Family, Women, And Ill-being: A Critique of the Family in Twenty-First Century Kerala

1 review for Family, Women, And Ill-being: A Critique of the Family in Twenty-First Century Kerala

1. 

   Melissa – February 27, 2026

   I love the book. I love how you have started from “the present” and invoked Foucault’s “genealogy” as one of your methods to understand the social production of family in 21st century Kerala. Rather than a straight “history” project, thus by adopting the genealogy method, you have categorically destabilized the definition of a unified family in Kerala, instead letting your discussion cut across a large swathe of 20th and 21st century events that influenced the structure and context of Malayali families in both their private ruminations and public stagings. In other words, you have succeeded in being a “kutumbamkalakki” in this work as you set out to do. Also, Foucault’s method in identifying women as a core constituent in the genealogical units of family, particularly in its disciplinary intent, helps establish the true objectives of this book: state, power, citizenship, wpmen, and family. This overall theoretical framework is executed with great imagination and sophistication in your study. Well done.

   The second more direct theoretical framework informing your study – social reproduction theory – concretely informs the excellent case studies that illuminate the crisis connecting state welfarism, neoliberal self-help groups, and neo-Brahminical and patriarchal configurations discussed in great detail in chapters 3, 4, 5. In particular, I greatly enjoyed the discussion of the janmabhedam model and the traditional kulina, the new kulina, the elite kulina, the non-elite kulina, the non-sexualized bhrthya etc. These are fantastic discussions; your discussion of Malayali nurses both at home and abroad is fascinating. Excellent work.

   The heart of your book is a highly compassionate and thrilling intersectional critique of the Kudumbashree women and their fraught relationship with the state government. I could not take my eyes off this discussion, to tell the truth. The picture you have drawn is so refined and so complex: the creditor-debtor relation, the worker-local leader transition/ relation, the elite-non-elite relations, the asset-assetless relation, the slippage from elite to vulnerable to precarious to abject, the women from regions of natural predation, the lack of growth in the agricultural sector, the wannabe kulinas in the most abject employment sectors, the entrapment of perpetual debt – these discussions are exemplary in their empirical facticity, and the detailed enumeration of the complex network of power and powerlessness that constitutes the personal and public identities of these women, their families and their communities. When I read of the debt/gratitude relationship of Kudumbashree women vis a vis the state, I remembered years ago hearing somewhere about KSFDC soliciting the service of Kudumbashree women to enter some sweepstakes to see the KSFDC produced women empowerment films! Even in entertainment, there is no escape from the state, I remember thinking then! I loved the various forms of “effeminisation” discussed in your case study chapters—(in particular, the sartorial one which reminded me of Rajeev Ravi’s wonderful film Annayum Rasoolum.)

   The heart of your book are the women you interviewed; their voices are unforgettable. In fact, while I was reading your book, I kept hearing the voices of these women inside my mind in the form of a play, a theater of voices, women on the brink of various forms of resilience and abjection, one monologue after the other. Monologues of Women and Labor. These are powerful excerpts. There are whole lifetimes inside them, whole narratives. The coast, the quarry, the slum, places of inclusion and exclusion, with every landscape represented by a voice. Even the nun. Very powerful. I hope you will seriously consider turning these case study excerpts into a theatrical piece for performance. Let me know if you need any help.

   Likewise, I applaud you for discussing Malayali family through the perspective of precarity and the emphatic connections you lay bare between tall claims made about Malayali family, Malayali women and the neo-welfarism of a neo-liberal provider/protector/patriarchal state. I imagine future scholars walking down some of these paths that your research has opened for them: environmentalism/sustainability; feminism/women’s empowerment; transwomen and women’s labor economy.

   I like the structure of the chapters, particularly, the detailed conclusions; these will be very handy for readers since you cover a vast body of research in the discussion. Your Conclusion chapter, likewise, tightly brings back the key themes of your book. One suggestion I have is to revisit “Foucault and genealogy” just to circle back since the man’s spirit pervades your book. Similarly, I would develop transwomen’s labor in the context of women’s labor in Kerala in greater detail. The little glimpse you have provided whets the reader’s interest for more.
   – Review by Gayatri Devi, Professor of English, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia