making fresh thematistions. The shift in focus to the wide- J. Devika Being Woman and Marginal in Contemporary ranging transformations of Kerala in the cultural sphere as Kerala.......................................................................... 490 beckoned by modernity has been a plausible location to V. J. Varghese The Alluring Music of Labour launch investigations that can exceed the exercises of writing Modernity, Migrations and Recreation of the biography of nation in regional terms. The reliance on the Syrian Christian Community................................ 501 predominantly official archive has also been apprehended Satish Poduval Making Space: as a limiting factor to alter the focus to various cultural An Administrator’s Memoirs of War............................ 539 productions that were considered as infidel or defective From the Archives formerly. Such resources began to be used more imagi- R. Caldwell The Languages of India, in their Relation to natively to disentangle the cultural conditions of their Missionary Work.........................................................574 production and the influence they in turn exert on the Kth-j-W-cwKw context, instead of picking-up ‘truthful facts’ from them and make sense of the underlying processes from ‘outside’. The F. sI. \ºym¿ ae-_m¿ Iem-]-Øns‚ hmsamgn ]mc-ºcyw Zneo]v Fw. tat\m≥ tUm. jwjmZv lpssk≥/tUm.-kvI-dnbm k°-dnb.... 589 multiple ways in which modern self was constructed and sustained, with definitive positions of subjectivity and F≥. AP-b-Ip-am¿ A[x-Ir-X-cpsS kmaq-ln-I-Po-hn-X-Nn-{Xo-I-cWw marginality, is one of the areas that come under the reflection ae-bm-f-t\m-h-en¬/Pn. sI. kmhn{Xn..................................... 593 of new scholarship on Kerala. Along with the modes of Complementing the Books structuring new forms of self, the resources and sensibilities DileepRaj Partial Provocations/Dilip M. Menon........................... 596 that made it possible, belonging to both exterior and interior Bindulakshmi Pattadath Gender Paradox in Kerala: A Q2 Response realms, explicated the cultural terrain of modernity as / Swapna Mukhopadhyay (ed). ....................................... 605 extremely contested and negotiated. The new spaces and new meanings constellated in the cultural politics of modern kvIdnbm k°-dnb aW-se-gpØv/kpK-X-Ip-amcn......................................609 and contemporary Kerala are thus explored with its local THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES TAPASAM, KARIKKAMPALLY, PERUNNA - 686 102, CHANGANASSERY, KERALA, TAPASAM ¾Jan. & Apr. 2007 INDIA P\p-hcn & G{]n¬ 2007 ¾Xm]kw and universal constituents. The set of articles figuring in this Oscillating between the rhetoric of self-sufficiency and self- issue positively belong to this new genre of writing and deal insufficiency of the literary field, the genres of scandal writing, broadly with the intersecting issues of subjectivity, self and political allegories and literary reviews of Ramakrishna Pillai marginality. The cosmopolitan, vernacular, abject, contingent expresses his multiple belongings and shared obligations. and hard-working subjectivities are unraveled in their Going beyond what has been circulated through the specific locations alongwith an attempt to read a narrative appellation, Udaya Kumar points out that Swadeshabhimani’s of the nation against its grain. The articles herein foreground writings were not exemplary with images of national pride. the multiple engagements within the Malayalee world, as Exhibiting the limits of the universal claims of public sphere, subjects and objects of modernity, and complicated Pillai brought an array of vernacular issues to the public, often mediations of identities and competing notions of publicity defining the sense of decorum associated with the public involved in the same. domain in his own terms. Camouflaging the underlying caste prejudice in a new vocabulary of accountability of public Dilip Menon takes us to a form of modern Malayalee office and literary authority, Pillai attempted to dignify his subjectivity that conscientiously attempted to outdo its local critique against the alien Diwans and writers of other castes affinities to a universal/cosmopolitan terrain, as represented in a modern language. Udaya Kumar highlight the fact that by the intellectual maneuvers of Kesari Balakrishna Pillai in what one see in the writings of Pillai are not very much a his self-stated capacity of a sankramachintakan. As a go- conflict of modernity and tradition, but a vernacularisation between thinker, Balakrishna Pillai placed himself at the of the public sphere. interstices of the world, where both Europe and India remained just possibilities of useful translations and The next three essays focus on the gender dimensions crossovers. Menon points out that English allowed him to of modern and contemporary Malayalee subjectivity. G. have elective affinity with Europe according to his own Arunima takes a different route to understand the cultural priorities and he deployed European categories and meaning of satire and by reading the satirical writings of EV techniques other than English in critiquing and re-forming and Sanjayan she questions the often-held view that satire is the native politics and sensibilities. The colonial subject invariably a powerful medium for social critique. She argues aspired to establish the unity of human behavior through art that it is important to understand the contingent subjectivity by beating debilitating distinctions that polarize East and the of the satirist to track the strands and nuances of laugh. The West. Pillai envisaged a difference without hierarchies and satirical writings engage with colonial modernity and histories not subordinating to the universal and hence urbanization and expose the complicity of the modern confidently domesticated Europe to deploy its traditions subject with its simultaneous subversive and conservative critically as a corrective force. As somebody who resisted the demeanors. Nonetheless, the laughing subject here is creation of a collective identity that would subserve a invariably male and particularly Nair, where the laughter was national imagery, his endeavour was to recover what was particularly against the social expectations of womanliness valuable from both European and Indian locations and and masculinity, trivializing political dimensions of gender by thereby overstep the borders produced by colonialism and wrapping it up with laughter. In a historical context where nationalism alike. Udaya Kumar, on the other hand, ‘rights, relationships and identities were yet in the process of foreground the ‘incoherencies’ and ambivalences of a ordering’ the humour subtly displays the anxieties of modern Malayalee self as represented in the political and masculinity. This anxiety, according to Arunima, was literary writings of Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai. expressed through humour violence pitted against 378 TAPASAM ¾Jan. & Apr. 2007 P\p-hcn & G{]n¬ 2007 ¾Xm]kw 379 constructed figures of ‘dominating’ women, ‘society ladies’, citizenship and status as productive workers for sex-workers, weak men who allows themselves to be dominated and only to jeopardise her ‘outlier’ status and face the outrage ‘hubbies’ as against modern bhartavu. The crisis of of the elite convictions. Devika argues that both the masculinity continued in the post-reform phase too as politicised abject, though a significant amount of difference Ratheesh Radhakrishnan demonstrates in his study on the separates them, resort to strategies of their own, in their own historical constitution of a masculine public sphere in Kerala terms, of combating their marginality and elitist insolence. with special reference to the modern Nair subjectivity. By The paper by juxtaposing prostitute figure against the modern reading a literary text and a film, Nalukettu and Elipathayam, wife and incurable feminist against the elite middle-class he finds problems of adapting to modernity as the primary feminist calls for a re-visioning of politics beyond the reason that spawned the crisis of Nair masculinity. Seeing it entrenched notions of Developmentalism and reformism. retrospectively, Ratheesh postulates that it was principally the masculine anxieties that accorded primacy to women’s The arrival of modernity and capitalism also resulted in the question in the Nair reform rhetoric. The