WRITING THE FIRST PERSON

Literature, History, and Autobiography

in Modern Kerala

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 WRITING THE FIRST PERSON
Literature, History, and Autobiography
in Modern Kerala

UDAYA KUMAR
WRITING THE FIRST PERSON

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 for

b. rajeevan

in friendship
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Acknowledgements
1. Conditions of Self-Writing
2. The Degree Zero of Difference: Passages of the Body
in Sree Narayana Guru’s Writings
3. Intensities and the Language of Limits: Marking
Gender in the Poetry of Kumaran Asan
4. Unsteady Luminosity: Reading the World in Early
Novels
5. Sovereignty and Mourning: C.V. Raman Pillai and
Fiction’s Performance of the Past
6. Incomplete Inhabitations: History’s Autobiographical
Signature
7. Style and the Subject
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
O ver its unusually long period of gestation, this book has
accumulated debts far too numerous to acknowledge
adequately. Its origins were in a research project I
worked on as a Fellow at the Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, Shimla, almost two decades ago.
Initially proposed as an enquiry into the development of
autobiographical writing in Malayalam, the project
developed into a study of idioms of self-articulation
through several genres of writing from the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth century in Kerala.
A first draft of the manuscript was submitted to the
Institute in 1998 and was soon accepted for publication.
However, I felt that more research and thinking were
needed. For a variety of personal and intellectual
circumstances, the process took longer than expected.
Much of my research and writing over the past years has
been closely linked to the issues I began grappling with
in Shimla; this has helped in developing my initial ideas
more clearly, in greater detail, and in new directions. I
would like to thank Professor Mrinal Miri, who was
Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study during
my fellowship, and Professor Chetan Singh, the present
Director, for their warm and generous support in making
this book and its publication possible.
In addition to the Indian Institute of Advanced Study,
several institutions have supported my work on this
book and I am indebted to them all. I wish to thank the
University of Delhi, where I taught at the English
Department for the major part of the past two decades;
the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSSC),
Calcutta, where I worked as a faculty member for three
years; Newcastle University, which hosted me on a
Leverhulme Visiting Professorship; and the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), where a Senior
Fellowship enabled me to complete this manuscript as
well as do some new research. Friends, colleagues, and
students at these institutions have played a
tremendously important role in shaping this book. Many
of them read earlier versions of the chapters, and their
responses helped correct misconceptions and opened
new directions of thinking. Partha Chatterjee and
Mahesh Rangarajan—then directors of the CSSSC and
the NMML, respectively—were unstinting in their
support.
Earlier versions of some arguments developed in this
book have appeared elsewhere. Parts of the analyses in
chapters 2 and 3 were published in Studies in History;
some ideas in chapters 4 and 5 were initially formulated
for a contribution to the volume Early Novels in India
edited by Meenakshi Mukherjee; initial versions of the
analyses in chapter 6 were published in History in the
Vernacular edited by Raziuddin Aquil and Partha
Chatterjee, and in Different Types of History edited by
Bharati Ray.
The intellectual friendship of G. Arunima, Sibaji
Bandyopadhyay, Prathama Banerjee, Baidik
Bhattacharya, Rimli Bhattacharya, Howard Caygill,
Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pradip Datta, J.
Devika, Oommen George, Aniket Jaaware, Ritty Lukose,
Dilip Menon, Tilottama Misra, Udayon Misra, Sanal
Mohan, Navaneetha Mokkil, Meenakshi Mukherjee,
Janaki Nair, Francesca orsini, Ayyappa Paniker, Rochelle
Pinto, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Manas Ray, V. Sanil, K.
Satchidanandan, Sambudha Sen, Suresh Sharma, Tridip
Suhrud, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Milind Wakankar, and
A.R. Venkatachalapathy have been invaluable for my
thinking, and conversations with them have helped
hugely. I have also been fortunate in my close personal
friends—Anu, Jayan, Jose, Marcus, Maya, Nilofer, PK,
Ritty, Sambudha, Sangeetha, Satheesh, Savithri,
Sebastian, Venu and many others—whose affection has
been an unfailing source of sustenance during these
past years.
My thanks to Veena are difficult to express; without
her, this book, like so much else in my life, would remain
unthinkable.
I owe a special note of thanks to Rukun Advani and
Anuradha Roy of Permanent Black for accepting this as a
manuscript. The book has gained a lot in clarity and
coherence from Rukun’s attentive, extraordinarily caring
editing.
Thanks to Shibu Natesan’s warmth and generosity, the
jacket shows an image of his ‘Kumarasan’, a painting I
admire for its rare beauty and force. I am very grateful
for his permission to use it.
B. Rajeevan’s work, as well as his personal and
intellectual friendship, have been enormously important
for my thinking, and this book bears indelible traces of
his proximity. In affectionate acknowledgement, I
dedicate this book to him.

udaya kumar

New Delhi, February 2016

 1

T Conditions of Self-Writing his book

an attempt to understand
began as
the beginnings of autobiographical
writing in Malayalam, the major
language of Kerala in South India. As
in most Indian languages,
autobiographies began to make their
appearance in Malayalam in the
nineteenth century. 1 Some of these
were written in the context of
Protestant Christian missionary
activity and testified to experiences
of religious conversion; others were
authored by persons of some public
standing.

The documentation of one’s own life was not always

undertaken with the aim of later publishing it; the
beginnings frequently suggest an intent more modest
and informal. For instance, when K. Kannan Nair, a well-
known figure in the Nayar reform movement, decided to
write his autobiography in 1939, he assured his readers
that his account was based on a diary he had kept
continuously for almost fifty years. 2 Kannan Nair was
introduced to diary writing in school by a teacher called
Selvanayakam, who considered it ‘a good means of
literary training on an easy subject matter.’ 3 Short
essays in periodicals, many of which had just begun to
appear, offered another form in which idioms of first-
person writing were forged. Entertaining anecdotes and
ordinary experiences from the everyday formed an
important part of these pieces.
In the twentieth century, autobiographical writing in
Kerala stabilized as a literary genre and developed a
canon. Narratives of personal life, set against a
background of changing times, acquired prominence and
came to shape the genre’s principal features. In these
texts, a narrative about one’s own life—a self-narrative—
became the means of documenting a world rapidly
receding into the past, and for recording personal
testimonies of social change. Autobiography became an
important form for the writing of histories outside the
professional or academic domain. Several dimensions of
social and individual life, which often do not find much
room in scholarly histories of the period, managed
ample space in these personal narratives. Experiences
of embodiment and social inhabitation, which relate a
subject not only to the world but also to one’s own
identity, found at times their strongest articulation in
them. These oblique pulsations of history in the timbre
of the first-person voice raise some fertile questions.
Practices of personal narration in the late-nineteenth
and twentieth centuries indicate an important moment
in the discursive history of the ‘subject’—understood
here as the point where ideas of personhood, agency,
and capacity for experience converge—in modern
Kerala. Choosing one’s life for narrative elaboration has
often been seen as a distinctive marker of modernity.
What would a nebulous, polyvalent term like ‘modernity’
effectively mean if one were to look at it through the
lens offered by these narratives? How did the
autobiographical subject appear in Malayalam writing?
What can we learn about the nature of this moment of
narrative inception? Where did self-narratives find the
resources for their conception, for their processes of
imagination? How did they forge their idioms of
narration? These questions were in my mind when I
began work on this book.
However, to address them even obliquely I had to shift
gear and engage with a larger body of writing, a wider
range of questions. This was primarily because
autobiography is everywhere a deeply heteronomous
genre, connected in all manner of ways with other
genres of writing. Self-narratives do not fashion their
idioms in isolation; they draw heavily on resources
shaped elsewhere. Nor do autobiographies hold a
monopoly in the domain of self-articulation: they share
the space of first-person enunciation with novels and
poetry, and, more importantly, with non-literary writings.
Social, governmental, and historical prose played an
important role in forging the language of self-writing in
Kerala; so did translation, travel, and discursive
bricolage. So, although I began this book as an inquiry
into autobiography, I found it soon turning into a wider
study of the emergence of new idioms of self-articulation
in Malayalam from around the 1880s to the middle of
the twentieth century.
In Kerala, as in many parts of India, the end of the
nineteenth century witnessed new ways of imagining
collective and individual belonging; family, caste, and
gender were reconceived with new significations.
Historians and social scientists have studied aspects of
these transformations: for example, changes in
matrilineal kinship, economic relations, political
structures, caste organizations, and marital
arrangements. 4
Caste (jati) functioned as perhaps the most prominent
grid for social differentiation in early-nineteenth-century
Kerala. While pervasively dominant in Hindu society,
caste differences were also apparent among, and
reproduced by, the Christians and Muslims of the region.
The age-old Syrian Christian community, it has been
noted, enjoyed rights and privileges commensurate with
some of the upper Hindu castes. Clothing, jewellery,
hairstyles, naming, food—all worked as part of an
elaborate apparatus of signs which had its basis in a
system of caste differentiation. 5 The appearance of the
body was replete with, even shaped by, caste markers.
People’s movement in public spaces was normatively,
and often practically, regulated through the practice of
distance pollution. Separate spaces of sacredness and
bodily purity were maintained through restrictions on
proximity and access to other bodies—in terms of
visibility, touch, hearing, and clearly specified distances.
This was no doubt violated at times, especially for the
convenience of men from the higher castes, as in sexual
relations, followed by ritual acts of purification. Markers
of individual differentiation, such as the personal name,
foregrounded a person’s caste status more than
individual identity. Clothing and jewellery were among
the most visible signs of caste on the body of the
individual, and were instrumental in preventing or
identifying infringements to a severe system of distance
pollution.
 The semiological status of attire is evident in
nineteenth-century controversies around the conversion
of lower-caste women to Christianity. Channar women
from southern Travancore who converted in the 1850s
began wearing blouses, and thin cotton shawls
(melmundu, literally upper dhoti) across their shoulders.
6 Among upper-caste Hindus this form of dress was, at

the time, meant for special occasions. A royal

proclamation of 1829 had allowed Channar converts the
right to follow Syrian Christian women in wearing a long
white jacket. Worn by the new converts, the melmundu
seemed to upper-caste Hindus an insult to their own
caste status. The Channar lahala (rebellion) of 1858 was
an explosion of these tensions. A royal proclamation in
the year following, responding to the situation, declared
that while there was no legal objection to Channar
women clothing themselves in the melmundu, they
should not emulate the attire of upper-caste women to
the degree of obliterating all difference. 7
There were riots around jewellery and naming. Until
the royal proclamation of 944 me (ce 1768/1769), and
even till much later, there were restrictions in
Travancore on the form of gold and silver jewellery that
women from the Sudra castes could wear. 8 Nine
decades after the proclamation, there were reports of a
nose-ring being wrenched from the nose of a lower-caste
woman in Pandalam in Central Travancore. 9 These
examples may suggest that the hostility was only to
lower-caste sartorial adoptions of high-caste dressing
traditions. But there was more to it. A counter-example—
which strengthens the notion that clothing and jewellery
can be looked at through the lens of semiotics—can be
seen in the Nayar–Pulaya confrontations of the early
decades of the twentieth century. In 1915, the
Sadhujana Paripalana Sangham, an organization of the
Pulayas founded by Ayyankali, began a campaign of
reform. 10 A leader of this movement, Gopaldas, argued
that the red stone necklaces worn by Pulaya women
were signs of primitiveness. Many Pulaya women
followed his advice and relinquished their ornaments—
only to invite the wrath of the Nayars, who began
insisting that Pulaya women wear them again. Riots
followed. Subsequently, some sort of reconciliation was
effected at a public rally in Kollam, addressed by
members of both castes, at the end of which Pulaya
women discarded their traditional jewellery and piled
them in a heap in front of the dais. Ayyankali, who
rushed to Kollam in the wake of these incidents, spoke at
the rally in a conciliatory way on the virtues that his
community should cultivate—including ‘theistic faith,
civilized attire, and obedience to the Nayars’—while also
warning the Nayars in a less placatory tone of the
difficulties they would face were they to fall out with the
Pulayas. 11
The sign system of caste differences was not an
inverted pyramid, with the largest number of caste
markers assigned to the highest caste, and the least to
the lowest. Elements of the system, by their presence or
absence, could function as caste markers, and the
acquiring or relinquishing of items of attire or jewellery
by any caste could invite the wrath of the higher castes.
Such elements could include personal names as well.
The addition of ‘Amma’ to the names of Ezhava women,
‘Panikkar’ to Ezhava men, and the dropping of self-
deprecating diminutives (such as ‘Kunju’ and ‘Kutty’) by
the lower castes—none of these changes, be it the
adoption or rejection of any element that could serve as
a caste marker, was allowed a smooth, unchallenged
passage. 12 Potheri Kunjambu, the first lower-caste
novelist in Malayalam, made his Brahmin protagonist
Kuberan Nambutiri cite slokas from the Manusmrti to
expound the law of personal names: ‘The first part of a
Brahmin’s name should indicate auspiciousness and the
second part prosperity; . . . the first part of a Sudra’s
name should indicate contempt and the second
servitude.’ 13 The Nambutiri is here shown expressing
his displeasure at the pretensions implicit in his Nayar
servant’s name; the Nayars gave vent to similar
displeasure at Pulaya and Paraya adopted names which
lacked the signs of self-humbling.
The last decades of the nineteenth century saw new
articulations of caste identities and the emergence of
novel forms of agency in the social and political
domains. Various non-Brahmin castes began organizing
themselves to campaign for their rights. The Sree
Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam was
founded by the Ezhavas, a lower caste, in 1903, followed
by an organization of the Nayars, the Nayar Samajam, in
1906 (it became the Nair Service Society in 1914). The
Sadhujana Paripalana Sangham of the untouchable
Pulayas, some of whose activities we saw above, was
founded in 1907. Soon the Brahmins followed suit: the
Nambutiri Yogakshema Sabha, a forum for voicing the
concerns of Nambutiri Brahmins, was formed in 1908.
The actions, ideas, and ways of speaking generated by
these organizations suggested new conceptions of
collectivity and caste identity, signified by the wide
currency of the word samudayam (community). In
debates between the proponents and antagonists of
caste reform, both parties used emergent notions of
identity, even though these were at times announced as
authentically traditional.
My account of these social changes contains no
surprises and is in tune with studies on the
transformation of caste identities in several parts of
India over this period. Colonial governance, it has been
argued, had largely to do with the formulation and
application of rules and regulations to the country’s
various communities, in the construction and regulation
of which technologies of enumeration—such as the
census—played a crucial role. 14 This was supplemented
by extensive ethnography, which gave anthropological
substance to the existence of distinctions within castes
and religious communities. 15 Myths of origin,
occupational profiles, customary practices, and
physiognomic features all became instruments of
governance and knowledge making. But they worked
also as vital components in the construction of new
community identities, such consolidations in Kerala often
replicating the two-pronged thrust—the enumerative
and the ethnographic—of colonial discourse. In 1891 a
petition, endorsed by more than ten thousand
signatories from various non-Brahmin castes, was
submitted to the Dewan of Travancore. Known as the
Malayali Memorial, this plea cited statistics from recent
census data to point out anomalies between on the one
hand the proportion of various communities within the
total population, and on the other their proportion in
government employment. The petition began in the
ritual language of respectful prayer to a sovereign, but
moved on to make its case in a distinctively modern
idiom informed by a new conception of the social. 16 It
was prepared by English-educated members of the
Nayar elite, including the novelist C.V. Raman Pillai and
the lawyer P.K. Sankara Menon, with advice from
eminent lawyers in Madras. Then, in 1896, an ‘Ezhava
Memorial’, drafted by a Dr P. Palpu and signed by
thirteen thousand members of the community, showed
even more vividly the newly formulaic combination of
ceremonial submission to the king and the fresh idiom of
petitioning. The pleaders portrayed themselves as
‘humble subjects weeping before their affectionate
sovereign, as children do before their mother’, yet made
veiled threats to the effect that, should their grievances
fail to be remedied, they might have no option but to
leave ‘our sovereign’s religion, which is our own
religion’, and consider converting to Christianity. 17
Numerical arguments were supplemented by others
that Kerala’s communities used in order to define
themselves. Chattampi Swamikal’s Pracheena
Malayalam (Ancient Kerala), in its arguments against
Brahminic-mythic accounts of the origin of Kerala, used
as ‘evidence’ not only the Puranas and old palm-leaf
manuscripts in vattezhuthu (a very old writing system
used for Malayalam and Tamil), but also European travel
accounts. 18 Swamikal contested Brahmin narratives—
found in eighteenth-century texts such as
Keralappazhama and Keralolpathi—which linked the
origin of Kerala with a reclamation of land from the sea
by a mythical figure, Parasurama. Swamikal’s alternative
history claimed that Kerala belonged originally to the
Nayars. Comparable histories appear to have been
produced by the Nayars in other parts of Kerala:
Vidyavinodini, a journal from Trissur, published a series
of essays on ‘Adikeralacharitram’ (the early history of
Kerala), proposing similar arguments. 19
Dr P. Palpu, the third signatory of the Malayali
Memorial and the author of the Ezhava Memorial, in his
correspondence with colonial officials in the 1920s,
worked up an entire mythography and served it up as
his history of caste in Kerala. 20 He believed Kerala had
been at the centre of a transoceanic Buddhist empire
which extended from Mexico to China. Ezhavas were the
descendants of these Buddhists, who had lost their
social status after the Brahminical usurpation of power
and the creation of a caste society in Kerala. Like
Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra, Palpu produced a reading
of Hindu mythology, especially the ten incarnations of
Vishnu, interpreting them as cryptic records of the
defeat of Buddhism at the hands of Brahmins. 21
Community histories written in the early decades of
the twentieth century echoed these arguments or put
forward similar claims, often making partial and
unorthodox use of scholarly literature to establish
fanciful connections between historical phenomena.
Etymological arguments—mostly speculative assertions
—were commonly deployed, sometimes to suggest
eccentric links and conclusions. Palpu, for instance, cited
the Greek word ‘therapy’ as evidence in support of his
arguments for a Buddhist history of Kerala: this word, he
claimed, derived from theraputra, which in Pali, he said,
referred to a Buddhist monk. Such monks, in Palpu’s
account, had travelled from Kerala to Greece and, being
renowned as medical practitioners, left their traces in
words associated with medical care. 22
Variars, an upper-caste group associated with temple
occupations, were, according to one community
enthusiast, originally a warlike race that protected
Brahmins. In his concoction European visitors, impressed
by the heroism of Kerala’s Variars, carried the name
back and used it in their language to denote all soldiers:
this was the origin of the English word ‘warriors’! 23 At
times the etymological method was even pushed
towards morphologies of the body: Palpu claimed that
the medieval Chinese custom of styling hair into a tuft
indicated an earlier domination of China by Kerala. 24
These outlandish flights of the imagination were not only
dreams of power, they were also acts of mimicry and
inversion that had their distant originals in modern
scholarship of Western provenance.
For our purposes, it is more important to notice how,
towards the end of the nineteenth century in Kerala,
these arguments illustrate the diverse moves through
which several communities began fashioning a language
of identities. Colonial discourse, we saw, combined
enumeration with ethnography, often mapping on to the
colony metropolitan schemata relating to racial and
other social categories. In the new discourses of the
region’s communities, this dual structure reappeared as
a dovetailing of the empirical and the mythographic. It is
easy to mistake the effort as a deft negotiation between
tradition and modernity; on a closer look it appears less
a matter of the old and the new, for the empirical and
the mythographic discourses both appear to have
emerged from an encounter with colonial governance
and scholarship. The language of community identities
of the time seems to parallel the curious combination of
governmental and sovereign vocabularies of power and
subjection under colonial rule. 25 My book is, among
other things, an exploration of this ambivalent
discursivity.
The sense of ambivalence is not unique to caste
identities. We also find it in the formulation of new
gender identities. Projects to redefine femininity in
relation to newly emergent domestic spaces drew not
only from modern Western values, but also from idioms
found in tradition: in the epics, the Puranas, and ancient
history. Projections of the ‘new woman’ as the true
inheritor of time-honoured values entailed a
rearticulation of tropes and scripts from antiquity in the
terms of a new patriarchy. The body and mind of the
new woman, her desires and her pleasures, derived
simultaneously from hoary custom and contemporary
arguments about gender within and outside India. This
was accompanied by a disavowal of certain practices—
such as the puberty ritual tirandukalyanam and the
widespread form of marital alliance known as
sambandham—as primitive or promiscuous. Feminist
historians of Kerala have shown how early women
writers expressed themselves in the language of this
new patriarchy, even as they contested it. 26
Alongside the discursive redefinition of women’s
identities, we find less eloquent and indirect expressions
of change within ideas of masculinity; it may be too
simple to see these solely as a reaction to the former.
Transformations in notions of masculine identities have
not received the incisive critical attention they deserve.
Some of the chapters in the present book consider
certain registers in which the self-identities of Malayali
men found redefinition: asceticism, sexual desire,
military prowess, loyalty, authority within and outside
the family, and the memory of national and community
histories being some.
Caste and gender identities were not merely external
to or background noise against these new discursive
reformulations of the individual subject. By inhabiting
these identities the individual was being styled as a
locus of feeling, self-reflection, bodily experiences, and
collective solidarities. Gender and caste did not, in other
words, appear to an unmarked originary individual and
impose specific determinations. Even if identities are
seen as having been cast in antique moulds,
individuation involves distinctive ways of inhabiting such
moulds. This holds true also for attempts to erase
ascribed identities and recover a primal ground of
species existence, as in Sree Narayanan’s thought; such
ground had to be produced. His identification with
humankind was not only an ontological insight, but also
a task to be accomplished through newly invented
individual and collective practices. This book is less
interested in analysing identities as stable figures than
in tracking styles of inhabitation as they surface in self-
narration.
 II

Theoretical discussions of autobiography have been

riddled with paradoxes: the genre is seen as the modern
individual’s medium of expression, yet its history is also
traced back a very long way; its truth claims invoke the
immediacy of self-intuition and the privileges of a first-
person account, but it is often aimed at convincing a
public through strategies of persuasion; it refers to an
interior realm inaccessible to others, yet one that is
constructed in a language commonly shared. The
generic regularities of autobiography, on a closer look,
turn out to be anything but stable. Readers who search
self-narratives for a literal, verifiable correspondence to
reality are bound to be disappointed; yet, self-narration
invariably makes some sort of claim to truth, even if in
the end it reveals only the truth of deception.
Autobiography’s association with the individual has
acquired a sort of paradigmatic status in most of the
scholarly writing on the genre. The late emergence of
autobiographies in India has often been explained as the
consequence of a civilizational absence of ‘the
individual’ before the colonial encounter. Historians have
disputed this claim in recent times, pointing to the
existence of individuals and personal narratives in
earlier periods. This debate, valuable as social history,
has distracted attention from an issue that seems more
urgent to the literary historian: what is the relationship
between the individual and autobiographical expression?
Are personal narratives to be seen as the necessary
discursive choice of a pre-existent form of social and
political life, namely the individual? Or, conversely, is
the very capacity for autobiography—i.e. the ability to
turn one’s life into an object of narrative elaboration—
constitutive of what we recognize as the individual?
Must modern autobiographical acts be necessarily
manifest in genres of self-narration that are recognizable
as having long existed through history?
There could be another approach to this problem:
rather than treat the relation between the individual and
autobiography as a causal one, we may look more
closely at the varied nature of autobiographical practice.
The question then becomes: under what conditions does
one occupy the position of the subject in relation to
selfnarration? What enables the insertion of oneself into
a discourse whose theme is one’s own life? There is no
single universally valid answer to these questions. Even
canonical histories of autobiography in the West show
that the situations under which St Augustine and St
Teresa wrote their lives were markedly different from
those of, say, Rousseau and Mill. In India too, self-
narrations—first-person statements about one’s own life
—have been created within very diverse conditions and
situations, and show a range of motivations. Devotional
enthusiasm, spiritual and ethical practices, testimonies
in law courts, administrative documentation, political
participation, and historical witnessing were perhaps the
most obvious driving forces. Can we probe these various
activities from the traces they leave behind in
autobiographical texts in order to attempt a genealogy
of the subject of self-narration? Would such an inquiry
take us beyond the familiar history of the
autobiographical genre and its paradigmatic
presupposition, the individual?
The student of self-narratives in India is likely to be
struck by two features which resist the analytical
assumptions of modern autobiography studies. Indian
autobiographies from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, especially those written by men, rarely speak
of private interiorities: self-narration in them is seldom
confessional intimacy. Second, the distinctiveness of the
individual life is not the focal point of most such texts. It
is, in fact, as if the author’s distinctive life were a pretext
for revealing something more typical or larger. As we
shall see in chapter 6, historical changes during the
narrator’s lifetime represented an important reason for
personal life-narratives making their appearance. What,
then, of the inner world of intimate experiences and
affective living? If they did not directly figure in most
autobiographies, where did they find the discursive
laboratory for fashioning their expressive forms?
Once again, we may need to ignore the generic
boundaries of autobiography and look at adjacent
domains: it was in the novel, in new genres of lyric and
monologic poetry, and in forms of reflective and spiritual
writing that a language of feeling and inner deliberation
developed in nineteenth-century Kerala. The fictional
and metaphysical orientation of these genres made it
easier to explore personal experiences that did not find
room in autobiographical accounts. In poetry and fiction
we see the arrival of characters who can be depicted in
their private moments, alone or in intimate interaction
with other characters. Interestingly, through an apparent
negation of the speaker’s singularity, metaphysical and
spiritual writing allowed the appearing of a first-person
relationship to one’s own body and to the experience of
one’s worldly existence. It is important to see these
genres as more than mere resources for the fuller
discourse of autobiography; some strands of self-
narration found articulation in them. So it is necessary to
consider these diverse forms as part of a composite
history of self-articulation.
These genres do not always privilege a narrative
unfolding of events: lyric poetry seldom tells us stories;
monologic forms often subordinate the narrativization of
external events to emotional experiences and inner
deliberation. The metaphysical or spiritual genres we
shall discuss do not re-narrate puranic stories; in the
main, they adopt the form of a structured explanation of
reality, or an analytical delineation of stages of
phenomenal experience. Devotional poetry too was not
always narrative in orientation, and invocations of
events associated with the deity were subordinated to
expressions of fervent worship and prayer. We shall see
in chapter 2 that devotional poetry often staged
dramatic scenes out of an inner metaphysical drama.
Temptation and revulsion, fear and despair, and the
ecstasy of union were invoked through graphic
descriptions in which the devotee appeared as the
experiencing first-person locus of intensities. Such
scenarios were not usually allowed to develop into
extended narratives; they appeared as moments in a
sequence of impassioned devotional states.
Autobiography studies have arguably valorized
structures of narration over the non-narrative modes.
This has been partly because the genre of
autobiography, especially in the nineteenth century, saw
itself as primarily telling a story. A more important
conceptual reason may be found in the belief that
autobiographies are essentially expressions of individual
agentiveness. Narrative has been regarded as the
privileged medium of human agency. 27 Bringing into
focus forms of writing with a strong non-narrative
dimension allows us to reconsider the identification of
self-articulation with the capacity for individual action.
The concept of agency is in itself complex and calls for
careful handling. Etymologically linked to agere, the
word for action in Latin, ‘agent’, denotes the one who
‘acts or exerts power’—as distinct from ‘patient’ and
‘instrument’. 28 This sense has been dominant in
contemporary social and cultural theory, where its use
often implies a sovereign originary source of actions. But
the word can also mean exactly the opposite: when it
refers to ‘one who acts for another, a deputy, steward,
factor, substitute, representative, or emissary.’ 29 The
second usage, in referring to authorized performers—
rather than to real originators—of action, helps us see
the link between agency (as the capacity to carry out
actions) and authority (as the power of the originating
intent to authorize their execution). This insight might be
relevant for thinking about autobiographical agency:
rather than extend the scope of autos to cover the
author’s originary self, it might be useful to explore
structures of authorization in autobiographies. Under
what authority does one gain the right to speak about
one’s life, write one’s autobiography?
A nuanced notion of agency may also enable a better
estimation of ‘passivity’ in self-narration. This is not
merely a question of the autobiographical subject
splitting itself into an active, writing pole, and a passive
pole that merely observes what is being written.
Selfnarratives are not solely about one’s actions in the
world; they also present oneself as an experiencing
subject, in an attitude of receptivity. Self-narration
requires the writer to capture a passive dimension of
one’s selfhood, even as the act of such self-capture
involves an active stance. At an even more fundamental
level, the very possibility of autobiography may be seen
as premised on our capacity to be affected by our own
presence. The experience of being affected by ourselves
—where we are simultaneously active and passive—is a
necessary condition for self-representation. This
convergence of agency and passivity is possibly intrinsic
to the modern conception of the subject. Kant famously
argued, in relation to inner intuition, that ‘we intuit
ourselves only as we are inwardly affected by ourselves’,
leading to the paradox that ‘we should then have to be
in a passive relation . . . to ourselves.’ 30 Kant’s
discussion of ‘auto-affection’ has elicited significant
philosophical discussion. 31
Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of holocaust testimonies
led him to examine the configuration of the subject in
auto-affection. ‘Passivity does not simply mean
receptivity,’ Agamben argued, ‘the mere fact of being
affected by an external active principle. Since everything
takes place here inside the subject, activity and passivity
must coincide. The passive subject must be active with
respect to its own passivity.’ In the experience of shame,
a recurrent affect in holocaust testimonies, Agamben
found an analogue to Kant’s account of auto-affection.
Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’ characterization of
shame as ‘the fact of being riveted to oneself, the
radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself
from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to
itself,’ Agamben argued that ‘to be ashamed means to
be consigned to something that cannot be assumed.’ 32
It is not an external entity that cannot be assumed here,
but ‘what is most intimate in us’: ‘the “I” is overcome by
its own passivity, its ownmost sensibility; yet this . . . is
also an extreme and irreducible presence of the “I” to
itself.’ 33
The insistent appearance of humiliation in Dalit self-
narratives from contemporary India has brought the
trope of passivity into discussions of autobiographical
enunciation. 34 By recounting experiences of humiliation,
Dalit autobiographies make a public claim regarding the
norms that govern the treatment of each other in
society. However, the force of Dalit autobiographies
arises more often from the intensity of the affect
produced in such experiences. In situations of
humiliation, as in shame, the subject is in an
unassumable relation to itself. The paradigmatic
instance of such humiliation is perhaps found in
stripping or forced nudity, which places the subject in a
situation where it is unable to inhabit its body or escape
from it. The radical contribution of Dalit autobiographies
—and more generally Dalit literature—to idioms of self-
writing in India arguably derives from the ability to
foreground instances of impossible inhabitation where
agency and passivity are difficult to separate.
These discussions may help us revisit the relations
between subjectivity, agency, and figures of passivity in
self-narration. Even in autobiographies presented as
products of autonomous agency, other figures of the
subject fleetingly appear. In non-narrative genres we
find a more detailed engagement with these structures
of passivity, but even in autobiographical narratives they
sometimes announce their subdued presence in vital
‘slippages’ that silently or fleetingly disrupt the
dominant telling. Such dissonances redeem early
autobiographies in Kerala from being simple narratives
of modernity using a linear and progressivist conception
of time. The normative structures they foreground are at
times belied by less prominent signs of disorientation. If
autobiographies possess a vital link to history, it is not to
be sought solely in the rich documentation of the times
unfolding through the events; one may sense the
presence of history perhaps even more vitally via
fleeting or sudden moments of an opening within the
narrative—or ‘slippages’—through which we can glimpse
a different landscape of the subject and its inhabitation
of the world. Leaving instances of this to a longer
discussion in chapter 6, I shall here merely indicate
some consequences of this for our understanding of
modernity.
A sense of its modernity is prominent in contemporary
Kerala’s self-consciousness. This often finds expression
in exceptionalist claims about the region’s progressive
polity, social development, cultural superiority, and
cosmopolitanism in ideas and art. Social reform, lower-
caste movements, democratic political mobilization, and
egalitarian left politics are frequently cited in this
narrative of Kerala’s life. The nineteenth century
features in this story as the critical watershed, and as
the horizon of contemporary Kerala’s historical
imagination. The all-too-frequent valorization of social
reform in Kerala is often also a suppression of the
memory of norms and practices of earlier times, a
refusal to recognize their continued existence.
Autobiographical genres developed here from the cusp
of changes in normative structures—in order to speak
about them. The authors of the texts we examine in
chapter 6 not only lived through this period of change
but also took active part in reform initiatives. Most of
their autobiographies are narratives of progress and
freedom, open endorsements of enlightened modern
values. The grip of the past, however, is not so easily
loosened; it retains some of its claims, deflecting the
privileged narrative of progress and autonomy. This
appears in autobiographical narration, contrary to
authorial plan, in the shape of slippages in the subject’s
inhabitation of new identities. In such unavowed
moments, self-narratives demonstrate what may be
considered a less easily narrativizable dimension of the
subject’s embeddedness in time, or the historicality of
the subject. The past sticks invisibly to the narrator’s
body, movements, and utterances despite its conscious
rejection, and despite the narrative itself being in the
main an account of its overcoming. Can we call this form
of existence of the past, its survival, after Marcel Mauss’
celebrated study of techniques of the body, a literary
form of ‘habitus’? 35 Autobiography’s vital link with
history is not just its documentation of life and society in
a lived past; even more importantly, it is revealed in the
lack of fit between narrative and subjectivity.
This is true not only of autobiographies; novels too
have their moments of slippage. Unlike in self-narratives,
however, in fiction such slippage becomes a structural
principle, and in many early novels determines their
aesthetic—as distinct from their narrative—form. While
celebrating their enchantment with the modern world,
many such novels produce—through description and
detailing, and through their way of looking at things—a
perceptual economy that finds itself in opposition to the
general run of values endorsed in the narrative. When
these novels turn away from realism to draw on
protocols of description more commonly found in poetic
traditions, or deviate from the norms of verisimilitude,
they fleetingly reveal the ‘non-narrativizable’ presence
of the literary habitus of the times. Intimate tensions
between avowable histories and disowned inheritances
are nowhere more pronounced than in historical novels.
They shape the aesthetic and the perceptual economy of
the work, which works as the condition for imagining
characters in their sometimes very different or
contradictory moments of action and passion.
Our discussion has stayed at a distance from the
apparent anchoring of autobiographies in individual
interiorities. As we saw, early Indian examples of this
genre were neither intimately confessional nor deeply
introspective. Self-narration in them was part of a public
exercise, not an activity carried out in hermetic solitude.
So, even if theoretical discussions of autobiography have
privileged the relationship between the text and its
author-protagonist, self-narratives must also be seen as
resolutely public utterances.
Is it possible to develop an account of autobiographical
practice which sees its public dimension as
fundamental? Resources for an enquiry in this direction
are scattered within recent theoretical enquiries into
subjectivity and political existence. Hannah Arendt
called politics the domain where human beings exhibit
themselves to one another through actions and
utterances. She noted the inseparability of political
existence from appearance: to be and to appear are one
and the same thing there. 36 Following this line of
thought, Adrianna Cavarero suggested that what is
revealed in self-narratives is a desire for exteriority—the
desire to appear in the narrative of another as its object:
at the heart of autobiography, for Cavarero, was the
biographical desire to hear one’s story being told by
another. 37 Judith Butler, drawing on Cavarero, argued
that the core of one’s singular existence consists in
one’s ‘exposedness’ to others; what human beings share
in common is their constitutive exposedness. 38
These insights open up the possibility of developing a
vocabulary for analysing the public, exterior dimension
of self-narration. Instead of seeing the autobiographical
act as a movement from the inner domain to the outer,
we may see it as located from the outset in a public,
exhibitionary space. This means shifting our attention
from introspection to the outer, to gestures of
extrospection. The thematic of shame I referred to
earlier offers an account of the subject in a rigorously
exteriorized frame of exposure. A focus on exteriority
may help us see autobiographical utterances as
performances. By this I do not mean to suggest a
distinction between inner selves and their outer
dissimulations; we need to consider the inner world itself
as inscribed on the surface of things, as produced
through actions and utterances in a field of mutual
exposure and unevenly shared visibility.
The approach has a special burden in locations like
Kerala, where the very existence of a commonly shared
field of visibility was in doubt till the nineteenth century.
Distance pollution treated not only touch, but even the
act of seeing as contaminating. Vision was considered in
this scheme a form of contact akin to touch, as
something which had the power to affect another, as the
bearer of a force that could be benign or violent. Like the
shared field of visibility, the common space for public
utterances began emerging in Kerala in the nineteenth
century. This space was shared unevenly—large sections
of the population had little access to it. Yet an idea of the
public as an entity which could potentially, or at least
hypothetically, include most, if not all—and therefore
also as an arena threatened with division and strife—
seems to have come into being at this time.
The texts discussed in the ensuing chapters
presuppose, and also work to create, the idea of a
shared public. Literature was the principal activity within
which this new publicness of utterances was imagined.
This was a consequence, and also a precondition, of the
democratization of literature. The status of literature as
an art of special enjoyment exclusive to the traditional
elite began to change; especially in prose forms, it
addressed a much larger public with widely varied
backgrounds and competences. Literature in its modern
form emerged in Kerala when it came to stand,
synecdochially, for the idea of an inclusive, contestatory
space of public utterances—a status it possesses in
Kerala even today.
 III

