Gender and Modernity in Kerala

This volume brings together scholarly explorations of the idea and practice of modernity, focusing on gendered archives of modernity from Kerala. The essays in this volume investigate marginalised, unexplored and less discernible gendered narratives. They draw upon archival material that ranges from some of the earliest textual iterations of gender since Kerala’s initial engagements with modernity, to its various contemporary digital representations. The volume engages with a range of questions including literary, cultural and digital discourses around women’s clothes, body, menstruation, education, vocation, writing, caste identities and everyday practices. Gender and Modernity in Kerala, while unearthing debates that earlier projects of modernity failed to erase, makes a compelling argument for re-reading India’s multiple modernities from the perspective of gender.