Shaping of Colonial Bodies: The Ambivalence in the Writings of Early Women’s Magazines in Malayalam

Abstract

Women’s literary writings, particularly the women-centered magazines published in Malayalam – the local vernacular – was critical in shaping the “idea of the modern body” in the making of the colonial subject in Kerala, a coastal, peripheral southwest state in India. These magazines emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century and flourished in the early twentieth century at a time when Kerala was witnessing a constant colonial attempt to tame and regulate colonial, native female bodies. The body, especially its sexual aesthetic and desires, became precarious to the historical project of shaping the modern colonial subject. The discursive public space of these magazines interrogates the colonial reform discourse in the region, which imposed a new gender and sexual order in shaping governable subjects, publicly articulating the social relationships of colonial time and space. Thus, early women’s writings in Malayalam acts as a critical tool in decentering colonial dialectics, deconstructing cultural spaces, expressing alterity, and articulating multiplicity towards the decolonization of gender.[1]

[1] Judith Butler, in a lecture-seminar session titled “Who is Afraid of “Gender”?” as part of Makerere Institute of Social Research’s Global Conversations webinar held on the 29^th of April, 2020, states that gender is neither “a universal theory,” nor “a category” that is continually applicable, and therefore, be understood as “a contested site.”  (“Who is Afraid of “Gender”?”).