The preceding discussion suggested that we approach

autobiographical writing as public utterance rather than
as the expression of pre-existing ‘private’ selves. In this
view, the private domain does not possess any
ontological primacy in relation to the public domain. We
shall encounter, in the following chapters, changes in
the significance of both privacy and publicness, and
shifts in the borders of these concepts. The spatial or
topographical idioms in which the private and the public
are conceived of as distinct areas may be seen as the
work of what Ranciere calls a ‘partitioning of the
sensible’ (‘sensible’ here in the sense of ‘that which can
be sensed’), of configuring the world of experience. 39
Or, more radically, the public–private distinction is one
of the modes of partitioning the sensible, of establishing
distinct norms of access and behaviour for specified
locations, activities, and contexts. The institutional
dimension of these distinctions has been noted both in
Western and postcolonial contexts. Habermas famously
linked the emergence of new forms of public enunciation
in Europe with the spread of print and new locations of
interaction. The trajectories taken by publicness in
modern India have been studied in their postcolonial
specificity. Arundhati Roy has suggested that the word
‘public’ ought in the Indian context to be recognized as a
vernacular word signifying opposition to ‘sarkar’, the
word for the state in many Indian languages. 40 ‘Public’
here denotes ‘the people’, as separate from the state,
indicating a situation of political existence. The drawing
of the line that carves out the public as a
distinguishable, thinkable entity is always a political act.
It demarcates the shared space of exposure in which
utterances are made and received.
We noted that early autobiographies in India,
particularly by men, possessed a strong public
dimension. Many autobiographers in the early twentieth
century saw their destinies as tied to the changing life of
their nation or community. The emergence of a new
sense of individuation from a deep involvement in
nationalism has prompted some to see the relationship
between autobiographical selves and the nation in
homological or allegorical terms. Philip Holden found in
nationalist autobiographies, especially from the
postcolonial world, parallels between the individual and
the emerging nation, arguing that these narratives of
growth towards emancipation imagined the nation less
as a community than as an individual. 41 Similar
analogies have been observed in prison autobiographies
written by nationalist leaders: the prison is regarded as a
metaphoric counterpart to the nation’s servitude, and
self-disciplining, especially in relation to the senses,
reflects the disciplining of the crowd by nationalist
movements. 42
While these parallels may find resonance in self-
narratives written by pan-Indian and cosmopolitan
nationalist leaders, they may not work smoothly in
autobiographies considered later in this book.
Governmental and mythographic constructions of
community, more than nationalist identification, appear
to shape autobiographical narration in them. Their
‘vernacular’ character indicates their difference not only
from professional historiography but also from
nationalist self-imaginings. 43 The language in which
personal narratives negotiated their public dimension
drew from several contemporary genres of public
articulation. Before we proceed further, we need to get a
sense of the public field of writing in Kerala in which the
genres of self-articulation we discuss in the ensuing
chapters made their appearance.
The second half of the nineteenth century, its last
decades in particular, saw the emergence of a new print-
public sphere in Kerala. Interestingly, many figures
central to this moment were from outside Kerala.
Benjamin Bailey of the Church Missionary Society,
Hermann Gundert of the Basel Mission, a Gujarati
merchant Devji Bhimji, and Kalahastiyappa Mutaliar are
important names in the early history of printing and
publishing in the region. 44 Among the Malayalis,
important contributions to the early development of
print came from Christians like Kunnamkulathu Ittuppu,
Maliyammavil Kunjuvarithu, and especially Kandathil
Varghese Mappila, who edited a number of seminal
publications: Keralamitram, Malayala Manorama, and
Bhashaposhini. Varghese Mappila played a crucial role in
creating a literary public sphere that cut across caste
and religious divisions and regions. 45 His regular
columns for poetry and samasyapuranam (competition
in composing a stanza which concludes with a line
announced in advance by the editors) offered room for
many lower-caste writers to publish their first work.
Paravur Kesavan Asan published a newspaper called
Sujananandini, perhaps the first initiative in this
direction from the lower caste of Ezhavas. 46 Friendships
spawned by this new realm of public exchanges could
cross boundaries of region, caste, and religion.
The word ‘public’ does not translate easily into the
Malayalam language, which has no counterpart of the
various senses of the word in English. ‘Public’ as an
English word became familiar in Kerala through
governmental usage; phrases such as ‘public road’
became key political terms in the 1920s, when the lower
castes waged sustained campaigns for their right to use
roads around temples. A public works department was
set up in Travancore in the mid-nineteenth century.
‘Public works’ is usually translated into Malayalam as
‘pothumaramathu’. The prefix (pothu-) has the sense of
‘general’, or ‘something that pertains to all’. This prefix
was added to the word ‘janam’ (people) to create
‘pothujanam’, the Malayalam word for ‘the public’ as a
collectivity. Swadeshabhimani’s editor, K. Ramakrishna
Pillai, the first writer from Kerala to reflect extensively on
the idea of the public, used the words ‘pothujanam’ and
‘janasamanyam’ (again, samanyam signifies a similar
idea of generality) interchangeably for the new idea of
the public that he proposed in his writings. The English
word ‘public’ also appears in some of his Malayalam
writings, where it refers, in the main, to social spaces
that can be contrasted with domestic interiors. For
example, elite women emerging from their houses into
the open to watch a royal procession are described as
‘appearing in public’. 47 This usage underlines the
importance of access and exposure in defining notions of
the public.
I shall focus briefly on Ramakrishna Pillai’s
engagement with the concept of the public, as it
highlights some of the formative tensions of this domain
in early-twentieth-century Kerala. In 1903, in the
opening editorial of his newspaper Keralapanchika,
Ramakrishna Pillai reflected on the duties of
newspapers. ‘Newspapers have, in the main, two duties,’
he wrote. ‘First, to form public opinion, and second, to
obey public opinion.’ He argued that in ‘our country’ the
first of these duties had greater importance, as ‘here,
people have not really grasped the nature of the
relationship between the State (rajyam) and the public
(pothujanam).’ 48 There is a tension—or, if one were to
push the argument, a paradox—inherent in the nature of
the address to be performed by newspapers: they were
to represent a public which did not as yet exist; the
public was constituted through the very act of address.
This project of forming public opinion may appear at
first sight as a move towards an abstract and more
universal subject, and towards grounds of greater
universality for politics. However, this is belied by
Ramakrishna Pillai’s journalistic practice. He used
scandal writing as a powerful form of political criticism,
especially in his attacks on the Travancore dewan, P.
Rajagopalachari. This eventually led to Pillai’s expulsion
from Travancore in 1910. I use the word ‘scandal’ to
refer to Ramakrishna Pillai’s mode of journalism on
account of the twin senses of the word: it refers both to
(scandalous) events that cause public outrage and to
malicious (scandalizing) representations of people’s
private lives. Pillai’s use of scandal as a tool for political
publicity had elements of both these meanings: while
some of his criticisms were directed at the public
functioning of Rajagopalachari, and of other high officials
in the palace, others concerned events from their private
lives.
The mode of scandal writing oscillates between the
explicit and the suggestive. Sometimes details, dates,
etc. are mentioned and the persons involved identified;
at other times, the reports adopt the language of hints
directed at an implied knowledge already possessed by
the public. The public is regarded here as a formless,
amorphous entity; few members of this undefined group
—perhaps none of them—actually possessed the
information alluded to in the report. The imprecise
network of gossip and the untraceable transfer of
information through hearsay give the individual reader
the sense that everyone else is in the know, or at least
some people are in the know. The reader is interpellated
into this group by the tacit offer of sharing a body of
non-explicit knowledge. Such information acquires the
status of public knowledge through its appearance in a
printed newspaper; this confers political value on the
information and turns it into a potential object of public
moral outrage.
The truth claims made by the journalism of political
scandal thus involve an imprecise but convincing sense
of public knowledge. This leads to an attenuation of the
usual demarcation between gossip and reporting, and
between on the one hand private information possessed
by individuals, and on the other public knowledge
shared and used by all as grounds of moral indictment.
Scandal reporting pushes the boundaries of legitimate
representation in newspapers, dragging out for the
public gaze sordid details from the private lives of
powerful individuals. For Ramakrishna Pillai, people in
public office were not entitled to claim immunity from
moral scrutiny for a violated private life.
Ramakrishna Pillai’s use of scandal writing, with its
oblique suggestions and imprecise details, had
consequences both for the nature of the public being
constituted as the addressee of the newspaper, and for
the nature of what was being constituted as public
opinion. It was through his interpellation into the
universe of whispers and murmurs, of hearsay and
gossip, that the subject came to occupy the public field
of political criticism. The truth of public opinion was
arrived at and articulated through the rhetoric of a non-
public arena of opinion and rumour.
 This also complicated the distinction between the
domains of news and fiction. In the early years of the
public uses of print, a newly emergent body of readers
negotiated such distinctions in markedly different ways
from what is professionally mandated in academic
disciplines. In her study of early print culture in Goa,
Rochelle Pinto demonstrated the difficulty of establishing
sharp differences in use between various print genres
such as government notifications, news writing,
pamphleteering, and fiction. 49 Scandal reporting as a
form of political criticism raises a similar problem. Even
when readers regard lapses in the private lives of high
officials as scandalous, the appearance of such
unseemly information in newspapers may embarrass
them: use of the form ran the risk of violating the sense
of decorum commonly associated with the public
domain. This explains the obliqueness and
suggestiveness of the reports, which gesture towards
preserving a sense of public decorum by ‘de-realizing’ or
insufficiently specifying the details referred to.
While these strategies push news reporting closer to
fictional writing, a converse movement is also seen:
alongside Ramakrishna Pillai’s journalism on public
scandals, a genre of political fiction began to emerge in
Travancore in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Pillai played an active role in this—as the author of two
novels and as the publisher of some of the most
controversial political novels of the time. Two fictional
works that he published created much debate in
Travancore—Parappuram and Udayabhanu—both written
by his former teacher, K. Narayana Kurukkal. These
contained thinly veiled representations of scandals
surrounding the Travancore court, contrasting them with
images of the high ideals needed for moral regeneration
in the country. The novels suggested, without openly
affirming, parallels between the characters in the story
and public figures in Travancore. The method shows
striking parallels to the representational techniques of
scandal writing: these novels too appealed to an implicit
public knowledge, a so-called ‘open secret’ that
everyone was expected to recognize and no one to
speak directly about.
Ramakrishna Pillai tried to turn the tables on those
who accused him of slander by arguing that their views
betrayed a lack of literary cultivation and an inner sense
of guilt. ‘Just as a thief thinks that everyone he meets is
a police constable, some people have been struck by
similarities between the conduct of certain characters in
this novel and their own ways of living.’ 50 Works of
fiction, even if they emerge from the writer’s
experiences and observations, are ultimately products of
the imagination. Ramakrishna Pillai used claims
regarding the autonomy of the literary world as a device
for protecting these novels from charges of libel.
This argument, and the way in which the genre of
political satires worked in Travancore, imply two distinct
notions of publicity. As interventions in the political field,
these novels were indeed thinly disguised
representations of people and events in the real world.
However, since they were ‘literary’ works, one could not
criticize them on the basis of such parallels. Literariness
denied any close connection with the real world of
politics, and, in that sense, marked its distance from the
world of pamphlets and newspapers, claiming for its
representations an aura of the ideal and typical.
However, the literary work could indeed be made use of
in the political field; events presented in the quasi-
imaginary space of the novel might direct political, not
literary, criticism at the real events to which they
alluded. This was possible because a shared notion of
the public informed both literature and politics: the
readers of novels were also politically interested readers
of newspapers.
Ramakrishna Pillai’s negotiations with the public
domain are instructive; they enable us to recognize the
ambivalences that lay at the root of the literary arena in
Malayalam. The early print history of literature in
Malayalam did not work with a stable opposition
between the imaginary and the real. The eighteenth
chapter of Indulekha, widely regarded as the first
‘proper’ Malayalam novel, shows the ease with which
elements from non-literary discourses could make their
way into novels without much regard for the economy of
storytelling. Lakshmikesavam, another novel written in
the late nineteenth century, included a chapter
comprising no more than an itemized summary of the
provisions of the new Malabar Marriage Act. The political
novels of Travancore in the 1900s and 1910s provide
exacerbated instances of negotiating the borderline
between the proper domain of fiction and reality. 51 C.V.
Raman Pillai’s ‘social novel’ (samudayikakhyayika),
Premamrtam (1914), may be read as working with and
transforming the representational strategies used in
some of the more contentious political novels of
Travancore. 52 We shall engage with some of these in
later chapters.
Ramakrishna Pillai’s arguments and interventions
demonstrate the ways in which the domains of literary
and political publicity overlapped in early-twentieth-
century Kerala. The amphibious character of public
discourses is visible in the works of several writers.
Figures like Kandathil Varghese Mappila, C.V.
Kunjuraman, and Moorkothu Kumaran, who played a
central role in the formation of a space of public
discussion in Malayalam, worked with both a specific
community locus as well as normative ideas of a larger
public as their addressee. Their writings oscillate
between a register addressed to their own community—
engaged in contestations with other groups to gain
dominance over the emergent public space—and
another which assumes the existence of a domain where
interactions normatively presume equality.
Ramakrishna Pillai’s scandal writing and fictional
allegories of Travancore politics point to two modes in
which lives were rendered visible for political censure. In
contrast to these critical strands, official discourses of
life writing at the end of the nineteenth century were
dominated by the registers of commemoration and
veneration. The emulation of great lives was considered
an important means of moral and historical education. A
textbook committee set up in 1866 by the Travancore
government commissioned a series of biographies called
‘Mahacharitamala’ (The Garland of Great Lives). Early
periodicals in Malayalam published several short
biographies of religious and secular figures. The idioms
of life writing developed in these texts had their own
share of ambivalence. The protagonists of these life
narratives are perceived both as characters operating in
a fictional or mythical space as well as inhabiting a real
historical field. Ramakrishna Pillai’s own biography of
Karl Marx combined a precise summary of the latter’s
political and economic arguments with a celebration of
his life in the language of spiritual commemoration. His
account of Marx’s death is telling; in his narrative it
follows on the footsteps of his wife’s demise. Sitting in
his chair, his visage showing contentment, Marx receives
death: ‘A smile played on his face at the time of death.
This is how Marx the Maharishi (great sage) attained
samadhi.’ 53 The use of diverse registers in life writing
had its consequences for truth: the claims made by
biographies did not always square with verifiability; they
also drew on allegiance and belief. It was in this terrain,
where utterances possessed an uncertain valence, that
autobiographers began writing the stories of their lives.
 IV

This book takes a close look at a few important moments

in the development of a language of self-articulation in
Kerala. The analyses offered do not add up to a
comprehensive history of that process; the number of
texts considered is small; and the discussion is mostly
focused on the relations between language and
figurations of the subject in order to understand the
discursive economies within which these writings made
sense. Even for the short timespan it deals with, this
study is neither exhaustive in its coverage nor
representative in its choice of texts. Most of the works I
discuss were written by male authors from Hindu upper
castes, or from the Ezhava low caste. My choice was
determined to an extent by the nature of the public
sphere of the times, by the dominant idioms of
individuation and self-reflection which have come down
to us from this period, and by the particular discursive
trajectories that appeared to me to merit closer probing.
I am concerned with a critical understanding of this
seemingly well-known strand and its complex heritage. A
recovery of other currents—suppressed or silenced—has
been attempted in recent scholarship: necessary as it is
and critically complementary as it would be to an inquiry
of this kind, that has not been my aim here.
The chapters of this book do not necessarily follow a
chronological or causal sequence. At an apparent level,
each chapter is on a body of work held together under
an author’s signature or the coherence of a literary form,
but those unities are not meant to be the mainstay of
the book. Such discursive units, on closer examination,
appear as sites of pluralization: an author or a literary
form quickly turns into a multiplicity of concerns, tropes,
and pulls. The proper name of an author or the seeming
coherence of a genre often serves as a refracting prism
that separates seemingly united strands and elements.
The chapters that follow are attempts to reconfigure
them into varieties of thought and enunciation. This
enables other kinds of connections between chapters:
tropes, issues, and themes introduced in one are taken
up in another to introduce variations or mutations. This
somewhat diminishes narrative continuity, but helps
highlight continuities and breaks that the pressures and
pleasures of storytelling often obscure. Within individual
chapters I have also sometimes found it useful to work
against the grain of the narrative: such interruption has
allowed the isolation of elements which, in the
arguments developed in this book, play a more vital role
than is allowed in the stories within which they appear.
I begin by examining, in the next chapter, some of the
writings of Sree Narayana Guru, the most significant
social-reform figure to emerge in Kerala in the
nineteenth century. His writings are varied in form and
intent. They range from metaphysical and devotional
compositions often closely tied to forms of spiritual
practice, to texts such as ‘Jatilakshanam’ (The Signs of
Caste) and ‘Jatinirnayam’ (The Determination of Caste)—
which advanced philosophical arguments against the
validity of jati (caste) as a category of thought—and on
to instructions in prose pronounced in the context of
new initiatives of community making. In spite of their
diversity in objectives and audiences, Sree Narayanan’s
writings and actions are linked by the recurrence of
certain concepts, tropes, patterns of thinking, and
discursive organization. For instance, one of his
arguments—that jati involves a false differentiation of
the social body—deploys a form of argumentation used
in his philosophical texts, which in turn drew on
elements from Advaita, Saiva Siddhanta, and the
writings of the Tamil Siddhars. Narayanan’s instructional
texts call for a reading that is sensitive to the relations
between doctrines and practices: doctrines perform
varied functions, including generating new practices and
conferring fresh meanings on practices from the past.
This has, by implication, consequences for our reading of
his metaphysical texts as well.
My discussion of Sree Narayanan’s writings takes the
figure of the body as a strategic point of departure. As
metaphor, and as all too real and physical—occupying
the levels of the individual, the collective, and the
species as a whole—the body is repeatedly
foregrounded in his texts. The positions and postures of
the subject in Sree Narayanan’s spiritual writings,
instructional texts, and practices appear connected in
new ways when viewed from this angle. He lived and
wrote during a period when bodily practices—those
already noted as pertaining to dress and jewellery,
marriage and sexuality, proximity to and distance from
other bodies—were undergoing crucial changes in
Kerala. It is reductive to suggest an easy determination
of Sree Narayanan’s thought by the popular landmarks
of a materialist history. My aim is rather to track the
emergence of a discursive space in Malayalam writing
within which subjects of new bodily practices, with a new
relationship to their bodily existence, could appear. I
argue that Sree Narayanan’s diverse and at times
seemingly paradoxical investments in the body enabled
corporeality to acquire a new valence in processes of
thinking about the concept of difference at the levels of
individuation, species identity, and social life. In
denuding the body of caste markers and producing it as
the site of the ‘degree zero’ of difference between
human beings, a new discursivity around the body
begins to emerge, whose elaborations I track in
subsequent chapters.
This perceptual economy is also evident in the poetry
of Sree Narayanan’s prominent disciple Kumaran Asan,
which forms the focus of chapter 3. Asan was an active
participant and leader in the community reform
movement inaugurated by Sree Narayanan. He is,
however, best known as one of the most important
poets in the history of Malayalam writing. His poetry
marked a distinctive turn in literary sensibility,
emblematized in his fashioning of a monologic discourse
of meditation and self-relation. At the core of this shift
was a new language of thoughts (vicharabhasha)
through which the subject—often a female protagonist—
made her inner self available to an interlocutor and, in
the process, to herself. Even forms of dialogic exchange
serve in Asan’s poetry primarily as pretexts for
introspection and self-revelation. The interlocutor is
turned into a rhetorical device in order to facilitate
monologic self-articulation. Mutual dependence and
responsiveness, typical of a dialogic organization of
discourses, are absent; even where one senses the
presence of an impulse to dialogue, it stands in most
cases for the play of inner differences within the soul of
the protagonist. Asan’s monologues appear primarily
within contexts of deliberation in which the subject, after
taking measure of divergent inner impulses,
consolidates her position in decisiveness and action.
Chintavishtayaya Sita (Sita Immersed in Thought) shows
this in its most consummate form: after taking stock of
her entire life, Sita reaches a state of readiness to
relinquish her body.
Asan’s new discourse of the mind raises important
questions: what prompts the subject to enter into this
active self-relation, and what initiates and sustains the
inner action of deliberation and articulation? These turn
our attention towards the economy of desire in his
mature poetry. Asan’s female protagonists often leave
their domestic locations behind in pursuit of their
intense, inexorable desires. The poetry which contains
them establishes close connections between the realm
of the inner, the experience of desire and moments of
deliberation and action. Asan’s valorization of the ‘inner’
involves, interestingly, a displacement of the body:
erotic intensities, which presuppose embodiment, are in
their ultimate manifestations not considered as bodily;
they belong to the inner self. The ambivalent placement
of the body in Asan’s work involves a tense complicity
between the restraint of bodily senses and the
experience of intensities. This is crucial to the shift
effected by Asan’s poems in discourses of desire and
erotic enjoyment in Malayalam. Gendered subjects,
manifest in the figure of the woman, are placed at the
core of this shift. Our discussion of Asan’s poems will
take forward some of the concerns introduced in the
earlier chapter: if Sree Narayanan’s work involved
cleansing the body of caste semiology, Asan’s poetry
created a clearing in language whereby gender
difference found articulation as inner experience,
marking the subject’s relationship to desire and speech.
Two later chapters turn to early novels in Malayalam:
even as our engagement with the body persists, new
issues come to the foreground. Central to chapter 4 is
the novel’s configuration of a world of objects and
spaces. When novels began to be written in Malayalam
in the late nineteenth century, many of them, including
the famous Indulekha (1889), distinguished themselves
from older genres of literary representation and claimed
a lineage that came from ‘English novel books’. The
novel’s ability to show its readers a plausible world was
its strength; it was in equal measure a source of anxiety.
Appu Nedungadi, the author of Kundalata (1887), set his
story far away, in an imaginary kingdom called
Kalingam, to ward off criticisms of his possible deviations
from existing Keralan customs and conventions
(mathirikalum maryadakalum) 54 A new conception of
the literary public, not defined in terms of skills and
training, but negatively, as lacking in special
qualifications or preoccupations, began to take shape.
The objective of the novel, for Nedungadi, was to
‘provide harmless entertainment to people who [did] not
know English, as well as to women who [did] not have
much work and [found] it difficult to while away their
time.’ 55 Chandu Menon’s Indulekha also aimed at
‘entertaining the mind of the common man and
imparting knowledge’; Menon defined the novel as a
device of realistic representation, distinct from the
improbable stylization used in traditional narrative
forms.
Although the novel was announced as modelled on a
Western form, the nature of the relationship remained
unsettled. In their prefaces, the early novelists turned to
metaphors of translation, retelling, and adaptation to
describe their art. The discourse of the early novel
reveals a complex and inconsistent picture. This is
indicated in the tension between different modes of
representing characters, some of which came from the
English novel of the nineteenth century, and some from
Malayalam or Sanskrit poetry, or local visual and
performing arts. Chandu Menon, in his Preface to
Indulekha, spoke of a shift in taste away from traditional
representations which ‘in defiance of all possible
existence’ depicted ‘Vishnu as half man and half lion’,
and the ‘god Krishna, with his legs twisted and twined
into postures in which no biped could stand and blowing
a cowherd’s horn’, towards an appreciation of ‘pictures,
whether in oil or water colours, in which shall be
delineated men, beasts, and things according to their
true appearance.’ 56 As we shall see, however, a close
look at Indulekha reveals Menon’s reliance on non-
realistic and schematic forms of organization in his
portrayal of characters. Such tensions are even more
pronounced in novelists like Padu Menon and Chathu
Nair.
Three major thematic strands are usually identified in
early Mala-yalam novels. The first, loosely modelled on
the liberal novel of ideas, addressed questions of
education, reform, and issues in the civic sphere. Many
of these novels came from Malabar, then directly under
British rule, and were often written by Nayar writers
worrying over issues raised by English education and the
legitimacy of their caste practices within the colonial
world. Debates around the validity of customary marital
alliances (sambandham) among Nayar women and the
proceedings of the Malabar Marriage Commission were
central to the discourse of many of Nayar reform novels
from Malabar. 57 Chandu Menon’s Indulekha (1889) and
Sarada (1892), Padu Menon’s Lakshmikesavam (1892),
and Cheruvalathu Chathu Nair’s Meenakshi (1890)
incorporate discussions on these issues. Romantic love
and the choice of marital partners occupied the centre of
plots and marked the new subject positions endorsed in
these novels.
By contrast, in Travancore—a princely state under
indirect rule by the British—C.V. Raman Pillai produced a
trilogy of historical romances around the royal court and
its history. Even while placing kingship at the centre of
their political and moral universe, these novels show a
world corroded by deep instabilities, in which subjects
face having to deal with, interpret, and unravel the
obscure mysteries of an unreliable, deceptive
environment. Sentimental love figures in this universe
too, but is of secondary importance.
Nineteenth-century Kerala also saw the development
of a third strand in novels about conversion, mainly
written by lower-caste Christian converts and Christian
missionaries in northern Kerala. Erotic desire and
sentimental love did not figure prominently in the inner
world of these novels, which were primarily concerned
with practices of self-making and self-discipline
demanded by the new faith. Education recurs as an
implicit trope, often in order to transform the subject and
show his or her earlier life as inauthentic and unethical.
Reading the Bible converged with the idea of learning in
some of them. Lower-caste social-reform novels, such as
the anti-caste Saraswativijayam by Potheri Kunjambu,
used a variant of this model. The struggle against caste
involves education and a transformation of the subject
by imparting new knowledge.
Our discussion tries to move away from these
thematic taxonomies to look at the way early novels
showed a new world of things and people. By organizing
their fictional worlds as domains of varied visual
experiences, these novels impelled a consideration of
human beings as people who were engaged in acts of
seeing and reading; conversely, being human in the
world of the novel meant being viewed and interpreted
by others. Therefore, questions of visibility and legibility
—and the production of a field in which objects, spaces,
and bodies appeared—are the central engagements of
the chapter that deals with these fictions. I contend that
the novel opened a space in discourse for new modes of
visibility and new orders of subjectivity. The voice that
emerged in this process was not only a subject of
sensation—one affected by the world of objects, but also
of exposedness—open to the gaze of the world. Caste
and gender were not external entities merely referred to
in the novel; they were produced not as categories but
as living processes by the marking of human subjects in
particular ways within the new perceptual field being
configured by these novels.
C.V. Raman Pillai’s (hereafter ‘C.V.’) fictions and
political writings lead us in chapter 5 to explore in
greater detail the links between perception and fiction,
and their close kinship with questions of affect and
memory. C.V.’s extensive use of modes of stylization
serves as a useful point of departure. Drawing on
performing art forms such as the Kathakali, he created a
new language of exaggeration for the physiognomies,
expressions, and gait of his characters. The fictional
images in his novels constantly oscillate between the
poles of realistic representation and schematic
performance routines. I regard this oscillation as a key to
the aesthetic-political form of historical recollection in
his novels.
Although his trilogy of historical romances—
Martandavarma (1891), Dharmaraja (1913), and
Ramaraja Bahadur (1918–19)—presented celebratory
accounts of two eighteenth-century kings of Travancore,
i.e. Martandavarma (r. 1729–58) and Ramavarma (r.
1758–98), the novelist saw Dharmaraja and Ramaraja
Bahadur as the first two volumes in a planned trilogy on
the eighteenth-century Nayar dewan Kesava Pillai
(1745–99), better known as ‘Raja Kesavadas’. The shift
in focus from the king to the Nayar minister may be
seen as a screen that conceals an additional level of
complexity, found in the recurrent and obsessive
preoccupation in C.V.’s fiction with Kazhakkuttam house,
a destroyed taravad (matrilineal family) of rebel Nayar
chiefs (madampimar). They appear to rise from the
ashes, novel after novel, to confront royal power anew. If
C.V.’s novels celebrate images of Nayar loyalty, valour,
and governance through the figure of Raja Kesavadas,
they also manifest a powerful subterranean strain of
heroic mourning for earlier forms of Nayar power
destroyed by Martandavarma’s consolidation of the
Travancore state.
I argue that tensions between two configurations of
sovereignty, two forms of political life, underlay C.V.’s
fictional and political projects. Language and narration in
his historical novels negotiate their opposed pulls
through the invocation of a heroic register and the use
of stylization and schematic performance routines; they
bring together praise and mourning, ritualized royal
acclamation and new forms of discursive restraint. The
subject of historical memory in C.V.’s fiction is produced
at the tense convergence of these conflicting elements.
The theme of memory leads to chapter 6, which
engages with the discourse of remembrance in
autobiographical writing. Personal narratives developed
a special tone in Malayalam with the emergence of what
may, somewhat crudely, be called ‘reform
autobiographies’. Their authors were people who took an
active part in community reform movements in the early
decades of the twentieth century, the autobiographies
being written mainly in the middle of the twentieth
century, after independence and the creation of Kerala
as a state. I focus on the modes of self-articulation in
these self-narratives and try to place them within a
longer history of the genre in Malayalam.
The chapter begins with a discussion of two early
autobiographies, by Yakob Ramavarman (1814–58) and
Vaikkathu Pachu Moothathu (1815–83). Both texts invoke
the divine as source of veridiction. Ramavarman’s
narrative introduces a new conception of time by
privileging the moment of individual transformation and
linking it to the subject revealing a hidden truth about
himself.
The chapter juxtaposes these early narratives with
autobiographies that have social reform and changes in
social life as their primary points of reference. Personal
narratives written by two Nambutiri Brahmin authors,
Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad (1891–1981) and
V.T. Bhattatiripad (1896–1982; hereafter ‘V.T.’), show us
new idioms of temporal articulation. For Kanippayyur,
autobiography was not the story of an individual’s life: it
was a recording of the customs and practices that had
disappeared from his society, but which could be
conjured through personal recollection, in the mode of
an autoethnography of the past. V.T., by contrast, used
his autobiography to critique conservative practices
among Nambutiri Brahmins and to affirm the pleasures
and desires of the new subjects produced by the reform
movement. We find important moments of ambivalence
in these texts: Kanippayyur, who praises the harmonious
pre-modern ethos of caste societies, resorts to a modern
understanding of caste in his historiography; V.T.’s
affirmative new subject appears enmeshed in acts of
betrayal when we take a closer look at his invocation of
female figures.
Jeevitasamaram (1953–65)—the autobiography of C.
Kesavan (1891–1969), an Ezhava leader who later
became chief minister of the Travancore-Cochin state—
shows the emergence of a different model of self-
presentation. In this narrative a rebellious, ‘natural’
masculinity combines with a secular-modern desire to
plan one’s future. It also shows a powerful strand of
popular memory at work, which often militates against
the principles and ideals endorsed by the reform
movement. This permits Kesavan’s self-narrative to
produce an ethnography of modernity which disrupts
easy inhabitation of the norms avowed in the text.
I conclude with a brief discussion of a fragmentary
autobiography written by Lalitambika Antarjanam, which
makes the difficulty, even impossibility, of
autobiographization determine the very form of
selfnarration. Lalitambika’s account foregrounds the
conditions of entry into the world of autobiographical
eloquence. These conditions did not merely reflect or
reproduce inequalities that existed in the ‘real’ world;
they shaped the fabric of writing by determining who
could speak under what signature, and what discursive
manoeuvres allowed speech about oneself, one’s life.
Self-narratives tend to provoke discussion of the
author’s conscious design: what sorts of events or
details were selected for narration or suppressed, what
self-image is projected, what pattern is meant to emerge
from the story as a whole. However, we often find
instances where what is drawn into self-narratives goes
beyond the ambit of authorial control. Descriptive detail,
narration, and conversation pull in resonances that are
inadequately contained by authorially intended patterns
or self-images. Autobiographical self-exhibition exceeds
that which was meant to be exhibited. The very force of
story-telling—the intoxication with the flow of elements
from the world into one’s story—may result in a
breakdown or betrayal of control. If autobiographies
have been a means for writing history, and not merely
raw material to be processed by the discipline of history,
the reason is their capacity for drawing in things that
cannot be assimilated by the intended story.
A powerful instance of this is the anecdote: the
memory work of autobiographies clears a space for this
and draws it in. A good anecdote is not exhausted by its
value as illustration. It possesses a memorable,
compelling sense of detail, and often a quirkiness which
fits with what is being said, but only to an extent, and
without being submerged. A detail sticks out to outlive
the purpose for which it was brought in, producing
resonances that may go beyond, even against, what is
being said. The anecdote ‘speaks’ of itself, independent
of the author of the self-narrative, even if it originated in
the personal experience of the author. The anecdote,
like a rolling pebble, acquires its form through repeated
recounting. It has a loose sense of contextual belonging:
it shakes off the dust of the longer stories within which it
has appeared to move into new tales. Anecdote, in a real
sense, is not answerable to its author; its very mode is
that of being retold by others. Its repetitions invoke and
betray authority. Its links are to a less regulated popular
realm of remembrance and recollection. A discussion of
self-narratives is bound to remain flawed unless the
work of the anecdote is taken on board. How do
anecdotes impel us to reconsider the figure that appears
in autobiographies as the subject of recollection and
retelling? This question informs some of the discussion
in chapter 6, but its consequences may be larger.
During work on this book, two concepts grew
increasingly important. They have determined the
analyses in it, often without marking the text’s surface.
These are the concepts of ‘inhabitation’ and ‘style’. Both
have been useful in probing the limits of
selfidentification, and in asking after elements that
escape the table of self-descriptions and the calculus of
identities. This is not always a matter of remainders, and
we may need a different kind of question: closer to a
‘how’ than to a ‘what’. ‘Inhabitation’ helps us ask after
the ‘how’ of identities: how are identities lived or lived
in, how are they inhabited? ‘Style’ is vital to identifying
and differentiating the levels to which questions belong.
I was drawn to ‘style’ initially because of its flexibility in
comparison to more ‘robust’ concepts like
‘representation’, ‘structure’, and even ‘imaginary’. Style
suggests a movement best captured in the process of
enunciatory unfolding. It is closer to the manner, the
habits, the gestures of saying and telling, than to the
story told. I have tried to focus on postures and
movements which appear within acts of enunciation, but
which may slide away from the apparent goals of what is
said. Such slides show us snapshots of subjects in their
imperfect inhabitation of narrativizable identities. I have
used ‘style’ as a name for this plane of visibility.
2

The Degree Zero of Difference

Passages of the Body in Sree
A Narayana Guru’s Writings T the
beginning of the First World War, Sree
Narayana Guru, renowned for his
spiritual and social initiatives, is said
to have advised his followers to pray
for Britain’s victory. ‘The British are
like our guru: it is they who gave us
sanyas,’ he observed, recalling the
age-old denial of the right to ascetic
practice to the lower castes in Hindu
society. 1 These words, tinged with
the wry humour typical of many of
Sree Narayanan’s observations, bring
into relief the non-traditional
authority behind his own ascetic
career. A famous riposte attributed to
him is revealing: when he founded
the Siva temple at Aruvippuram in
 1888—by consecrating a stone from
the local river as idol—and his
eligibility to perform such rituals was
challenged by the upper castes, Sree
Narayanan is said to have responded
with disarming wit: ‘What I installed
is only an Ezhava Siva.’ 2 The
unauthorized character of his
initiatives was important within Sree
Narayanan’s thoughts about his own
practice. Till late in life he did not don
the robes of a sanyasi. 3 His
statements on religion suggested
diverse and apparently contradictory
positions. The nature of religious
belief and identity, the relationship to
tradition, and the founding
presuppositions of community—all
these remained live issues in his
work and thought throughout his life.
Sree Narayanan was born in Chempazhanti near
Trivandrum in 1856. After a spell of primary education
he engaged in agriculture, his family’s main occupation,
until the age of seventeen. He went on to study Tamil
spiritual texts in Trivandrum, and Sanskrit texts from
Kummampilli Raman Pillai Asan, a scholar interested in
Sanskrit as well as Tamil literature. 4 On his return to
Chempazhanti in 1881, Narayanan set up a traditional
elementary school (pathasala) where children of the
untouchable castes were also taught. Around this time,
probably on account of family pressure, he married a
woman named Kalikkutty. He forsook conjugal life soon
after and took to wandering as an avadhuta (a spiritual
practitioner who has freed himself from social
etiquettes) to engage in ascetic austerities. Around this
time he met Chattampi Swamikal and Thycaud Ayya,
two advanced practitioners of yoga, and was quite
possibly trained by both. In 1888 Sree Narayanan
founded a temple at Aruvippuram, following this up with
consecrations of new temples at Ayiramthengu (1892),
Kolathukara (1893), and Kayikkara (1893). He set up an
organization around the Aruvippuram temple called
Vavoottu Yogam, and, with the help of Dr P. Palpu—an
Ezhava doctor in the service of the Mysore government
—founded the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP)
Yogam in 1903. His subsequent life is well documented.
He authored several devotional and philosophical texts
in Malayalam, Tamil, and Sanskrit. These form an
important part of his work—alongside prescriptive
writings, instructions, messages to the SNDP Yogam and
to the ashrams he founded, as well as the records of his
conversations with co-workers, visitors, and devotees.
Located at the intersection of philosophical reflection,
religious doctrine, and communitarian practice, Sree
Narayanan’s work combines diverse modalities of
discourse to re-cite and re-signify tropes from a variety
of traditions.
Sree Narayana Guru has been the object of
widespread adulation, worship, and commemoration in
Kerala, and across parts of the country. A visitor to the
state cannot escape chancing upon some of the
numerous statues of the Guru, erected by local branches
of various Sree Narayana organizations, which punctuate
the length and breadth of Kerala. Hundreds of
institutions— schools, colleges, and hospitals, for
instance—have been named after him. Beginning with
Kumaran Asan’s brief sketch in 1907, Narayanan’s life
has been written about in numerous biographies;
anthologies of his compositions, scholarly studies of his
work, and selections from contemporary writings on
caste society also circulate well in Kerala. 5 The widest
possible political spectrum—ranging from the far left to
the right—shows Sree Narayana Guru being invoked as a
commanding spiritual figure, modernizing social
reformer, lower-caste campaigner, and harbinger of the
ideals of egalitarian democracy. This unanimous
valorization has arguably limited the possibilities of
interpretation—for instance, in relation to Sree
Narayanan’s legacy vis-a-vis contemporary critical
thought—as well as reduced the arena for new idioms of
engagement outside the registers of adulation and
canonization. 6
A strict separation between life and thought is difficult
when viewing figures like Sree Narayanan. Biographical
commemoration is an important means through which
his heritage has been constructed, interpreted, and
disseminated. Most accounts of his life use the
techniques of charismatic biography and hagiography to
construct the Guru as a source of authority for
contemporary redefinitions of community identity. 7
Commemorative spiritual biographies often operate by
the logic of the exemplum, interweaving human effort
and superhuman agency in idioms that prevent easy
distinction between the secular and the sacred. While
many of Sree Narayanan’s biographers regard him as an
exceptionally great, spiritually enlightened individual,
and as a privileged, emblematic sign of his times,
popular hagiographical accounts in books and pamphlets
give greater prominence to his siddhis (miraculous
powers). They retain a strong residue of the popular
estimation of Sree Narayanan in his time, found only
with increasing difficulty in the more rational, secular,
and disciplined constructions of his legacy. A critical
engagement with the Guru’s work needs to step outside
these dominant frames of canonization and the divide
between the secular and the sacred. Is his thought a
singular event or does it acquire meaning only in
historical narration? Is the newness of his thought to be
sought in the doctrines he presented or in the context in
which he invoked and deployed elements from tradition?
Here I respond to these questions obliquely, by tracking
the figures of the body, the species, and the community
in Sree Narayana Guru’s writings.
 II

The bulk of modern scholarship considers Sree Narayana

Guru an Advaitin thinker, a latter-day Sankara from a
lower caste. Sree Narayanan drew on Advaita Vedanta
arguments in prominent metaphysical writings such as
‘Atmopadesa Satakam’, ‘Darsanamala’, and
‘Advaitadeepika’. Reading his texts for doctrinal
consistency, however, raises important questions
regarding the links between doctrines, thought-events,
and practices. Advaitin arguments were invoked in a
range of writings in nineteenth-century India in relation
to worldly life and social action. The salience of these
interventions is often found less in their strict adherence
to Advaita doctrine than in its re-citation, in the way the
later texts make the doctrine confront fresh experiences
and authorize new discursive moves. It is over the
course of this innovative repetition that the space of a
new subject—of thought, articulation, and action—takes
shape. This does not mean that the invocation of
metaphysical arguments is instrumental or strategic.
Authorizing doctrines appear as essential and
indispensable to the ‘work’ performed by these texts,
but collapsing all distinctions between them may be
reductive. A productive reading requires moving away
from doctrinal labels to track discursive events.
This is particularly important in the case of Sree
Narayanan’s writings, where Advaitin arguments at
times appear influenced by other doctrinal and
discursive lineages. Sree Narayanan, as we saw, was
educated in Tamil as well as Sanskrit traditions. He is
said to have received special lessons in yogic practice
from Thycaud Ayya and Chattampi Swamikal. Both these
thinkers, along with scholars such as P. Sundaram Pillai,
were members of a group called Jnanaprajagaram,
organized around Pettayil Raman Pillai Asan in
Trivandrum, to discuss philosophy, literature, and
spiritual matters. 8 Sree Narayana Guru seems to have
known these people well. Thycaud Ayya was a disciple of
Vaikundaswamy (aka Ayya Vaikuntanathar) from
Tirunelveli, a Dravidian sage with a millenarian,
egalitarian vision. 9 Vaikundaswamy and Thycaud Ayya
came from the strands of an anti-Brahmin spiritual
practice of lower-caste provenance. They drew upon a
Tamil intellectual and spiritual tradition which combined
elements from Advaita Vedanta with Saiva Siddhanta
and the practice of the Tamil Siddhars. Sree Narayanan
is said to have travelled widely in southern Tamilnadu in
the 1880s and to have interacted with practitioners of
this spiritual tradition. He may be better understood in
relation to these thinkers, who were part of a vernacular
context of spiritual initiatives in southern Travancore in
the second half of the nineteenth century.
Chattampi Swamikal, closely associated with Sree
Narayanan during this period, had had a long-standing
and intimate engagement with Sanskrit and Tamil
traditions. He authored texts such as
‘Advaitachintapaddhati’ and ‘Nijanandavialasam’ to
explicate Advaita Vedanta doctrines, as well as writings
that maintained a close relationship to contemporary
anti-Brahmin Dravidian thought—for example,
‘Pracheena Malayalam’, ‘Vedadhikaranirupanam’, and
‘Adibhasha’. Some of his contemporaries recall his
proficiency in the Advaitin and Saiva Siddhanta
traditions: ‘Although Chattampi Swamikal was a sanyasi
in the Siddhanta tradition, he was a great rishi who had
equal scholarship and experience in both the traditions
[Saiva Siddhanta and Advaita Vedanta]. Therefore, with
great independence, he disseminated an Advaita
practice that combined both Vedanta and Siddhanta.’ 10
Chattampi Swamikal’s reluctance to adopt the external
attributes of a sanyasi was perceived as a sign of his
connection with the tradition of the Siddhars. 11 The
confluence of elements from Advaitin and Siddhar
traditions was also a feature of the intellectual and
spiritual context within which Sree Narayanan’s thought
took shape. In some of his explicitly Advaitin texts,
details of doctrine as well as metaphors used for
illustrating arguments appear to have derived from
Siddha or Saiva Siddhanta sources. Tamil Saivite saints
such as Appar, Sambandhar, Sundarar, and
Manikyavachakar are prominent in Narayanan’s writings.
12 Advaitin arguments at times deflect in the direction of

the traditions of Saiva Siddhanta or of the Siddhars, and

arguments from texts in these traditions are recast in an
Advaitin idiom.
Arivu and jnanam, two words for knowledge prominent
in Siddhar texts, occur repeatedly in Narayanan’s work.
Kamil Zvelebil points out the predominance of arivu and
its identification with God in the Siddha tradition:
‘Civavakiar identifies civam, the Absolute, with arivu,
knowledge. This is, of course, nothing new; again we
may point back to Tirumular who says, “Those who say
that knowledge and civam are two different things are
ignorant.”’ 13 Arivu in Narayanan’s writings often
occupies a privileged structural space analogous to that
of ‘Brahman’ in the philosophical discourse of Advaita. 14
It is seen as the sole essential reality, and the world and
all lived experience are considered moments in arivu’s
self-searching movement.
An early composition by Sree Narayanan, which begins
‘Atu pampe!’ (Dance, snake, dance!), initially known as
‘Pampattichintu’ (the snake-charmer’s song), is evidently
modelled on a song composed by a major Siddha poet in
Tamil known as ‘Pampatti Siddhar’ (the snake-charmer
Siddha), and the refrain ‘Dance, snake, dance!’ is
borrowed from his compositions. Later, Sree
Narayanan’s poem came to be known as
‘Kundalinippattu’ (Song of the Kundalini), after the
concept of the Kundalini, the source of energy in
yogasastra, conceived in the form of a small snake
resting in three and a half coils at the base of the spine.
With yogic practices the Kundalini can be awakened and
made to rise through the spinal column via a series of
chakras towards the head, releasing the practitioner into
a state of final, ecstatic liberation. Pampatti Siddhar’s
work too has invited yoga-sastric readings. 15 The word
‘Kundalini’ does not appear in Sree Naryanan’s
composition, and some commentators have disputed the
identification of the snake in the poem with the
Kundalini. 16 The poem moves between the worship of
Siva in concrete, corporeal terms, and the ecstatic
contemplation of a moment of realization which is
beyond figural representation; the latter appears in the
poem as the culminating sound and final effulgence that
encompass the entire universe. Sree Narayanan used
metaphors from yogasastra more directly in some of his
other compositions, such as ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’.
Presenting the body in intimate play serves as the
nodal point for these eclectic processes of re-
signification. Sree Narayanan’s writings house numerous
moments where phenomenal experience is regarded as
lacking in ultimate validity. These moments exist
alongside instances when the world is seen as Siva’s
body, suggesting a positive characterization of its
ontological status. The dualism associated with the
vision of Siddha and Saiva Siddhanta thinking allows
differentiation of reality, though false differentiation is
criticized and rejected.
Valorization of the world as Siva’s body is paralleled by
a positive evaluation of the human body. The Siddha
texts often insisted that uyir (life force) does not exist
without utal (body). Tirumular, one of the eighteen
Siddhars, saw the body and its care as prerequisites for
spiritual practice: If the body perishes, Prana departs

Nor will the light of truth be reached;

I learned the way of preserving my body

And so doing, my Prana too. 17

For Tirumular, despising the body is untenable: porul
(essence, meaning) is discovered within utal. The body
is the temple of God and its attentive preservation is the
new task entrusted to the enlightened devotee. 18 In
another verse, Tirumular characterizes the heart as the
temple and body as the house. 19 All these tropes imply
that the body is a site of positive practices.
However, in a strand of the classical yoga tradition,
and in the work of some of the later Siddhars, the
sensory body is denounced as a locus of decay and filth.
20 Some of Pattinattar’s poems illustrate this. 21 One also

finds criticism of bodily existence in Pampatti Siddhar,

Kaduveli Siddhar, Bhogamuni, and even Tirumular. T.N.
Ganpathy has argued that the ‘negative attitude of
some of the Tamil Siddhas towards the human body is
explainable in the background of the positive attitude
developed in the doctrine of kayasadhana (culture of the
body) with a view to attaining kayasiddhi (perfection of
the body).’ 22 Thycaud Ayya, who instructed Sree
Narayanan in yoga, is believed to have been an
advanced practitioner of kayasadhana. 23 Narayanan’s
work draws from both positive and negative attitudes to
corporeality found in Siddha literature. This adds
richness and complexity to the figure of the body in his
writings.
Narayanan’s early texts, such as ‘Mananateetam’ and
‘Siva Satakam’, include passages where the devotee-
subject entreats Siva to rescue him from temptations of
the flesh. The figure of the woman in these verses
stands for the lower state of the body, entrapped in
desires of the flesh. In diametrical contrast to sensuous
descriptions of the female figure in Sanskrit and
Malayalam poetic traditions, here the female body is
imaged as disgusting, resembling a vast stinking waste-
heap. 24 Women’s breasts are compared to boils, and life
with the woman is represented as an infernal ocean
filled with blood and pus. 25 ‘Mananateetam’ oscillates
frenetically between the opposed poles of fear and
attraction. The female figure is viewed as an irresistible
conqueror before whom the devotee is powerless
without the support of Siva’s grace. The soul is
compared to a bird caught in a snare set by Kamadeva.
Death and madness haunt the presence of the woman:
the female body appears as a corpse, or the woman
reveals herself as a raving lunatic in the midst of fervent
embraces. 26 Fear of the female figure merges with the
fear of mortality and unfreedom.
In these texts by Sree Narayanan, bodily senses
appear as lacking any knowledge of what they can
celebrate, what their legitimate enjoyments are. They
are reminders of the proximity of death and the
promiscuous trap of existence. They produce jugupsa
(disgust); to escape the experience of revulsion, the
senses have to be reinscribed in a new relation to the
body and the self. Another poem by Narayanan, ‘Indriya
Vairagyam’, tells us that the senses contain neither the
problem nor the solution: the senses do not feel any
suffering; it is the self that suffers. 27 The devotee
perceives his body as being abused by the senses; the
latter are inferior beings irredeemably engrossed in the
sensible world. The devotee’s only recourse is to pray to
Siva to save him from the untruthful entrapment of the
senses and make him embrace a new, uncorrupted body.
28 The conceptions of a pure body and its maintenance

are articulated in terms that come from yogasastra.

