This book is a feminist endeavour that seeks to retrieve what was meant to be a damning accusation—that feminists are responsible for the dissolution of the family or kutumbam kalakkal—into a source of illuminating critique. This is attempted through initiating a conversation about the convergences and divergences in the distinctly different histories of elite and non-elite Malayali families and the material and political consequences of these for women. Secondly, the book focuses on the social reproduction struggles of less-privileged women in present-day Kerala. Taken together, these strands of inquiry are essentially concerned with stripping off the quasi-natural, benign aura that continues to highlight and protect the idealised Malayali family. The book draws on interview-based research with women workers in the informal sector in the present, and on different spells of fieldwork conducted by the authors during 2006-2022, to construct a fresh conceptual vocabulary to perceive and critique the mutation of brahmanical patriarchy in late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Kerala.

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J Devika is a feminist teacher, researcher, social commentator, translator and writer of children’s fiction based at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala. Her research has been about the intertwined histories of gender, politics, development, and culture in twentieth-century Kerala. She brings to bear her training as a historian to make sense of contemporary events and developments. She writes in Malayalam and English. Among her many publications are New Lamps for Old: Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralisation in Kerala (co-authored with Binitha V Thampi, Zubaan 2012) and Individuals, Householders, Citizens: Family Planning in Kerala (Zubaan 2008).

Anamika Ajay is currently Principal Scientist in Gender at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. Before joining the Foundation, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. She holds a PhD in development studies from the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru. Her research interests lie at the intersections of gender, labour, ecology and the political economy of development. She is particularly interested in exploring questions of gender and caste in shaping traditional and new forms of work in contemporary rural and urban settings. Her work on gender has been published in both national and international journals.

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.