By Umar Nizarudeen

An elderly scion of the erstwhile royal family of Travancore in Kerala recently courted controversy for her suggestion that the proximity of menstruating women has been known to cause plants to wilt. The statement was supposedly to provide some kind of logical justification to the traditional prohibition on young women entering certain temples. In recent times, Kerala has seen a massive movement against such prohibitions, including the one on women trekking peaks such as the Anamudi in the Western Ghats. As a vestige of the turn of the century Kerala enlightenment, a robust discourse has tried to posit menstruation and bodily functions as signs of vitality and empowerment. Such a valorisation of menstruation forms a para-discourse to the normative regressive one, in that both invariably end in litanies of vitalism. Vitalism, as in the performative speech act of JL Austin, obviates the need for the `signature’ and graphology as posited by Jacques Derrida. The graphical sign in written form is seen as leaching of life and vitality, whereas the speech act is considered performative with the efficacy to wed people, inaugurate ships, open ceremonies, all but with the use of the mere spoken word! But Derrida deconstructed this binary and signed his essay as a performative act, albeit graphical.  The empirical vitalism in Kerala has in the past been pitted against an ageist Savarna idealism of the feminine, which generally regarded middle aged women as sexless. The progressive vitalism that foregrounds menstruation sought to counter this denial of sexuality to women and `lower castes’ by projecting menstruation as an index of vitality.

Another largely toxic debate on social media spaces and platforms such as Facebook and Reddit focuses on the predatory nature of the Tamil male’s `lust’ for the Malayali woman. The inherent irony and pathos of the quintessential  Malayali racism is unmissable in the racially inflected gibes by actors such as Jayaram (a Tamil speaker himself)  towards Tamil women, who are contrasted unfavorably to Malayali women. The presence of Keralite actresses in Tamil cinema in `glamorous’ roles is the apparent impetus for the crass objectification of women in Malayalam language debates on various platforms, that provide the de-idealizing counterpoint to the `savarna mystique’. The `upper-caste’ woman otherwise imprisoned in patriarchal familial ties is offered as a normalizing heterosexual compensation and fetish that creates a certain `mystique’ around savarna (`upper caste’) women. That is, repression creates its own libido. At the same time the savarna woman is elevated, her polyvalent sexual potential is deflated through objectification.  

The `epitome’ of Malayali Savarna feminine mystique has for decades been a poet and writer-Kamala Das. Even after her demise, efforts were underway to dig up baseless scandals about her conversion etc. As a middle-aged woman, Kamala Das converted from Hinduism to Islam, which served to make her sexuality more evident. The event of her conversion was something which, in a Badiouian sense, enabled her to transcend the strictures imposed upon her by society, caste and history itself. However, although this made her sexuality more prominent, it was confined to support heteronormativity. This is is a generalized phenomena as in millennial movies such as`Aaram Thampuran’ (1997) and `Ravanaprabhu’ (2001) in which the savarna heroines were depicted as cloistered ladies with repressed sexualities. The cosseted nature of their feudal habitus, however, added a mystique. That is, women’s physical sexuality is still denied in these films, but this is done by positing a compensatory idealized and mystified eroticism.  

Betty Friedan in her work, `The Feminine Mystique’ argues that the subjugated sexuality of the wife in a domestic relationship like marriage is sought to be restituted through a compensatory heterosexuality that is non-tangible in a physical sense, with a `je ne sais quoi’ quality to it. In recent films, the sexuality of upper caste feudal woman is similarly simultaneously mystified and repressed. This comprises the eponymous `mystique’. This has to be read in conjunction with Ti-Grace Atkinson’s `Vaginal Orgasm as a Mass Hysterical Survival Response’. The vaginal orgasm is a ploy used to ambiguate female sexuality, and make it subservient to the pleasing of men. The duty of the woman is to satisfy the man, so goes patriarchal wisdom. There is a compulsion to enjoy, propped up by the spectre of the vaginal orgasm. This makes it imperative for the sexually repressed women imprisoned in patriarchal relationships to feel guilty and inadequate. 

In Kerala studies, matriliny has been erected as a counterpoint to patriarchy. Even progressive, emancipatory texts in Kerala have focussed on the orgasmic female. Kamala Das, prior to her conversion to Islam, exemplified in her writings, the orgasmic female trapped within the patriarchal heterosexual marriage. She who is the holder of oceanic realms of pleasure and creativity has been imprisoned in the institution of the feudal family. This simultaneously serves as an ethical response and fantasy. Within the Keralite milieu, the counterpoint to this patriarchy is matriliny.  The totalizing and self-aggrandising energies of liberated female sexuality have been imposed on an idealized manifestation of the kinship system called matriliny. The matriarch in the matrilineal kinship system as a wholesome, holistic, all-encompassing, idealized locus of Malayali savarna kinship is resurrected in the sexualised image of the woman. This goes hand in hand with rampant homophobia and marginalisation of gender minorities.