Narayanan’s most elaborate discourse of the doctrine
of the self is to be found in ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’. 29
Presumed to have been composed when he stayed at
Aruvippuram, and initially circulated as ‘Atmabodham’,
this text is believed to have reached its present form by
1897. 30 It is written in the mode of advice, and the title
captures vital ambiguities: it could mean advice to
oneself or advice on the doctrine of the self. Each stanza
concludes by stressing the modality of instruction,
evident in locutions such as ‘may be uttered’, ‘may be
remembered’, and ‘may be practised’. The guru and
sishya both seem intermittently to be the enunciating
subject; the speaking voice in the poem seems to
oscillate between the two, becoming the subject as well
as the object of advice. The text’s performative mode is
that of self-practice, comprising actions performed by
the self on itself, effecting and recognizing moments of
transformation. This is stressed by the appearance,
several times in the text, of postures of the body,
beginning with the pranamam in the opening verses and
ending with the amarcha of the closing lines, presenting
the condition of an active containment of energy.
‘Atmopadesa Satakam’ is widely read as Sree
Narayanan’s most important text on the Advaitin
doctrine of the self, subtly extending its scope beyond
the ambit of spiritual affairs. The poem also contains
elements that resonate with the discourses of Saiva
Siddhanta and the Tamil Siddhars. 31 The prominence
given to arivu as the manifestation of God and the
placing of the senses (indriyam), inner sense (karanam),
the body (kalebaram), and the world (jagat) as its
manifestations pick up elements from these traditions.
The third verse, for example, describes the five
elements as vivartham in the Advaitin tradition and as
vibhuti in the Saiva Siddhanta way. While vivartham
denotes the projection of an unreal figure onto a real
object, as in mistaking a rope for a snake, vibhuti refers
to the eight powers of Siva. 32 The verse introduces the
metaphor of ‘waves in the ocean’, a trope which runs
through several of Narayanan’s texts. The ocean
produces waves, but the waves are inseparable from the
ocean: the image brings together apparent difference
and underlying unity; it also presents difference as a
result of creation, as the work of the ultimate.
The poem charts a phenomenology of arivu, seeking
itself and going through a series of manifestations. The
conception of the evolution of prakrti in the Saiva
Siddhanta and Sankhya traditions underpins this
narrative. 33 Ahanta (sense of the self) is seen as
comprising skin, bones, excreta, and volatile inner
thoughts (anthakalakal). 34 But ahanta is itself a
moment in the differentiation of arivu. 35 Even time, the
very modality of differentiation, is the play of arivu. The
temporality of the body has an ambivalent status: even
as it is a site of transience and decay, it is a moment in
the narrative of the search for the self by arivu.
Narayanan describes the body as the shadow of the
soul (atmavu), but the soul is presented as a lamp of
which the senses form the container, vasana from earlier
life the oil, and vrtti or the forms assumed by the inner
sense the wick. 36 The metaphors of light and darkness
make the body’s positioning ambivalent. The image of
the shadow suggests that the body, while unreal in
itself, has its origin in something real and thus may
serve to guide one’s attention to a point where that
reality may be grasped. 37 In other words, while the
body’s ontological status may be open to question, it
may possess epistemological and axiological value in
the search for self-realization.
The text’s ambivalence in relation to the body is
expressed more fully in verses 8 and 9 of the ‘Satakam’.
Verse 8 describes the body as a foul-smelling tube on
which tantalizingly play the five birds of the senses,
feeding on five distinct objects. 38 The use of the word
nalika is interesting. Sabdataravali, Sreekanteswaram
Padmanabha Pillai’s canonical dictionary of the
Malayalam language, defines nalika as a tube and
nalikam as a gun. 39 Nalikagulika is a cannon ball, and
nalikarandhram the apertures in forts for mounting
cannons. Nataraja Guru and T. Bhaskaran take nalika to
mean ‘gun’ in their commentaries on this verse. This is
an unusual image in Sree Narayanan’s writings, and, if
we follow this reading, the relations between the senses
and the body appear more complex. Does the image of
the gun— associated with annihilation—suggest that the
foul-smelling body in which the sense organs are located
may also be used as a means for their destruction? The
verse ends with a contrasting image of the body—that of
a body of light or knowledge (velivuru). This new avatar
of the body is the slayer of the birds of the senses. Two
notions of the body appear here: one is presented as the
subject of a self-practice, while the other is not only the
object but in all probability also a means for carrying out
this practice.
 The juxtaposition is made possible by the availability
of distinctions between various figurations of the body in
yogasastra and Siddha practice—sthula sariram (gross
body) and sukshma sariram (subtle body), for example.
In fact, the next verse in ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’ offers a
re-presentation of the body in terms of the yogic
tradition. Verse 9 presents the image of a sage
meditating under a tree, on the two sides of which
climbs a creeper bearing six blossoms. 40 The tree has
been read as a yogasastric diagram of the body, with
the two sides of the creeper being ida and pingala, and
the six flowers suggesting the six stations in the ascent
of the Kundalini towards its final station of
enlightenment, sahasrara. These verses also point to the
complex intertextual universe behind Sree Narayanan’s
images. The image of the birds resonates with
Pattinattar’s description of the body as a cage with five
birds inside. 41 Tirumular’s writings also speak of the ‘six
birds in the house of five’ and the ‘hundred birds on top
of the tree’ and the seven steps that lead to the home.
42

Sree Narayanan’s writings of the self, in drawing on

diverse strands of philosophical and spiritual practice,
thus produce an ambivalent estimation of the body. We
shall consider below the ways in which his philosophical
thought and his poetic imaginary connect with the
arguments he developed on practices of worship and
community identities. The reading proposed below seeks
to stay away from two prominent tendencies in the
scholarship on Sree Narayanan and other thinkers whose
work straddles the distinction between the social and
the spiritual. One approach involves treating
philosophical arguments and doctrines as providing an
interpretative key to the practice, while the other
creates a sharp dichotomy between them, treating the
doctrine and the practice as independent of each other
in fundamental ways. From the first point of view,
practices are expressions of metaphysical principles,
while the second perspective considers doctrines rather
like ideologies which make practices possible but
obfuscate their real nature. The focus of this chapter is
on the innovative moves and effects produced by the
invocation of doctrines and discourses. One needs to
track not only philosophical lines of argumentation but
also the iteration and transformation of tropes and
locutions. The discursive function of doctrines is not
exhausted by their legible meanings; their performative
and incantatory function also needs to be accounted for.
 III

Sree Narayanan’s interventions towards altering

practices of worship have generally been seen as efforts
to civilize Ezhava rituals and bring them in tune with
upper-caste Hindu methods. An account of the Ezhavas
in 1909 by the colonial anthropologist Edgar Thurston
describes their popular religion as ‘Bhadrakali’ worship
and animal sacrifice. By this Thurston meant the worship
of indigenous deities like Chattan, Madan, and Kali
prevalent in lower-caste shrines in nineteenth-century
Kerala. Thurston noted that ‘the Bhadrakali cult [was]
gradually losing favour under the teaching of a Vedantic
scholar and religious reformer named Nanan Asan’ and
that ‘in many Central and South Travancore shrines,
images of Subramania have been set up at his instance.’
43

Vivekodayam, the official journal of the SNDP Yogam,

published reports of Sree Narayanan putting an end to
animal sacrifices and the worship of Kali, Madan, and
other deities, and instituting the worship of
Subramanian, Sivan, and Devi. We find the following in a
1915 report: During the past month, Swamikal travelled
to Kottar and Kadukkara and reformed the primitive
forms of worship among the Ezhavas. In Kadukkara, in a
Samadhi temple in an Ezhava street, Swami stopped
rituals involving alcohol and meat and, following his
command, devotees have started practising satvika
forms of worship. The cruel act of killing animals in a
Devi temple there has also been stopped. The people of
this locality are very happy about all this. The horrifying
(bhayankara) images kept in the Arumugham Pillayar
temple in Kottar and in the street nearby were also
removed. 44
This is followed by a list of the images removed: ‘Isakki
(yakshi) idol (vigraham): 2; Madan’s platform (peedam):
2; Poothathan platform: 1; Vankaramadan platform: 1;
Chudalamadan platform: 1; Isakki platform: 1;
Mallankarunkali platform: 1; Karuppan, Irulai, etc.: 21.’
The report goes on to say that the young men of the
locality were very enthusiastic about getting rid of these
evil deities (pisachukkal), and as soon as the Swamikal
issued his command, they destroyed the stone platforms
of these deities with iron implements. 45
There has been little discussion in historical
scholarship on the impact of the removal of these
ancient gods from the moral universe of lower-caste
communities. What imaginary and ethical events were
required for the transfiguration of these deities, which
commanded worship for a long time, into ‘horrifying’
images? Was a sacrificial rite of passage necessary for
entry into the idioms of the high Hindu community and
secular history? Or do such moves require a different
historical understanding? Roby Rajan and J. Reghu have
proposed an interesting argument which regards the
valorization of Sree Narayanan’s installation of Siva at
Aruvippuram as a response to this problem. ‘[W]ith the
unseating of the old gods, the very substance-effect of
Ezhava communality was suspended in a collective
selfcontraction. Every attempt to historicize this
contraction as a form of progressive secularization or
Sanskritization must pass silently over the void that
opened up between the departure of the old gods and
the arrival of the new. . . This moment of extreme
contraction which exceeds the grasp of historicization is
what is memorialized in popular remembrance as the
Aruvippuram Pratishta.’ 46 Rajan and Reghu are right to
highlight the limits of historicist arguments in
understanding these acts. We shall note the discursive
moves which mark and negotiate this complex knot in
temporality in Sree Narayanan’s writings.
Narayanan’s early prose text ‘Daivachintanam’
(Meditations on the Deity), written in 1881, argued
against offerings to malignant deities (durdevata;
kshudradevata) and recommended the worship of
benevolent ones (saddevata). Interestingly, Sree
Narayanan did not deny the existence and power of
these deities. 47 ‘Just as there are myriad varieties of
living beings on earth, in the atmosphere (vayulokam)—
which has the properties of heat and cold and smell—
there are innumerable living beings. This is revealed at
times through actions like the pelting of stones, their
resolution through performance of magical rituals, and
the miraculous deeds performed by persons possessed
by deities.’ 48 After admitting their existence, Narayanan
listed the attributes of malevolent deities, and then
forbade their worship, instead recommending
saddevatas (benevolent gods). The cult of durdevatas
was not the only practice Narayanan criticized in this
text; he also castigated atheists and atomists who
denied divine causation to the universe. Their
worldviews, which he censured, resulted in death and
destruction, while the worship of good deities, he said,
leads to knowledge of the absolute (brahmajnanam) and
liberation. Even if the law of karma compelled us to be
reborn, we would go to the abode of the good deities at
the end of each life, enjoy divine comforts, and then be
born anew in propitious circumstances. A gradation of
enlightenment, ranging from the primitive worship of
malign forces to the ultimate attainment of
brahmajnanam and liberation, is suggested: each of
these stages possesses its own degree of reality.
 Biographers, beginning with Kumaran Asan and
Moorkothu Kumaran, have included in their accounts
stories from popular memory in which Sree Narayanan
performed supernatural acts, including expelling and
banishing spirits and ghosts from persons and places
haunted by them. Dharmanandaji, the author of a
strongly hagiographical account of Sree Narayanan’s
life, writes of infertile women coming to the Guru, eating
his leftovers, gaining fertility, and bearing children. 49 An
incident narrated often in biographical accounts involves
a Christian by the name of Pereira approaching
Narayanan for protection from the attacks of a
Kuttichathan, a mischievous imp-like spirit. Sree
Narayanan asks Pereira if the Kuttichathan will defer to
his intervention. Yes, Pereira reassures the Guru, he will.
Narayana Guru gives Pereira a letter signed by him,
addressed to the Kuttichathan, asking him to trouble
Pereira no more. 50 The story is frequently cited as an
example of Narayana Guru’s humour and his ironic yet
indulgent response to popular superstitions. 51 However,
Dharmanandaji reads this as a true illustration of the
Guru’s magical powers. He notes that, following this
intervention, the Kuttichathan stopped troubling Pereira,
and that the letter—now lost—was displayed as a
talisman among the sacred objects in Pereira’s house. 52
He recounts similar instances of Sree Narayanan
performing acts of exorcism by verbal command, by
letter, and by the sheer power of his thought.
It is difficult to determine the nature of these
interventions: while they are marked by the
compassionate irony characteristic of Narayanan’s
gestures towards worldly life, they are also celebrated in
popular lore as magical feats that resonate with
subaltern imaginations of sovereign power. Could Sree
Narayanan’s successful efforts at dislodging older,
indigenous objects of Ezhava worship in favour of
mainstream Hindu deities be the source of his magical
power over inferior deities celebrated in these accounts?
The similarities between the new lower-caste
devotional practices introduced by Sree Narayanan and
upper-caste Hindu idioms of worship have provoked two
opposed readings: while some see in them the logic of
‘Sanskritization’—an emulation of upper-caste practices
with a view to ameliorating one’s social status—others
read them as acts of appropriation by which dominant
Brahminical religious practices are made to serve the
ends of new social groups. Narayanan’s comment about
the idol he consecrated at Aruvippuram as an Ezhava
Siva tantalizingly brought together these idioms: it may
be read as a deft move by which the Ezhava could
assume the powers of a Brahmin priest; it may equally
be seen as a move by which Siva is turned into an
Ezhava and brought outside the ambit of caste-Hindu
protocols. B. Rajeevan has, in a series of essays, argued
that Sree Narayanan’s interventions need to be seen as
involving a ‘minorization’ of Vedanta. 53 This invocation
of the conception of the minor—as in Deleuze’s
argument that minor literature works by denuding a
major language and making it stutter—is useful in
understanding the discursive grammar of the new
concept of Ezhava Siva. 54 It places Sree Narayanan’s
innovative acts at the confluence of idioms of
sovereignty and minorizing subversion.
Sree Narayanan’s writings make these gestures
possible through a citation of the familiar reference in
Vedanta to the two orders of perception: on the one
hand there is the conception of Brahma, which is often
identified as arivu in texts such as ‘Atmopadesasatakam’
and ‘Arivu’; on the other there are specific Saivite deities
such as Subramanian, Siva, Ganesa, and Devi to whom
Sree Narayanan addressed most of his devotional
writings. 55 The play between the two conceptions of the
divine—one abstract and the other specific—is a feature
of the Advaita tradition and prominent in Sankara’s
writings.
Narayanan’s social interventions were inlaid with this
dual perspective: the sage-reformer engages with
different levels of perceived reality, as a brahmajnani
and master working with the worldly consciousness of
his followers. The new rituals he proposed relied less on
metaphysical justification than everyday practical
reasoning. When his followers sought Sree Narayanan’s
permission to institute an annual pilgrimage to Sivagiri
and requested him to decide on the colour of the
garments to be worn by the pilgrims, he suggested
yellow: this was not only because the colour was dear to
the Buddha and Krishna. Pilgrims could obtain yellow
robes inexpensively: they just needed to dip their white
clothes in turmeric, and after their pilgrimage the yellow
could be washed off and the clothes would fit their
grahastha lives again. 56
Unlike many of the anti-caste spiritual reformers of the
times, Sree Narayanan consecrated temples and
installed idols. This was criticized by some of the other
spiritual thinkers of the times, such as Brahmananda
Sivayogi and Vagbhatanandan. Sivayogi’s strong
criticism of idol worship in texts such as
Mokshapradeepam (1905) and Vigraharadhana
Khandanam (1916) were perceived at times as directed
against Sree Narayanan’s practice. Vagbhatanandan
directly questioned Sree Narayanan on idol worship but
the Guru agreed with his interlocutor’s criticism, while
adding that he thought temples would help people
practise cleanliness. 57 He once clarified that temples
were founded in response to demands from Hindus, and
he would be willing to found places of worship for people
of other religions too if they so desired. 58 In 1917 he
suggested that it might be better to found schools rather
than temples as belief in temples was on the decline;
and, contrary to his aims, temples had served to
strengthen caste differences. 59 Most of the idols
consecrated by Sree Narayanan were images of Siva,
Subramanian, and Devi; he also installed a Vaishnavite
Jagannatha idol at the temple in Tellicherry.
The less orthodox idols that Narayana Guru
consecrated have attracted wider scholarly attention. He
ordained lamps as objects of worship in Karamukku in
1920, and in Murukkumpuzha the following year.
Towards the end of his life he installed mirrors with the
inscription ‘Om’ in temples at Kalavamkodam and
Vaikom in 1927. The installation of mirrors as idols has
precedence in Vaikunta Swamikal’s practices, and
probably in the Tamil Jain tradition. The symbolic value
of the mirror, signifying reflection, and the
preoccupation with selfhood have been widely noted. In
Narayanan’s text of abstract meditation, ‘Atmavilasam’,
the mirror appears as a prominent trope. The word
atmavilasam may be translated as ‘play of the self’ (or
the ‘Self’), emphasizing the reflexive and substantive
aspects of the phrase. The text presents the production
of the real in terms of the mirror conceived as a
reflective-optical machine. The visible plane of the
mirror also contains a moment of blindness, as the
opening indicates: Om! All this seems to be like a
shadow that appears in a mirror placed before us. How
amazing! The eye that sees everything—it is not seen by
the eye. When we hold a mirror before the eye, the eye
appears as a shadow in that mirror. Then the eye sees
the mirror as well as the shadow. The shadow is lifeless
(jadam). It does not have the power to see the eye. The
eye does not have the power to look directly at itself.
Thus, when the eye and its shadow are not visible in our
eye, it is we who see the eye there. Similarly, we do not
see the we who sees the eye. 60
While the eye can see the external world, it cannot see
itself except as a shadow that appears in the mirror. The
viewer is divided between the blindness of the eye to
itself and the visibility of the reflected shadow. The
subject is available to its vision only as a shadow in an
imagined mirror, which does not have the power to see
and which cannot reciprocate its gaze. A second order of
subjectivity becomes necessary in order for the first-
person ‘we’ to be perceived. That is the position of the
divine: ‘O! This is truly astonishing! God has given space
within himself for us as well as all that we see to appear
as shadows. Besides, God sees all these. Thus God has
become a divine mirror as well as an eye.’ 61
The play of this mirror is at the core of the human
experience of exteriority. However, the subject also
realizes that it was always located (as a shadow) in a
divine mirror. ‘Our God is none other than this mirror. We
had not seen this earlier. Now it is visible to us without
any concealment. We have become one with God. There
is no room for articulation (vyavaharikkuka) any more for
us. O, we are becoming one with God.’ 62 This moment
of inner perception of itself as a shadow in the divine
mirror is a moment of dissolution for the subject. This
shadow does not have an original any more. The
original, the mirror, the shadow, and the perceiving eye
all coalesce in this final moment of disarticulation.
In Narayanan’s phenomenology of perception, the
‘real’ world appears and disappears through a specular
play that renders objects visible at the cost of the
viewer’s visibility to himself. Orders of reality are thus
established through constitutive acts of vision and
blindness. The sage-reformer figure oscillates between a
final disarticulation of the self, and an exterior, specular
engagement with the real. The play between these two
orders of the real made a range of styles available to
Sree Narayanan: devotion, irony, compassion, and the
contrasting registers of the practical and the abstract.
The importance of this becomes clearer when we turn to
his arguments about the social, and his use of
philosophical doctrines and discourses. This may enable
us to revisit the challenge of a history of acts that
exceeds historicism.
 IV

Sree Narayanan wrote two texts that directly address

the question of caste. One of them is titled
‘Jatinirnayam’ (The Determination of Caste), after a well-
known anonymous Brahminical treatise on caste.
Narayanan’s text begins with a verse in Sanskrit,
followed by four verses in Malayalam. The first, with the
succinctness of a sutra, offers a philosophical definition
of jati and the poem goes on to reject commonly used
caste categories such as ‘Brahmins’. The only jati of
human kind is human-ness: as cow-ness is to cows, so
human-ness is to humans. After defining jati as a natural
kind, as that which differentiates man from other beings,
Narayanan goes on to proclaim ‘one caste, one religion,
one God for man’, a line which became a popular motto
for the Sree Narayana movement as well as for the
critique of caste divisions in Kerala. In its common,
decontextualized use, this line is often understood as a
programme for unifying and harmonizing castes and
religions. However, in ‘Jatinirnayam’ it is firmly located in
a discourse of natural kinds, as it is followed by the
verse: ‘men come from the same yoni, they have the
same shape, there is no difference in any of this.’ The
text goes on to develop an argument about the unity of
the human jati based on the natural logic of procreation
—all human beings are born from the same jati,
including Brahmins and Parayas. It was from a Paraya
woman that Rishi Parasara was born; Vedavyasa was
born of a fisherwoman. Narayanan’s critique of caste
here is based on the status of the human body as the
common, natural endowment of the species. The act of
procreation, with the human body as its locus as well as
end, indicates that all human beings belong to the same
caste. All this seems to be consistent with— and perhaps
echoes—Buddhist arguments that the only valid
meaning of jati, as far as living beings are concerned, is
‘species’. However, Narayanan’s meaning is not clear
when he extends the scope of unity from jati to religion
and to God, to announce: ‘One caste, one religion, one
God for humankind.’ Is Sree Narayanan suggesting that
religion and theistic belief are also universals which arise
from the unity of the human species as a natural kind?
To engage this question, one needs to consider some
of Narayanan’s other texts and pronouncements. Firstly,
let us turn to ‘Jatilakshanam’ (The Signs of Caste). Here
too Narayanan uses the Buddhist argument that jati is a
natural kind: the poem begins by suggesting that ‘all
beings that embrace and procreate with each other
belong to the same kind (inam).’ The argument echoes
Siddhars like Siva Vakiar who exclaimed: ‘What is caste?
. . . What is it to sleep with a Brahmin woman or a
Paraya woman?’ 63 Except in the title, Narayanan does
not use the word ‘jati’ in this composition, using inam
(kind) instead, emphasizing his philosophical argument
on differentiation. We saw that ‘Jatinirnayam’ concluded
with a rejection of caste categories such as Brahmin as
valid principles of differentiation. ‘Jatilakshanam’ begins
at this point by considering ‘human kind’ as a ‘kind’ and
moves on to a meditation on the process of
differentiation which gives rise to ‘kinds’ and the value
that such differentiation may have. After stressing the
importance of reproduction and mating as signs of
belonging to the same caste, Narayanan cites
physiological features—body, voice, odour, taste,
temperature, appearance—that members of the same
natural kind share.
If this commonality establishes the genus, what would
be the use of further, specific differentiation? Narayanan
admits that there are valid marks that enable us to
differentiate individuals within the species: signs
indicating one’s personal name (peru), place (ooru), and
occupation (thozhil). These contrast with the logic of the
body, which announces the generic commonality of
human kind. Narayanan says that one may ask
individuals for their names, places of origin, and
occupations, but one cannot ask them for their jati since
their bodies announce they belong to the human race.
‘As inam takes the form of the body to announce itself,
people with sight and intelligence will not ask after the
inam.’ Caste is a false principle of differentiation as it
has no grounding in nature. This is revealed in the
common propensity that people who believe in caste
display in announcing to others that they belong to a
higher caste: such dissimulation is possible because
caste is not the ‘kind’ that the body announces. By
contrast, sexual difference—the bodily mark of being a
man or a woman—belongs to natural differentiation. It is
sex and not caste that offers a case of naturally
grounded differences within the human species.
Thus there are two sorts of difference. The one
announced by the body has the status of natural kinds;
the other, invisible to the naked eye, and not naturally
given, but which may allow us to differentiate natural
kinds further, pertains to names, places of origin, and
occupation. These differences arise from human acts—
naming, habitation, and work—and do not originate in
nature. Caste, in its common usage, pretends to belong
to the first kind of difference by claiming that it is
naturally grounded, but is open to falsification and
dissimulation. Believers in caste treat the second set of
differences as signs of caste, mistaking their status and
attributing to them a natural origin.
 Naming, as we saw in the Introduction, was a
performative act in the politics of caste in Kerala.
Personal names, as well as signs of occupation and place
of origin—as instruments of self-designation—were
deeply embedded in the discursive politics of caste in
Narayanan’s time. Caste indicators in names were often
signs appended to individual personal names to indicate
place of origin or occupation. It was expected that
Pulaya and Paraya names would include a prefix or
suffix, such as kutti or kunju, indicating self-diminution.
We saw that attempts by the lower castes to change
practices of naming in the nineteenth century met with
stiff resistance from upper-caste Nairs and Nambutiris.
The use by Ezhavas of names such as ‘Panikkar’ and
‘Amma’—traditionally used by Nairs—led to conflict in
the early decades of the twentieth century, and some
Ezhava writers even introduced a new ‘second name’ for
themselves—‘Saundikan’. In instances of defiance,
names were not randomly chosen. Arguments are
advanced about the appropriateness of the new second
names, such as Saundikan, and these presuppose a
community locus for the use of names. Narayanan did
not propose alternative second names for use by Ezhava
individuals: his point was that names indicate man-made
individual differences within the human species, which
means they have no natural foundation. By this
argument, naming is a useful resource for identification
universally available to all individuals within the human
species. For Narayanan, naming was not the
performative announcement of a new social or
communitarian identity.
Occupations and place names were also caught in
similar debates when Narayanan was writing. The
Travancore government, in response to the Malayali
Memorial of 1891, argued that ‘Thiyyas . . . have largely
been devoid of education, being satisfied with their own
occupations such as agriculture, coir-making and toddy-
tapping rather than going in for education which would
make them eligible for jobs with the Government.’ 64
This paved the way for Dr Palpu’s campaign and the
Ezhava Memorial submitted in 1896. It was against this
background that Sree Narayanan presented occupation
as a nonnatural principle of differentiation freely chosen
by individuals. Two other initiatives need to be placed
next to this: Narayanan’s appeal not to ‘tap, drink or sell
toddy’, and his emphasis on agriculture, industry, and
education as central to the Sree Narayana movement.
One may see in these an attempt to rewrite the
association between Ezhavas and their designated caste
occupations. Sree Narayanan disagreed with Gandhi’s
endorsement of varnashramadharma, arguing for
mobility and personal interest. 65
Lastly, the place of one’s origin was a hotly contested
issue in the politics of Ezhava identity in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Narratives of arrival
were deeply entwined with arguments about the
historical origins of caste in Kerala. Arguments were put
forward to the effect that the Ezhavas had come to
Kerala from Sri Lanka—that the caste name ‘Thiyyan’ is
a corruption of ‘Dweepan’, indicating a connection with
islands, and that the word ‘Ezhava’ came from ‘Ilam’, i.e.
Sri Lanka. In proposing these arguments, C.V.
Kunjuraman and other Ezhava intellectuals were trying
to place Ezhavas outside the traditional caste structure
of Kerala, as well as to trace a Buddhist lineage for
them. Sree Narayanan neither endorsed nor contested
these views directly. He is said to have argued against
the use of the word ‘Ezhava’, saying that, if it indicated
place of belonging, one should use ‘Malayali’ since
Ezhavas had long been in Kerala; or ‘Malayalam’—the
word referred to the territory as well as the language. 66
Sree Narayanan’s reluctance is marked by an attempt to
set limits to the use of history in his arguments on the
social domain. I examine this attitude later in the
chapter.
Although ‘Jatilakshanam’ denies name, place, and
occupation any fundamental value as natural kinds, they
are given an important, positive status in the text.
Enquiring after these attributes is a valid means for
differentiating individuals, unlike enquiring after one’s
caste identity. If the human body announces its caste—
that it belongs to the human species—and this is the
only meaning of jati which Narayanan allows, why do we
need principles of further differentiation? The last three
stanzas of ‘Jatilakshanam’ are about differentiation and
its positive role.
The discussion of Sree Narayanan’s philosophical
works, such as ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’ and ‘Arivu’,
showed that differentiation is an integral part of the
manifestation of arivu or knowledge. This argument is
repeated in ‘Jatilakshanam’: inam (kind) emerges from
the ocean of knowledge. The water of this ocean
comprises differentiated entities. The relation between
inam and knowledge is similar to that between waves
and the ocean. Inam is the mould in which the
differentiated entity is cast; it is also the root that gives
rise to all entities or kinds. The metaphor of ‘casting’ is
repeated when Narayanan suggests that difference
(inam) is the mould cast by the blacksmith called arivu.
67 The entire world of creation reappears incessantly,

moulded in new forms. Differentiation, as in arivu,

appears here as the very mode of temporality.
‘Jatilakshanam’ concludes by pointing to the link
between difference (inam) and specificity or particularity
(innathu). Without differentiation, there are no
particulars; difference indeed has a positive function,
giving rise to the world of creation and to the knowledge
of particulars.
One may rightly feel that Narayanan is repeating an
argument from the Advaitic tradition, accounting for the
phenomenal world in terms of a process of
differentiation. What interests us here is the use of this
argument in his critique of caste, where it is employed
not to reject difference but to stress a positive role for
differentiation. The focus is not on the difference
between a non-dualist apprehension of Brahma and a
differentiated perception of the phenomenal world. The
crucial distinction is between valid and invalid principles
of differentiation. Jati as species is a valid principle of
differentiation; but jati in the sense of ‘Brahmin, etc.’ is a
false principle. Name, place, and occupation are valid
categories of individual differentiation when they are
recognized as the product of human institution; they are
false categories if seen as caste markers.
Designating the human body as the site of natural
difference was central to Sree Narayanan’s intervention
in the politics of caste. We have already noted how
attire, jewellery, and hairstyles served as physical
markers of caste in nineteenth-century Kerala. In this
scheme of things such marks are not separable from the
body, they are borne by the body as a sort of natural
extension and external manifestation. Clothes do not
conceal the body; rather they ‘visibilize’ the caste body.
Visibility is important where caste bodies are concerned,
not merely on account of its role in preventing polluting
touch; caste identities may be seen as a mode of
political existence which works within a frame of
intersubjective visibility and recognition. The practice of
distance pollution presupposed a spatial frame for
understanding caste bodies in which vision functioned as
an attenuated form of touch; even the touch of shadows
could result in pollution. Caste markers offer a
semiological system through which the body was offered
for perception in the social domain. Changes in this
model at the end of the nineteenth century inflected the
visual imaginary of literary works in Malayalam, as we
shall see in later chapters.
It needs also to be recalled that, around this time,
colonial discourses were trying to develop ways of
‘naturalizing’ caste by linking it to theories and debates
on race in the imperial metropolis. Anthropometry was
one of the means of this process, as the work of
ethnologists like Thurston and Fawcett attests. Fawcett
argued that the Nambutiri was ‘perhaps, as his
measures seem to prove, the truest Aryan in South
India.’ 68 This discourse may be seen as producing ‘caste
bodies’ through racial inscription, visible
physiognomically, and measured through the nasal
index and other such ways.
Sree Narayanan’s conception of the body militated
against both these ways of ‘materializing’ caste bodies.
By contrast with them, he adopted a strategy that
privileged the human body’s biological and reproductive
functions. This is the ‘degree zero’ of difference—the
only difference inscribed in the body. The valorization of
the body as a site of true difference was an important
moment in Narayanan’s writings on the social. He used
it in order to initiate new moves in ethical thinking and
propose fresh notions of religion and the community. It is
to these arguments that we next turn.
 V

What are the ethical consequences of taking the species

body of the human, denuded of all social inscription, as
a point of departure? Sree Narayanan’s writings offer
some pointers. An attempt to take the discussion of the
human body to its own degree zero, its minimal origins,
is found in the poem ‘Pindanandi’, which meditates on
the body’s first stage of formation—as a foetus in the
mother’s womb. 69 Earlier than the appearance of one’s
parents and relations, in absolute fragility, the formation
and survival of the foetus is attributed entirely to Siva’s
compassion (anpu). Compassion as ethical orientation,
coeval with creation, is thus prior not just to the social
domain but to the originary human bonds that connect
offspring to mother. Compassion exceeds the human
coordinates within which it is practised; its provenance is
in an anterior domain of fragile creatureliness which
human beings share with all living entities. This sets a
special task for humans: to devise their ethics under the
sign of a compassion of non-human provenance.
In 1914 Sree Narayanan wrote two poems,
‘Jivakarunya Panchakam’ and ‘Anukampa Dasakam’, that
had as their theme compassion in the context of human
creatureliness. These texts were written at a time when
he was actively campaigning to put an end to animal
sacrifices in Ezhava shrines. A little later, Chattampi
Swamikal wrote ‘Jivakarunya Nirupanam’, parts of which
were initially published as essays and compiled
posthumously as a book. 70 Sree Narayanan was not a
strict vegetarian in his early years: there are stories of
his eating fish with fisherfolk during his Avadhuta years.
71 His writings on compassion do however speak against
the killing and eating of animals. This attitude comes up
in his conversations as well: he is said to have
recommended travelling by hand-pulled rickshaws
rather than horse or bullock carts, for the rickshaw
puller, unlike the animals, wants the traveller to use his
vehicle. 72 The domesticated animal like the foetus is the
proper site of compassion on account of its
inarticulateness and lack of autonomy.
‘Jivakarunya Panchakam’ begins by suggesting that all
creatures are our brothers and sisters (atmasahodarar)
and concludes by identifying compassion as a distinctly
human imperative: If he does not kill, he is a worthy
human

If he does, he is an animal’s equal

Even with all virtues

The killer has refuge for none. 73

The capacity for offering refuge (saranyata) is
distinctively human; in its absence the distinction
between the human and the animal is eradicated.
‘Animal’ here does not carry the pejorative connotation
it often does in ordinary discourse: it is rather that not to
kill is distinctive to human ethics; animals have no
obligation not to kill. ‘Anukampa Dasakam’ develops this
line of thought further: without compassion, man is just
a degraded body, a bundle of ‘bones, skin and nerves’,
and his life is wasted like water thrown on a desert or a
flower without fragrance or fruit. 74 The highest praise is
offered to the practitioner of compassion: he is
compared to Krishna, Buddha, Sankara, Jesus, and
Muhammad, and to the renowned siddhas from the Tamil
tradition: Sambandhar, Appar, Manikyavachakar, and
Nandanar. 75
What is it that differentiates the human from the
animal? We saw Sree Narayanan suggesting that the
human body reveals the true caste of the human
species. But unlike animals, human beings often do not
recognize this. Sree Narayanan was fond of using this
point of contrast: an animal can recognize its own jati by
sight, human beings are inferior to animals in that they
cannot recognize their own kind. 76 This places the
human being in a paradoxical state: unable to recognize
its own kind and commanded by its originary creaturely
fragility to practice compassion towards all creatures.
How is this ethical passage to be effected? What is the
idiom in which the human being can recognize his own
kind? Sree Narayanan’s thoughts on dharmam and the
social domain include efforts to chart this difficult
passage.
His version of Advaita argues for the identity of the
worldly and the spiritual aspects of existence. A
prescriptive text, written around the time of the
founding of the math at Sivagiri, and later published by
Kumaran Asan under the title ‘Advaita Jeevitam’,
illustrates this point well. 77 It begins by asserting that
all human beings desire happiness, and that the human
soul in general prefers eternal, spiritual happiness to
that of a transient, sensory nature. Narayanan
introduced a social dimension into this familiar argument
in order to suggest that the internal reforms of diverse
communities influence the extent to which such
happiness is attained. This passage is worth quoting at
length: For a community to achieve prosperity of all
sorts—related to the body, the mind and the soul—the
religious and moral rectitude of its members could be a
source of great help. Temples and places of worship may
be useful for developing these qualities in everyone
within the community. However, the economic prosperity
of the community’s members is equally essential. For
this, we need to reform agriculture, trade and technical
education, among other things.

