Kerala 2005 - of Planning Commission

114
beyond the conventional indicators of well being to hitherto
less examined sites such as mental health, crime against
women, political participation or property rights (Sonpar and
Kapur, 2003; Eapen and Kodoth, 2003). In what follows, the
influence of social reform is traced in fostering a new form of
patriarchy in the nineteenth and early-mid twentieth century.
Two areas where this new patriarchy is keenly at work are
taken up for further analysis. a) In the limited extent and
constraining dimensions of women’s property rights in the
State today, which hinge upon practices that regulate intergenerational
transfers of property – prominently inheritance
rights and dowry transfers. b) In the growing evidence of
the serious dimensions that violence against women has
attained in the State.
3.2 Social Reform, Gender and Family
Comprehensive social reform in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century was instrumental in thoroughly
transforming institutions and practices, particularly
marriage and family in Kerala. It has been suggested that the
reformed institutions and practices were built upon entirely
new forms of non-reciprocal relations of power between
men and women (Devika, 2002). In fact, a wide array of
processes (modern education and employment, modern
law and judiciary, public debate, active mobilisation and
campaign) and disparate agencies (the State, Christian
missionaries, caste and religious reform organisations, the
nationalist movement and the media) came together in
advancing new norms of gender, sexuality and domestic
economy. The matrilineal family was in the firing line of
reform for the ‘unusual’ sexual and property practices that it
sanctioned – prominently that husbands did not gain rights
over women’s property and sexuality. If the Nairs were
matrilineal throughout Kerala, Ezhavas, Tiyas, Brahmins,
Pulayas, Christians and Muslims practised matrilineal
descent in specific regions. 10 Crucially, matrilineal women
had permanent rights to property and residence in their
natal taravads. However, social reform identified patriliny
as a key factor in human/individual enterprise, turning the
moral criticism against matriliny into an economic rationale
(Kodoth, 2004b). The matrilineal family (and more generally
the joint family) was seen as flouting ‘man’s natural’ instincts
towards his wife and children. In the early twentieth
century, a series of regional laws gave recognition to
patrilineal inheritance among the matrilineal social groups,
eventually abolishing matriliny in 1976. Across caste and
religious groups, however, social reform was instrumental
in anchoring women’s interests firmly to marriage within
a small family that undermined their associations with
their natal families. A gender-based separation of space
between a man as the legal-economic protector of his
wife and children, and his wife as responsible for their
home, supportive of her husband but his legal dependent
was at the core of the new family. The spectrum of social
reformers who associated success in the economic sphere
very generally with patrilineal institutions, included the
patrilineal Nambudiri Brahmins, the Syrian Christians and
the Mappilla Muslims. Boxes 7.5 and 7.6 reveal that the
association between patriliny and individual initiative
motivated reforms among the patrilineal groups as well.
If questions of marriage and property laws that dominated
reform among the landed groups were not so important
among the lowest castes, the same cannot be said of deeper
institutional questions. Social reform movements among
the lowest castes were centrally concerned with addressing
caste indignity through education and agrarian struggle for
better working conditions as was highlighted in Chapter 1.
Nevertheless, gender questions entered into these concerns
in central ways. For instance, the onus of community
honour/dignity was made to rest heavily on women. And
as among the upper castes, women’s bodies became the
sites of contestation and inscription of community identity,
Box 7.5: Patriliny and Human Enterprise:
Reforming the Malayala Brahmins
Numerically very small, but dominant until the
mid-nineteenth century, the Nambudiris followed
primogeniture and allowed only the eldest son in a
family to marry within the community. Younger sons
established alliances with women of acceptable lower
castes. Reformers struggled to establish the right of
younger sons to marry within the caste underlining its
importance to individual enterprise. Here too, women’s
interests were tied to marriage. The Kerala Nambudiri
Act, 1958, provided that upon marriage women would
cease to be members of the family they were born into.
It restricted their claim in natal family property to a
dowry and marriage expenses, which were not to exceed
one-third of what would fall to her share upon partition
(Sreedhara Varier, 1969, appendix p 5).
10 One account of the proportion of people who followed matriliny puts it at 51 per cent (see Jeffrey, 1992). However, this should be read
with as much caution as accounts that suggest that it was but a small section of people, and mostly of the feudal elite, for matrilineal
and patrilineal families existed in close social proximity in Kerala, among castes low and high and among different religious groups,
influencing each other’s practices and defining a very considerable historical and spatial diversity in practices (Kodoth, 2004b, 2002).