A relevant anecdote is that of a student at Delhi’s elitist JNU who opined that the Malayali male fear of transgender people can be attributed to the absence of such communities in Kerala. Ignorance of trans traditions in Kerala is not a natural one, but carefully constructed and orchestrated to provide a bulwark to emergent forms of patriarchy. As transgender people are disappeared from mainstream representation in Kerala, transphobia becomes more pronounced. The family as the cornerstone of society and the ability of the family to offer compensatory heterosexuality as an amelioration for social ills such as patriarchal repression has been a facade of Kerala society, as portrayed in Malayalam feature films that problematize eros. `Golandara Vartha’ (1993) starring the Malayalam megastar Mammootty tells the quaint tale of a good natured rural upper caste male who, though besotted with his school teacher wife, idealizes her to a point where he cannot approach her in a sexual manner. The movie subtly hints at the unconsummated nature of the marriage that leads to `outside temptations’ for the husband. It is interesting to note that matriliny, which is offered as an antidote to patriarchal oppression, has itself been legally repressed. 

The Madras Marumakkathayam Act of 1932 had far reaching implications on the evolution of the polity of Kerala. According to this act, the inheritance system of matrilineal families, through the sister’s children and not from father to children, was sought to be abolished. The doing away with of an entire kinship system has rarely been envisaged before in legal history. The spectre of the fallen matriarchy still haunts the imagination of the state. From the English romantic poet, PB Shelley’s fascination with James Lawrence’s 1811 work, `Empire of the Nairs’, the orientalising stereotypes about the matrilineal kinship practices have been rife. Shelley wrote to Lawrence in 1812, “Your ‘Empire of the Nairs,’ which I read this Spring, succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines”. The Nair caste of Kerala predominantly followed the matrilineal system, and followed a system of semi-formal marital alliances with the Brahmin Nambudiri caste. The use of Keralite characters itself invokes the specter of matriliny and alternate kinship forms in the pan-Indian imaginary. A modern example of matrilineal exploitation  is Mani Ratnam’s 1998 Hindi-language movie `Dil Se’ (inspired by `Good Morning Vietnam’ starring Robin Williams). The movie doesn’t explicitly invoke matriliny. But it involves a Keralite Nair woman character who forms the alternate love-interest for the hero.  The movie has a North Indian upper caste male played by Shah Rukh Khan who is posted to an insurgency affected area. He falls in love with a vengeful  insurgent woman with a bitter past. Meanwhile the hero’s family has arranged a conventional Indian style marriage for him with a Keralite girl. The heterodox family setup of the character played by Shah Rukh Khan and the ensuing impossible love triangle found in the film form a matrilineal aporia. The marginalized vengeful character with a traumatic past is vested with the mystique of compensatory heterosexuality in her all too veiled, yet passionate, romance with the hero.

This obsession with matriliny as a custom and tradition, has recently taken on pan-Oceanic as well as multi-religious avatars. Traces of matrilineal kinship can be found in places along the Indian Ocean rim, from Minangkabau to Mauritania. As the ultimate Malayali male totalitarian fantasy, the matrilineal motherhood as an ether that imbues the world, cannot be perfected. Royalist historian manqués like Manu S Pillai have done a disservice to knowledge by pandering to these elitist sensibilities. Compensatory heterosexuality functions as the excess or the Lacanian object `a’ that serves as the source of infinitesimal difference and hatred. Just as Meghalaya and Kerala form the North-Eastern and South Western complements of matriliny, Assam and Kerala are complementary social texts in the toxic sexualisation of their respective polities to the point where they have become textbook laboratories of hatred and patriarchal toxicity. Recently writers such as GR Indugopan and Jeyamohan have in their fictional works attempted to provide slightly better versions of the fantasies that have hitherto been peddled. Bodily vitality is offered in Kerala’s  public sphere of discourse as a compensation for the denial of general humanity to women and `lower castes’. But this unfortunately cannot undo the historical wrongs that have been perpetrated on them and the nefarious effects of the matriliny mystique. 

Bio: Umar Nizarudeen is a student at Goldsmiths, university of London