The worldly and the spiritual are not two separate

things. In reality, both work with the same aim. The
body enjoys happiness thanks to the harmonious
functioning of all its parts. Similarly, the harmonious
functioning of various spiritual and worldly
arrangements is necessary for the human
community to attain its ultimate goal of happiness.
78

This passage displays two moves that Sree Narayanan’s

writings rehearse time and again. Firstly, there is a
movement from the individual to the community and
from the community to the species as a whole.
Individual aspirations to well-being and the self-practices
necessary in spiritual endeavours are used as a model
for thinking about initiatives of social reform. Secondly,
imaging the human species as a body involves
considering the various activities of mankind as
analogous to the functions of the different bodily organs.
The care of the body is the model for conceptualizing
collective effort. We saw in the previous section that for
Narayanan it is not caste markers that constitute the
true semiology of differentiation, it is the body that
indicates difference. The body is not a bearer of signs, it
is a sign in its own right. Without the distinctiveness of
the human body, the identity of the human species is
inconceivable. The unity of the social realm, founded as
it is on the specificity of the human, refers us back to the
human body.
Three concepts recur prominently in his discussions of
the social realm. These are caste (jati), religion (matam),
and community (samudayam). While pointing out that
caste was a principle of false differentiation and needed
to be rejected, Narayanan also argued that religion was
purely a matter of inner beliefs and opinions. His
argument on jati privileges, as we saw, the literal
meaning of the word. In the case of religion too, he
stresses the literal sense of matam, i.e. belief, opinion.
In both these instances, current usage is criticized as an
instance of historically generated misunderstanding.
Appeal to a literal meaning leads to a redefinition of jati
as natural kind and dissociates matam from birth and
external institutions to establish its status as inner belief.
The third element, community (samudayam), signifies
in Narayanan’s writings a locus of concerted action and
the sense of belonging that arises from this. Although
earlier uses of samudayam referred to Brahmin
collectives, and to committees engaged in the
management of temples, by the late nineteenth century
the word had come to indicate human collectivities in
general, and religious and caste groupings in particular.
79 In Narayanan’s texts the sense of samudayam

appears to oscillate between the specific and the

general, between collectives founded on a commonality
of conditions of existence or of objectives of action on
the one hand, and the human species as the most
universal and pre-eminently valid form of community on
the other. The second, general, meaning is evident in
statements like ‘Caste should go; there is no other way.
All human beings belong to the same community.’ 80
Narayanan uses the idea of a natural, universal human
community as the original, literal standard against which
other notions of the community must be measured or
understood.
His own reform movement primarily addressed the
Ezhavas, appealing to them to get rid of their caste
markers and internally reform themselves into a
samudayam. The word ‘Ezhava’ here ceases to function
as a sign of differentiation according to convention and
becomes the name of a community, i.e. the shared site
of individual and collective practices. The construction of
places of worship, the development of agriculture and
trade, and the spread of education are actions which
have specific communities as their locus. The deeper
ambitions and assumptions of these reformist practices
are universal—they are validated in terms of the concept
of a virtuous life that pertains to the entire human
species or human community (manushya samudayam).
However, identification with the human species is
actualized only when there is an eradication of false
divisions like caste. This is implied in Narayanan’s
statement that the progress of the human soul towards
spiritual happiness is facilitated by the extent of internal
reform attained by the various communities (oro
samudayangal). 81
We saw earlier that Sree Narayanan considered the
human being in its creatureliness as the locus of a
special predicament, marked by avidya, which
prevented it from recognizing its own kind or jati in its
humanity, and commanded to perform ethical acts of
compassion towards all creatures. Samudayam appears
as the means by which the human being can learn to
recognize human-ness, its species identity, as its natural
kind. This apprenticeship works through an unlearning of
false identifications of jati: the first step in that direction
is to work through and destroy the caste character of
Ezhava identity and reconstitute it as samudayam. The
cleansing of the community, analogous to the cleansing
of the body’s caste markers, involved the removal of
rituals like talikettu and tirandukalyanam, associated
with the attainment of puberty by girls in the
community. The concept of samudayam pointed in two
directions: towards a caste identity, which it sought to
annihilate, and towards a universalistic identification
with the human species.
The twin-faced character of samudayam introduced in
Sree Narayanan’s initiatives made an appearance in
discourses of social reform among other castes in Kerala
too. The Nambutiri reform movement’s motto, ‘to turn
the Nambutiri into a human being’ (namboodiriye
manushyanakkuka) and its practices of internal reform
invoked similar ideas. 82 An extension of this line of
thinking can also be seen in a resolution passed in 1931
at a conference of the Nayars which declared that
‘anybody who speaks Malayalam and observes Malayali
customs can be admitted, regardless of their caste, as
members into the Nair community.’ 83 Membership of
the samudayam is linked here to cultural, national
identity. These grand assertions of universality, however,
went along with a practical identification of the
community with caste members.
Sree Narayanan’s writings and organizational
initiatives demonstrate similar ambivalences in his
concept of samudayam. Without a universalist aspiration
as its grounding, samudayam ran the risk of becoming
an instrument of the caste struggle, a tool in the service
of jati identity. Narayanan resisted this possibility and
tried to ensure that the institutions he founded did not
become exclusive domains for the Ezhavas; and that the
untouchable castes of Pulayas and Parayas had free
access to the schools, temples, and ashrams he
founded. 84
A samudayam, however, is unable to deny its
moorings in the ascribed caste identity of its members.
This was manifest in many of Sree Narayanan’s
organizational decisions, especially in the early years.
Some pronouncements reported in Vivekodayam (the
organ of the SNDP Yogam) in 1905 appear to work with a
jati identity. When Sree Narayanan’s attention was
drawn to some Ezhava converts to Christianity who
pretended in public that they were still Hindus, he is
reported to have suggested that ‘believers in other
religions should not be allowed to attend the functions of
the caste (jati), and that if they renounce in writing their
new religions then there is no objection to their
participation.’ 85 Similarly, in response to a question
concerning a woman who had intimate contact
(samsargam) with a man from another religion,
Narayanan is reported to have ordered that ‘the woman
should be made an outcaste, depending on the
seriousness of the evidence of the contact. On the basis
of a penalty commensurate with her fault, she may also
be pardoned and purified. The money paid as penalty
should be kept as common property.’ 86 Even in later
years, Narayanan used rituals of inclusion, or the
rehabilitation of people into the samudayam. In 1915 he
took back into the community a number of Ezhavas
whose families had converted to Christianity generations
earlier. These families had offered worship in churches
while retaining close contacts with the Ezhavas. In the
light of the reform initiatives undertaken by the
Narayana movement, they wished to sunder their
connection with Christianity and return to Hinduism. 87
More interestingly, in 1919 Narayana Guru introduced
some members of a caste group in Changanassery,
known as Kanikkuruppanmar, into the Ezhava
community. 88 A public meeting was held, after which
Narayanan announced to the Kanikkuruppanmar that
‘Your title “Kurup” is no longer valid from today. These
people and you should dwell in future as swajanangal.’
89 The word swajanam (one’s own people) is usually
used to refer to kinship or caste affiliation. 90
These examples may indicate how deeply the concept
of samudayam was enmeshed in its caste moorings.
However, Sree Narayanan also attempted gestures of
inclusion and exclusion in order to redefine the
samudayam. He once said that toddy tappers should be
expelled from the samudayam; he saw this as analogous
to amputating an organ infected by leprosy to prevent
the affliction from spreading to other parts of the body.
They can be rehabilitated, he said, after purification if
they give up this ‘dirty occupation’. When a devotee
asserted that people took to toddy tapping because they
had no other means of subsistence, Narayanan
responded by saying that if one were to break a tapper’s
knife into four pieces, one might be able to make four
shaving knives: it would be more respectable to work as
barbers with these shaving knives than tap toddy and
would bring in more income as well. 91
Narayanan used a literalist definition for religion
(matam) too, taking it to mean inner belief or opinion, a
matter of autonomous choice by the individual. This
view appears, at first sight, to be in tune with a modern
privileging of religion as personal belief. ‘It is wrong to
subordinate matters of the community to religion or
religious matters to the community. There should be no
connection between community affairs and religion.
Religion is a matter of the mind.’ 92
These views entailed no clear endorsement or
opposition to conversion as a strategy in anti-caste
struggles. In the early 1920s Ezhava leaders like C.
Krishnan, C.V. Kunjuraman, and Sahodaran Ayyappan
argued that Ezhavas should renounce Hinduism to free
themselves from the caste system. C. Krishnan, who
embraced Buddhism in 1926, was a propagandist for his
religion in Malabar for several years, advocating that
Ezhavas convert. 93 C.V. Kunjuraman and Sahodaran
Ayyappan were largely sympathetic, the latter
identifying himself as a Buddhist in a legal document
around 1922. 94 Kunjuraman wrote an article entitled
‘The Buddhist Faith is the Best for the Thiyyas’ in 1926.
95 It is also said that he considered Christianity a

possible alternative for Ezhavas. 96 Other leaders, like

Kumaran Asan and T.K. Madhavan, were opposed to the
idea of conversion, arguing for fighting the caste system
from within Hinduism. Kumaran Asan’s thinking,
however, was strongly influenced by Buddhist
philosophy.
Narayana Guru clarified his position on religious
conversion in two conversations —with C.V. Kunjuraman
and Sahodaran Ayyappan. 97 In his responses to them,
Narayanan used the word samudayam in another sense.
‘Religion (matam) has two sides: one internal and the
other external,’ he said, ‘Which of these sides would you
like to see changed?’ He continued: ‘If the desire is for
change in the external aspect, it is not really religious
conversion (mataparivarthanam), but change in
community (samudayaparivarthanam). As for internal
religion (abhyantara matam, also meaning inner belief,
inner opinion), it is subject to constant and gradual
change in all thoughtful people.’ 98 Here he made a
distinction between the inner and the outer dimensions
of religion, equating the latter with samudayam. In this
view, it was inner religion (abhyantaramatam) that really
merited the appellation of matam. Nonetheless,
Narayanan’s views also resisted the elevation of religion
as a source of stable identity. Matam is understood
literally as inner opinion, subject to constant change in
the intelligent person.
 Did Narayanan consider differences in matam
inadequate grounds for differentiating communities? A
samudayam may include followers of diverse practices
for the attainment of moksha. This also meant that caste
and its disabilities may not disappear by changes in
abhyantaramatam—a different spiritual opinion and
practice—at an individual level. This would require
samudayaparivarthanam—the transformation of the
community—according to principles and practices
independent of and opposed to caste. Religious
conversion as a response to the communitarian problem
of caste did not, for Narayanan, resolve the relations
between the external and internal dimensions of
religion.
In his conversation with C.V. Kunjuraman, Narayanan
said: ‘What does India need today? Liberation from the
struggles between castes and religions. Let everyone try
to learn about all religions with equal attention and
respect, and then mutually exchange that knowledge.
One will then realize that the struggles are not on
account of religion (matam) but because of one’s
arrogance (madam). The enthusiasm for religious
conversion will also disappear then.’ 99 He organized a
conference of universal brotherhood in 1921 and an all-
religions conference in 1924.
Narayanan introduced another element of complexity
in his discussions on religion: in response to
Kunjuraman’s argument that those who oppose the
conversion of Ezhavas have expressed their
dissatisfaction with the Hindu religion (Hindumatam), as
it exists in the present, he said: Then they are arguing
for a conversion (parivarthanam) not only for the
Hindus, but also for the Hindu religion. However, there is
no religion called the Hindu religion. Foreigners used to
refer to the inhabitants of Hindustan as Hindus. If the
religion of the inhabitants of Hindustan is Hinduism, the
religions of the Christians and Muslims who live in
Hindustan now is also Hinduism. Nobody, however, says
this. Now, Hindu religion is a common name for religions
which have originated in Hindustan, excluding those like
Christianity and Islam which came from outside. This is
why some people consider Buddhism and Jainism as also
a part of the Hindu religion. If it is not illogical to give the
common name ‘Hindu religion’ to several religions such
as Vedic religion, Pauranic religion, the Sankhya religion,
Vaiseshika religion, Mimamsaka religion, Dvaita religion,
Advaita religion, Visishtadvaita religion, Saiva religion,
Sakteya religion and Vaishnava religion which are
apparently different from one another, then what is
illogical in referring by the word ‘One religion’ to all the
religions formulated by various Acharyas for the
liberation of the entire mankind (manushyajati) in
accordance with their different times and places? 100
Narayanan begins this passage by pluralizing the idea of
religion and suggesting that the seeming unity of the
Hindu religion conceals widely divergent matams or
inner opinions. Then he goes on to project the same
logic to religions in general. If the Hindu religion can
presume to be one in spite of substantial differences,
could one not overcome the seeming diversity and
conflict among the religions of the world by bringing
them under a common name, ‘One religion’
(Ekamatam)? This is an important sense in which the
phrase ‘one religion’ in the Guru’s motto—‘One caste,
one religion, one God for humankind’—may be
understood. 101 Interestingly, the unity that Sree
Narayanan stresses with this slogan is, in the light of the
passage cited above, an argument for difference and
plurality. It is the very diversity of religions that enables
the use of the category ‘One religion’ as a principle of
the subsumption of plurality.
The new rituals Sree Narayanan devised for the
Ezhava community, however, were all within the horizon
of Kerala’s Hindu traditions. At the same time,
Narayanan’s argument for ‘One religion’ and his
statements—such as ‘It is enough if a man is good,
whatever his religion’—offered no grounds for arguing
against advocates of conversion. In 1916 he issued a
statement to the effect that he did not belong to any
particular caste or religion. 102
Gandhi’s conversation with Sree Narayanan, during his
visit to Travancore in 1925, reveals the complexity of
Sree Narayanan’s position. The Mahatma enquired if the
Guru gave permission to those who wished to convert to
other religions as a means for obtaining greater
freedom. Sree Narayanan replied: ‘It is often seen that
those who convert to other religions are able to obtain
freedom. Seeing this, it becomes difficult to criticize
people for speaking in favour of religious conversion.’ 103
Gandhi continued his enquiry: ‘Do you consider the
Hindu religion sufficient for the attainment of spiritual
liberation (adhyatmikamaya moksham)?’ The Guru
replied: ‘Other religions too possess paths for liberation
(moksha-margam).’

Gandhi: Let us leave aside other religions. Is it your

view that the Hindu religion is adequate for the
attainment of moksha?’

Narayana Guru: ‘For attaining spiritual liberation, the

Hindu religion is amply adequate. However, it is
worldly liberty (laukikamaya swatantryam) that
people desire more.’
 Gandhi then asked the Guru to set aside the
unfreedom arising from untouchability and other similar
practices, and state whether for spiritual liberation
(adhyatmikamaya moksham) religious conversion was
needed, to which the Guru responded in the negative.
104

This conversation, in its twists and turns, highlights the

differences between the approaches of the two thinkers
to the political and religious domains. Sree Narayanan’s
reluctance to separate questions of worldly and spiritual
freedom was in tune with the thoughts he articulated in
‘Advaita Jeevitam’. Separating these two aspirations
went against the grain of his thought on freedom. Then
how do we understand his separation of the internal and
external senses of matam and his identification of the
latter with samudayam? The distinction between the
external and the internal, it seems, is not to be seen as
identical to that between the worldly (laukikam) and the
spiritual (adhyatmikam). It pertains, rather, to the levels
of the collective and the individual. This would mean
that the spiritual and the worldly are inseparably
intertwined in Sree Narayanan’s conception of
samudayam. For him the spiritual dimension of
samudayam was not to be sought in institutional
religious forms; it was located in a primordial ethical
orientation prior to the conception of the social domain
and deriving from the creatureliness of the human
species. A social collectivity grounded in a domain
anterior to the social, samudayam, in Sree Narayanan’s
thought, maintained this paradox at its heart, as
attested by the difficult negotiations of this idea in its
worldly history.
One may say that dharmam—a concept central to Sree
Narayanan’s discourse—sums up this primordial ethical
orientation of the human in its creatureliness and
worldly destiny. The anteriority of this concept to the
social domain is reflected in Narayanan’s reluctance to
endorse historical arguments clarifying the identity of
samudayam. We noted his reluctance to explain
‘Ezhava’ through narratives of origin and arrival. This
contrasted with the discourse of several important
Ezhava intellectuals of the time who invoked history—
especially a Buddhist past—as the principal ground for
the community’s ethical and political ideals. 105 Sree
Narayanan’s discursive innovations did not draw on the
resources of historical narration; they worked, rather,
through their deliberate avoidance, and through a
carefully set up assemblage of the primordial and the
contemporary. Historically momentous innovations
introduced by Sree Narayanan had, as their discursive
ground, not historicist narratives of a glorious past or a
redeemable future, but the creaturely human subject in
its worldly contemporaneity. In this one may find a
conception of human history that is not narrativizable in
the idioms of recovery or progress.
3

Intensities and the Language of

Limits Marking Gender in the Poetry
T of Kumaran Asan he poetry of kumaran
asan (1873–1924) signalled a crucial
moment in the history of idioms of
self-articulation in modern Malayalam
writing. Asan was a disciple of Sree
Narayana Guru and the first General
Secretary of the SNDP Yogam.
Drawing upon a meditative, ascetic
strand in Sree Narayanan’s thinking
and, more generally, in Indian
philosophical and literary traditions
and the idioms of English
romanticism, Asan forged a new,
primarily monologic, language of
intense passion and inner
deliberation in his major poems. Here
I look closely at this innovative poetic
apparatus. Asan’s protagonists are
 marked indelibly by their status as
men or women. Gender is a matter of
interiority in Asan’s poetry, and this
is articulated through trajectories of
desire and agency pursued by his
characters.
Kumaran Asan was born in Kayikkara near Trivandrum.
After preliminary education in a village school, initial
lessons in Sanskrit under a local scholar, and four or five
years of training in a Malayalam school he worked for a
few months as a teacher and for a couple of years as an
accountant in a shop before deciding to study Sanskrit
seriously. His meeting with Sree Narayana Guru in 1891
was a turning point in his life. He soon became the
Guru’s disciple, moved towards the path of bhakti, and
read extensively in Vedanta, Yoga, Sanskrit, and Tamil.
With Dr Palpu’s help Sree Narayanan arranged for Asan’s
higher studies in Sanskrit at Bangalore and Calcutta,
where he also gained close familiarity with English
literature. He returned to Kerala in 1900 and stayed with
Sree Narayanan at Aruvippuram as one of his favourite
disciples, gaining popularity among the followers as
chinna swamy (the little sage). He became secretary of
the SNDP Yogam when it was founded in 1903 and held
the office for sixteen years. To the surprise of many of
Sree Narayanan’s followers, Asan married in 1918 and
entered grhasthashrama (a householder’s life). He died
pre-maturely in a boat accident in 1924. In his brief
poetic career, from the publication of ‘Veenapoovu’ (The
Fallen Flower) in 1907 to ‘Karuna’ (Compassion) in 1923,
Asan wrote some of the important poems that shaped a
modern poetic language in Malayalam.
 To appreciate the significance of Asan’s intervention,
some familiarity with the dominant tendencies in
Malayalam poetry at his time is necessary. The later
decades of the nineteenth century saw poetry become
an important part of the emerging print-public culture in
Kerala. Kandathil Varghese Mappila, editor of the
Malayala Manorama, was perhaps the first to start a
regular column for poetic compositions in his newspaper.
1 Literary pages in magazines were initially dominated

by competitions in versification such as

samasyapooranam, where poets were invited to
complete slokas for which only the last phrases were
given. Mangalaslokangal (verses of felicitation) and
compositions on predetermined themes were some of
the other major genres of public versification.
It seems possible to identify two major trends in
Malayalam poetry in the late nineteenth century. One of
them, of which Kerala-varma Valiyakoyil Thampuran was
the most important proponent, looked to the Sanskrit
tradition for poetic norms. Poets of this bent showed a
preference for Sanskrit words and metres. In contrast, a
group of poets centred around Kodungallur—including
Kunjikkuttan Thampuran and the Venmani poets—wrote
in an idiom closer to ordinary Malayalam and often
addressed themes from everyday life. Both these
strands, and the poetic field of Malayalam in general,
were dominated by the upper castes, especially
Nambutiri Brahmins—linked to royal families and
traditionally associated with Hindu temples. In spite of
the active presence of several Christian poets and a
large body of compositions in Arabi Malayalam by
Muslim authors, the mainstream of Malayalam poetry
was almost exclusively dominated by upper-caste Hindu
writers. 2 The young Kumaran Asan—along with Muloor
Padmanabha Paniker and C.V. Kunjuraman—was among
the few Ezhava poets to be published by newspapers in
the late nineteenth century.
Asan found his distinctive poetic idiom by moving
decisively away from both these strands of writing. In
language, versification, and choice of themes, his
sensibilities were far removed from those of Kerala
Varma; in fact, it was from A.R. Rajaraja Varma—Kerala-
varma's’s nephew and antagonist in some of the
aesthetic debates— that Asan received substantial
support and encouragement. Asan’s poems also broke
decisively with the work of the Kodungallur poets,
especially Venmani Achhan Namboodiri and Mahan
Namboodiri. He turned away, especially in his early
writings, from any quotidianization of poetic themes. In
his use of erotic sentiment and representation of
women, Asan’s work came to occupy a position
diametrically opposed to the poetic universe of the
Venmani poets and their successors.
Asan and his contemporaries Vallathol Narayana
Menon(1878–1958) and Ulloor S. Parameswara Aiyer
(1877–1949) have been regarded as forming a
triumvirate of great poets in modern Malayalam. Unlike
Vallathol and Ulloor, Asan did not write in the genre of
the mahakavyam or extended poetic narrative. His
critical discussions of Vallathol’s Chitrayogam (1914)
and Ulloor’s Umakeralam (1914), as well as his response
to Vallathol’s review of his elegiac poem ‘Prarodanam’,
stressed the differences between his own poetic
principles and those of his contemporaries. 3
Asan’s poetic innovation in relation to the erotic should
be understood against the background of a long and rich
tradition of erotically charged versification in Malayalam.
Venmani Achhan Namboodiri (1817–91) and Venmani
Mahan Namboodiri (1844–93) were the most prominent
proponents of this strand in the nineteenth century.
Some of the earliest poetic manipravalam compositions
in Malayalam, such as Unniyacchicharitam,
Unnichiruthevicharitam, and Unniyadicharitam—as well
as the large number of srngara slo- kangal cited as
examples in Leelatilakam, a medieval Sanskrit text on
manipravalam poetry—attest to the longevity and
popularity of this strand. 4 These poems revolved around
courtesans from the non-Brahmin Hindu upper castes,
with their physical beauty appearing as a principal focus
of attention. 5 They displayed a consistent desire for
voluptuous female bodies, marked by the frequent
appearance of bare breasts, seductive glances, and
expostulations of erotic fulfilment. Compositions in a
genre known as Vaisikatantram (the art of the
courtesan) used the format of advice offered by an
elderly courtesan to a young woman about to enter the
profession as a guise for outlining strategies of
seduction. Venmani Mahan Namboodiri’s Ambopadesam’
is a comic composition in this genre, in which a ninety-
four-year-old woman lays out for her granddaughter the
special techniques of her profession: the use of magic
potions, cosmetics on one’s body, skilful speech, and
deft erotic attention. The srngara slokangal written by
the Venmani poets sometimes adopt the same hard-
hitting perspective on the economic underbelly of erotic
transactions, cheerfully complaining about women who
demand a price for letting men close to their enticing
bodies. Poems that do not have a satiric intent are also
often filled with an air of playful erotic festivity.
The feel of breasts and the taste of lips recur as tropes
of fulfilment, the principal end to which the subject of
these erotic poems constantly strives. The drama in this
poetic theatre works with varied forms of apostrophe
and appeal, with changes in tone ranging from sarcasm
to a flirtatious feigning of indifference, to an avid
declaration of obsessive desire. There is space only for
two entities in Venmani’s erotic theatre—an erotically
charged male subject and a female addressee described
largely in terms of her seductive body. One might even
say that this theatre has only solo performances, since
the female figure is often reduced to the status of a
silent addressee by the male performer. This does not
mean that the woman’s presence is static or passive:
her gestures and actions become objects of male erotic
investment—a woman lifting her hand to place a ritual
mark on her forehead, her sweet voice, and even her
ability to appreciate the sloka that is addressed to her
can be sources of sexual charm. 6 The woman’s
engagement is often a necessary moment in the
scenario of enjoyment. She is imagined as being
provocative with the male subject through feigned anger
or mock challenge. Her postures are ‘feigned’ since the
acts and counter-acts in this exchange function as props
to generate the ultimately solitary pleasure of the male
sensual subject. 7 The anger, the fear, the challenge and
the conquest—all these belong to the realm of ‘play’. An
unfolding of the encounter is thus made possible,
permitting the emergence of a gaze that converts
details of this dynamic into objects of enjoyment. The
female partner is not allowed to be the subject of such a
gaze, and this asymmetry restricts play to its proper,
fictional locus.
The female body in these poems is the object of
delight and enjoyment, no different from other such
objects. 8 Yet this does not mean that it can be
substituted with a combination of other objects of
sensory enjoyment. There is something specific to
sexual pleasure, as with other extraordinarily
pleasurable sense experiences. In Venmani’s poetic
universe, the uniqueness of a female subject is
conceived as the distinctiveness of enjoyment of each
erotic encounter. Such encounters are particularized as
experience, although the female partner’s identity
remains insufficiently individualized. Female figures in
the writing of the Venmani poets appear as a series:
each of them may be substituted for others by virtue of
their function in the erotic encounter. Their bodies are
not adequately differentiated; the features offered for
erotic contemplation do not vary from poem to poem.
These women are accorded a state of pseudo-
subjectivity, a simulated space from which they can
incite or respond to the initiatives of the male subject.
The modes of subjectivity developed in Asan’s poems
appear in direct opposition to this. 9
 II

There is a story about Asan’s first meeting with Sree

Narayana Guru: in response to the Guru’s demand, the
young poet read out some of his poetic compositions.
Narayanan was pleased with the young Kumaru’s talent,
but advised him not to write srngara slokangal or verses
dominated by the erotic sentiment, at least for the
moment. 10 Another, related story speaks of their
offering prayers together at a temple soon after their
first meeting: Sree Narayanan composed a verse
apostrophizing the goddess and asked Kumaru to
complete the sloka. Asan’s instant composition was
more sombre than the Guru’s: it pleaded with the deity
not to send him the merciless summons of death. 11
These stories have a special resonance in light of Asan’s
subsequent poetic career. A move away from the
tradition of srngara slokangal and an intense
preoccupation with mortality run through his work as
constant, almost obsessive concerns. However, Asan’s
poetry shows a redefinition rather than abandonment of
the erotic, and an incorporation of human finitude as an
essential element in its phenomenology.
In his early work, Asan seems to have followed his
guru’s advice to the letter. Compositions from this period
are devotional in nature, addressed to Siva,
Subramanian, and Devi. Devotional compositions written
a little later—such as ‘Nijanandavilasam’— show a clear
Advaitic orientation, adopting a nirguna conception of
the divine in not addressing any particular deity. This
parallels, as we saw, Narayana Guru’s own literary
itinerary. Compositions such as ‘Vairagyapanchakam’ in
Sivastotramala and ‘Kaminigarhanam’ are good
examples of Asan’s early renunciatory poetics and his
condemnation of the erotic. ‘Vairagyapanchakam’
appeals to God to protect the devotee from gazing at
doe-eyed beauties who pierce his heart with their
glances and throw him into the confounding welter of
sensory attachment. 12 ‘Kaminigarhanam’ also warns
against their killing glances. 13 As in Sree Narayanan’s
‘Mananateetam’ and ‘Siva Satakam’, the speaking voice
here views sensory attractions as the destructive path to
his own mortality.
Mortality and the charms of the female body converge
in Asan’s early poems in another way as well.
‘Vairagyapanchakam’ highlights the transitoriness of
sensory beauty by reflecting on the untimely death of
beautiful women.

Heavily tied hair and breasts

Decked up in lovely attire

Alas, she lies on the pyre now

Not a dog will desire her. 14

‘Kaminigarhanam’ invokes a similar image: the ornate

body of a young woman returning to the five elements,
becoming food for birds of prey. 15 We have already seen
Sree Narayanan’s invocation of corpses in his early
poems: the woman in one’s arms suddenly turns into a
decaying cadaver, producing disgust and dread. In
Asan’s early writings the spectacle of the dead female
body assumes another tonality: rather than inducing
disgust and provoking the devotee’s flight from the
scene, it leads to a lingering gaze of mourning. The
devotee is struck with the bewilderment of grief: how
could this lovely young woman, all decked up in new
clothes, suddenly become lifeless and unattractive?
Mortality incites compassion and grief rather than
disgust. The dead female body is not a frightening,
nightmarish apparition, but the centre of a sombre
theatre of bereavement. Acts of mourning in these
poems offer a paradigm for imaging renunciation. The
male devotee, his eyes sepulchral and downcast,
recognizes the transience of phenomenal life;
mournfully, he withdraws from the last scene of the
body to contemplate a higher truth. These elements—
dead women’s bodies, funeral scenes, aspects of
desolation, and the valedictory walk away from the
venue—reappear with variations in Asan’s later poetry.
They are arguably among the most frequent, or at any
rate the most strikingly visible, motifs in his work. They
show us how Asan’s early devotional writings and his
later poems, in spite of their apparently contrasting
approaches to erotic desire, are deeply connected.
‘Veenapoovu’ (The Fallen Flower), written in 1907 and
generally considered Asan’s first mature work, indicates
the earliest links in this chain of continuity. Using the
allegory of a wilted flower, the poet grieves over the
passing nature of the sensory world. The last lines of the
poem enact the retreating gestures of the mourner: the
poet’s voice appeals to its own gaze to withdraw from
the scene, as the fallen, wilting flower will soon
disappear into oblivion: this is our shared, tearful
destiny; life on this earth is no more than a dream. 16
The ‘killing glances’ of female beauty in the devotional
writings, inciting fear and anxiety, are no longer in
evidence, and the mortal world of phenomenal beauty is
approached with a mourner’s sombre compassion. This
involves more than the recognition of death’s inexorable
work: grieving for works by acts of remembrance, by
devising a site where phenomenal life is retained as an
image of beauty and finitude.
 The story of the flower in the poem stands for an
affective female life beginning with the innocent
sportiveness of childhood and moving to a natural
discovery of the joys of love. Death interrupts reciprocal
affective longing and turns the lover into the first
mourner. Death appears as an absolute limit in
‘Veenapoovu’, and reflections on the human body and
on the inner sense take place within an irreducible locus
of finitude. Notions prominent in Indian metaphysical
thought, such as vasana (tendencies), mukti (liberation),
deham (body), and dehi (soul), come up time and again
in Asan’s poems. The use of these notions does not
ameliorate—on the contrary it intensifies—death’s
ubiquity in his work. 17 The shadow of cessation falls on
the subject’s gaze and thought. Poetry is not just
epitaph; in its very vocation, it is thanatography or
death-writing. ‘Veenapoovu’ mourns less the
disappearance of animating life from the young limbs of
the woman than the interruption of her vital, affective
investment. Bereavement directed at the female
protagonist extends to all phenomenal life and to the
mourner-subject’s relation to his own existence. A new
cluster of concerns emerges around the dead body of
the woman, linking memory, narrative, affective ties
between men and women, and the ethical act of poetic
reflection. Asan went on to explore this thematic terrain
further in his later writings, in poems of female longing
and the mourner-subject’s acts of compassionate
witnessing.
 III

In the works that he wrote next—two long poems

entitled ‘Nalini’ (1911) and ‘Leela’ (1914)—Asan firmly
established his new poetic identity. 18 These poems,
abandoning the metaphoric structure of ‘Veenapoovu’,
directly engage with the figure of the woman in her live
presence. The presentation of the female body continues
to be fraught, though, and the heroines, Nalini and
Leela, are hardly described in any physical detail. A
reluctance to describe the woman’s body persists in
Asan’s work almost till the end. Physical descriptions of
characters such as Sita and Matangi have hardly any
relation to sensory relish. 19 ‘Karuna’, his last work, is
the only one to present its heroine, the courtesan
Vasavadatta, with the language of sensory attraction. 20
This description, interestingly, has a paradoxical
function: the heroine’s beautiful body reappears in the
second and third sections of the poem, bleeding and
mutilated, staging finitude and corporeal fragmentation.
21

‘Nalini’ and ‘Leela’ unravelled somewhat similar

narratives at different levels of experience and intensity.
‘Nalini’ presents a heroine who goes into the forest in
search of Divakaran, a young ascetic, whom she knew
well in her childhood and whom she had steadfastly
adored. She manages to catch up with him in a forest
near the Himalayas, but Divakaran does not recognize
her, and, even when he is reminded by her of their past
association, is affectionate to her in a non-desiring, non-
differentiating way. Nalini affirms her love for him and
appeals to him to let her accompany him over his life.
Divakaran turns her down, saying that it is the same
emotion of love, in its intensity, that makes him abandon
any desire for earthly union. He gives spiritual advice to
Nalini and she attains enlightenment by receiving the
mahavakya. Paradoxically, this supreme moment of
revelation turns into the moment of her death: she
collapses, her face ecstatic with joy, and dies on
Divakaran’s chest.
Unlike in ‘Veenapoovu’, it is not the desiring male and
the dying woman that form the axis of affective
imagination in ‘Nalini’. The poem is organized around a
male yogi who has left behind the world of desire, and a
woman protagonist single-mindedly devoted to her
unreciprocated passion. In spite of apparent contrast, a
deep thread of affective intensities connects them. The
yogi’s first appearance in ‘Nalini’ highlights a sense of
calm harmony achieved through austerities; but there is
an implied suggestion of covert, subterranean fire. The
deep sigh that emanates from the yogi’s tranquil body
attests to elements unaccommodated by an ascetic
understanding of perfection. However, from Divakaran’s
responses to Nalini’s declaration of love, we understand
that what is carried within, as if in a crypt, is neither a
passion directed at an individual nor a series of personal
memories. A link with the experiential universe—free
from the details of a personal biography—survives under
the yogi’s calm demeanour. Divakaran understands by
love the inexorable connectedness that emerges
between creatures in their pursuit of diverse chains of
action. In this sense, sneham (love) is a compulsion of
the soul (dehi) in a state of embodiment. 22
Nalini’s love on the other hand is resolutely
individuated. It is expressed in intense images of
personal recollection: I remember, how the butterfly flew
Fluttering in the wind

And how we watched, and walked

Along the jungle, hands entwined. 23

The flashback of personal memory is available to the
yogi as well, but it is dim; even after he is reminded by
Nalini’s memory-images, his recollection does not gain
affective intensity.
In Nalini’s articulation of her love, a new configuration
of bodily desire makes its appearance. Desire is not
understood in her speech as directly corporeal; however,
the physical dimension is not rejected. The body seems
to mark a certain stage in the life of desire, which is
eventually overcome. The true object of desire is not the
body of the other, not even reciprocal bodily desire from
the other, but a desire affirmed by the other’s soul. Such
feeling is possible in Asan’s poetry only between a man
and a woman: it depends on a differentiation of human
beings into men and women, of which the body remains
the primary sign. The law that ultimately governs gender
differentiation and the operation of the passions belongs
to the originary order of nature.
We have seen Sree Narayanan arguing against the
false differentiation of the human species into castes by
showing the natural sexual differentiation between the
male and the female as an instance of true difference.
Asan takes this line of thinking in a new direction. The
treatment of love in ‘Nalini’ suggests that just as the
body signifies the inexorable difference between the
sexes, physical desire is the privileged sign of a passion
that is ultimately grounded in the soul. The intensities
the soul expresses, enjoys, and suffers remain
inescapably connected to a discourse of bodily desire.
Even the moment of spiritual revelation, where the
soul’s need finds its fulfilment in absolute separation
from bodily experience, resonates with the ecstasy of
bodily union: ‘unable to bear the waves of ecstatic joy
that inundated her inner states, her body gave way, like
a reed on the river’s bank. The yogi took her in his arms,
with care as if this wounded body were his own. As calm
ripples merge, their hands entwined, and their bodies
joined—sound to like sound, glow to like glow.’ 24
Paradoxically, the moment of bodily contact is also
that of an ecstatic cessation of existence for Nalini. The
yogi finds to his surprise that his body has now become
the deathbed of this beautiful lovelorn woman. His
response clearly marks the distance travelled by Asan’s
poetry from devotional verses in which the proximity of
the female corpse evoked fear and disgust. Here it
generates compassion and self-purifying mourning. The
yogi recognizes in Nalini’s love a form of asceticism akin
to his own: at the end of the poem he recounts how the
contemplation of her auspicious life has made his mind
pure. 25 Elsewhere in the poem, Nalini is characterized
as a mahavrata whose austerities are arguably as
stringent as the yogi’s ascesis. 26 Nalini’s death signifies
the ultimate sacrifice of the body and its universe of
experience; yet this sacrifice is performed in honour of a
love whose transcendental intensities maintain a
relationship to corporeal existence.
‘Leela’, Asan’s next major poem, is an occasion for
unravelling these tensions further. This is evident from
the Preface, where the poet says that the protagonists of
his earlier poem ‘Nalini’ had almost fully relinquished
rajas and had attained the satvik stage. ‘However,’ Asan
continues, ‘it is in stages prior to this that the sorrows of
life and the secrets of the mind are contained in greater
measure. Therefore, it was about lives situated at a
stage lower than the protagonists of “Nalini” that I felt
writing next.’ 27 The complex transactions between the
body and the soul in the experience of desire, indicated
in ‘Nalini’ in a form all too abstract, could be explored
further only if one moved closer to subjects who had not
renounced worldly experience.
Asan also referred to another source of inspiration:
‘Around this time, probably in the Central Hindu College
Magazine, I came across the picture of a Persian heroine
published along with an essay by the famous Dr
Coomaraswamy. That image stimulated my conception. I
do not remember the essay containing anything in detail
about the story.’ 28 Asan’s attempt to obtain a copy of
the essay and the picture to aid him in composition was
unsuccessful, and he had little to draw on except his
imagination. Nonetheless, the passion Asan sketched in
‘Leela’ has resonances in narratives of love in the
Persian tradition, as in LaylaMajnun: the links may not
just be in onomastic resemblances between the
protagonists.
Leela, the heroine of the poem, in spite of her deep
love for Mada- nan, marries a merchant in accordance
with the wishes of her father, and lives with him until his
premature death. The lines in the poem on the
consummation of Leela’s marriage are ambiguous,
although she is presented as persisting in her devotion
to Madanan, and as distraught within her marriage. She
returns to her parental village after her husband’s
demise, only to discover that death has stolen her
parents as well, and that Madanan—still the enduring
object of her desire—has left the village soon after her
wedding and has subsequently been sighted wandering,
like Majnun, in the forest like a madman. Here the
similarities with the Layla-Majnun plot come to an end,
and the poem picks up parallels from Asan’s own earlier
composition, ‘Nalini’: Leela too, like Asan’s earlier
protagonist, travels to the forest in search of Madanan.
While Nalini expressed her desire in the form of a plea to
be Divakaran’s spiritual companion, Leela’s affirmation
takes a form more closely related to the body. She
senses the proximity of her lover in the intoxicating
fragrance of chempakam flowers in the forest and
prepares to meet him by decorating herself with them.
The site of their meeting, even within the forest, is a
garden abundant with the treasures of spring—wild
colours, maddening fragrance, the sound of birds and
bumblebees, and the gentle murmur of trees—indeed
the topos of a sensual tryst between lovers. 29 Yet this
space of sensual luxuriance is also a liminal site where
bodily desire encounters its boundaries. When Leela
finds Madanan and, holding him in her arms, reminds
him of their past, Madanan remains unresponsive, his
mind far away from the present. Slowly, he comes to
remember her, responds to her gestures of love and, in
a brief moment of intense passion, takes her in his arms
and kisses her. This marks the limit of their tryst—he
immediately walks away as if frightened and disappears
into the torrential flow of the river to embrace his death.
Leela follows him without hesitation and ends her life too
in the river. Later, Madhavi, Leela’s sakhi (friend), has a
dream in which both Leela and Madanan reappear with
new, unblemished bodies to tell her that no one
disappears from this universe, and that there is no
cessation for the love-entwined bond that unites the soul
to the body. 30 Madhavi’s acts of witnessing provide a
conclusion to the narrative of ‘Leela’. Spiritually
transformed by this epiphanic moment, Madhavi
becomes a sanyasini.
In the poetic universe of ‘Leela’ Madanan appears as
another figure of the renunciant, carrying with him
traces of the ascetic in ‘Nalini’. However, Madanan is no
sanyasi: his mind is focused solely on the image of Leela
whose name he chants as he wanders through the
forest. 31 Yet when Madhavi returns after her initial
search for Madanan, she tells Leela that the creatures of
the forest were all devoted to Madanan as no yogi had
ever loved humans or the gods as Madanan had. 32
Forest-dwelling Malaya women compose songs to
commemorate his supreme devotion to love. 33 The
poem does not indicate that anything other than the
memory of Leela ever preoccupies Madanan. Yet the
purity and intensity of his love are perceived as
comparable, if not superior, to the intensity of the love
that a yogi feels for all humankind, for all creation, and
for the divine. Here, as in ‘Nalini’, desire in its purity and
constancy is a potent spiritual exercise—an intense
vrata—which provokes the same response from nature
as the yogi’s ascetic steadfastness.
However, even while endorsing the ascetic intensity of
pure desire, Madhavi tries to advocate prudence,
discouraging Leela from following Madanan. Man was
given two faculties for the enjoyment of the world, she
says, desire and intelligence. Those who follow desire
alone, giving it unrestrained play in the conduct of life,
violate the rule of creation and thus insult the creator. 34
In countering this argument, Leela makes a distinction
between two realms—the inner and the outer. Socially
accepted norms of conduct belong to the realm of the
outer and change constantly. True dharma, on the other
hand, is located in the realm of the inner, which is the
domain of love. 35 This is why incomplete lovers
(apoornaragikal) obey the injunctions of social morality
while full desire (nirayum rati) does not recognize these
norms. In a familiar move, the inner/outer distinction is
mapped on to that between the soul and the body. Leela
goes on to say: ‘The body is external, and so is the world
which is dependent on that body. Pure love belongs to
the inner soul (antaratmikam). How can human souls
(dehikal) forget that?’ 36 Therefore, those who do not
value the mortal garment of the flesh
(mamsakanchukam) do not fear the norms that prevail
in society. 37
Some critics have pointed out that Asan drew on the
conceptual pair jivatma and paramatma in Advaitic
thought for figuring the passion of Leela and Madanan.
38 The conception of love as a pure desire that orients

the individual soul to the supreme would justify the

attribution of a spiritual dimension to the sentiment of
pure love. This understanding has been a major strand
in Bhakti poetry, where devotion often aims at fusion,
and Asan’s poetry does rework elements from this
tradition. This has also been a prominent idiom in the
Sufi poetic imagination. However, to read ‘Leela’ solely
as an allegory of fusion between the individual and the
supreme may be to miss the point. We need to
remember Asan’s Preface to ‘Leela’, in which he
contrasts his new work with ‘Nalini’, wherein the
protagonists had almost fully relinquished rajas and had
attained the satvik stage. The rajasik stage involves a
more concrete confrontation with the consuming
intensities of earthly desire.
We saw that, in the forest, Leela and Madhavi came
across a grove of chempakam flowers and that they
inferred from this the proximity of Madanan who loved
the intense fragrance of chempakam blossoms. The
difference between the male protagonists of ‘Nalini’ and
‘Leela’ is obvious here. While Divakaran’s ascetic life
comprises a renunciation of the sensual, Madanan’s
vrata of desire involves an accentuation of the sensual
and its incorporation as memory. The maddening
fragrance of the chempakam becomes an object of
supreme relish by virtue of the association of Madanan’s
memories with it, but these memories are not directly
available to him for reflection. Waiting for Madanan’s
arrival, Leela asks Madhavi to decorate her as a floral
bride. Bearing the signs of heady spring, she waits for
her tryst, like a self-willed woman (swairini) in defiance
of the social codes of propriety and restraint. The
overcoding of Leela’s body with signs of sensual
intensity runs parallel to the undercoding visible in the
skeletal frame of the male renunciant lover. When the
protagonists meet, the moment of physical contact
generates intensities that cannot be contained by the
body, except in the ultimate experience in terms of
which all intensities are understood in Asan’s work—
namely, death.
The laws of poetic necessity at work in ‘Leela’,
however, require that the body reappear for the final
conflagration of inner intensities. The ultimate earthly
possibilities of desire can be expressed only through the
body and the sensorium. Inner intensities retain
something essentially corporeal about them, something
erotic and sensual, which can only be expressed through
a caress or a kiss. However, unlike in the tradition of
erotic poetry that Asan rejected, the caress and the kiss
do not seek their final destinies in bodily pleasure. They
indicate, in an asymptotic way, higher intensities that
rupture and exceed the body’s powers of
accommodation. The body in ‘Leela’ appears as the very
limit of figuration. In seeking to fulfil its expressive
function, it buckles: it is the moment of corporeal
breakdown that comes to express unbearable, higher
intensities.
 IV

