The Malayalam literary public is one of the most vibrant in India and thrives on the long history of widespread literacy in the state of Kerala. It is well described as the ‘beating heart’ of Kerala’s public life. Historically, it has been the space in which entrenched power structures encountered their earliest challenges. Not surprisingly, then critiques of patriarchy in twentieth-century Kerala were first heard and continued to be raised there, even when they had become muffled in wider public discussion.

Womanwriting = Manreading? is a provocative take on some of the raging debates in Malayalam literature, which surely resonate elsewhere. But it also raises the important question: Can we tell the story of women’s anti-patriarchal writing in Malayalam in a way that highlights the force and drama of their confrontations with the male-dominated literary establishment?

J. DEVIKA has written on the intertwined histories of gender, culture, politics and development in her home state, Kerala. She is bilingual and translates both fiction and non-fiction between Malayalam and English and also writes on contemporary Kerala on www.kafila.org. She currently teaches and researches in the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.

Based on a large number of interviews with women politicians of many generations and women who have entered the three-tier Panchayati Raj institutions since the mid-1990s in Kerala, this book tries to initiate fresh debate on the impact of the large-scale induction of women into the institutions of local self-government in India. The State of Kerala has been hailed as a success story in accommodating gender concerns in local-level planning and political decentralisation; this conclusion has been based on relatively simple evaluative exercises that ask whether women of diverse backgrounds have gained entry into formal institutions of governance or not.

This book seeks to place political decentralisation and its possibilities for women within the historical and contemporary contexts. Against the popular assumption that the liberal feminist promise made by the state will be delivered, say, once the noxious influence of male relatives is removed, the book points to the multiple social forces that shape possibilities and hindrances for women, and reshape gender divisions in the political field. The book thus pays attention to women in both local governance and politics. Secondly, it examines how women have utilised, extended, survived within or subverted these spaces. In the present context in which fifty per cent of the seats in the institutions of local self-government are being reserved for women, and there exists considerable skepticism about reservations for women in the Parliament, this book offers reflections on both local governance and ‘high’ politics.