En-Gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Twentieth Century Keralam

This book explores how, in early modern Malayalee society, individualism was inextricably bound on gender difference.  As such, the process of ‘individualisation’ became a process of ‘en-gendering’.  Thus, the individual, as imagined in early Malayalee reformism, though deemed to be ‘free’, was already implicated in new institutions which required capacities specific to each sex.  Men and women came to be seen as ideally placed within separate social domains-the public and domestic endowed with different kinds of power, and bound together in a relationship of complementarity.  Further, training and education was required to realize this (paradoxically) ‘naturally’ gendered self.  J. Devika examines the discourses around education, reformism, the construction of ‘womanliness’ and the aestheticised female body.  She also examines the complex engagements with these issues as they emerge in the works of early twentieth century writers of fiction, of tracts and magazines, articles and especially in the writings of Lalitambika Antarjanam.