Asan’s male and female protagonists occupy two distinct

positions and postures in relation to the event of desire
that erupts in his poems. There are similarities between
‘Nalini’, ‘Leela’, ‘Chandalabhikshuki’, and ‘Karuna’ in this
respect. The female protagonists in these poems affirm
and express desire while the males turn away—in
detachment (Divakaran); or excessive, imploding
attachment (Madanan); or in benign, non-reciprocal
accommodation and sublimation (Anandan, Upaguptan).
The woman is always the active subject in articulating
desire. Her agency assumes forms ranging from
invitation (Vasavadatta) and passionate declaration
(Leela) to a readiness to follow the path of the beloved
even if takes her away from the erotic to ascetic
renunciation (Nalini, Matangi). Asan’s women characters
travel from their domestic and social locations to an
uncharted realm of discovery and affirmation. This
territory is imaged in Asan’s poetic topography through
liminal spaces: the forest in ‘Nalini’ and ‘Leela’, the
funeral ground in ‘Karuna’, the monastery of the Buddha
in ‘Chanda-labhikshuki’. In these final stations of
women’s journeys they meet men who remain
‘elsewhere’ in relation to their desire. The non-
reciprocity of the male also takes several shapes: an
ascetic non-recognition of the intensity of female
affirmation (‘Nalini’), intensities that shock and destroy
the coherence of the male subject (‘Leela’), an
engrossment in the dharma of the social so that the
dharma of individuated desire has to be abandoned
(‘Chintavishtayaya Sita’), and a compassionate ascetic
plenitude which sublates desire in Asan’s later work with
its various figurations of the Buddha
(‘Chandalabhikshuki’, ‘Karuna’).
In none of these instances is there a male equivalence
of the woman’s desire, and this renders all symmetry
and reciprocity impossible. Men and women are
differently placed: the woman embodies the realm of
transformation while the man stays beyond the pale of
change. He may inhabit a position of fullness where
change is anticipated and contained, as in the Buddha
figures, or he may be incapable of conscious agency, as
in Madanan. The woman, on the other hand, deliberately
performs acts of reflection and resolution, even when
she eventually submits to the law embodied in the male.
These two dimensions—of deliberate action and
submission—are sketched vividly in the figure of Sita in
‘Chintavishtayaya Sita’. Her actions in Asan’s poem
conform to the events narrated in the Ramayana, but
her inner intentions are vastly different. Asan’s Sita is
animated by a spirit of independence and a profound
relationship to herself. Sita’s sense of autonomy and
resoluteness is shared, less explicitly, by Asan’s other
female protagonists as well.
Asan’s male characters, by contrast, are either silent
or located in a non-reciprocal ‘elsewhere’. A crucial
moment in ‘Leela’—when Madanan kisses Leela, breaks
away from the kiss, and flees in fear—reveals this well.
His fear is anticipated in an earlier verse in the poem,
when he attempts to touch Leela’s body and reciprocate
her caresses: Together with her, he tried,

mutual bodily caresses

but fumbled, confused,

A child close at a mirror

faced with its own face. 39

The male subject who flees from an uncanny specular
vision stands in clear contrast to the deliberative self-
relation of the heroine in ‘Leela’. The self-destroying
mirror stage reveals a mechanism by which male
identities are constituted in Asan’s work. The male
protagonists of ‘Nalini’ and ‘Leela’, in turning away from
women’s desire, redeem themselves from the intense
passions of the phenomenal world. The male subject
attains his identity as a renunciant only through a
disavowal of desire. This renunciatory passage permits
the male subject to be compassionate to the woman and
places him in a superior position of understanding. In the
Buddha figures—Anandan, Upaguptan or the Buddha
himself—disavowal is not directly thematized; an
achieved spiritual stature is assumed. In the case of
Divakaran, the protagonist of a more personalized
drama, disavowal takes the form of forgetting: even
after listening to Nalini’s detailed recollection of events
from their childhood, he is unable to insert himself into
an autobiographical narrative of experiences and
affects. However, disidentification with his past enables
Divakaran to offer redeeming spiritual advice. Even
though he is momentarily shaken by Nalini’s death—by
her use of his body as her pyre—he is able to proceed on
his spiritual path with greater sanctity. For Madanan, the
rajasik male subject, the disavowal of desire is
traumatic. The sensual female body, bedecked with
chempakam blossoms, becomes the mirror image of
male desire. His flight from the female body appears to
be a traumatic disavowal of his own desire and life.
In other words, gender identities are assumed in
Asan’s poetry through the staging of a non-reciprocal
drama. While desire finds discursive expression in the
woman, the male subject disowns it in order to exit the
pale of attachment. In this new position, he turns into
the mourner-witness of the woman’s passion and
extinction. Facing the dead female body, the male
subject mourns an identity that he has refused for
himself. Asan’s major poetical works stage the
construction of a masculine identity which,
paradoxically, is carried out through the elaboration of
the female subject’s desiring interiority.
In Asan’s writings, gender is marked not only by the
relationship assumed by the subject towards desire; it
also has a bearing on one’s discursivity: one’s
relationship to language and articulation. While the
discourse of male subjects displays fulness or nullity,
wisdom or inarticulateness, female discourse is
tremulous with remembrance, deliberation, and longing.
The differentiation of these two languages and the way
subjects implicate themselves in them was perhaps
Asan’s most significant contribution to the craft of
Malayalam poetry. It is to these gendered territories of
language that we turn next.
 V

In his major poems—‘Nalini’, ‘Leela’, ‘Chintavishtayaya

Sita’, ‘Duravastha’, and ‘Karuna’—Asan developed a new
discursive machinery. The primary source of discourse in
these poems is neither the meditative imagination of the
poet reflecting on objects or situations, as in
‘Veenapoovu’ and ‘Oru Simhaprasavam’, nor the
unravelling of a narrative, as in ‘Balaramayanam’ and
‘Sreebuddhacharitam’. It is to be found, rather, in acts of
inner deliberation and autobiographical enunciation
performed by a female character-subject.
‘Chintavishtayaya Sita’ provides a prime example of this:
in it the protagonist, ‘unable to contain her turbulent
mind, emitted inner utterances in the language of
thought.’ 40 Sita’s monologue presents thoughts that are
possible only in a first-person account consisting of I-
statements; her language, in its form and texture, is
constitutively linked to inner self-reflective acts. This
connection is anticipated to some extent in ‘Nalini’ and
‘Leela’, while Asan’s later works, ‘Duravastha’ and
‘Karuna’, conform to this logic in oblique ways. In these
four poems the protagonist produces a first-person
account, a discourse of the ‘I’, in the context of a
conversation. In ‘Leela’ and ‘Karuna’ the interlocutor to
whom the statements are addressed is a sakhi, while in
‘Duravastha’ Savitri’s long monologue is addressed to a
parakeet—which responds by mimicking and echoing
human speech. The interlocutor offers a context for
voicing inner thoughts but does not determine the
course of what is said dialogically. This is true even in
‘Nalini’, where the heroine’s self-revealing statements
are addressed to Divakaran in a context of non-
reciprocity. These conversations need to be understood
not as instances of dialogue or dialectic but as self-
analysing monologues.
Asan’s portrayal of Sita provides a typical illustration
of the monologic moment: away from male presence,
the female subject immerses herself in inner speech:
‘Not knowing how to calm her agitated mind, using the
language of thoughts, with grief she spoke within.’ 41
Inner turbulence is constitutive of Sita’s monologue and
her first thoughts are about the unsteady state of her
own mind. They then move to her past through an
invocation of memory images, the slowly unfolding
elements of a narrative which returns her eventually to
the present. It is a transformed subject that returns,
having overcome inner conflicts through a resolute
taking hold of one’s own destiny. Parts of Sita’s inner
speech are addressed to others, and some of the best-
known passages of the poem are directed at Rama.
However, he is an absent addressee and there is no
expectation of a response. It is in fact the absence of the
addressee—the addressee’s virtual character and non-
reciprocity—that makes Sita’s interior monologue
possible. Her inner speech does not aim at convincing or
persuading this absent addressee and at resolving an
external conflict, but at ‘calming one’s inner turbulence’,
at reaching a moment of inner resolution. This
preoccupation with oneself in one’s autonomy—in its
lack of dialogicality—shapes the auto-biographical
monologues in Asan’s poems. The monologue indirectly
draws on the structure of the testimony.
Testimonies make their truth claims on the basis of a
first-person, experiential relationship to the content of
their statements. All auto-biographical acts involve the
modality of the testimony and found their truth claims
on I-statements, i.e. statements made by a first-person
subject on its own experiences. Sita’s arguments on
justice are grounded in a direct, reflexive access not only
to her own purity and innocence, but also to her pain
and anger. Her monologue makes its claims in a
language of authenticity: even when unruly emotions
make her thoughts defy norms of propriety, these
transgressions also bear testimony to the genuineness
of selfrevelation. Asan’s monologic form allows an
incorporation of such excesses into an economy of inner
deliberation. Memories, feelings of pain and indignation,
a narrative consolidation of one’s own self—these
elements in this economy finally lead to a moment of
decision. Sita’s gesture of leave-taking from the world
appears in Asan’s poem as a form of renunciation,
withdrawal from life, and perhaps even suicide, taking to
its logical conclusion the convergence between self-
authentication and agency, autobiographical narration
and selftransforming decision.
These patterns are evident in the structure of the
dramatic monologue used in ‘Chintavishtayaya Sita’. In
‘Nalini’, ‘Leela’, ‘Duravastha’, and ‘Karuna’ they are less
directly displayed since these poems are not monologic
in their outer form. However, each of them shows the
female protagonist narrativizing her life through a
process of inner deliberation and a moment of
irreversible decision. In ‘Nalini’, as we saw, the heroine
reminds Divakaran of their shared past and tells him the
story of her subsequent life. In ‘Leela’ autobiographical
testimony is presented in a third-person account, but
deliberation and agency centre on Leela’s conversation
with Madhavi. This conversation, like Savitri’s utterances
to the parakeet in ‘Duravastha’, is monologic in its basic
impulse. Self-narration in these texts does not display all
the features found in Sita’s monologue. Not much is
revealed about Vasavadatta’s past history—her
autobiographical utterances articulate a present
condition of desire.
Unlike these women characters with their
autobiographical narratives, Asan’s male protagonists
adopt forms of speech located outside the borders of
personal recollection and analysis. Divakaran’s
utterances work with impersonal resources of discourse,
such as maxims (aptavakyam), cited repeatedly in
tradition as a source of authority and guidance. His
conversation with Nalini closes with spiritual teaching
and the (possibly silent) instruction of the mahavakya
(the great proposition). 42 Nalini, in contrast, begins by
noting the inadequacy of language to reveal her inner
domain: what she has to say has not been said before;
she needs to forge a new language and risk errors and
misprision. 43 The speech of the male protagonists is
often not directed at any particular individual, as in the
case of Divakaran, Upaguptan, Anandan, or the Buddha;
or they are silent (Madanan), or not fully articulate
(Chathan). Male discourse arises either from a position
of sublimation and transcendence of desire or dissipates
into a silence that marks an inability to identify oneself
as the subject of desire. The temporal orientation of the
discursive subject, a central feature of female
autobiographical articulation in Asan, is missing from
male speech. Asan’s men do not think of themselves in
terms of a history. The spiritually accomplished among
them consider their past as having already been
renounced: it no longer exists. For Asan’s inarticulate
male subject—Madanan—there is no past; it has been
incorporated as the timeless present of an obsessive
melancholia.
However, it may be a mistake to read into Asan’s
female characters a discourse of history. Their
monologues show an ambivalent relationship to alterity.
The desiring subject in Asan is structurally placed in a
situation of non-reciprocity. Even as Asan’s women
affirm worldly life as desire, they are enveloped in a
profound solitude which isolates them from family and
society. Desire, Leela says, is about the realm of the
inner, while the body is regulated by the rules of the
outer and the social. 44 This makes the articulation of
love free from restrictions made on the basis of social
distinctions like caste and class, a point Asan stressed in
some of his later poems. The discursive space marked
as inner is the space of female autonomy and
transgression rather than patriarchal control. The pursuit
of desire in these poems takes women away from the
social world towards a moment of solitary resoluteness.
There is a non-narrativizable core (of decision or
resolution or realization) which escapes and determines
autobiographization in Asan’s female monologues. They
all conclude in moments of exit from the world. It is as if
there is no space in the world for the resolute female
subject, and the autobiographical monologue is the only
keepsake she leaves for the living.
One might point to ‘Duravastha’ as an exception. In
terms of its narrative, ‘Duravastha’ does not follow the
features of Asan’s earlier works. The poet referred to it
as a vilakshanakrti (uncharacteristic or non-normative
work). 45 Written against the background of the Mappila
revolt of 1922, the poem presents the story of Savitri, a
young Nambutiri woman, and Chathan, an untouchable
Pulaya youth. Savitri flees her home when it is attacked
by rebellious Muslims who rape, kill, and abduct her
family members. She takes refuge in the hut of Chathan,
who protects and looks after her with keen devotion.
Even after the revolt is suppressed, Savitri resolves to
stay with Chathan and lead the life of a Pulaya woman.
The poem ends with Savitri inviting Chathan to share her
bed and be her husband. While Left criticism has found
in ‘Duravastha’ a laudable precursor of Marxist
‘progressive literature’, the poem was criticized by many
contemporaries and later critics on aesthetic (its
propagandist element), moral (its fostering resentment
against the elite), and political (its allegedly anti-Muslim
verses) grounds.
Although Savitri and Chathan are united in happy
conjugality at the end of ‘Duravastha’, asymmetry and
inequality are central to the configuration of their
relationship. Chathan’s personal qualities are objects of
praise by Savitri, but they are not part of the latter’s
self-consciousness; they have no way of figuring in his
own discourse. An inheritor of centuries of slavery,
Chathan’s place is at the edge of articulate language; he
occupies a space of ‘infancy’. Savitri too, in spite of her
elite lineage, is an outcaste. Her inner thoughts sketch a
future in which she will work in the fields alongside other
Pulayas and remedy Chathan’s infancy through
education. One might say that this apprenticeship
begins already in the poem’s present, when Savitri
explains the meaning of her name to Chathan by
narrating the Puranic story about chastity. Asan’s
Preface stressed the need to restructure Hindu society,
ravaged by centuries of caste oppression and existing in
the present in dramatic mutilation after the Mappila
revolt. Is the poem then a programme of Hindu reform
and reconsolidation, and is Savitri’s desire a means to
effect it?
In his Preface, Asan characterized the union of his
protagonists as configured in a state of intractable crisis,
a fall without recourse (gathyantharmillatha
pathanathil), stressing the link between desire and
destitution in the poem. 46 It is as if desire in
‘Duravastha’, as in Asan’s other poems, cannot inhabit
the social domain: Chathan’s hut is a topos of
destitution, similar to other liminal spaces in the poems
mentioned earlier. Chathan’s inarticulateness is marked
by an absence of social habitability; Savitri’s
transgressive desire emerges from a moment of
denudation of the world rather than from a discourse of
social equality. An exception to Chathan’s infancy is
offered in the poem when, on his way back from the
fields, he is moved by the beauty of lotus blossoms in a
pond, one of which he plucks and presents to Savitri as
an offering. 47 This moment works through a contrast
with Savitri’s Puranic education. The affect visibilized in
Chathan’s act occupies a plane prior to the acquisition of
culture through education. He represents a dimension of
affective life that in Asan’s thought is more primordial
than history and society; it comes not only before
culture but also before what culture identifies as nature
and before figures of bodily or sexual desire.
‘Duravastha’ places the union of its protagonists
alongside the beautiful confluences of the universe—as
in earth reaching out to the skies through its mountain
ranges, clouds coming down to kiss treetops, and rivers
merging with the ocean—which cannot be prevented by
human will. 48 The law that governs these urges for
union is not that of instincts, which exist at a level of
embodiment. Desire’s location is prior to this, in the
earliest links between the soul and the body; it is desire
that makes life and embodiment possible. Destitution
and infancy—the free fall without recourse—is where
such desire can be delineated. The universality of love
reveals itself in the outcaste woman and the inarticulate
slave, as they occupy the degree zero prior to the
charting of the social and historical domains.
 VI

Asan used several words to refer to the interior realm of

the individual subject, including antarangam, manataru,
and antakaranam. The last of these, antakaranam (inner
sense), merits special attention, as Asan used it in his
non-poetic discourses as well to refer to the interiority of
agent. 49 In modern Malayalam, antakaranam refers to
the domain of inner thoughts and feelings, and the word
was already used in this sense in ordinary language in
Asan’s time. 50 Chandu Menon’s Indulekha, for instance,
mentions the protagonists of the novel at the beginning
of the story as having already performed
antakaranavivaham (a marriage of minds). 51 The word
antakaranam has its conceptual origins in classical
Indian philosophy and refers to the inner perceptual
apparatus. Like the external sense organs, antakaranam
engages with the phenomenal world, and this
differentiates it from atman and sakshi, which occupy a
non-phenomenal final level in the subject’s perception of
reality. It is conceived as physical (bhautikam),
consisting of the five elements and dominated by tejas,
which accounts for the inner sense’s instability and
constant transformations into various forms known as
vrtti.
Our concern here is less with classical Indian doctrines
of knowledge than with the semantic associations of this
word in Malayalam at the time Asan was writing. We find
the use of the notion of antakaranam in the
compositions of both Sree Narayana Guru and
Chattampi Swamikal. In ‘Atmopadesasatakam’, Sree
Narayanan mentions it along with the sense organs, the
body, and the perceptual world as the sacred body of
the supreme being, i.e. knowledge. Furthermore, he
compares vrtti—the forms assumed by the inner sense
in the process of knowledge—as the wick in the lamp
where the atman burns, accompanied by its corporeal
shadow. 52 Chattampi Swamikal’s
‘Advaitachintapaddhati’ offers a doctrinal discussion of
antakaranam. He defines it as ‘that organ which has
been composed of the sattvika aspect of the five
elements and which has knowledge as its object.’ 53
Vrtti, the evolute of the antakaranam, has four forms,
namely manas, buddhi, chitham, and ahankaram. Since
these function within, as distinct from the external sense
organs, they were called antakaranam. 54 Ahankaram, or
the sense of the ‘I’, which is a part of the inner sense,
when united with the sthula sariram, begins to identify
itself with the body and to think of itself as ‘dark or red,
tall or short.’ 55 For Chattampi Swamikal, as for Advaitin
thinkers in general, this sense of the ‘I’, as well as the
antakaranam on which it depends, is, in the final
instance, the result of a deluded perception, similar to
that which sees a serpent in a rope. 56
Kumaran Asan translated Maitreyi, a short novel
written in English by a Bengali scholar named Pandit
Sitanath Tatvabhushan. It was first published serially in
Vivekodayam, the organ of the SNDP Yogam, when Asan
was its editor, and then published as a book in 1913.
Asan gave it a subtitle: ‘A story which depicts the
religion and community practices among Hindus in Vedic
times’. Asan’s interest in this narrative was twofold:
firstly, he wished to suggest that the varna system in
the Vedic period was based on one’s actual qualities
(guna) and occupational engagements (karma) rather
than on birth. Secondly, the narrative contained two
long discussions on Advaita thought between
Yajnavalkya, Katyayani, and Maitreyi. In the course of
one of these discussions, Yajnavalkya responds to
Katyayani’s objections to believing in the permanence of
the atman: ‘Your problem has arisen from confusing the
atman with the inner sense (antakaranam) or with the
psyche (manas). Manas is in a sense inseparable from
the atman. Yet, in another sense, they are different from
each other. The impermanence and instability you
referred to are those of manas and not of the atman.’ 57
In Asan’s poetry antakaranam is used as part of a field
of words denoting personal interiority. These words are
deployed in a variety of senses, ranging from the flux of
thought and the turbulence of emotions to the locus of
inner reflection. While most of these are in tune with the
philosophical conception of antakaranam in the tradition
we indicated above, as the site of the ‘secrets of the
mind’, the word acquires in Asan’s hands a clearly
individualized sense; it became central to the use of this
word in modern Malayalam. One of the principal
functions of the monologic method in Asan is to make it
possible for the subject to reflect on the activities of
antakaranam. At the same time, the monologue is also a
manifestation of one’s inner state.
Asan’s reflections on inner thoughts and the role they
play in shaping our experience of the universe also show
the influence of Buddhist thought: ‘As one is, so is one’s
world. Each state in the universe is firmly rooted in our
inner experience of that state. It is not important to look
at the external state. This is because all that [external
state] is a reflected image of the state of our inner sense
(antakaranam).’ 58 This is even more pronounced in his
reflections of the soul (atmavu): ‘Each human life
experiences events, helpful or difficult, depending on the
quality and the strength of its inner life of thoughts. The
body is a mixture (samavayam) of the experiences and
thoughts condensed in the soul, as well as the
temporary vehicle for articulating them. Therefore, our
real soul (yatharthamaya atmavu) is none other than our
thoughts.’ 59 This reading introduces a dimension of
individuation to the Buddhist conception of the subject,
a strand in his thinking also seen in some of his other
works. Asan translated James Allen’s As the Man
Thinketh into Malayalam under the title Manassakti,
emphasizing its arguments regarding the determining
role played by our thoughts in creating the world that we
inhabit. Inner sense, as individualized personal
interiority, with its relations to the bodily and the
worldly, was for Asan the site for unveiling the ‘truth’
about the subject.
Two features are striking in Asan’s portrayal of women
subjects: firstly, they embody a self-conscious and
reflective notion of inner agency, which identifies them
as unique individuals; secondly, the instability of female
antakaranam is contrasted with the stability of the
enlightened male subject. The woman’s turbulent inner
self is, as we saw, often framed in Asan’s work by the
man’s immutable spirituality. A temporal unfolding of
human agency is not found in his male figures; one
needs to turn to Leela or Savitri for this. Asan’s
valorization of female agency is ambivalent: it is
oriented in the last instance towards spiritual fulfilment;
the woman though is an apprentice-subject, finding the
destination of her spiritual journey in guru-like male
figures who are outside the ambit of self-transformation.
Her lack of perfection allows the woman to be the locus
of individuation. The woman, for Asan, is the agent of
autonomous initiatives and the transgression of social
norms; at the same time, she is an object of instruction
by male figures who have transcended the world of
desire.
 Kuttikrishna Marar read into the narrator’s silence in
‘Leela’, on the cause of death of Leela’s husband, an
implied suggestion that he was murdered by the
heroine. In the same vein, Sita’s final disappearance
may be seen as the veiled manifestation of a
transgressive, suicidal agency. We noted the parallels
between Nalini’s emotions in front of Divakaran and
female erotic experience. Leela and Vasavadatta express
their desire through their physical seductiveness. Even
in Matangi and Savitri, religious conversion and the
move against caste are motivated by a movement of
erotic desire. All these initiatives and transgressions are,
however, framed within a narrative of female, spiritual
apprenticeship. The erotic is sublated into the spiritual
by the male subject. Matangi’s desire in
‘Chandalabhikshuki’ is the ground from which her
spiritual initiation arises: ‘The blessed One
understanding her sentiments towards Ananda made
use of them to open her eyes to the truth, and took her
among his disciples.’ These lines from Lakshmi Narasu’s
The Essence of Buddhism form part of the summary
narrative cited by Asan at the beginning of
‘Chandalabhikshuki’. 60 The woman is the desiring
subject, but she is also the object par excellence of
instruction.
This conception of female agency seems to draw upon
two distinct strands. It reworks the paradigm we saw in
the vairagya compositions, which express a strong fear
of woman’s desire. At the same time, this conception
joins the efforts in Asan’s time to address the woman as
an object of reform and instruction. In addition to the
novel, a large number of prescriptive texts—some
authored by women and several by men—appeared
around this time in Malayalam, elaborating on the notion
of streedharmam. Asan reviewed some of them with
approbation. 61 Often using verse, these texts drew on
ideas, tropes, and idioms from Hindu prescriptive writing
to outline the duties of women within the household and
in relation to their body and conduct. Such reiteration of
familiar propositions was made necessary by the
changes in the role and status of women and in the
relationships between men and women. The normative
tenor of the genre helped in conferring a sense of
authority on their responses to contemporary
challenges.
The newness of these concerns was acknowledged
more openly in the larger body of prose writing on these
themes. Much of the content of early women’s
periodicals—such as Sarada, Mahila, and Lakshmibai—
were of this genre. 62 Articles published in Sarada, for
instance, often addressed topics such as bhartrsusrusha
(care of one’s husband), veettuvela (house work), and
vyayamam (physical exercise). 63 Lakshmibai, a
magazine that began publication from Trissur in 1905,
announced that it would make available to native
women writings in Sanskrit and English on subjects such
as garbharaksha (pregnancy care), sisuparipalanam
(childcare), arogyarakshamargam (health care),
pachakavidhi (recipes for cooking), grhabharanam
(governing the household), bhartrsusrusha (caring for
one’s husband), pativratamhatmyam (the glory of
chastity), and manyamaraya oro streekalude
jeevacharitram (the biographies of reputed women). 64
Streedharmam too appeared as a theme in many
essays. T.B. Kalyani Amma, one of the editors of Sarada,
argued that ‘women’s duties in the world are twofold.
The first and the more important one is to be performed
in their homes; the second is as a member of their
community. Indian women in our times are performing
only the first of these; the second needs to be
demanded of them.’ 65 Some discussions of
streedharmam cautioned women against the passion for
modern ways (parishkarabhramam), which was seen as
a reckless imitiation of Western practices. 66 Women’s
education was frequently discussed in these magazines,
and it was often extolled on account of its possible
benefits for the family, especially for the sound
upbringing and education of children and for the
intelligent, prudent running of the household. 67 The
education of women was also seen as the best means of
forestalling unwanted attractions and changing the
everyday preoccupations of women, such as gossip and
popular entertainment. The nature of the education
appropriate for women, and the language and contents
of the curriculum, were matters of debate.
The construction of the woman as an object of reform
and education in nineteenth-century India has been
extensively discussed in the scholarly literature. The
relationship of this configuration to the emergence of
nationalism, to novel forms of patriarchy and
domesticity, and to new senses of the community and
tradition has been noted for colonial Bengal and North
India, as well as other regions. 68 Advice manuals and
literary works written especially for women, magazines,
and periodicals addressed to and sometimes run by
women, and sessions for women in conferences held by
community organizations—all these were spaces crucial
to the elaboration of a new discourse on women.
In Kerala, although a substantial part of this literature
was written by men, sometimes under assumed female
names, women also became important participants in
producing and altering the terms of this discourse. Many
of the writings by women stressed the virtues and
necessity of women’s education and of women’s
freedom, although the latter was initially presented
within the frame of male protection. Essays by women
brought into the public domain of writing the texture of
domestic life, everyday activities in the lives of couples
and families, and a new tone of worldly experience,
alongside aspirations for participation in professional
and public arenas which had been the preserve of men.
New notions of female agency, which sought autonomy
in thought and expression, developed in the pages of
women’s journals. 69
Asan’s poetry primarily envisaged the apprenticeship
of the woman as spiritual rather than worldly. The
woman’s capacity for transformation was in her
autobiographical constitution, which opened her
interiority—fraught with negotiations between the
corporeal and the spiritual and traversed by intense
desire—for insistent discursive articulation. In contrast to
the disciplines of modern gender recommended for
women in contemporary texts of streedharmam, which
Asan applauded, the women characters in his poetry
were sketched in the incandescence of a desire which
transgressed the social coordinates of womanhood:
family, marriage, and the body. In the female subject’s
ambivalent links to the corporeal—connected through
primordial ties of desire and made uninhabitable through
the body’s embeddedness in the social world—Asan’s
poetry found a fleeting promise of freedom and a new
grammar for the subject’s presencing in language.
4

Unsteady Luminosity Reading the

P World in Early Novels Remamrtam
(1913), C.V. RAMAN PILLAl’s satiric
‘social novel’ set in the late
nineteenth century, has within it a
curious moment when Ayyappan
Thampi—a young graduate gainfully
employed by the Travancore
government and therefore an
eminently eligible bachelor—looks at
the photograph of a prospective bride
brought to him by Panki Paniker, an
interested go-between. As he gazes
at the image, he finds himself
extraordinarily transported: His
fleshly vision clouded over. For the
first time, the eyes of love that his
inner body possessed became
capable of sight . . . These eyes saw
not a form created by the
arrangement of light and shade, but
 the purity of a slender virgin leaning
on a chair immersed in intense
thought . . . Thampi felt that the
heavenly beauty of divine virginity
had appeared before his eyes draped
in innocent piety and assuming a
pure, sublime state of femininity. 1
As he emerges from the spell—captured with all its
intense vicissitudes—Thampi is convinced that the
referent of the image could not be of this world; it could
only be the replica of an ideal. But ideals are beyond the
realm of photographs; could the photo then be of a
painting which had conferred fleshly lineaments upon an
ideal? Was this not in fact the photograph of a painting
by Raja Ravi Varma? Who but that unsurpassed master
could conjure up such an image of ideal beauty?
Thampi is invited the following day to meet the
ineffable original of which the photograph, for all its
superlative charm, is but a copy. He is taken to a
decorated chamber festooned with images of ideal
beauty. Heavenly women in attitudes of erotic charm
confront him from paintings on three walls: on the
eastern wall is Menaka in seductively loosened clothes,
lit up in an amatory glow; a thinly veiled Rambha bathed
in moonlight is on the northern wall, sternly forbidding
the approach of those without a taste for the amorous;
on the south, Urvashi recounts her passion for Arjuna
and is ready to curse those blind to beauty’s charms. In
the room’s centre, surrounded by these ethereally
sensuous images, stands a round table upon which is
placed another photograph of the girl he has come to
meet. This portrait shocks Thampi: it scarcely resembles
the one he has so ecstatically contemplated the
previous day.

if the second photograph is accurate, it is a certain

elegant seductiveness (chetitvam) that is dominant
in the woman whom he has come to visit . . . As it
was a full-length portrait one could see the rare
exuberance of her hair. If a girl who has such copious
hair is ready to comb and hold it up before a
photographer, thus displaying the taste of a
seductress, her heart was untouched by the
venerable trait of modesty, and she did not possess
sufficient majesty to become spouse to the heir of
Chambrangottu taravad. . . He put the photograph
down on the table. Paniker’s hopes dimmed. He said:
‘Same girl in both pictures. You can see the very
original if you wish.’ 2

Soon enough the girl enters the room, heralded by the

intoxicating scent of rose flowers and attired in white in
the North Indian style. Her physical presence, instead of
resolving the conflict between the two images, serves
only to multiply appearances and compound the
confusion: ‘Amidst the dark abundance of her hair,
which indicated the profusion of natural riches, her face
shone with the glory of the golden image of a goddess . .
. and Thampi felt that this face was not familiar to him
through either of the photographs he had seen. Radiant
like the full moon, on that face played childlike purity as
well as traces of frivolity . . .’ 3 The visual enchantment
is intensified by the extreme beauty of her voice as she
begins to play the veena and sing a srngara padam (a
verse of erotic love), with a slight smile at the aptness of
the words: ‘What wrong have I done thee, my love . . .’
The singer’s aesthetic self-abandon, surprisingly, leads
to the spell’s abrupt undoing.
 Thampi’s taste identified in the bluish glow of the
singer’s eyes the flicker of an animal emotion. On
her red lips tender like buds, glowed a fire that could
rage and burn down the sacred abode of matrimony
—thus he analysed her natural propensities. A strong
awareness shone inside him that the beautiful
fingers which were now playing the veena as if they
were dancing on the hood of the serpent Kaliya,
those same fingers could turn into snakes with
multiple tongues for the man embraced by them. 4

