About

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.