Caroline Osella

Social mobility in Kerala : modernity and identity in conflict

Acknowledgements Preface 1. Introduction 2. Working for Progress 3. Marriage and Mobility 4. Consumption: Promises of Escape 5. Religion as a Tool for Mobility 6. Mobility and Power 7. Micropolitics, or the Political in the Personal 8. Conclusions Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India.

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Glossary Introduction 1. Honour, status and state formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maravar country 2. Cosmological fragmentation in the public sphere 3. Domain formation in mid-nineteenth-century Ramnad 4. Human and divine palaces in the fragmentation of monarchical cosmology 5. Ritual performances, the ruling person and the public 6. Raja Baskara Setupati and the emergence of a new political style Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Articulation of physical and social bodies in Kerala

This paper uses ethnography from Kerala to examine the concept of sneham, simultaneously an oily bodily fluid and the quality of nurturant affection. Sneham, which flows and circulates within and between persons in intimate moral relations, is the joint lubricant essential to the health of both physical and social bodies. Connections between snehams two meanings are traced, and snehams role in the foundation of a powerful metaphor—patronlemployer as father— is examined, drawing upon two domains of ethnography:—popular knowledge about bodily health and physical characteristics; and gift exchanges within the family and between landowners and labourers.

Desires under reform: Contemporary reconfigurations of family, marriage, love and gendering in a transnational south Indian matrilineal Muslim community

I trace here some connections between contemporary reconfigurations of gendering, family and marriage in a matrilineal Muslim south Indian community (Kerala Koyas). I argue that shifts from joint matrifocal households to small neo-patriarchal households are underscored by market reforms, migration processes, Islamic reformism and by modernist processes which work towards purging queer forms of affect and gender in favour of impeccably gendered heterosexual subjectivities. I also note considerable ambivalence and tension within these moves, and argue against any teleological mappings of such moves that would – first – take for granted and – then – celebrate a shift from Indian ‘arranged marriage’ towards a ‘pure relationship’, founded on romantic and passionate love. In thus article, I present recent academic discussions of Western marriage, Indian middle-class and Indian subaltern marriages, and conclude that many commonly drawn oppositions (‘love’ versus ‘arranged’, ‘companionate’ versus ‘ economic-pragmatic’, ‘till death do us part’ versus ‘easy divorce’) are representational fictions requiring sharp critique. I also address the question of moral panic around female-centred households and proffer feminist and queer critiques. Finally, I build upon work by Saba Mahmood and others who are urging Western academics to examine their own production as liberal subjects.

Food, Memory, Community: Kerala as both 'Indian Ocean' Zone and as Agricultural Homeland

The Kerala region in India can be said as an exceptional state especially when one tries to understand the stereotypical assumption of South Indian food. People in the Kerala region are non-vegetarian as they eat rice and fish. Keralas openness to outside influences such as new foods and new people, is notable and quite different from mainstream South Indian patterns, which tend towards conservatism, closure and valorization of the familiar and the local. Meanwhile, there are certain items associated strongly with a community identity and are the very food items which are the ones people seem most attached to. They are the foods that evoke food memory, which comfort and provoke desire and appetite, which are the subject of nostalgic longing. They are the distinctive festive community-identified foods which are the most highly-appreciated in open discourse and discussion about meals.

Migration, Neoliberal Capitalism, and Islamic Reform in Kozhikode (Calicut), South India

This article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the “bazaar economy” in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a “new economy.” The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as “neoliberal global capitalism.”

Utopia Interrupted: Indian Sex/Gender Dissident Activism and the Everyday Search for a Life Worth Living

‘Revealing myths as simplistic or unrealistic does not help (…) we cultivate them even when we know better’, as Tereza Kuldova argued. Sex/gender activists in India are simultaneously well aware of problems with globalized liberal mythologies of ‘liberation’ and ‘gender freedom’ but are also caught up in them. While trying to maintain a sense of caution and realism about what might be possible in India’s capital, Delhi, or in small-town south India, still it proves impossible not to become drawn into imaginings of a different future. My ethnography reveals that utopias rise and are viciously shredded, and can carry us into urgent danger zones, in contexts of gendered violence.

A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia.

Preface l. Land rights for women: making the case 2. Conceptualizing gender relations 3. Customary rights and associated practices 4. Erosion and disinheritance: traditionally matrilineal and bilateral communities today 5. Contemporary law: contestation and content 6. Whose share? Who claims? The gap between law and practice 7. Whose land? Who commands? The gap between ownership and control 8. Tracing cross-regional diversities 9. Struggles over resources, struggles over meanings l0. The long march ahead.