The extraordinary predominance of visual images and

their apprehension in these passages could serve as a
point of departure for our engagement here with early
novels in Malayalam. C.V.’s obsessive preoccupation
with visuality, even if exceptional in its intensity, is not
unique. Many novels of the period appear to be
concerned with presenting a visible world within which
characters live and move, and which they frequently
attempt to make sense of. Readers are interpellated into
a new imaginative practice in which the configuration of
vision and language, seeing and saying, becomes
difficult to disentangle. Through their perceptual and
discursive economies, these early novels found ways of
inserting subjects into new, complex domains of
worldliness and speech.
The account of obsessive visual scrutiny in
Premamrtam makes no distinction between a
photograph and a painting, or between images and
reality: the body in its immediate presence also works as
an image, eliciting an equally intense visual
investigation. Even the animated body, which resists
static contemplation, is regarded as a moving picture:
the viewer’s compulsive gaze becomes even more alert
to track momentary corporeal transitions and register
the slightest signs that flicker across a face.
C.V. Raman Pillai, unlike his French contemporary
Marcel Proust, was not concerned with a hermeneutic
configuration where personal jealousy produces and, in
the same movement, impedes the affective work of love.
5 Neither the unique personal history nor the inner

intentions of the woman directly command Ayyappan

Thampi’s anxieties. His concern is rather with her
natural proclivities, her swa- bhavam or
6
swabhavadharmam. Close observation and relentless
speculation about bodily testimony mark this pursuit. We
also see another relationship at work. This is not defined
by sceptical distance: the spectator is affected by the
image, being carried away to a realm that lies not only
beyond the viewer’s encounter with the photograph but
also the moment captured and presented in the image.
While looking at the first image, Thampi does not notice
the luxuriant length of the woman’s hair or the style of
its arrangement; his gaze does not register details of the
represented body. He sees only emotions and abstract
virtues, which, we realize later, have their provenance in
his English education, in his exposure to Western
literatures and ideas. The narrator does not translate
details of the image into linguistic description, but
documents the imagined drama produced by the
photograph. ‘In the figure standing in profile, decorated
with the hair falling on the cheek, the eye half-closed in
inner agony seemed to be in prayer beseeching the
helping hand of a virtuous ally. The soft cheek appeared
to quiver as an outward manifestation of uncontainable
suffering.’ 7
It is difficult to disentangle visual information and
abstract ideas, and the passage appears to be pulled
simultaneously in two directions: an allegorical vision
where pure ideas are made visible, and an extreme
verisimilitude where the image begins to come alive and
acquire a corporeal immediacy. The living image makes
demands on the viewer, in the form of a prayer or a
quivering cheek, and his responses find their expression
in a language of essences: virtue, innocence, divine
beauty. The spectator—and the narrator—are not
reading the image according to a well-formulated
iconography: the code that links essences to
appearances seems rather to be an offshoot of the
viewer’s transformation in the presence of the image.
The image exerts an uncanny power over Thampi and
draws dramatic freezes from his acquired imaginary.
The second photograph, by contrast, breaks the spell
of this virtual production. The viewer’s gaze abandons
the search for transcendental essences and focuses on
the prosaic conditions of picture-making. The
photograph appears to represent nothing more than a
model who has combed up her hair before a stranger,
the photographer. The viewer is located outside the
auratic world produced by the image; the gaze is
obsessed in its eagerness to reconstruct the scene in the
studio and make inferences. The photograph possesses
no virtual dimension and offers no transcendence from
the conditions of the studio. Enchantment, however,
reclaims its dominance when the heroine enters the
room: her physical presence offers a third, more
complex image next to which the two earlier
photographs pale in comparison. Idioms of
transcendence to imaginary scenes and the reduction of
the image to its conditions of production recede into the
background, and a new, intimate engagement with the
face begins. A tense competition between enchantment
and interpretation, a passive submission to the power of
the female figure, and an active hermeneutic dominance
become discernible. Musical performance accelerates
and complicates this tussle when Thampi listens to the
singing voice in rapt attention even as he scans the
singer’s face for signs. The fleeting appearance of a
bluish glow of animal desire, apprehended by the
viewer’s agile powers of discrimination, provokes no
turbulence: Thampi feels neither attraction nor revulsion
but reaches a composed judgement with which he
detaches himself from the image, having now become
immune to its powers.
Later in the novel another suitor, Karta, entranced by a
fleeting encounter in the street with the same woman,
goes through the same steps. However, the chamber
looks different now: on the walls we find images of
deities instead of heavenly nymphs in erotically charged
postures; books are displayed on the tables; the
decorated bed in the corner is hidden away by a screen.
The new suitor too is captivated by the first photograph
that had bewitched Thampi’s imagination, but he quickly
dismisses the second as the handiwork of an inept
photographer. And the appearance of the woman leads
not to a musical performance but to the mutual avowal
of love through a combination of Westernized rituals of
romantic love and native gestures of propriety. The
mastery of the second, successful suitor over the
unstable world of visual appearances, however, does not
last forever. Later in the novel he becomes prey to a far
stronger misrecognition of the woman’s fidelity on
account of an inadequate and misleading visual
encounter. 8
Visual experience plays a vital role in shaping the
narrative in these passages, but it is marked by deep
instability. In contrast to the novel’s celebrated claim to
describe things as they are, these passages chart the
difficulty and insufficiency of vision: instead of revealing
an indisputably existent world available through the
senses, visual experience is put into crisis by dimensions
that conflict with the empirical. No pre-existing codes of
decipherment appear to guarantee the significance of
objects of vision and the stability of the viewing subject.
Yet this perceptual and discursive instability—the lack of
surefootedness in sensory apprehension and in the
choice of the code that will unlock its significance—does
not appear to hinder the novel’s work: rather it appears
as a vital source of the form’s energy, as the kernel of
the aesthetic experience offered by fiction’s new
imaginary.
The proliferation of visual images in Premamrtam is in
tune with the transformations in scopic regimes and
technologies of image-making at the time the novel was
written. Raja Ravi Varma did indeed produce oleographs
of Rambha and Urvashi, akin to the ones described as
decorating the imaginary walls of the bridal chamber in
C.V.’s novel. It is possible that the attire ‘in the northern
style’ in which the heroine appears before Thampi was
borrowed from Ravi Varma’s paintings, which drew on
eclectic sources to produce ideal costumes for female
characters from Indian mythology. But it is not the
portrait but the photograph that occupies the centre of
the drama whose unfolding we traced in Premamrtam.
Sujith Kumar Parayil has noted the arrival of
photography in Travancore and the establishment of the
early studios in Trivandrum during C.V. Raman Pillai’s
lifetime. 9 Could there be a relationship between these
new visual technologies of photography and the scopic
environments of the early novel?
In her study of the relationship between fiction and
photography in nineteenth-century England, Nancy
Armstrong argued that literary realism converted ‘a
particular kind of visual information—infinitely
reproducible and capable of rapid and wide
dissemination—into what was both a way of seeing and
a picture of the world that a mass readership could
share.’ 10 Her contention is that realism involved a
pictorial turn, a supplanting of the word by the image:
visual information became the basis for the intelligibility
of verbal narrative. This led to a conjunction between
the interests of literary realism and photography: ‘in
order to be realistic, literary realism referenced a world
of objects that either had been or could be
photographed’, and ‘photography in turn offered up
portions of this world to be seen by the same group of
people whom novelists imagined as their readership.’ 11
Based on this shared ground between realist fiction and
photography, Armstrong makes larger claims about the
‘image’ and its epistemological centrality in modern
social life: ‘in establishing a relationship between fiction
and photography, I will insist that the kind of visual
description we associate with literary realism refers not
to things, but to visual representations of things,
representations that fiction helped to establish as
identical to real things and people before readers
actually began to look that way to one another and live
within such stereotypes. It is the referent common to
both Victorian fiction and photography that I mean by
the term “image”.’ 12
For Armstrong the new fictional regime—of literary
realism and photography—did not refer to a world of
things and people; its referent was the image, which
occupied a field of images and gained its value from
differential relationships within the field.
In Premamrtam, however, the stress is not on the
capacity of images to bear reliable visual information; it
is rather the power exerted by the image on the viewer
and the difficulty of hermeneutic decipherment which
come to the foreground. The light that makes images
visible also obscures them: the shifting luminosities of
the photograph, and the barely perceptible glow of
emotion on the singing face are moments in an
uncertain struggle; it is within this tussle that the
spectator-subject of C.V.’s novel is formed. Do
differences in perceptual regimes between Victorian
England and early-twentieth-century Travancore account
for the distance that separates this from Armstrong’s
account?
Thampi’s praise of Ravi Varma highlights the painter’s
ability to give visible form to an ideal beauty for which
there is no analogue in the living world. The image is not
a stereotype under whose regime human beings will
relate to and read each other; it marks a limit where the
world is surpassed and astonishment overpowers the
viewer. This is not pivoted on a stable distinction
between the empirical and the ideal; it is the power of
the image, regardless of its origins in experience or
imagination, that matters. Even the photograph, with all
its claims to mimetic accuracy and indexical relationship
to the world of objects, is well within this regime of
power and affect. Historians of early photography in
India, like Judith Mara Gutman and Christopher Pinney,
have shown how this emergent visual technology
inserted itself into the dominant scopic regimes in an
India where visuality and other embodied practices
played a vital role in public culture, and produced effects
and relations at variance with their histories in the West.
13 The use of painted photographs, photolithographs

which present composite images taken from different

sources, and the simultaneous representation of all
elements in the picture field—as if it were happening in
an ‘idealized and timeless space’—were all distinctive
features of the popular practice of photography in India.
14 The power of the image and the transformative

effects it could have on the viewer imply, according to

Pinney, a corposthetic rather than aesthetic approach.
The modality of the Darshan—described by Diana Eck in
the context of religion and invoked subsequently in the
study of popular print culture and cinema—‘mobilizes
vision as part of a unified human sensorium, and visual
interaction as physically transformative.’ 15 Vision and
language in early novels in Malayalam, and the new
modes of imagining subjectivities they offered, worked
within the ambit of a corposthetic dimension of images
and the transformative power of seeing and saying.
Discussions of the early novel in India have recognized
the many ways in which the representational strategies
of this genre deviated from its Western predecessor.
Even as early novelists claimed novelty for their
compositions on grounds of representational realism,
what they offered was manifestly different in
expectations of verisimilitude, representational
conventions, plausibility of plots, and other aspects of
narrative organization. Critics have tried to understand
this difference in terms of the novel’s allegiance to
earlier literary forms and techniques. Meenakshi
Mukherjee pointed out that the physical appearance of
characters is described often according to conventions
of head-to-toe description (nakha-sikha or apadachooda
varnana) inherited from the Sanskrit poetic genres
(kavyas). 16 The novel’s selfproclaimed distinction from
the traditional kavya seems to be belied by its reliance
on the latter’s representational norms. Are these novels
to be seen as continuous with the kavyas, or did they
fashion a new literary technology that put to innovative
use earlier representational strategies? The vocabulary
of hybridity may not, on its own, help us describe with
precision the ways in which the novels worked as
discursive assemblages. And large categorical
distinctions between the pre-modern and the modern or
the Indian and Western may not take us close to a
positive description of the nature of the perceptual world
offered by the early novel, with its objects, characters,
and events.

II
A set of tropes recurs in accounts of the origins of the
new form offered by early Malayalam novelists.
Prominent is a desire to tell new stories and widen the
scope of entertainment for readers who had only puranic
tales at their disposal; a shift away from supernatural
extravagance to showing things as they appeared in real
life; an intervention in the contemporary world with a
social or moral purpose, or to document in detail the
customs of one’s community; and a deep entanglement
with translation—failed, abandoned, or partially carried
out—where derivativeness and originality do not
function in strict opposition to each other. These go
alongside occasional comments on language: how does
one make one’s language assume a new literary voice
and a new mode of address and make it capable of
showing and saying things in a way it has not done
before?
Literary historians are known to quibble about the
‘first’ novel of a language, marking the commencement
of a genre; while doing this they often posit an
immediate prehistory revealing a number of ‘not-yet’
novels which anticipate the emergence of the genre
without belonging to it. However, these texts, judged as
having failed to reach the normative benchmark for the
genre, anchor an alternative history, enabling us to see
an unstable terrain of discourse before its subsequent
settlement and regulation. This is less a matter of
generic or textual properties and features than of
literary habits, imaginaries, and publicly affirmed
aesthetic pleasures. In Malayalam, several early
attempts at long fictional narratives in prose came from
Protestant missionaries and native Christian writers.
These efforts, often translations of Christian literature,
did not usually consider themselves as aiming at the
reader’s aesthetic attention. Hana Catherine Mullens’
Phulmoni Ennum Koruna Ennum Peraya Randu
Streekalude Katha (The Story of Two Women Named
Phulmoni and Koruna), a schematic narrative about
Indian converts to Christianity, originally published in
Bengali in 1852, was translated by Joseph Peet into
Malayalam six years later. Mrs Collins’ novel Slayer Slain,
set in Kerala, was translated by her husband, Rev.
Richard Collins, as Ghatakavadham and published in
1877. Archdeacon Koshy, who translated John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress in 1847 (another translation by Joseph
Peet was published by Basel Mission in the same year),
authored a text called Jatibhedam (Caste Difference) in
the 1860s in the form of a fictitious debate. This was
republished in 1887 with the title Pullelikkunju. Apart
from these stories with a direct Christian religious intent,
Kalloor Oommen Philippose wrote Almarattam
(Impersonation) in 1866 as a loose, non-dramatic
translation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.
Kundalata, written by Appu Nedungadi, was published in
1887 and soon found recognition as a novel, although its
principal role in subsequent literary histories has been to
serve as a precursor to O. Chandu Menon’s Indulekha,
published two years later and hailed as the first properly
modern novel in Malayalam.
 Nedungadi’s Preface to Kundalata shows an awareness
of the newness of his project: In English there are
several books by the name of ‘novel’—meaning stories
of a new kind—in which readers find much distraction.
Since there are no books of this sort in Malayalam, the
majority of Malayalis who lack proficiency in English are
unable to feel the pleasures of narration and dexterity of
language in these books. As a result, they pass their
time in a pitiable state, reading again and again without
enjoyment some Puranic stories found in a few books
like Ramayanam, Mahabharatam and Nalacharitam,
which in all probability their parents had already
narrated to them in their childhood. It is also a matter of
surprise that the few capable Malayalis who possess
knowledge of the English language have not been trying
to change this situation. 17
It is clear that Nedungadi conceived his readership as
essentially Hindu, as having been shaped by Hindu
mythological narratives and the literary tradition that
derives from Sanskrit. Interestingly, Kundalata’s story is
closer to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline than to English
novels. However, the texture of the novel has much in
common with the Sanskrit literary tradition and its
afterlife in Malayalam poetry and drama. This is evident
from an inaugural compositional move: although
Nedungadi stresses the newness and invented nature of
his work as well as its similarities to the English novel,
he takes care not to place it in a world familiar to the
Malayalis from experience: ‘Names of kingdoms like
Kalingam and Kuntalam and personal names like
Kundalata and Taranathan have been used in this novel
mainly to remind the readers that the story is said to
have taken place in an alien land far away from Kerala:
in case [readers] find in this mores and practices out of
tune with the customs in Kerala, these may be in
accordance with the ways of those countries. However,
readers should not think that the story took place in
countries famed by these names in the Puranas and
which are now called differently.’ 18
While the names of places and persons would appeal
to the reader’s familiarity with native literature, the
narration seems to bring it closer to the reader’s own
temporal frame. In spite of their royal status, characters
are described in their ordinariness: even the mystery
surrounding Kapilanathan is eventually resolved in
favour of motives that are not extraordinary or elevated.
The descriptions that punctuate the early chapters of
the novel rehearse this combination of strangeness and
ordinariness. The first chapter, which presents a
mysterious hermit, who is later revealed to be a
renowned former minister in disguise, is succeeded by
descriptions of a hunt, assembling details and actions
that have no consequence for the turn of events or the
reader’s understanding and affective response to the
principal characters. The exteriority of the description—
its role as an element in assembling a picture of the
strange kingdom, far away from Kerala—seems to be its
own justification. The same tendency is evident in a
detailed description of the house of Aghoranathan. The
garden, each of the rooms, and the principal objects that
decorate them are profusely described without aiming
for a totality of effect. Each object is a curiosity in its
own right. The detailing reveals no rationale other than
the operation of an implied, imaginary gaze which
registers things and notices their strange and special
qualities without trying to integrate them into an overall
image.
This tendency is pursued in a number of early
Malayalam novels. In Ammaman Raja’s
Indumatiswayamvaram, the heroine Indumati sends a
message to her lover Sukumaran asking him to meet her
in secret in a bungalow to discuss some matters of the
utmost urgency. Indumati and the reader are both aware
that the king has turned against Sukumaran, and that he
is going to be expelled from the palace. At this vital
moment, the narrator cheerfully interrupts the progress
of the story: Now, for the delight of the readers, I shall
briefly describe the excellences of this bungalow. It was
set in the middle of an exceedingly beautiful garden in
Srinagar, the capital city of Kashmir, renowned all
through the country. On both sides of the paths that take
you beyond the steps, on the beautiful iron fencing that
enchants the minds of viewers and in the bowers
specially built for the enjoyment of the breeze in the
middle of gardens dense with plants and bushes, spread
fragrant, flowering creepers in abundance. Even the
heavenly garden Nandana will be put to shame at this
sight. On the outer edge of these bowers, four or five
ponds—a yard or two in depth and some sixty or seventy
yards in length and breadth, and filled with limpid
unsullied water—have been lavishly constructed with
special moonstones and illuminated by lamps placed on
short pillars cast in copper and coated in gold. At their
centre, above the water stand female forms sculpted in
marble; from the artificial lotus flowers held in their
hands water fountains emerge and spread out fanlike
and fall. Different kinds of fish nurtured there flit around
and play all the time. Who can help being delighted by
the beauty of this garden adorned by all this? 19
This description uses techniques from the kavya
tradition, especially in the triumphant comparison with
Nandanodyana, but it would be a mistake to see this as
an instance of the survival of a pre-modern poetic
device. The detailing of the features and forms of the
garden, the mention of measurements, the precision in
the description of the fountain all follow the same
principle we found in Kundalata, that of detailing without
consolidating or totalizing. This tendency is taken further
in Cheruvalathu Chathu Nair’s novel Meenakshi (1890),
where the entire village is mapped in a similar way
before locating the heroine’s house and describing it in
detail. Even though the raison d’etre of the description is
the production of a total subjective, aesthetic experience
of delight and marvel, the narrative appears to be
guided by a desire to master the object inch by inch,
detail by detail.
Chandu Menon’s Indulekha (1889) is remarkable for
adopting a somewhat different and far more diverse set
of descriptive procedures. Interestingly, in the author’s
Preface it is vision and language that serve as the
ground for defining the uniqueness and novelty of his
venture. Indulekha, Menon says, had its origins in a
failed attempt at translating Disraeli’s novel Henrietta
Temple. 20 A direct translation, he realized, posed two
major problems: firstly, it was far more difficult to
reproduce the flavour of the original in an accurate
written translation than in oral retelling, where a wider
range of expressive and explanatory resources were
available to familiarize the listener with the world and
culture in the English novel; secondly, a straight
translation into Malayalam of passages in the English
novel ‘where srngaram dominated as rasa’ would not be
aesthetically pleasing. 21 The choice of the word
srngaram to refer to scenes of romantic love in the
English novel is in itself an act of translation, predicated
as it is on an apprehension of the English novel by Indian
literary habits. Chandu Menon’s oral retellings were also
of this kind, drawing on native imaginaries to grasp alien
literary gestures. His aim was to find a substitute, in the
domain of writing, for the flexible inventiveness of his
oral translations. This is what led him to write a ‘novel
book in Malayalam more or less in the manner of English
novel books.’ 22 A paradoxical notion of creativity: the
new composition’s originality derives precisely from its
status as an imitation. Indulekha was addressed to an
audience mostly unfamiliar with the English novel, and
this made it impossible for Menon to anticipate their
possible response to his work. This raises questions
regarding the literary habitus presupposed by the new
form, and the grounds on which it appealed to its
readership.
Menon did not directly address these questions; but
his clarification of the nature of his project does give us
some leads. It was to visual representations and ways of
speaking that he turned for analogues of the novelty of
Indulekha. In response to the scepticism about his
choice of ordinary affairs of contemporary life and his
avoidance of marvellous incidents, the novelist had this
to say: Before the European style of oil-painting began to
be known and appreciated in this country, we had
painted, in defiance of all possible existence, pictures of
Vishnu as half man and half lion, pictures of the deity of
the chase, pictures of brute-headed monsters, pictures
of the god Krishna, with his legs twisted and twined into
postures in which no biped could stand and blowing a
cowherd’s horn, pictures of Ananthan wearing a
thousand cobra-hoods, pictures of gigantic demons, and
all these executed with a touch and colouring so coarse
as to banish all idea of chiaroscuro, perspective and
proportion. 23
Against this older indigenous mode of visual
representation, Menon placed an emergent form of new
visuality: A taste has set in for pictures, whether in oil or
water colours, in which shall be delineated men, beasts,
and things according to their true appearance, and the
closer that a picture is to nature the greater the honour
paid to the artist. Just in the same way, if stories
composed of incidents true to ordinary life, and
attractively and gracefully written, are once introduced,
then by degrees the old order of books, filled with
impossible things, will change, yielding place to the new.
24

Are we to see in this a simple opposition between

traditional indigenous practices of stylization and
modern, Western norms of realistic representation? The
former is shown here not by classical traditions of
stylization but by popular prints whose draughtsmanship
and colouring are criticized as tasteless and crude. Does
this analogy hold in the domain of literature too?
W. Dumergue, then Acting Collector of Malabar District
and former Malayalam translator to the Madras
Government, was the first to render Indulekha into
English. His praise for Menon’s novel was more than
equalled by his outright denigration of literary practices
in Malayalam: ‘The popular literature, with its unnatural
and supernatural paraphernalia, belongs to an age when
the human mind was still in a go-cart, its language is as
obsolete as the language of Piers the Plowman, and as it
is without exception founded on the venerable Sanskrit,
there is a total absence of originality.’ 25 Menon’s
relationship to the poetic culture in Malayalam was very
different from Dumergue’s. His avid enthusiasm for
Kathakali was well known; he shared a close literary
friendship with Keralavarma Valiyakoyil Thampuran, a
great proponent of the classical strand in Malayalam
poetry in his time. 26 Menon, as an enthusiastic reader,
inhabited the very poetic tradition that Dumergue
rejected as worthless. These differences are obliquely
reflected in Dumergue’s translation of Menon’s Preface:
the word ‘supernatural’ appears twice in the English,
once without any warrant from the original and once as
the equivalent for ascharyam (marvel, wonderment); the
word sadharanam (common, general, ordinary) in
Menon’s Malayalam is rendered as ‘natural’. Dumergue
insistently foregrounds an opposition between the
natural and the supernatural (and unnatural) which has
religious and colonial-historicist overtones, while
Menon’s Preface appears more interested in
distinguishing the ordinary from the exceptional and
differentiating the modes of representation associated
with them. The contrast set up between coarsely
coloured prints in which figures appear in improbably
stylized attitudes and recent watercolours and oil
paintings that tastefully depict things as they appear to
us—was Raja Ravi Varma in Menon’s mind?—ought to be
seen against this broad background. The word
swabhavam (translated by Dumergue as nature)
captures the complexities and ambivalences of Menon’s
aesthetic formulations, pointing variably towards
verisimilitude, probability, and innate tendencies, with
an eclectic mix of intellectual resources and histories of
usage as their background.
Menon’s second point in the Preface is about the
language of his novel. The word sadharanam makes an
appearance again. The novel, Menon says, is written in a
Malayalam that is ordinarily spoken in Kerala’s
households. This move challenges the rules of literary
language in Malayalam, which were largely derived from
Sanskrit. The word vyutpathi, of Sanskrit origin, he says,
is usually pronounced vyutpathi by Malayalam speakers,
and that is how the word will appear in his novel. 27 This
deviation from ‘correct’ pronunciation will appear as a
mimetic device in the speech of characters; it will be a
part of the novel’s linguistic normativity, which conflicts
with the protocols of correctness and felicity in literary
language. Ordinary, common usage—the sadharana
form of language—is not merely the object of this new
idea of literature; it is literature’s very stuff, what it is
made of: one might even say that it is the swabhavam of
the novel. While defining the ordinary language spoken
at home, Menon had educated upper-caste Hindus in
Malabar in mind. But does the ordinary, even in this
restricted sense, displace literary language and fully
assume its place in his novel?
The opening chapter of Indulekha does keep the
promise of a simple, ordinary style of narration.
However, at the beginning of the second chapter, when
the heroine is about to make her first appearance, the
narrator begins to forget the principles announced in the
Preface by the author and suddenly adopts an elevated
style: I confess that it is impossible to describe the joy
and the happiness and the fervour and the excitement
and the intense desire and the grief that arises in the
minds of men when they see Indulekha’s complexion
which resembles the colour of gold, her teeth which
resemble gems, her lips red like coral, her eyes which
make dark flowers feel like slaves, her face which has
the glow of red lotuses, her dark hair, her heavy breasts,
and her slender waist. 28
The passage sounds like the paraphrase of a verse from
a Sanskrit kavya—its syntax is modelled on the long and
complex sentences of anvaya-artham that appeared in
print after each stanza of Sanskrit verse in Malayalam
prose translations. Its vocabulary and rhetorical tropes
also follow Sanskrit poetic conventions, frequently used
in Malayalam poetry of the time, which describe female
beauty through a series of schematized similes and
metaphors. The change in register is aimed at producing
an experience of the exceptional, and a corresponding
sense of wonder and awe. Menon, we saw, had alerted
his readers about the impropriety of direct translations
from English novels when srngara rasam was dominant;
the exceptional beauty of the heroine—intimately linked
to the production of srngara rasam in readers—seems to
demand stylization in description. Her body cannot
appear in the natural light of everyday perception, or be
written of in the ordinary language spoken at home
without resulting in a loss of literary decorum; there is a
need to place a screen of cultivated language before the
gaze of ordinary readers. English novels do not supply
the material for this screen; it is the language of poetic
formulae, the oft repeated, the schematic, that helps
Menon to veil—and make visible—the heroine’s body. In
fact, this allows him to describe his heroine’s body with
an explicitness which, without this inflection of the
poetic, may have appeared vulgar and indecorous: ‘One
may say that at this time her breasts had begun to
become hard and heavy. Which youth will bear the sight
of those pots of gold growing incessantly in their
roundness?’ 29
Ammaman Raja, in his novel Indumatiswayamvaram,
used formulaic descriptions from the kavya tradition in
their straightforward conventionality: Indumati’s dark,
long and curly hair, exceedingly beautiful forehead, her
eyes that give agony to dark water lilies, lips that put
ripe red fruit to shame, her lotus face that diminishes
the beauty of the full moon, round breasts that stun
even the globes of elephants, her slender waist that
seems about to break under the weight of her breasts,
and her limbs that defeat sirisha flowers in softness and
chembakam flowers in colour—it is impossible to
describe the fluctuating emotions that arise in the hearts
of young men as they see all this. 30
The passage draws on the convention of describing the
body from head to foot, known as kesadipadavarnana or
apadachooda varnana in the kavya tradition. In Komattil
Padu Menon’s Lakshmikesavam (1892), this form of
description is found not only in the narrator’s initial
presentation of the heroine but even in the protagonist
Kesavan Unni Nair’s inner imaginings. 31 The narrator’s
presentation of Lakshmi’s beauty concludes with a
volley of figures of speech like upama and utpreksha, to
despair at the inadequacy of all rhetoric to present her
ethereal beauty. Formulaic similes from Sanskrit poetry
are paraded to suggest that the leaves of the banyan
tree keep trembling because they are excited by the
voluptuous beauty of the heroine’s hips. 32 Early
novelists did not always borrow such images directly
from Sanskrit originals; they were available in
abundance in Malayalam poems of the times. These
formulaic descriptions were attacked by a new
generation of English-educated critics such as C.
Anthappayi and Thatha Kanaran. ‘Malayalam poets think
nothing of appropriating, or rather misappropriating the
ideas and sentiments of others’, wrote Kanaran, ‘and the
same figures and expressions are repeated over and
over again by each successive writer without the
slightest acknowledgement or the least compunction.’
Kanaran’s examples are precisely of the kind that we
encountered in the early novels: For instance, columns
of dust and smoke commenced carrying their complaints
to Indra so far back that one might reasonably expect
that even the slowest of tribunals had settled their case
long ago, but at any rate it is high time indeed they are
allowed to rest in peace. The abdominal contour of some
beautiful damsel centuries ago had struck terror into the
peepul leaves so effectually that they have not yet
ceased trembling, though the recent innovations in the
female habiliments of the natives of the country obviate
all necessity for further anxiety on that score. 33
Kanaran’s criticisms were based on aesthetic norms
derived from Western literatures, especially English;
interestingly, the early novels in Malayalam, which also
looked up to Western literature for their aesthetic
models, provided a happy habitat for the formulaic
similes and metaphors condemned by him.
The accommodation of poetic cultures in early novels
complicates not only Menon’s linguistic characterization
of the novel, but also his visual analogies. Formulaic
poetic descriptions are more in tune with a visual culture
of stylization than with a representation of things as they
appear. There is a partial justification for their use in the
narrator’s initial discussion of female beauty and the
difficulties of describing it. The narrator accepts as
correct the features of female beauty upheld in classical
Sanskrit texts; they are appropriate for Indian women,
while Western ideals of beauty—upholding a totally
different set of features—are right for European women.
There is an attempt at formulating a universalistic
principle for beauty: it is based on lustre (sobha) as well
as on the pleasing quality of all features individually and
in their togetherness. 34 Indulekha is introduced as
foremost among the beautiful women in whom these
conditions are fulfilled. While discussing the relativity of
beautiful features, the narrator says dark skin, although
generally not considered attractive, might appear
beautiful in felicitous combination with other features,
but quickly interrupts himself to warn readers against
thinking even for a moment that Indulekha is of dark
complexion. The description of the heroine, in fact,
begins with her skin: ‘since her skin was of the same
colour (savarnam) as the golden brocade, no one could
tell with certainty where the brocade ended and her
body began.’ 35 The word savarnam, which also means
Hindu upper caste, appears like a symptom of the caste
underpinnings of the narrator’s alacrity. The colour of
Indulekha’s lips finds its equals only in the lips of
European women, the narrator tells us, thus violating his
earlier pronouncements on the local embeddedness of
ideals of beauty. The description of Indulekha’s eyes and
breasts shifts focus from the objects to their effect on
the viewer: the scorching heat of her glances, the
insufferable beauty of her breasts. It is as if the viewer’s
turbulence makes static contemplation and clear
description impossible. In the concluding sentence,
attempts to describe the heroine’s beauty through the
subjective experience of the spectator are also given up:
it is as if citationality, with its formulaic panegyric
centred on features, provides the final screen through
which the reader may look at the heroine’s beauty
without bringing it into the promiscuous proximity of
naturalist description. The stimulation and interruption
of the reader’s voyeurism deftly negotiate a new public
visibility of the heroine’s body while simultaneously
protecting caste propriety and female dignity. Stylized
ways of saying—phrases that Thatha Kanaran had
condemned for being unimaginative and insincere—
come alive as both spur to and brake on the desire for
visual pleasures set in motion by the novel’s direct
prosaic presentation.
Such direct representation in these early novels
appears to require, when the object warrants it, a non-
naturalist, stylized enhancement which works by
interrupting and replacing earlier descriptions even
while retaining and drawing on them for its effects.
There may be parallels between this and the use of paint
in the history of early photography in India. Pinney notes
that while European photographers had used paint ‘to
retouch the negatives and to enhance colour on the final
print’, many of the Indian instances from the 1860s
‘deploy paint as much more than a supplement to the
photographic image; rather the overlay of paint
completely replaces the photographic image in such a
way that all or most of it is obscured.’ 36 Paint, in India,
thus acquired a new valence and offered a new sort of
pleasure on the photographic image, obscuring and
transforming it. Similarly, in the early novel, formulaic
representations from the kavya tradition found a new
function: that of interrupting and supplanting naturalistic
descriptions and thus spurring a new experience of
desire.

III
Stylized, schematic descriptions of female bodies in
early novels were not always about formulaic praise.
Sometimes they were there to supply cues for reading
characters and their inner propensities. The body in such
instances turned into a semiological space: it suggested
character traits according to a taxonomy of personality
types or of emotional states. In Padu Menon’s
Lakshmikesavam, the emotional transformations in the
heroine were represented through bodily changes:
‘Meenakshi thought, “Her body is fatigued like a tender
leaf under the scorching sun. Her breasts do not appear
to have any firmness at all. Face resembles the full moon
caught in a thin cover of clouds. Even when I fan her,
she speaks of feeling warm. Medicines do not have any
effect on her.”’ 37 The withering creeper and weak
breasts have their origin in the Sanskrit kavya tradition;
the passage may have directly derived from a verse in
Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam 38 Cheruvalathu
Chathu Nair’s novel Meenakshi (1890) incorporated
inferences based on samudrikasastram, a traditional
method for reading bodily signs, into a description of the
heroine’s physical beauty: ‘From the width and the rise
of her forehead, anyone familiar with samudrikasastram
will conclude without a doubt that she is highly
intelligent and fortunate.’ 39
Descriptions of this sort create a sense of exteriority in
the presentation of characters. Inner propensities are
worn on one’s body: they take the form of physiognomic
characteristics, changes in the body, and recurring
expressions on the face. The last necessitates a closer
gaze at the individual’s face and a description of
expressions, and this helps produce a sense of
individuation and interiority. Comparing samudrikvidya
in vernacular print in nineteenth-century India with
colonial phrenology, Shruti Kapila suggests that
[f]undamentally, the point of application for samudrik
practices of decoding and giving meaning to markers of
physical distinction was at the level of the self. In other
words, the operative logic was diametrically opposite to
that of race and phrenology. In the latter, (individual)
skull and other physical materials were representative of
a type. For samudrik, on the other hand, the self or the
individual carried unique signifiers and marks of physical
distinction that needed to be rendered meaningful.
Further, it was the random nature of the presence of
signs on the entirety of the body and in relation to the
head and face that needed a coherent strategy of
interpretations. It was quite unlike the case of
phrenology for which the key signifier of distinction, the
head or the skull was a fixed one. 40
We found an attempt at determining the individual
through a close reading of the face in Premamrtam,
although there was no settled taxonomy or code which
guaranteed accurate decipherment. In his first novel,
Martandavarma, C.V.’s descriptions are more closely
determined by a schematic orientation. Consider the
presentation of the heroine: I cannot find a simile for her
face, which is slightly elongated and not entirely round.
But her eyes display a steadfastness that seems to keep
her suitors at a distance. Some may feel that our
heroine’s beauty is not pure and aesthetic, as the
emotions that appear to play on her lips and eyebrows
are not seductive. Those who have seen emotions arise
on her face in different situations, however, have
compared her to holy women like Sita and Draupadi. 41
C.V. invites the reader to adopt a gaze trained in the
significance of bodily features and expressions, but
unlike in Padu Menon’s novel the description works
through differentiation, with some inferences rejected
and new types invoked from literary and mythological
traditions. Are Sita and Draupadi to be regarded as
sources of visual schemata? Is C.V. drawing on visual
imaginaries of his own time in the description of the
heroine of his historical novel, situated almost two
centuries earlier? In any case, his description focuses
less on features than on facial expressions, linking them
closely to ideas of ‘character’, for which he sought a
typology by referring to mythological heroines. The word
swabhavam, primarily meaning ‘natural disposition’,
also possesses in Malayalam the sense of ‘individual
character’. In addition, the dramaturgic idea of
character, as a principle of coherence for diverse
propensities, actions, and expressions, underlies C.V.’s
search for a schematism of characterization. I shall
discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter.
Kavyas and puranas were not the only resources used
in early novels for a taxonomy of characters.
Technologies such as photography, as we have seen,
gave rise to the emergence of new schematisms,
especially an aesthetic of ‘sameness’ produced, as
Walter Benjamin noted, by the assault of technological
reproducibility on a culture of uniqueness. 42 While the
photograph documented fleeting moments and testified
to the unique identity of individuals (as would become
normative for major identification documents), it also
nurtured investigations into recurrence and sameness:
the use of photography in establishing racial and
criminal types in the nineteenth century has been well
documented. Photography became an important
component of the colonial ethnography of castes and
tribes in India, as the images in Edgar Thurston’s seven-
volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India
demonstrate. 43
Potheri Kunjambu’s novel Saraswativijayam shows an
interesting use of the photograph as an indisputable
document of identity and source of typification. Towards
the end of the novel, Marathan, a Pulaya supposedly
murdered by a Namboodiri landlord’s Nayar manager, is
revealed—years later, at the conclusion of the murder
trial—not only to have survived but also to be present in
the very courtroom as the presiding judge. His identity is
established through a photograph taken by a German
missionary, who testifies to its authenticity and explains
the circumstances in which it was taken.

I took that photograph when I was informed that

some scholars in England needed to study the
physiognomy (dehaprakrti) of members of various
castes in Kerala. In particular, the man you see in
this image had come to join the Christian faith. If his
physiognomy were to undergo some change later, it
was necessary to know how much that change would
be. These pictures would be very useful in later years
for scholars who inquire into the physiognomy and
 the state of civilization of people from various
countries from all over the world. This picture,
therefore, was taken and preserved before he was
admitted into the Christian faith. 44

An intriguing passage, not only on account of the way a

document of ethnographic intent is turned into the
decisive piece of evidence for establishing a singular
individual identity; more importantly, the photographer’s
explanation confuses the discourses of ethnicity,
civilization, and religious belonging. The image is made
to serve diverse expectations: represent the
physiognomy of a caste group in racial terms, to
establish relations between stages of civilization and
physiognomy, and to help measure the physical changes
that might take place over the years after conversion to
Christianity! The burden placed on the body and on
photographic evidence testifies to the inseparability of
questions of religious conversion and caste mobility for
the novel’s imaginary. The borderlines between bodily
features and attire begin to blur in the concept of visual
stereotypes for communities. Photography is seen here
as a recording device not merely of the empirical but
also of the typical, and is endowed with a magical
capacity to track transformations in the subject through
religious conversion.
Schematic representations of the body were not
always directed at the subject in question. In Chandu
Menon’s description of his heroine, we saw a movement
from bodily features to their effect on the viewer: the
description of Indulekha’s eyes turned into a paean on
the erotic power of her glances and their grievous
effects on the onlooker. It is not necessary for the
woman to intentionally address such potent glances to
her victim. The eroticism of the glance is intransitive in
its orientation. Chathu Nair’s novel Meenakshi has a
description of its heroine’s glances: ‘Her eyes were the
seats of several gestures of the erotic emotion
(srngaracheshtakal) which flickered inside her. They
appeared like containers of some secret medicine for
attracting and captivating the minds of valiant men.’ 45
Gestures that produce erotic emotion are neither
voluntarily produced nor directed at anyone in particular.
Meenakshi’s glances are signs of an inner erotic
attractiveness; they refer not to an intending
consciousness but to taxonomic determinations of
female beauty. We saw in the previous chapter that this
separation of the individual’s singularity from her outer
expressions was a prominent feature of traditions of
sensual poetry in Malayalam. In the compositions of the
Venmani poets the female subject was primarily the
source of an overwhelming seductiveness. In Indulekha,
Madhavan’s initial romantic expostulations to Indulekha
are couched in the same idiom; the poetry he recites to
her during their courtship is very much in the style of
srngara slokangal. 46 Interestingly, neither of them, in
spite of their avid reading of English literature, cites
anything from English love poetry.
If the intransitivity of expressions pushes descriptions
away from inner intentions, another element adds to
their complexity. Since expressions rely on schematic
readings for their intelligibility, it is also possible to
perform them as pure artifice; they were always
shadowed by the possibility of deceptive imitation. If the
signs of love and valour could be determined by
convention, they could then also be imitated and
reproduced at will. The anxiety of the viewing subject of
photographs in Premamrtam has at its root the fear of
the iterability of signs and the possibilities it opens for
deception. It is not an accident that disguise comes up
repeatedly in many of the early novels. This trope draws
on Sanskrit plays, indigenous performance traditions,
and Western literature—notably the plays of
Shakespeare. In many novels, disguises acquire the
same degree of coherence and concreteness as full-
fledged characters. This is not surprising, given the
reliance of character descriptions on exteriority and the
link between disguise and performance. The singularity
of the individual is at times fleetingly produced in the
gaps between the different roles adopted by characters,
which are all described in exterior terms. Schematic
descriptions, performance routines, and disguises play a
vital role in C.V. Raman Pillai’s novelistic imaginary. They
will return to our attention when we discuss his historical
novels in the next chapter.

IV
The regime of bodily descriptions discussed above had
important consequences for the articulation of love and
erotic desire in the early novel. The connections
between these, especially in the upper-caste novels of
Malabar, merit consideration against the background of
debates around the marital practices of matrilineal
castes in the late nineteenth century. Sambandham
arrangements were regarded by colonial administrators
as a form of concubinage and condemned by Nayar
reformers as the sexual exploitation of Nayar women by
Nambutiri Brahmins. Conceptions of ‘primitive’ and
‘civilized’ stages in the history of conjugal institutions,
issues of justice in the inheritance of property, and ideas
of the ‘natural’ strength of filial relations dominated
these criticisms. 47 The lack of constraints on annulling
conjugal arrangements and on substituting one partner
with another were seen by both colonial and reformist
critiques as the morally inadmissible core of
sambandham relations. Chandu Menon, as a member of
the Malabar Marriage Commission, formally disagreed
with the recommendations for change that eventually
led to the Malabar Marriage Act of 1896, arguing that
the sambandham practices prevalent among the Nayars
in Malabar were actually forms of marriage, and their
invalidation by the state through a marriage act would
be offensive to the customs of the community and
destructive of its sense of ‘nationality’. 48 Indulekha,
written just two years before his memorandum to the
commission, makes a powerful attempt to interpret
native custom as being in tune with modern Western
conceptions of matrimony and monogamy. The heroine
of the novel makes a strong argument for the autonomy
customarily enjoyed by Nayar women, and claims that
her community’s matrilineal practices actually resulted
in an enhancement and not a weakening of the respect
for chastity among Nayar women.
Suri Namboodiripad, the profligate Brahmin of
innumerable loveless sambandhams in Indulekha,
represents the economy of decadent desire against
which the novel pitches the values of monogamous
romantic love. The object of Suri’s sexual desire keeps
changing: he begins by desiring Indulekha, shifts his
attentions to Indulekha’s mother Lakshmikkutty, and
then to her maid Ammu, before finally fixing them on
Indulekha’s poor cousin Kalyanikkutty. There is an
important conversation on the nature of erotic desire
between Suri and his friend Cherussery, an erudite
Nambutiri Brahmin who is favourably contrasted with
Suri in several respects. In response to Suri’s contention
that the end justifies all means adopted for the
realization of sexual desire, Cherussery proposes a
distinction between agraham (wish, desire) and
bhramam (madness, passion), the word which Suri uses
to denote sexual desire. Cherussery says: ‘I do not
understand well what you mean by bhramam. If you
mean agraham by this, when a man realizes that the
woman [he desires] does not reciprocally feel such
agraham towards him, he ought to conquer his desire by
his will and relinquish his wish for sensual enjoyment
with that woman.’ 49 Suri, innocently lascivious, is
perplexed by this ethical burden: ‘Why should one
relinquish one’s desire? Shouldn’t I try and see if the
woman can be obtained?’ Cherussery corrects him.
‘What one needs to try and find out’, he says, ‘is not if a
woman can be obtained [for sexual gratification], but
whether love can arise in her.’ 50
Cherussery’s distinction between agraham and
bhramam is based on the principle of reciprocity: the
legitimate space for agraham is reciprocal desire. If the
object of your desire does not desire you in return, your
agraham becomes illegitimate and its realization
impossible. Suri is bewildered by this argument—why
should one abandon one’s desires merely for lack of
reciprocation? Cherussery’s answer elevates reciprocity
as the essential marker of a distinctively human
experience of desire: For a man to say that he has had
the enjoyment of a woman (streesukham), he would
have to have pleased (sukhippichittu) her erotically
(ramippichu). It is from giving erotic pleasure
(ramippikkunnatil) to a woman and from knowing that
she is having erotic pleasure (ramichu sukhikkunnu) that
a man should derive his own experience of pleasure
(sukhanubhavam). Similarly, a woman can say that she
has enjoyed (sukhichu) herself with a man only if she
gives him erotic pleasure (ramippichu sukhippichal). For
this experience of enjoyment to be fully and reciprocally
possible, an intense mutual sentiment of love
(anuragam) needs to be present. Those who seek the
[sexual] enjoyment of a woman (streesukham) in any
other way are like animals—even if they obtained their
aim, they would have only performed some antics with
each other. 51
Sexual desire in its human vocation is for Cherussery
predicated on a mutual mirroring of recognition and
gratification. Agraham essentially seeks another
agraham. As in Kojeve’s Hegel, the true object of desire
is always and only another desire. 52
Agraham, in this model, obliges the subject to
withdraw from situations where it does not find
reciprocity: its economy is marked by a will that
discriminates and controls itself. This approach to desire
chimes with an earlier moment in the novel where, in a
conversation with Madhavan, Indulekha denies the very
possibility of unattainable desire: her mind, she says,
possesses a natural ability not to set its desires
(agraham) on unattainable objects. She claims this to be
an innate attribute of her mind rather than a result of
external control or conscious self-disciplining. Indulekha
offers the example of romantic desire: ‘I am a young
woman. I see a handsome young man. Before my mind
determines whether he is fit to be my husband it does
not invest itself in that man. Here it is not as if my mind
gets invested first and then I free it with my will
[dhairyam, literally “courage”]. My mind does not invest
itself in him to begin with.’ 53
Indulekha goes a step ahead of Cherussery by placing
discrimination and restraint at the very origin of desire:
it is as if agraham is by its very nature self-reflective.
Restraint from the start rather than a suppression of
already existing desires; the inception of desire
presupposes a prior, instinctive discrimination and
orientation. In Indulekha’s erotic ethics, the opposite of
agraham is bhramam, the very word used by Suri
Namboodiripad for erotic desire. Bhramam in
Malayalam, derived from Sanskrit bhram, signifies a
turbulent, uncontrolled state of mind. It is often used in
situations where a character subject has ‘lost his/her
head’ and entered a state of intense attachment or
infatuation, be it with an object, an activity, or a person.
In this it displays its generic affinities with madness or
chitthabhramam. The word bhramam appears with
striking regularity in essays and stories in Malayalam in
the late nineteenth century. ‘Kesari’ Vengayil
Kunjuraman Nayanar, with characteristic humour,
identified vasana, bhramam, and bhrantu as three
gradations of the same affliction of the mind: while
vasana is a positive aptitude for and interest in a certain
object or activity, bhramam is a contagious obsession
which spreads through imitation. It can take any form,
ranging from kathakalibhramam (passion for Kathakali)
and streebhramam (for women) to udyogabhramam (for
government employment) andparishkarabhramam (for
new fashions). 54 Much of the discussion of bhramam in
late-nineteenth-century Kerala stresses its link to
colonial modernity, and is critical of the unreflective
imitation of English ways. In Indulekha, however,
bhramam is associated with decadent tradition; it is
what the new subject eschews.
In Indulekha’s ideal of a natural discrimination working
at the very origin of desire, we can find the diametrical
opposite of bhramam’s anarchy. Even after recognizing
her desire for Madhavan, Indulekha is shown as denying
any expression to those feelings until his examination
results come in and marriage becomes a clear possibility
between them. This is no cold calculation; her feelings
are presented as even more intense than Madhavan’s,
since she contains them within herself, denying them all
expression. 55 The stress on self-restraint does not mean
an ascetic denial of the sensual; desire, in the
appropriate circumstances, does not shy away from
sensual gratification. The physical attraction and erotic
enjoyment of young lovers are indicated in many early
novels, resulting at times in some tension between the
language of self-restraint and the display of erotic acts.
When Indulekha finally acknowledges her desire, her
words combine unrestrained gestures of physical
intimacy with a declaration of conjugal commitment:
Indulekha, suddenly overwhelmed by an irrepressible
rush of intense grief and love, went to the couch, joined
Madhavan’s handsome face to her own moon-like
countenance, and with a long sigh, gave a kiss on his
lips.

‘My husband, the lord of my life! Why do you grieve

like this? It is two years now since in my mind I
accepted you as my husband. My body and my mind
are all yours to rule . . . My mind has never desired
anyone but you; nor will it ever!’ Saying this, she lay
on Madhavan’s chest for a minute. Wiped his tears
with her hand. Then got up. 56

We must recall Chandu Menon’s reluctance to translate

English novels directly into Malayalam, especially those
moments where srngara rasam dominates. His attempt
here is to sketch a declaration of love in which the
daring representation of the woman’s kiss is balanced by
the formal, marital—even if impassioned—register of the
declaration. The kiss acquires a new symbolic value as
the signal performative of conjugal acceptance. C.V.
Raman Pillai’s Premamrtam satirically identifies the kiss
as the gesture of love par excellence in the ‘English
tradition’, indicating its derivation from English novels:
‘She moved as if she wanted to wriggle out of his
embrace, muttering something. He thought that she was
saying something about the ignoble background of her
family. “O, you don’t obey?” he said, “All right, let me
make you mine, register you as mine, and put brakes on
your freedom.” Saying this Kartha gave her a kiss, that
seal or sign of love allowed in the English tradition.’ 57
The use of the legal metaphor of registration is not an
accident; Indulekha and Premamrtam were written at a
time when the legal registration of Nayar marriages was
actively debated in Malabar and Travancore. Romantic
desire in the early novels, mostly written by Nayar
novelists, finds its most intense, definitive expressions in
a marital, institutional vocabulary. Heroines, at the
ecstatic moment of a declaration of love, apostrophize
their beloved as ‘husband’. In Lakshmikesavam, when
the heroine wakes from a dream about her lover, she
cries, Ayyo, the lord of my life (prananatha), where have
you gone? My dear husband (bhartavu)!’ 58 In Meenakshi
the heroine refers to her beloved as her husband much
before their marriage is fixed. 59 The new discourse of
romantic love in the early novel suggests not only that
marriages need to be founded on autonomous desire but
also that desire ought to be institutionally oriented: it
should find marriage as its proper locus, as both its
horizon of possibility and its telos.
Satires on the new routines of romance in the early
novel treat them as derived from English: ‘He uttered
the English word for priye,’ 60 the narrator of
Premamrtam tells us once. One of the characters says:
‘The situation that English authors eloquently speak of
as “love” has enveloped me.’ 61 Kizhakkeppatt Raman
Kutty Menon’s Parangodi Parinayam, a scathing parody
of early novels in Malayalam, shows its heroine
grooming herself according to the conventions of English
romantic novels, preferring courtship to actual marriage.
62 The example of a bhramam for emulating modern,

Western routines!
These satiric exaggerations nonetheless touch upon an
important aspect of early Nayar novels: the bodily
gestures and speech of the new, educated woman were
meant to exceed conventional semiologies of female
body types and emotional states derived from kavya
literature and suggest a new, schematic order of acts
and utterances. Indulekha linked its idealized heroine
with an education that brought together all that was
good in both English and Sanskrit traditions; they
inculcated in her both autonomy and deference to
customary propriety: When she was about three years
old, her uncle [. . .] Kochukrishna Menon, who was well-
versed in various skills such as Sanskrit, English and
music and who was employed as a Diwan Peshkar at a
salary of eight hundred rupees, took Indulekha with him
to where he worked and educated her till the age of
sixteen. English was taught very well. Sanskrit was
taught till the [advanced] level of drama and poetics
(natakalan-karangal). In music, she was trained to sing
[in the Indian classical style] up to pallavi and
ragavistaram as well as to play the piano, fiddle and
veena with felicity. Further, the uncle also arranged for
his extremely beautiful niece to be familiarized with
embroidery and drawing in which European women are
trained. One may say that Kochukrishna Menon realized
to a great extent his desire to provide Indulekha, by the
time she was sixteen, with the skills, knowledge and
conduct that a girl in England would be educated in. 63
While Madhavan wears Western clothes and goes
hunting, he also keeps a long tuft of hair and ties it in
the manner of his caste; even as Indulekha plays the
piano and reads English novels, she has not abandoned
the ways of being of a ‘Malayali woman’: ‘she is totally
unaffected by atheism or hatred for Hindu religion or
that contempt towards one and all which unfortunately
is often found among educated youth.’ 64 Interestingly,
as we saw, English novels and English poetry do not
figure as a discursive resource in the love talk between
protagonists. Indulekha and Madhavan never discuss
novels or poems in English but do read parts of
Shakuntalam to each other and use it as a code for
romantic banter. 65 In the famous eighteenth chapter,
Madhavan summarizes, for the benefit of his father,
arguments by English writers, especially on religion, but
these readings do not make an appearance in his
conversations with Indulekha.
In an important sense, English education in these
novels is not really about the English language. When
Kesavan listens to Lakshmi singing in the Indian style, he
is ‘overcome by so many different emotions’, and, as the
song comes to an end, the first question he addresses to
her father is whether she has had an English education.
When the father replies in the affirmative, Lakshmi and
Kesavan exchange glances and smile furtively at each
other, as if they know each other’s minds. 66 Both Suri
and Panchu Menon regard Indulekha’s English education
with some trepidation: they see it as making it difficult
for them to infer her intentions from what she says, and
to control her. Panchu Menon feels she is speaking in
English even when she is responding to some of his
questions in plain Malayalam. What he identifies as
English is not words or sentences, but the arguments,
and, more importantly, the way in which Indulekha
inserts herself into language as a subject. What is at
issue is an education in modernity; or rather modernity
as education.
 Education crops up as the dominant metaphor for
reform and self-making in most of these early novels.
However, seeing English education as a new styling of
the self which enables a new relationship to tradition—
making possible a new way of owning and inhabiting it—
seems to be a feature of the upper-caste—especially the
Nayar—novels we considered above. We can see
another strand among the early novels which focused on
lower-caste life, primarily in the context of conversion to
Christianity. Some of them, like Joseph Mooliyil’s
Sukumari, were written by lower-caste converts, while
others, such as Potheri Kunjambu’s Saraswativijayam,
highlighted caste oppression via a plot in which
conversion to Christianity offered possibilities of survival
and redemption. 67 In Sukumari, education is essentially
a matter of instruction in religion: the new self is formed
by religion, and part of this education is considered
primarily as the acquisition of skills—the ability to read
and write, to understand new forms of knowledge, and
proficiency in arithmetic. In fact, Sukumari voices a
critique of state-supported English education as a
substitute for religious instruction: without teaching
religious virtue, English education will merely prompt an
imitation of English manners and a consumption of
English goods. 68 Unlike in the Nayar novels, English
education does not lead here to a new corporeal and
discursive styling of the erotic subject, especially the
woman.
The new styles that Nayar novels proposed for their
heroines had two important consequences. Firstly, they
produced an effect of the possession of autonomy
among female protagonists, manifest in the
reorientation of their desires through a restraining
interior agency. Secondly, this very sense of autonomy
caused anxiety among male suitors, who perceived the
inner self of the desired woman as obscure and
inaccessible. Romantic gestures and declarations of
love, and even their institutionalization in conjugal
contracts, do not fully eliminate anxieties over the very
autonomy of the woman which made her the object of
male desire in the early novel. In Indulekha, when
Madhavan receives false intelligence of Indulekha’s
wedding to Suri, he oscillates between belief and
disbelief. The two conflicting inclinations prove, on a
closer look, to be linked to the two ways of
understanding desire in the conversation between Suri
and Cherussery, discussed earlier: ‘“Perhaps that is what
the female mind is . . . Perhaps Suri is cleverer and more
interesting than I am. Perhaps Indulekha was infatuated
(bhramicchirikkam) . . .”, he would think and then
immediately he would [correct himself] . . . “Will my
Madhavi ever desire (kamkshikkumo) another man?
What a fool am I? . . .”’ 69
Such novels bore conflicting marks of a transition in
thinking about the body and individuated desire. The
difficulty that Chandu Menon faced in translating the
language of love from the English novel is accompanied
by an attempt on the part of the novelists discussed to
elaborate a new, more appropriate language of love
where the presentation of the body does not fully
abandon schematic description. At the same time, these
novels try to subordinate this description of the body to
notions of an internal will and individual desire, both of
which find their natural and true vocation in being
oriented institutionally towards monogamous marriage.
The complex exchange between two impulses remained
unresolved in the early novels discussed above.
However, these economies pertain primarily to the
Nayar reform novels: ambiguities and tensions about
bodily desire are not central to Ezhava anti-caste novels
such as Saraswativijayam, and to novels of Christian
conversion such as Sukumari. Bodily desire is peripheral
to the projects of self-fashioning in them. While
Saraswativijayam concludes with the heroine wedded to
the Pulaya judge, the novel does not even sketch the
growth of their romantic involvement or affective
intimacy. Autonomous marital choice is important in
Sukumari, but its idioms—of life partner and helpmeet—
are resolutely kept away from the intensities of erotic
longing.

V
Early novels in Malayalam drew on tensions between
various ways of showing and seeing—of describing and
interpreting—not solely in the portrayal of female
subjects and erotic relations; they used them, more
importantly, to differentiate between subjects on the
basis of their perceptual relations to the world they
inhabited. In Indulekha we find Kesavan Nambutiri, an
underconfident and somewhat unremarkable Brahmin,
fascinated by the modern world and describing a new
kind of object: Siva, Siva, Narayana, Narayana! What
can I say! The cleverness of these white men is truly
astounding. Lakshmi, you will be amazed if you see it.
What a marvel! The spinning mill that we hear so much
about is actually an iron wheel. This wheel makes all the
yarn. And what turns this wheel? Smoke, pure smoke!
But this smoke does not hurt our eyes like in our
kitchens. The factory has a long tail raised upwards, like
the flagpole in a temple. They say it is for the smoke to
pass, but I have my doubts. There must be some trick
inside it. That these clever white men will not reveal. 70
The factory is for him a new, illegible object, a locus of
obscurity and concealment. This tricky thing can be
tamed only through a process of reading, which
translates it into familiar, legible signs and produces a
world of stable objects and meanings: ‘Smoke is a very
potent substance. Does the smoke of ritual offering
(homam) not have power? I have another doubt. I
suspect this is also a homam for some deity. Perhaps
some idols or chakras are kept inside the flagpole. Who
knows? Perhaps the deity likes this homam very much
and the factory turns because of its blessing. God alone
knows!’ 71 In Indulekha, as in many other early novels,
the inaccuracy or inappropriateness of such translations
becomes a source of humour. The reader is invited to
laugh not merely at the characters’ ignorance of facts,
but also at the farcical floundering by men and women
used to older ways of living when they encounter
incongruous new objects and incompatible modern
spaces. 72
The satiric representation of Suri Namboodiripad in
Indulekha is pivoted on his misdirected translation of an
unfamiliar world: he reads the polite gestures of a
modern, Western sociability as sure signs of an extreme,
delectable promiscuity. Suri has two white
acquaintances whom he calls, in hilarious approximation
of their original names, ‘Meghadantan’ and
‘Makshaman’. 73 When ‘Makshaman’ introduces his wife
to Suri, she extends her arm to shake hands with him:
‘Madamma sayippu held my hand—goose pimples rose
all over my body . . . I held her hand for a very long
time. I found her figure very enjoyable. Makshaman, that
fool, stood close by, observing all this with a smile.’ 74
The distance between the Englishwoman’s gestures and
Suri’s reading of them stands for the distance between
two modes of seeing and reading—of visibility and
legibility. The same objects, bodies, and gestures may
appear to two different kinds of subjects as occupying
two widely divergent but equally coherent and
meaningful worlds. For new objects or gestures (the
factory; the white woman’s handshake) to become
legible, for them to possess value or meaning, they need
to be made part of a world of coherent relations that can
be imagined or assumed as existing. This is indeed what
Suri and Kesavan Nambutiri are trying to do. They are
placed at the receiving end of these jokes, but one never
knows who has the last laugh: Kesavan Nambutiri has
astutely bought shares of the spinning mill, and his
capitalist entrepreneurship throws a different light on his
seeming ignorance of the way machines work. Suri gifts
the Madamma a ring and incorporates her into his
imaginary erotic- affective circuits of patronage; he has
met with no success in similar moves with Indulekha and
her mother. Objects and practices, in changing times,
are enmeshed in contradictory circuits of exchange: of
material and symbolic value. Ambivalence and
contamination in these systems constitute the novel’s
conditions of possibility; at the same time, they threaten
the coherence of circuits of value in the novel, inducing
attempts at control and resolution.
Collections of objects, organized by personal taste as
in private collections of individuals or by disciplinary
knowledge as in modern museums, directly thematize
issues of coherence and value. Indulekha presents two
kinds of collections. The first is Suri’s personal collection
of valuable objects, all gold and silver, which he
prepares to carry with him on his visit to Indulekha’s
house: ‘On a table was spread out about fifteen golden
shawls, about twenty special mundu, several rings, a
box made of solid silver with a gold handle on the lid,
betel-leaf rolls made of gold, a silver jug, silver lamps,
silver jars, a gold watch which can be worn as a
necklace with a gold chain . . .’ 75 By contrast, the novel
also speaks of ‘English sorts of objects, beautifully
collected’ in Indulekha’s rooms. 76 They form part of the
discursive elaboration of a new space of a modern
cultivation and style in the early novel, especially in the
description of the rooms of educated Nayar men in
Malabar or in Madras. Round tables, reclining chairs,
painted mirrors, embroidered covers, glass lamps,
carpets, and, as mentioned already, in the centre glass
cupboards of books in English and in Sanskrit, beautifully
bound and embossed with golden lettering—all these
objects conjure a new world of coherence, a universe of
new civility and new values. 77 The distinction between
these worlds is made not merely in terms of discrete
objects and their mutual connections, but in terms of the
owner’s and viewer’s relationship to them. Both
collections, Suri’s gold and the educated Nayar’s
ornamental objects and books, are marks of distinction
in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. 78 For Suri, his golden
objects are valuable possessions, available only to rich
people; the educated Nayar’s urban objects are signs of
taste as well as expendable wealth, obtainable only
through cultivation and worldly success.
The treatment of attire in Indulekha is a point of entry
here. Suri’s clothes are chosen according to a sign
system where gold is the original and paradigmatic
emblem of all value: As soon as the palanquin reached
the front courtyard, Kesavan Nambutiri opened its door.
Immediately, a golden form jumped out. Yes, it was truly
an idol in gold, a golden statue. Head covered in a gold
cap, body covered in a gold shirt and gold-coloured
dhoti, gold-gilded slippers on the feet, gold rings on all
ten fingers, on top of all a golden shawl thrown over the
shirt and a gold-cased mirror in the hand to look at
oneself. Gold, gold, all gold. What can I say about the
glow when [Suri] Namboodiri stepped out from the
palanquin into the mid-day sun. Around him in a one-
metre circle the glare of the sun turned yellow, acquiring
a golden glow. 79
Indulekha’s clothes, predictably, provide a contrast by
expressing a taste that turns away from ostentatious
display to signify simple elegance: Indulekha was not
very fond of jewellery. Her mother, grandmother, or
uncle had to plead hard to make her wear some
ornament as an exception on festive days . . . However,
although not overtly fond of jewellery, Indulekha took
particular interest in her clothes. Onnara and melmundu
with special weave and gold border had to be kept
ready, white and clean, every morning and evening
when she bathed. She was always seen with a white
melmundu with gold border covering her breasts. 80
Against the dominance of gold in Suri’s attire is placed
the gold border on Indulekha’s elegantly clean white
clothes (a gold border in-distinguishable from her skin in
colour). They suggest wealth and aesthetic
discrimination, respectively. It is not that Suri does not
have any aesthetic claims: he likes to recite Sanskrit
slokas and displays an obsessive enthusiasm for
Kathakali. However, the novel discredits these claims:
Suri can neither remember the Sanskrit verses
accurately nor understand their meaning. His passion for
Kathakali or kathakalibhranthu (literally, Kathakali
madness), although admitted to an extent by the
narrator, is mocked by Indulekha as mere bhranthu
(madness), a semantic kin of bhramam. The arbitration
of aesthetic taste, even in traditional art forms, is
ultimately vested in modern subjects. When Panchu
Menon finds his grand-niece Indu-lekha reclining on a
couch and reading Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam, the
conversation serves primarily to provoke laughter at the
old man’s ignorance of the basics of printing technology.
81

The presentation of objects in early novels is largely

about their status as props for self-fashioning. Familiarity
with new objects—the ability to use them rather than
merely look at them in wonder—and the conversion of
possessions into expressions of their owner’s interior
qualities are marks of distinction that identify the new
subjects being endorsed. Yet these novels do not entirely
give up the use of idioms of the marvellous in relation to
new objects. In fact, the narrator often invites the reader
to marvel at this new world of people and objects. We
have encountered the painted mirrors and chairs and
clocks that crowd the living rooms of educated Nayars
who live in the regional metropolis of Madras.
Madhavan’s travels to Bombay and Calcutta become
occasions for the release of the marvellous. The
description of the Bombay port occasions a narrative
abandon that can only be compared to the description of
Indulekha’s body when she makes her first appearance
in the novel. 82 Such passages offer an indulgence in
visual excess, a feast for the senses rather than a
discerning reading of the objects presented. This
reaches its culmination in the description of Babu
Govinda Sen’s bungalow, appropriately called
Amaravati, in Calcutta, which produces the longest and
most exuberant of descriptions. It concludes with an
admission of inadequacy by the narrator, recalling the
earlier confession of inadequacy in the description of
Indulekha’s beauty: As I do not have the eloquence to
convey the nature of all the objects seen thus by
Madhavan in Amaravati Bungalow, I shall now be brief. I
can only say that Madhavan, on seeing the balconies,
ponds, pearled couches, libraries and gardens depicted
above, experienced immense joy. He felt as if he had
been transported from this earth to the heaven or some
such place full of comforts that he had never
experienced before.’ 83 The narrator also provides a
scale to help Malayali readers imagine the inconceivable
wealth possessed by Babu Govinda Sen, and thus
overcome the limits of their provincial experience: In this
book I have referred to Panchu Menon and [Suri]
Namboo-diripad as ‘hugely wealthy’ and have called
Namboodiripad ‘Kubera’ in one or two places. I have also
spoken of Babu Govinda Sen as hugely wealthy and as a
Kubera. But my readers should not think that they are all
at the same level in the wealth they possess. There is a
huge difference between a Kubera in Bengal and a
Kubera in the Madras state. This difference can be
understood by gauging their wealth. A person who has
possessions worth five lakhs of rupees would be
considered a very wealthy person in Madras. In Bengal,
such five-lakh people would be regarded as the fourth-
class among the rich. There people with five crores
would be very wealthy. To refer to someone unhesitantly
as ‘hugely rich’ or as a Kubera, he would need to have
wealth amounting to more than fifteen crores. Govinda
Sen and his younger brother Chitra Prasad Sen were at
the top of the rich who possessed more than fifteen
crores. 84
In this comparative chart of wealth as worth, one may
see signs of another pedagogy, to train the subject to
move from the native provincial backwardness of
Malabar to the urban headquarters in Madras, and then
to Calcutta, the capital of colonial India. The
apprenticeship of the subject, however, is less a matter
of economics than that of affect, a training in what to
marvel at and how much. Suri Nambutiri’s fascination
with gold for its monetary value is discredited; but
money in modern circulations of exchange possesses not
only economic but also symbolic value. The large
numbers invoked here function less as accurate
estimates of wealth than as harbingers of wonder. The
modern world is not characterized solely by
disenchantment and a secular, sceptical mode of
perception. It is also a source of enchantment. It is not
through a single idiom, but through divergent and at
times conflicting frames, that the world is made
available for perception in the novel.
An instance in Indulekha illustrates this well.
Madhavan’s sense of shock when he hears the rumour
that Indulekha has married Suri Namboodiri, is described
not once, but twice, in the novel. The two accounts use
strikingly divergent tropes that derive from distinct
worlds of discourse: ‘As he listened to this, Madhavan
immediately understood the matter. Not only in his mind
but all over his body, he felt a sense of shock or an
intense pain, as if he had touched the electric box called
the battery when that machine is turned on.’ 85 This is
soon followed by the following exchange: Madhavan: Is
what I heard just now about Madhavi right?

Sankara Sastrikal: Yes.

The word ‘yes’ was like a thunderbolt; it was the

very fire of lightning. Madhavan’s face and his body
turned ashen, burnt-out. Like the deformation of Nala
when the serpent Karkodaka bit him, one might say.
86

The relations between the two descriptions cannot be

easily understood as complementarity or contrast: one
description does not complete the other to form a whole,
nor does one negate the other to propose a more
adequate account. The descriptions present two
discontinuous discursive worlds: their coherence is
produced only through the novel’s act of juxtaposition.
The space inhabited by these divergent representations
defines the emergent genre of the novel. These early
novels produced a new field of perception and
enunciation precisely through unresolved diversities.
They reveal no simple concatenation of the indigenous
and the colonial, or the traditional and the modern; they
produce a new discursive space where ideas and tropes
from varied resources—from Sanskrit kavyas to English
political treatises—acquire vernacular contemporaneity.
We began this chapter by looking at the configuration
of visibility. Conditions of perception and orientation in
relation to the world in the works discussed serve as a
major trope for exploring a new placement for the
subject. The complex and uncertain nature of these
conditions offered the novel one of its most fertile
resources. The unsteady luminosity within which
characters negotiate their apprehension of the world is
not a deficiency, a failure to achieve an ideal
transparency; it is a productive device from which the
fictional world of early novels, with its fragile integrity
and imprecise boundaries, emerges. This also gives us
an insight into the internally inconsistent language of
these novels: their value does not come from a status of
anticipatoriness and backwardness in relation to the full-
fledged languages of representation found in later
novels. They reveal to us a discursive economy in its
own right, where language, in its inner diversity and
dissonance, offers a new site for depicting and
describing people, objects, and emotions. Technologies
of seeing and saying devised in them show a space
being created within public literary language for
articulating the subject’s reflective relationship to
worldly experience and inhabitation.
5

Sovereignty and Mourning C.V.

Raman Pillai and Fiction’s
T Performance of the Past he novels
discussed in the previous chapter
highlighted the newness of their
time. Through hybrid and unstable
arrangements of sight and language,
they brought for literary enjoyment
new experiences, objects, emotions,
and people. Newness is paradigmatic
for the sense of contemporaneity in
these novels: their imaginaries often
overtook the everyday worlds shared
by their readers and authors. When
Chandu Menon published Indulekha,
there was a widespread feeling that
no Nayar woman with Indulekha’s
accomplishments existed in the
society of the time. 1 In these novels,
contemporaneity is experienced as a
 sort of untimeliness; it gestures
towards a dimension of the present
that has surpassed chronology.
In this chapter we turn to a different figure of
untimeliness, invoked now under the sign of the past.
C.V. Raman Pillai’s three major novels introduced new
and complex ways of staging the past, placing an
affective, talismanic invocation of history at the core of
processes through which political subjectivities were
fashioned and endorsed during his age. This, we shall
see, introduced a distinct dimension to idioms of self-
articulation in Malayalam writing. Speaking about
oneself began to involve acts of possessing, owning up,
and thematizing a dimension of the past which was
integral to the sense of location and selfhood. As in the
previous chapter, techniques of fictional narration were
vital to the forging of a language in which one could
express one’s inhabitation of historical time. C.V. Raman
Pillai’s novels, with their complex layering of the past
and intricate use of performative and narrative forms,
allow us to address this important chapter in our story.
C.V. Raman Pillai, popularly referred to as C.V., was
born in Trivandrum in 1858 and had a traditional early
education which included Sanskrit and Ayurveda. He
went on to the Maharaja’s College, Trivandrum, for his
Bachelor’s degree, where he came under the influence
of his teachers, especially the Scotsman John Ross. C.V.
became thoroughly conversant with English letters in
addition to gaining mastery over the literature, folklore,
and traditional performing arts ofTravancore. He left
home for travel, stayed in Hyderabad during a period of
emotional turbulence, and is said to have developed
close friendships with a number of Muslim families there.
After his return to Trivandrum he worked as a
superintendent at the Government Press. His first novel,
Martandavarma, was published in 1891, though it has
been claimed that an earlier draft version was
completed years before. He did not write another novel
for the next two decades but was active, often behind
the scenes, in contemporary campaigns around Malayali
and Nayar identities. The distinction between these two
political signs was not very sharp over the period
because the Nayars saw themselves as historically the
leaders of native communities. 2 C.V. played a major role
in drafting the Malayali Memorial petition submitted to
the Maharaja of Travancore in 1891. He wrote political
essays, mostly under pseudonyms, in newspapers in
English and Malayalam during this time. He wrote two
sequels to Martandavarma—Dharmaraja was published
in 1913, and Rama-raja Bahadur in 1918–19. He also
wrote the satirical social novel Premamrtam (1914), and
several farces (prahasanam), some of which were
staged in Trivandrum. He died in 1922. 3
C.V.’s three major novels—Martandavarma,
Dharmaraja, and Ramaraja Bahadur—are read as a
trilogy on major political events from the eighteenth
century, a crucial period in the history ofTravancore
marked by the reign of two powerful kings, Anizham
Tirunal Martandavarma (r. 1729–58) and Karthika Tirunal
Ramavarma (r. 1758–98). The novels were named after
these kings: Ramavarma Raja was referred to as
‘Dharmaraja’ to highlight his moral uprightness, and
‘Ramaraja Bahadur’ was one of his honorific titles. It
may be short-sighted, however, to regard these three
novels as segments of a dynastic saga. It was probably
in the long gap between Martandavarma and the two
later novels that C.V.’s fictional project took final shape.
He regarded Dharmaraja and Ramaraja Bahadur as the
first two volumes of a trilogy whose actual theme—in
spite of the prominence of the maharajas in the title—
was the life of Raja Kesavadas, the renowned Dewan of
Travancore during the reign of Ramavarma Raja. C.V. did
not live to complete the final novel of the trilogy which,
it is believed, was to deal with Raja Kesavadas’ last days
and tragic end. 4
The author’s preface in Martandavarma began by
stating that the book was ‘made with the intention of
producing in Malayalam a model of the narrative form in
English called “historical romance”.’ 5 The influence of
Walter Scott, especially Ivanhoe, and Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee’s Durgeshanandini has been noted. Generic
antecedents aside, C.V.’s vital sources were all from
closer home. Published and unpublished histories of
Travancore, literary works such as Ramapurattu Variar’s
celebrated poem Kuchelavrttam Vanchippattu,
Devarajakavi’s Sanskrit play Balamartandavijayam, a
poem of unknown authorship Martandamahatmyam, and
the folksong traditions of southern Travancore—including
‘Matilakatukatha’, ‘Neeli- katha’, ‘Iravikkuttypillaiporu’,
‘Ponniratalkatha’, ‘Mavaratam’, and ‘Valiatambi
Kunjutambi Kataipadal’—the repertoire of indigenous
expressive forms that C.V. drew on was vast and
variegated. 6
There may be difficulties in reading into C.V.’s
historical novels the distinctive imaginaries of modern
nationalism which have attracted recent scholarship. His
political concerns revolved around the princely state of
Travancore and the claims of native subjects, especially
the Nayars. His historical fiction had at its centre what
he saw as the sacred, magical bonds of protection and
loyalty between the maharaja and his praja, and the
intense ties of blood and affect that united people.
These tropes rubbed at times uneasily against normative
idioms of historical progress and the forms of political
life in C.V.’s own time. In fiction’s incantatory universe
the production of subjects of historical inheritance was
less a matter of knowledge than of affect; it was not
primarily in cognitive terms that the past asserted its
presence and made its claims there. C.V.’s fiction
performed an aesthetic work of memory-making,
fashioning a perceptual and enunciatory economy in
relation to the past: it is this work that we follow here.
A preoccupation with history-writing had emerged in
Travancore in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Vaikkathu Pachu Mootha- thu published the first history
of Travancore in 1867, and a decade later there
appeared P. Shungoonny Menon’s first official history in
English. 7 Pachu Moothathu began with a seemingly
simple definition of history as ‘the true account of great
people, focusing on their nature, the beneficiary deeds
they did in life, their land and other forms of wealth, and
other qualities.’ 8 Shungoonny Menon’s History of
Travancore offered an avowedly royalist account in
which the lineages of rulers and their achievements
served as the main principle of narrative organization.
Menon claimed an exceptional status for Travancore: it
was one of the rare kingdoms ‘whose dynasty continued
to exist in an unbroken line of succession, from the time
of its foundation to the present day’, and ‘one of the
very few living specimens of a pure Hindu government,
the institutions of which have never been affected by
the Muhammadan conquest.’ 9 However, his history had
a strangely asymmetric structure, which P. Sundaram
Pillai was quick to notice. ‘Mr. Shungoonny Menon
begins,’ he noted, ‘his history with Brahma the Creator,
but he fills up his first chapter which brings down the
account to His Highness Martanda Varma, who began his
rule just 164 years ago, i.e., within the memory in all
probability of the historian’s own grandfather, with . . .
questionable materials.’ 10 In several dynastic narratives
‘the earliest links in the genealogical chain are not
meant to be taken as facts in the way that the latest
links clearly are, with their dates, regnal years, and
highly specific locations.’ 11 However, Menon’s
condensation of several centuries and expatiation on the
recent fifteen decades is interesting. Sir T. Madhava Rao,
Dewan of Travancore from 1857 to 1872, attempted a
history in English but he too completed only sections
dealing with the years of Martandavarma and
Ramavarma. 12
The reigns of these two eighteenth-century kings
dominated the nineteenth-century historiography of
Travancore; the dramatic compression of the historical
past appears to have conferred on their times the
grandeur and weight of distant origins. The importance
of Martandavarma and Ramavarma was no doubt linked
to their role in the formation of a modern state in
Travancore. Susan Bayly has argued that it was in the
eighteenth—not in the nineteenth—century that ‘a
wholly new political system was built up in the region,
and with the rise of the new Keralan states came rapid
and dramatic change in many of the most fundamental
institutions of the society.’ The reign of Martandavarma
and Ramavarma was a period of ‘thorough-going
changes in military organization, in the machinery of
state, in caste leadership and in the structures of court
culture and religious life.’ 13 Not surprisingly,
Martandavarma is often referred to as the maker of
modern Travancore.
S. Raju has shown that words such as Raja (King) and
Rajyam (Kingdom) make an appearance in the official
records of Travancore only around the eighteenth
century. 14 He argues that notions of swaroopam,
muppu, and vazhcha were the operative concepts
earlier, and that they indicated a different conception of
self-location, seniority, and form of existence, all
intimately linked to the sabha (council) which governed
the affairs of the Padmanabha Swamy temple in
Trivandrum. The decisive shift that took place in political
configuration and discourse in the eighteenth century,
Raju contends, is suppressed or elided in the
historiography of Travancore from the nineteenth
century on, which projects more recent ideas of
sovereignty and territoriality—those of the Raja and the
Rajyam—to earlier times. The eighteenth century,
paradoxically, came to signify not a historical rupture
and the emergence of the modern, but a paradigmatic
formation that shaped Travancore’s sense of identity and
memory.
The eighteenth-century rulers of Travancore and
Cochin, Bayly points out, ‘were parvenus, sat-sudra
warriors who had built up domains possessing no
precedents in Keralan history and no clear standing in
the Hindu moral and religious orders.’ 15 This, she says,
explains Martandavarma’s use of new rites of
sacralization to improve his symbolic, caste status. The
rituals of Hiranyagarbham and Tulapurushadanam
reconstituted the king’s body as sacred, as twice-born.
Bayly understands the import into Kerala of Brahmins in
this light: a large number of uttupurakal or feeding
houses funded by the state came up as a means to
reward thousands of non-Malayali Brahmins who were
brought to Kerala during Martandavarma’s time. 16
For C.V., Martandavarma’s and Ramavarma’s reigns
did not represent the origins of the present; they stood
for an almost mythical past whose glory his own time
was unable to recapture. What did this grandeur consist
of? ‘Anungalillatha kora, valiya kora’ (The lack of men, a
huge lack), C.V.’s friends remember him saying this in
conversations often, as a comment on his own time. The
past was a time of men and manliness. 17 Masculinity in
C.V.’s world is a form of political existence.
‘Anayippirannal oru ottapperunkaiyenkilum nokkanam.
Allandu piraviyentinu, uyirentinu?’ (If you are born a
man, you should play a big hand at least once; or else,
what is the use of birth, of life?), says one of his
characters. 18 It is in the display of an irrepressible
impulse to grand deeds that manliness as political value
emerges, inspiring awe and emulation.
The relationship between history and emulation, even
without the foregrounding of masculine valour, was a
familiar theme in historical writing. Pachu Moothathu
saw it as the principal use of recounting the past.
‘Exposure to the stories of meritorious people will lead to
a gradual enhancement of worth among young boys.
Therefore some great men, to facilitate access to such
knowledge for people at large, have described in various
books the stories of venerable personages who have
lived in different times and places.’ 19 This made political
history rely on forms of biographical recall, making
individual persons and their deeds determine the form in
which the past could be narrated. This prevailed in other
domains as well. P. Govinda Pillai, who wrote the first
literary history in Malayalam, saw as one of his aims
‘paying homage to a lineage of poets who had countered
several obstacles (pratyuhavyuhangal) in the path of the
language’s development in years past.’ 20
C.V.’s novels too conjured up the past through a
biographical mode; they did so by sketching images of
extraordinary figures in a quasi-mythological register. It
was possible for him to elevate events from the
eighteenth century to the status of myth because the
modern Travancore consolidated by Martandavarma had
gone through vital, irreversible changes in the
intervening period. Nowhere was this more pronounced
than in Travancore’s subservience to British colonial
power and in the reduced autonomy of later rulers. The
moment captured in C.V.’s three novels belongs to the
last phase of pre-colonial sovereign rule in Travancore.
Martandavarma’s reign witnessed belligerent contests
between foreign trading powers and early decisive steps
in Travancore’s alliance with the East India Company;
Ramavarma’s time saw a strengthening of this
dependence, and the signing of a formal treaty which
involved substantial obligations on Travancore’s part for
English military support. It is important to see the quasi-
mythic biographical register in C.V.’s account of the past
against the backdrop of his concern with sovereignty.
The nineteenth century was a period not only of the
ascent of colonial control over Travancore; the period
also saw major transformations in governance and
administration, especially during Ayilyam Tirunal’s reign
(1860–80) and Sir T. Madhava Rao’s period as Dewan
(1857–72). 21 These changes, it has been pointed out,
were introduced at the advice of the imperial
government through residents and sometimes under the
veiled threat of annexation. 22 C.V. saw the new
arrangements as altering the links between the
sovereign and his subjects. He published a series of
critical essays on the dewans of Travancore under the
title Videshiyamedhavitvam (Foreign Rule). It was during
Dewan Madhava Rao’s tenure, C.V. argued, that the easy
access of subjects to their sovereign was interrupted. In
contrast with earlier times, when the king regularly
consulted leading householders in order to understand
the desires and grievances of his people, Madhava Rao
introduced Western modes of governance, making the
palace ‘an inaccessible fortress’ dominated by the
dewan. Instead of subjects directly approaching their
sovereign as their protector (rakshi- tavu), a new
practice of petitions and offices came into existence. The
highest office for the submission of petitions, C.V.
remarked, became the headquarters of the police, or the
secretariat of the government (hajoor kaccheri). 23
The main target of C.V.’s political criticism was the
office of the dewan and other higher positions in
Travancore’s administration, largely occupied by non-
Malayali Brahmins. The Malayali Memorial of 1892 had
made a strong case against the employment of high
officials from outside Kerala. What C.V. regarded as
‘foreign’ in Videshiyamedhavitvam was not the
dramatically increasing colonial influence in the
administration: ‘By the word “foreign” we do not mean
the imperial power which functions in alliance with the
king. At present, we include under this category only
those who, with the help of some groups of important
individuals in Madras, come as beggars to Travancore
and steal its wealth through the exercise of their power,
reduce its prosperity, and then leave this country.’ 24
The political essays in Videshiyamedhavitvam deflected
the dramatic decline in the king’s sovereignty under
colonial rule by foregrounding the problems of
governance by non-Malayali dewans. Political campaigns
led by the Nayars in C.V.’s time made a distinction
between the sovereign and the dewan, holding the latter
responsible for the objectionable policies pursued by the
government. The dewan’s appointment required consent
from the imperial government and therefore was not of
the king’s choosing. The dewans of Travancore at the
turn of the nineteenth century played a highly prominent
role in policy-making and administration. During a period
of attenuated kingship, before the introduction of
popular representative bodies, they shaped most of the
important policies and decisions under the direction of
the British resident.
C.V.’s historical romances conjured up an alternative
model of the relations between the king and his
subjects. At the centre of these relations was the image
of the native Nayar dewan, committed to his people and
loyal to the king. Raja Kesavadas epitomized these
qualities. And as a counterpoint to the contemporary
decline in the king’s sovereignty, the novels offered
valorized images of Martandavarma and Ramavarma, in
whom the two favoured attributes of the sovereign—the
sacredness of his person and his indissoluble bonds with
his subjects—came together. The figure of the king
guaranteed through his protective persona the
autonomy of native communities. C.V. injected these ties
with anachronistic political blood, producing a notion of
the ‘people’ drawn from popular memory, sentiments,
and desires available in his own period. The eighteenth-
century universe is attributed the sacredness of an
authentic tradition through a suppression of its new,
emergent character.
This imaginative reworking of history posed a problem.
The consolidation of the state of Travancore in the
eighteenth century had been accomplished through
brutal violence. According to Shungoonny Menon’s
history, Pappu Thampi and Raman Thampi, the former
king’s sons, challenged the custom of matrilineal royal
descent and staked their claim to the throne. They were
killed in a planned encounter: one of them died fighting
Martandavarma’s guards and the other was stabbed to
death by the king himself. 25 Martandavarma’s victory
also involved the destruction of traditional Nayar power.
The strong Nayar chiefs who challenged him—the
Ettuveettil Pillamar—were executed, their houses
demolished, and their property confiscated; their women
were given away to fisherfolk to prevent the resurgence
of family lines. The celebration of eighteenth-century
kingship as an idealized locus of relations between
protecting sovereigns and loyal subjects was belied by
the violent destruction of Nayar power that lay at its
very foundation. We see C.V.’s novels as being engaged
in a complex aesthetic negotiation of this ambivalent
historical inheritance.
An early sign of this is found in the silences in
Martandavarma: the novel does not recount the
execution of the Pillamar and the destruction of their
families: instead, the victorious king is shown as
granting pardon to enemies in an attempt to repair his
bond with prominent subjects. The last chapter, which
offers a summary of events over the final three years,
directs the reader to the annals of Travancore’s history
for the subsequent story of the Thampimar and
Ettuveettil Pillamar. Critics have pointed out from the
very beginning that the novel’s toning down of the
king’s ruthlessness in favour of gentler qualities was not
only historically inaccurate but had also diluted his
valour (veerarasam). 26 This move was in tune with
C.V.’s fictional reworking of questions of sovereignty. The
second and third novels in the trilogy, written after
twenty years, presume the destruction of the Pillamar by
the king and offer indirect homage to their valour. But at
their centre is an alternative conception of the Nayar
subject presented in the figure of the dewan, Raja
Kesavadas. C.V.’s configuration of historical memory
draws on the complex affects produced by these
conflicting images of Nayar heritage.
 In the novelist’s formulation, the stability of the
kingdom was pivoted on the vital relationship between
the king and his Nayar minister. Just as the sat-sudra
king underwent a ritual process of sacralization, the
traditional figure of the Nayar was invested with a new
aura of dignity and valour. Dewan Kesava Pillai,
renowned as Raja Kesavadas, served for him as a
prototype of the dignity of the new Nayar subject, in
striking contrast to the self-seeking non- Malayali
officials of later regimes criticized in C.V.’s political
writings. However, apart from Raja Kesavadas,
eighteenth-century Travancore did not supply C.V. with
enough resonant prototypes for shaping a new figure.
The energies of plot and action in Martandavarma of
course revolved around Anantapadmanabhan, the
charismatic Nayar protagonist of the novel. The
scholarship on C.V. has considered this character an
entirely fictitious creation. 27
C.V. followed royalist histories in regarding the conflict
between Prince Martandavarma and his cousins—the
two Thampis—as a confrontation between the custom of
matrilineal inheritance prevalent in Travancore and an
unorthodox, patrilineal claim. A contrary strand of
commemoration is seen in ‘Valiya Thampi Kunju Tampi
Pattu’ (The Song of the Brothers), a folksong from
southern Travancore, performed by lower-caste bow-
song singers, which places the sons of the former king
on the side of custom. The Thampis are sons of
Abhirami, a beautiful woman from Ayodhya whom Raja
Ramavarma, Martandavarma’s maternal uncle, met in
Suchindram, fell in love with, and married. The conflict in
the song revolves around the king’s wish, rejected by
the Thampis, to wed their younger sister Ummini
Thanka. The song associates Martandavarma with sexual
desire, deceit, and violence, and the Thampis with virtue
and valour. C.V., given his close familiarity with the folk
traditions of Nanchinadu, must have been aware of this
alternative tradition of commemoration. 28 His novel
reversed the ethical equation and attributed deceit and
sexual predatoriness to the Thampis. The alliance
between the pretender brothers and the Nayar chiefs
represents, in the novel, a corrupt counterpart to the
valorized relationship of devotion between
Martandavarma and his loyal Nayar supporters. The
novel pivots not on the contrast between custom and
innovation, but between two models of sovereignty and
subjection: one of them virtuous and gentle, the other
wicked and violent. In the later novels C.V. rethought the
stark terms of this opposition, re-estimating the legacy
of Ettuveettil Pillamar and the form of power they
embodied.
Why was C.V. obsessed with the question of
sovereignty? The history of Travancore in the nineteenth
century, subsequent to the period dealt with in his three
historical novels, was crucial in shaping his ideas. The
war against Tipu Sultan and his defeat by the British in
1792 led to a reconfiguration of sovereign power in
Travancore. In 1795 the princely state was forced to
enter into a treaty with the British, with an agreement to
pay for the protection they received from the East India
Company’s army. Colonel Colin Macaulay was appointed
British Resident to Travancore in 1800 and major
decisions by the king, including the appointment of the
dewan, required the Company’s approval. Growing
interference in administration and onerous financial
demands by the British met with stout opposition from
Veluthampi, the Dalawa of Travancore. Joining forces
with his counterpart in Cochin, he revolted against the
Company in 1807 and killed several Englishmen, but the
rebels were eventually defeated by an army dispatched
from Madras. Veluthampi mobilized an insurrection via a
powerful anti-British proclamation from Kundara but the
uprising ended in his defeat and suicide, leading to the
firm establishment of British supremacy in Travancore
and Cochin. Veluthampi’s dead body was captured and
publicly displayed on a gibbet to underscore the brutal
and total suppression of native rebellion against the
Company. This was followed by disarming the people
and disbanding all militia. 29
C.V. Raman Pillai, like many of the Nayar intellectuals
of his generation, looked at these events almost a
century later as an intensely poignant, tragic phase in
the history of his people. The last novel he began writing
and left incomplete, it is said, was to have as its theme
Veluthampi’s inspiring life and heroic death. As we saw,
C.V. had considered Dharmaraja and Ramaraja Bahadur
as parts of a trilogy on Raja Kesavadas’ life: this largely
unwritten last novel would have narrated the political
machinations against the dewan which led to his death,
supposedly by poisoning. Interestingly, the two works
promised but not completed were to commemorate the
heroic defeat and death of the two most venerated
Nayar ministers in the history of Travancore. The novels
C.V. published offered homage to erstwhile images of
sovereignty and subjecthood through praise and
worship, while the unwritten works were to be elegiac
lamentations. Could the affective tenor of these
unwritten works be of consequence to what was written
and published? Could it be that C.V.’s narratives of
praise derive their acuteness and power from the
suffusion of a displaced tone of tragic mourning?

II The registers of historical expression in C.V.’s

work are several. Palace records, royal edicts, and
 ministerial orders went into the shaping of his
idioms of narration. The novels also drew heavily
on commemorative forms, such as folksongs of
adventure and mourning, popular parodies, and
performative storytelling. The speech genres
deployed in his novels track the ritual work of
power in a range of domains: the monarch and the
state, communities and castes, family histories, and
the ordinary spaces of everyday life. The
biographical mode works in these texts alongside a
discursive frame of ritual commemoration and
veneration. Even as the king appears as a character
whose qualities of kindness or resolution are
revealed in action, he also appears as a valorized
image successfully calling for acclaim and worship.
More than emulation, a devotional attitude defines
the relationship between the narratorial voice and
the presence of the sovereign. At the same time, the
king is not the actual locus of narrative
elaboration; as we saw, in the later two novels it is
the minister—the dewan—Raja Kesavadas, who is
the centre of the action and invites admiration and
emulation. Circuits of affect in these novels gather
further complexity when figures and lineages
opposed to the king are drawn into the ambit of
veneration.

C.V.’s novels did not seek to narrate historical events:

that was not, at least, their principal aim. Narration
works more like a prop in a commemorative ritual to
draw participants into a magic circle of incantation and
enactment. A fictional language which broke with habits
of literary narration was fashioned to serve as the
vehicle for this mythical conjuring up of the past. Unlike
Chandu Menon, who preferred the simple Malayalam of
the Nayar home for his novels, C.V. deliberately wrote in
a stylized language unsuited to ordinary use. It was
made up of multiple elements: a high-sounding
Sanskritized diction in narration and a range of registers,
dialects, and languages in the speech of characters,
marking regional and caste differences. However, it
would be wrong to regard his sonorous narrative style as
a sign of classical purism. Several usages in
Martandavarma were judged erroneous by the renowned
Sanskritist of the time, Kerala- varma Valiyakoyil
Thampuran. Though C.V. did eventually accept some of
the suggested corrections in the second edition of the
novel published two decades later, his initial reaction
was one of defiance. He scribbled on the margins of
Keralavarma’s letter, commenting on the excisions he
had recommended: ‘[B]ut I thought let them stand.
Nothing like boldness to write . . . Worship of blind
authority . . . Fellows like myself who may have a good
original story to tell may be cowed into silence for fear
of criticism from literary autocrats . . . Who cares for
Sanskrit grammar? Where is the Malayalam Grammar to
say this is wrong?’ 30 It is not only the defiance of
classical prescription that is striking; one can also feel
the presence of a desire for the autonomy of the
vernacular, and the decisionist gesture of making it in
one’s writing. There is a sense that the rules of this new
language occupy the temporality of the future anterior—
that the writing will produce rules retrospectively to
validate and legislate norms of intelligibility. Dharmaraja,
when it appeared, attracted harsher criticism for the
excessive difficulty and eccentricity of its language. 31
C.V. agreed that its style had taken after the diction of
Kirmiravadham, a difficult Kathakali play; in Ramaraja
Bahadur, the last in the trilogy, he tried to go back to an
earlier, more lucid style, only to discover that it had left
him, along with his youth! 32 While citing a royal edict
from the eighteenth century, the narrator of Ramaraja
Bahadur places it in an unwritten history of Malayalam
prose, usually mistakenly traced to the introduction of
Western education in the nineteenth century. 33 This
understanding of literary history privileged a vernacular
strand of sovereign performative force over idioms of
modern discursivity and the prominence of description
and pedagogy.
Classical, scholarly uses of Sanskrit may therefore not
help us much in understanding C.V.’s language; we may
be better served by placing it alongside contemporary
stylistic innovations in Malayalam prose. We noted
earlier the existence of a long non-Brahminical history of
Sanskrit learning in Kerala. 34 The tendency to
incorporate Sanskrit locutions into Malayalam to produce
effects of elegance, gravitas, or virtuosity was quite
common in the early twentieth century. S. Guptan Nair
observes that astrologers and Ayurvedic physicians were
well known for their infatuation with girvanam (the
language of the gods), and lawyers in lower courts
tended to inflate their submissions with a generous
sprinkling of Sanskrit. 35 These uses of Sanskrit must be
differentiated from trained usages of the language in
scholarly circles and from survivals of a pre-modern
literary heritage. They occurred mostly in prose where
the norms of composition were not entirely set, and form
part of a popular and non-Brahminical usage where the
linguistic signature of Sanskrit invoked the resonances
and pleasures of cosmopolitan authority. C.V.’s inflated
language, in spite of his scholarship and literary
excellence, is arguably closer to this mode than to the
restraint and correctness claimed by classical scholars.
36

The nature of this language turns out on a closer look

to be even more complex: E.V Krishna Pillai recounts in
his autobiography how he transcribed C.V.’s oral
dictation of the first draft version of several passages of
Ramaraja Bahadur. C.V. was, he says, in the habit of
dictating important descriptive passages in the novel
first in English! Later, the English manuscript would be
translated and reworked into the high Sanskrit-tinted
style that became the signature of the novel’s diegetic
passages. 37 The language of C.V.’s later political essays,
often written in an elevated and seemingly Sanskritized
register in Malayalam, sometimes shows signs of having
been translated, indicating a possible derivation from
political thought and journalism in the English language.
His style was tied to a modern multilingual condition in
which English, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Hindustani were vital
elements. The ‘vernacular’ in his work was marked by
innovative transactions with local and cosmopolitan
idioms and languages of earlier and newer epochs. 38 It
is in this linguistic space that C.V.’s novels fashioned
their idioms for commemorative acclaim.
We hinted at a subterranean current of mourning in
C.V.’s heroic sagas. This strand symptomatically
surfaces, for instance, when in Dharmaraja Pavati Kochi
recounts the heroic lamentation of a mother whose
valiant son sacrificed his life to Dutch cannons in the
service of Martandavarma. 39 The incident is only
tangentially connected to the story of the novel but
works as a powerful narrative performance in its own
right. Told in a register of unadorned native discourse
elevated through grief and adulation, the story has at its
core an act of intense mourning which unites the king
and the Nayar soldier’s bereaved mother in virtual
kinship. The king pledges that he will be her only son
from now on, and she accepts, celebrating this grand
gift of maternity and filiation. Later she breaks into an
inconsolable lament, addressing her lost son as the
minister of the king. The alliance between the king and
the Nayar minister, forged in blood and sacrifice, is the
space of intensely avowed affect. As we saw, the tie
between the sovereign and the Nayar minister was of
special importance in C.V.’s imaginary. A new model of
manly subjectivity, proposed through the figures of the
king and the dewan, deftly measures its proximity and
distance in relation to earlier normative models of
masculinity. The community’s heroic past, inscribed in
the subject’s body as a habitus of valour, is modulated
and elevated to a higher register by the idioms of
ministerial loyalty characterized by maturity, restraint,
and administrative astuteness.
Parallel to this is a process of disavowal—a careful,
invisible exorcism of some elements from the
community’s historical inherit-ance. C.V.’s trilogy is
replete with symptoms produced by this un-
acknowledged rejection. We noted a principle of
displacement in the very plan of the trilogy: ostensibly
about kings, the latter two novels are actually about the
Nayar dewan. We may still be mistaken in taking this at
face value. The shift from king to Nayar minister may be
standing in for another, unacknowledged shift—from the
Nayar minister to the Nayar families who led the revolts
against the king. In each of the later two novels,
Dharmaraja and Ramaraja Bahadur, the destroyed Nayar
power sprouts again from a branch in spite of repeated
setbacks. What was to hold together the projected
trilogy may not be only the Nayar dewan; it may equally
be the Kazhak-koottathu house of Nayar lords who rise
up repeatedly to confront royal power. 40 And, who
knows, in the unwritten novel on Raja Kesavadas’ last
days, these strands would perhaps have merged with
each other in affective terms.
The heroic-tragic strain of mourning in C.V.’s novels is
directed not so much at foregone kings as at figures of
Nayar sovereignty. This power, in its guise as the
minister—the executive hands that operate the king’s
rule—was the explicit object of celebration in C.V.’s
world. The Nayar lords who rose against the king and
tried to murder him were unavowable objects of
veneration and mourning. C.V.’s historical novels
produced a literary apparatus that paid homage to
erstwhile Nayar power in both these guises. Even as the
Nayar minister, glorified as an image of responsibility
and restrained power, occupies the centre of the field of
events and actions visibilized in the novel, the heroic
images of an older Nayar sovereignty, discarded as
treason (rajyadroham), find their consecration in
occasional tremors of affect felt beneath the level of
narration. Tripura Sundari, the sister of Kazhakkuttathu
Pillai, living incognito in her old age, asks Nanthiyathu
Unnithan, ‘Did my elder brother bear the executioner’s
sword with strength befitting our clan?’ Unnithan replies:
‘Sister, please don’t ask about all this. That was a time
of high waters. Let bygones be bygones.’ 41 The
unspeakable moment of execution, invoked momentarily
but abandoned, controls and heightens the affective
tenor of the novel.
K. Vinod Chandran, in an engaging study of early-
twentieth-century Travancore, has argued that C.V.’s
discourse of Rajya worship ought to be distinguished
from modern forms of nationalism. 42 He makes a similar
argument about Nayar identity, contrasting it with
modern, enumerative forms of caste identity. Chandran
argues that modern identity formations such as the
nation and caste emerged in Travancore in the context
of colonial rule and missionary work, and that in contrast
with them the discourses on Rajya and the Nayar in
C.V.’s work contained a dimension of sublimity which
exceeded or escaped enumerative, governmental logic.
Chandran is right to invoke the figure of sublimity; an
element of the unrepresentable marks the invocation of
disavowed inheritance. This should not make us identify
C.V.’s work with tradition: we see in it rather the
invention of a tradition, and its use as a prop to stage a
difficult, conflicted relationship to the past. This process
took shape through an encounter with new technologies
of power and new forms of identification prevalent in
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Travancore.
The stories told in C.V.’s historical novels share their
idioms of sovereign power with the post-nineteenth-
century historiography of Travancore. However, in the
interstices of this narrative is inscribed a notion of Nayar
sovereignty that is not centred on the king. This ought to
be distinguished from the Nayar as minister, as dewan
or Dalawa, which formed the kernel of C.V.’s political
campaigns. In the pre-eighteenth-century conception of
political power, the Nayar lords or Madampimar were
actual bearers of sovereignty with their own militia and
the power to administer justice and to kill. P.K.
Balakrishnan suggests that even punishments awarded
by the state were in all likelihood regularly carried out by
them. 43 The story of the seventeenth century as it
unfolds in histories of Travancore is replete with what are
presented as challenges to the king or the queen from
the Nayar lords. If we take the changes in the
configuration and idioms of sovereignty in the
eighteenth century seriously, these conflicts may well
have been intrinsic to the divided, contestatory nature of
sovereign power during that period. Martandavarma’s
rule put an end to this situation and began consolidating
the state’s position as the sole arbiter and monopolistic
dispenser of legitimate violence.
However, we also know that the acquisition of
kingliness—the transformation of Trippapur Mooppu into
the Travancore king—was accomplished with the help of
the English East India Company. The exemplary alliance
between Raja Ramavarma and the native Nayar minister
Kesava Pillai celebrated in C.V.’s novels was indeed the
regime that took on financial obligations in return for
English military support to Travancore. The much praised
victory over Tipu Sultan, which is seen as having
ensured Travancore’s survival as an independent state,
also marked an irreversible erosion of Travan- core’s
economic and political autonomy. The honorofic ‘Raja’
was conferred on Dewan Kesava Pillai by the English
East India Company after Tipu Sultan’s defeat, making
him known as Raja Kesavadas.
How are these paradoxes about sovereignty and
autonomy produced and negotiated in C.V.’s fiction? I
suggested earlier that answers to this question are to be
sought less in ideological attitudes than at a plane of the
aesthetic work performed in these novels. I use the word
‘aesthetic’ on account of its etymological alliance with
perception: a quasi-mythic experience of history is
generated in C.V.’s novels through a careful
determination of how persons, objects, and spaces are
made to appear in the fictional world, and how people
exhibit themselves in action and speech. In order to
understand this, we need to look closely at his character
system, the organization of discourses, and the
orchestration of spaces and perceptual modes.
 III

Readers familiar with Indulekha and other early novels

set in modern times will immediately notice two
significant differences while entering C.V.’s fictional
universe. Firstly the light changes: we are greeted by
dramatic variations of obscurity and effulgence. An
equally striking difference is in the language: C.V.’s
novels are dominated neither by educated ordinary
language made newly respectable for entry into the field
of literature, nor well-known slokas from Sanskrit kavyas
offered for the trained sahrdaya’s delectation. The
language of these novels displays a variegated,
exaggerated, and stylized performance, delivered not
just to the faculty of understanding but to the entire
sensorium.
Martandavarma opens in the recesses of a jungle, with
the first sentences mimicking with sound and syntax the
harsh intricacies of the landscape: The events being
narrated at the opening of this story took place in a
jungle. The word ‘jungle’ should not make the readers
think that it was a fearsome forest resonant with roars
and reverberations, and frequented by ferocious felines
of prey. It was rather a patch of wilderness, rarely visited
by humanity, overgrown with shrubs and spattered with
thickets. Devoid of rocks and rivulets, not a single sweet-
scented flower lent its fragrance to the dank forest
atmosphere. Here and there, a few superannuated trees
towered against the sky in solitary grandeur, but the rest
of the ground was covered by a redundant growth of
noxious weeds. Huge palms stood in the dark, alone and
in clusters, like giant umbrellas held up in the procession
of some jungle god. 44
The English translation sounds inadequate, missing the
original Malayalam’s aural richness, typified in the
resonant verse cited from Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatma
Ramayanam: ‘jhillijhankara nadamanditam,
simhavyaghra salyadi mrgagana nishevidam . The
description accumulates detail over detail, blocking clear
perception through a sense of obscure excess. This dark
prelude gives way to the baffling appearance of a
resplendent wounded body—of an unrecognized, radiant
young man soon carried away from the scene by an
unknown group of men in strange attire. The narration
guides the reader’s gaze over an abundance of
particulars, suggesting possible explanations but
denying certainty to any of them.
Dramatic scenes shrouded in mystery open
Dharmaraja and Ramaraja Bahadur as well. They, as in
Martandavarma, serve not only to whet narrative
curiosity but to produce the past as a distinct space of
dark, mythical intelligibility. A skilful concatenation of
seemingly realistic detailing and an opposed orientation
towards schematic signs holds out the promise of
meaning but withholds or deflects it through
destabilizing moves. The temporal and spatial
coordinates are carefully calibrated: timings are
indicated with precision, and nights of the full moon and
the new moon are carefully calculated in descriptions of
nocturnal scenes. 45 The narration, on the other hand,
moves back and forth in time, suppresses crucial
intervals, and denies the apprehension of linear causal
connections. 46 The unexpected eruption of a dramatic
event on a scene is sometimes succeeded by a chapter
where the story traces its steps back in time to present
an earlier sequence of events which fills gaps in the
narration. 47 Such timely satisfaction is not always
offered; the unravelling of mysteries is often postponed
to later moments. Transformational strategies in the
presentation of objects, persons, and movements add to
the impression of uncertain visibility and unstable
orientation. This is how the habitat is constructed to
house the quasi-mythical figures of C.V.’s novels.
A first step in understanding his grammar of figuration
may be to look at schematic resemblances which
connect human characters to animals. P. Venugopalan’s
annotations on Dharmaraja note how, in relation to
physiognomic description, Chantrakkaran is modelled on
the buffalo, Kalaprakkottu Thampi on the elephant,
Ummini Pillai on the water snake, and Hari Panchananan,
as the name suggests, on the lion. 48 These
correspondences draw on schemata used in traditions of
physical culture, such as Kalarippayattu, where bodily
stances and postures are named after animals. Animal
images suggest interpretative clues about the
swabhavam (innate disposition) of characters.
The exteriorization of character is not confined to
schematic re-semblances in bodily features; actions and
gestures are also sites of schematic stylization. C.V. was
a great enthusiast of Kathakali, and the spectacular
schematism of appearance and gestures in this form
seems to have been a major influence in his novels.
Kathakali characters are presented through a typology of
costume (vesham): pacha (green costume) is used in the
representation of gods and heroic protagonists, tadi
(beard) for superhuman characters, kathi (knife) for
villains, and minukku (radiant) for women. In C.V.’s
novels, characters in conversation or action often appear
as if they are on stage, absorbed in a dramatic, stylized
performance. Major characters are usually introduced
through a detailed description of their appearance,
which incorporates schematic elements. Interestingly,
the influence of performance forms like Kathakali is
more evident in the visual imaginary of his novels than
in his farces, which dealt with contemporary times.
The stylized descriptions transform his characters into
larger-than-life images. Manikya Goundan, shocked by
the disappearance of his family treasure, ‘falls on the
ground like Kumbhakaranan mutilated by Rama’s
arrows, emitting blood through his mouth and nostrils.’
49 Similarly, Thrivikrama Kumaran, on hearing the

pledge made by Kesavan Unnithan, ‘felt as if the earth

had turned upside down. As a hallucination of darkness
rendered him blind, he stood immobile on the ground for
some time. Sweat, streaming down his body from his
crown, inscribed the contours of his feet on the ground.’
50 A narrative inset in the novel rehearses the visual

grammar of such dramatic transformations. In the story

of the Yakshi Neeli told to Parukkutty by her mother, a
pregnant woman killed by her Brahmin spouse
reappears as a beautiful seductress, only to transform
herself into the Yakshi Kalliyankattu Neeli, ‘filling the
forest and touching the sky, with terrifying teeth and a
blood-dripping tongue reaching the ground, with a
cavernous mouth and huge, round eyes which scatter
sparks of fire, and enormous hair standing up like trees .
. .’ 51 The narration in C.V.’s novels often enacts similar
transformations of character images.
Lines from Kathakali librettos or Attakkathas float
through the novel, producing an atmosphere appropriate
for stylized appearances and performance routines. In
Dharmaraja and Ramaraja Bahadur, the delightful
palace cook Mama Venkitan frequently breaks into bouts
of Kathakali singing. Aurally resonant textual allusions
sound a keynote while introducing some characters:
Tripurasundari Kunjamma’s initial appearance in
Dharmaraja along with her granddaughter Meenakshi is
accompanied in the description by allusions to Sri
Sankara’s ‘Tripurasundaristotram’, a composition in
worshipful praise of the goddess. 52 Later in the novel, at
Tripurasundari’s deathbed, her granddaughter
Meenakshi recites the same stotram. 53

Schematic presentations of characters, as we saw in

the previous chapter, may pose difficulties for
interpretation, since schemata, which involve
predetermined taxonomies and formulaic associations
between signs and meanings, are open to deceptive
reproduction. The stylized, performative presentation of
characters foregrounds this threatening possibility. Can
an appearance be trusted as genuine, or could it be the
clever use of a formula aimed to deceive? C.V.’s work
does not often draw on oppositions between the inner
and the outer, between a private interiority and a public
performance: the domain of the inner itself, as we saw,
is presented through exterior, performative elements.
Disguises are particularly useful for clarifying the way
unreliable exterior descriptions work in theses novels.
Consider the initial appearance of Prince
Martandavarma: About two years after the events
described in the first chapter, one morning, a Malayali
Brahmin was found sitting on the eastern verandah of
this house. His age might be somewhere between
twenty and twenty-five. One might think that he is a
Nambutiri or a Potti from Tiruvalla. The profusion of his
hair and moustache indicated that he is perhaps
observing some austerities. However, his face had
hardly any ascetic aura (vaidika tejas). It is valour (veera
rasam) that predominates. His complexion was very fair.
One needs to be cautious in praising the beauty of his
face since his nose is unusually long and somewhat
thick. Apart from the deformity of the prominence of this
organ, no defect can be found in his countenance. On
careful examination, all other parts of his body appear
as formed to perfection. His arms extend below his
knees. Although the attire is that of a Brahmin, his high
round shoulders, straight neck, arms strong like iron, his
broad firm chest, and his gaze like that of a lion which
has sighted an elephant—all these signs may make the
observers decide that he belongs to the race of
Kshatriyas. However, apart from a poor Brahmin’s dhoti
and shawl, he did not have any of the ornaments or
expressions of the virile Kshatriyas. 54
C.V. probably modelled the description on a portrait of
the king found in Padmanabhapuram Palace. This
apparent attempt at verisimilitude is offset by a careful
deployment of schematic elements, probably adopted by
the portrait painter as well. The epigraph of the chapter
refers us to the appearance of Arjuna disguised as a
Brahmin in the Sabha Parva of the Mahabharata. C.V.’s
description of Martan-davarma places, in a careful
overlay, Brahmin and Kshatriya attributes.
Martandavarma’s disguise as Brahmin stands for C.V.’s
transfiguration of the king’s image: it combines the
battle-readiness and courage of the veera with the
protective kindness of the king as prajavatsala, the
tenderly affectionate guardian of his subjects.
Disguises play several crucial roles in the novels. We
can begin by noting some of the effects produced in the
novel’s order of visibility. Apart from its thematic
significance, the prince’s disguise protects him from
becoming the object of a direct, non-sacral gaze. In the
passage cited, empirical description slides into the
schematic, revealing the resplendent royal body only
indirectly, tempered by the austere Brahmin attire. The
king’s body commands a ritualistic and reverential gaze,
conceived in analogy with the worship of the deity. Just
as the devotee’s gaze does not confront and appropriate
the deity’s image, but rather submits to it in ritual
obeisance, the royal body is available only for a
reverential, oblique gaze, an ocular prostration.
Appearance in the king’s presence, as with the darshan
of a deity, is less an act of perception than the devotee’s
entry into a relationship of ecstatic obeisance.
A passage in Ramaraja Bahadur shows this clearly,
when Azhakan Pillai, a loyal peasant from south
Travancore, has darshan of the king’s body: When he
surmised that the king was inside the building [watching
his performance in the wrestling bout], Azhakan Pillai’s
soul bathed in an ocean of delight. Immediately he
straightened his dhoti, adopted the posture of ritual
obeisance by folding one arm over his chest and
covering his mouth with the other. Standing with his feet
folded inwards, he placed his fingers on his shoulders
according to the old custom of the southern parts, and
bent down to see clearly the king’s sacred body and to
bow down before that only god visible to the eye,
protector to him and to his country. 55
This loyal peasant had earlier chatted with an old man
near the palace gates without the least suspicion that it
was the king he was speaking to with bold familiarity.
Ignorance and misperception resemble disguise in hiding
the true nature of the object. Later, when Azhakan Pillai
recognizes the features of the old man in the quasidivine
personage accepting his obeisance, he is terrified by a
sense of violent transgression.
Ritualized acts of looking produce spectators as
worshipful subjects. Vision here operates in excess of its
cognitive functions as a fuller corporeal experience.
Seeing is a way of approaching and making contact:
certain sorts of vision may result in pollution or in the
violation of limits. The practice of caste pollution
reproduces a similar approach to spaces and objects. In
C.V.’s novels the king’s body occupies a limit of this
codified perceptual space. As a special figure
unavailable for direct, full vision, its role is to authorize
and guarantee the stability of the visible universe and its
schematic meanings. But can it fulfil this function? The
stability of perceptual and moral universes is threatened
in the course of each of the historical novels, even if it is
restored at their conclusions.
If at one end of C.V.’s visual spectrum stands the
oblique, devotional vision of the king’s body, at the
other end we encounter two extreme instances of its
defiant negation: one of them summons overwhelming,
apocalyptic powers of darkness, and the other an
explosive conflagration of blinding light. It is in
Dharmaraja that we find their most dramatic
apparitions. Chilambinayethu Chantrak-karan, the
illegitimate son of one of the executed Nayar lords, is
defiant in his defeat, and apostrophizes the contra-sacral
powers of the dark before disappearing from the novel:
‘You, darkness!’, he cries, ‘open your mouth, take me,
this dim-witted fool, in. What is time, which is the end, if
not you! You alone are the god of death, the creator of
all time . . . For me, the darkest of the dark, sown in the
dark womb of a mother, grown in the pitch dark night of
human pretence, ending in this unrelenting dark pit, for
me, you alone the path, you deep, dreary dark.’ 56
This is succeeded by the last moment in the novel’s
denouement, when Hari Panchananan, the descendant
of the most persistent of the defeated Nayar lord
families, disguised as a sanyasi, sets ablaze his
stupendous armoury: Then, amidst the loud
exclamations of swelling crowds at the fire’s spreading
branches, a humongous universe-shattering noise—as if
from Viswakarma’s earth-shaking artillery—shook the
camp—no, the whole earth—right to its deep
subterranean foundation. From the centre of
Haripanchananan’s mansion a tower of light made of a
thousand apocalyptic fires rose with an elephantine roar.
57

The invocation of the infinite dark and the detonation of

an apocalyptic conflagration, these
counterperformatives, mark the outer limits of the
organized world of vision guaranteed by the king’s body.
One might even say that the colourful and variegated
world of C.V.’s fiction unfolds between these opposed
poles. Things appearing in this field of vision are from
the outset contaminated by an ambivalence which
opens them to hermeneutic or performative
transformations. How do characters inhabit this
uncertain field of vision? A closer look at the deployment
of disguise in C.V.’s work offers some preliminary
answers.
As mentioned earlier, disguise is one of C.V.’s favourite
fictional strategies: a range of characters, from the king
to his strongest enemies adopt it: Chantrakkaran,
Veluthampi, Bableswaran, Perin- chakkodan,
Anantapadmanabhan, Haripanchanan, the list is long.
Chantrakkaran, who made an apocalyptic exit into the
dark in Dharmaraja, resurfaces in Ramaraja Bahadur as
Kaliprabhava Bhattan, and then again as Manikya
Goundan, playing a crucial role in the manoeuvres
against the royal house in both these novels.
Haripanchananan’s disguises are even more fascinating.
The deepest of his masquerades are not the personas
adopted; they are to be found in the very unity of his
character. The figure of Haripan-chananan turns out to
be the ultimate disguise: it conceals identical twins with
contrary attributes: Ugran (fierce) and Santhan (calm).
Their contrast finds expression in other schematic
binaries: their names—Trivikraman and Janardanan—
manifest a Saivite/Vaishnavite opposition. The narrative
unity of Haripanchananan makes the twins appear as
contrasting moods of the same person. Here too, the
performance technique of pakarnnattam may have
shown C.V. the way to conceiving this character. 58
Disguise is a favourite tool of spies: Kandirava Rayar,
who appears at the palace as a famous wrestler from
foreign parts, turns out to be a spy in Tipu Sultan’s
service, and attempts twice to assassinate the king. On
the second occasion he is slain by Kunjikkutty Pillai after
a one-to-one combat. 59 Ramavarma Raja, an invisible
witness to Rayar’s death, sighs remorsefully at this sinful
killing of a Brahmin or brahmahatya; but Kunjikkutty
Pillai reveals that Rayar’s Brahminical appearance was a
disguise: he was from the lower castes. This is true of
the evil Sundarayyan who is killed in Martandavarma.
The last chapter of the novel reveals that he was a half-
caste born of a liaison between a Brahmin and a low-
caste Marava woman. 60 The anxiety about
brahmahatya may be double-edged: while the narrative
ensures that no Brahmin is actually killed by the king’s
party, the use of disguise allows a repeated staging of
brahmahatya; the world of appearances allows a
fictional dissolution of the impunity of the Brahmin, even
as the plot trades in the dispensable lives of the lower
castes.
The most elaborate disguises deployed in the service
of the king are used by Anantapadmanabhan, the hero
of Martandavarma. After his supposed death in a jungle
in the opening chapter of the novel, he reappears again
and again, adopting different appearances and personas
to save the king from his enemies, before he ultimately
discards his disguise at the end of the novel and is
reunited with his beloved Parukkutty. All other
characters, including Martandavarma, pale in
comparison before Anantapadmanabhan’s
resourcefulness. However, this hero is not only the
ultimate in skills of warfare; suppressed anguish about
his love marks him with a private, affective sense of
interiority. The novel presents this through quickly
controlled gestures of emotion: tearful eyes, voice
choking with emotion, caresses without revealing one’s
identity. This character’s external aspect, in comparison,
is variegated and flamboyant: Anantapadmanabhan
appears as a mad lower-caste vagabond who displays
outstanding skills in swordfight and hand-to-hand
combat, as the handsome interpreter from the Muslim
trader’s camp, as a mendicant who carries intoxicating
substances, and as a beggar. Ananta- padmanabhan’s
characterization is the obverse of Haripanchananan’s: it
is as if a number of independent characters are strung
together to make up this figure. Especially, Shamsuddin
and the mad Channan are developed as characters in
their own right, with some degree of internal coherence
and consistency.
I pointed out earlier that C.V.’s conception of
sovereignty was built around a valorized relationship
between the king and the Nayar minister, and that
history did not supply such a figure for Martandavarma.
Anantapadmanabhan, the fictional substitute that
supplements this lack in history, presages the new
subject in C.V.’s work. He, along with his half-sister
Subhadra, displays qualities developed further in the
figure of Raja Kesavadas in the two later novels.
Anantapadmanabhan’s disguises move across caste and
religious divisions to draw on idioms of heroism from
lower-caste Channars and the Muslims. Subhadra on the
other hand works mainly through an astute ability to
gather information and interpret misleading signs with
accuracy. Unlike her half-brother, the master of
disguises, she is the hermeneuticist, the decoder of all
disguise. It is in these two figures that the colourful and
misleading spectrum of visibility in Martandavarma finds
its resolution. Raja Kesavadas inherits Subhadra’s
intelligence as well as Anantapadmanabhan’s adeptness
and valour, but does not use the flamboyance of
disguise, especially in his later years. An idiom of
restraint is privileged in his characterization. It is to this
less dramatic idiom that we shall turn now.
 IV

I suggested that movements of displacement play a vital

role in the making of C.V.’s novels. We saw that the
centre of these texts, in spite of their apparent focus on
the kings announced in the title, in effect shifts to the
minister, or the king’s favoured Nayar lieutenant. The
sacralization of the king’s image and its apprehension
through an oblique, reverential gaze may in turn
function as a screen at a deeper level, deflecting direct
attention from the thematic centrality of the Nayar
minister. Interestingly, this initial displacement in turn
works in tandem with another, more complex
displacement, in which the apparent valorization of the
king and his Nayar supporters and the denigration of the
Nayar chiefs who rise against them seems to reveal—in
spite of efforts to conceal—a current of unavowable
reverence for the latter. This makes one wonder if the
centrality of the state—the king and the Nayar minister
—in the architectonic of C.V.’s works needs to be re-
estimated: is this a device to simultaneously hide and
make possible a strand of difficult mourning in relation
to the past?
The Nayar chiefs who militated against Travancore
kings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
represent an earlier configuration of sovereign power.
Does the celebration of the new, exclusive sovereignty
of the king hide a deeper longing for earlier forms of
sovereignty exercised by Nayar chieftains? If this is
indeed the case, how are these opposed impulses
reconciled or allowed to coexist in C.V.’s narratives?
What sort of aesthetic work is performed by his historical
novels to hold these complex and conflicting allegiances
and emotions together in an affective economy?
 C.V.’s techniques of characterization play an important
role as props for this aesthetic work. In the main, his
novels differentiate between two kinds of characters,
marked by distinctive ways of acting and inhabiting
discourse. These indicate different forms of political
existence, if the political is conceived, following Arendt
and Ranciere, as a distribution of the visible, and as a
field where people exhibit themselves to each other in
action and utterance. 61 In this sense the aesthetic
organization of stylized appearance, action routines, and
speech in C.V.’s novels create a specific literary form of
political intervention.
The speech of characters, as with bodily appearance
and gestures, quite often obeys a logic of performance.
It has been suggested that Martandavarma’s first
interior monologue reads like a verbal equivalent to the
movements used in Kathakali performances to represent
the act of gazing at a mountain. 62 Performing arts and
performance routines are a model not only for
movements and gestures, but also for speech.
C.V. is justly renowned for his command over the oral
registers of southern Travancore and for the dexterity
with which he differentiates characters on the basis of
speech. 63 Critics have tended to see in this a sensitivity
to the individuality and uniqueness of each character.
However, a closer look shows that distinctiveness of
character is constructed from trans-individual resources
and locations, be they those of region, gender, or caste.
Speech in C.V.’s novels is a site of excess and
exaggeration, of inflections and eccentricity: they come
across less as adequate expressions of carefully
sketched interior lives than as conspicuous events that
take place on language’s surface and its outer
thresholds. The utterances of Perinchakkodan and
Chantrakkaran come across as flamboyant aural
spectacles; they assume the presence of a large, rapt
audience, even when they occur in quiet contexts of
private conversation or inner monologues.
Chantrakkaran’s address to the night at the end of
Dharmaraja is as much a ritual of inverted acclamation
as a marker of the outer limits of the visible world.
Alongside these performances of excess, C.V. presents
characters who adopt pronounced self-restraint in
speech. The utterances of characters like Raja
Kesavadas, Anantapadmanabhan, Subhadra, and
Meenakshi show discipline and thrift in expression.
Decorum in their speech is produced by moderation, by
exercising control over expression as a sign of respect
for the occasion and the addressee. This stands in
opposition to elaborately ritualized forms of expressing
respect. Mankoyikkal Kurup, a peasant Nayar lord, does
not follow the protocols of speech and action in front of
Prince Martandavarma in disguise fleeing his enemies:
he offers him unsolicited advice and criticism, but before
he speaks he performs ritual gestures of obeisance in all
sincerity even if they deviate from the proper routines of
respect. Raja Kesavadas’ conversations with Ramavarma
Raja, as the young Kesava Pillai in Dharmaraja and as
dewan in Ramaraja Bahadur, combine ritual speech with
gestures of holding back, offering hints and suggestions
that the king is able to decipher. The culmination of such
restraint is found in the exchange between the king and
the dewan before the latter sets out for war. The
exchange has no content, and through a ritual of
vocatives (‘Kesava!’, ‘Adiyan!’) enacts the mere form of
interpellation and submission between the sovereign
and his devoted subject. 64
Controlled speech is not merely a matter of decorum
or urbanity. Through visible signs of self-restraint,
utterances point to processes of silent deliberation and
the presence of an inner domain of individuated
memories and sorrows. Dewan Raja Kesavadas,
Meenakshi, and Subhadra are probably the best
examples of this in C.V.’s work; a sense of personal grief
is denied expression in all of them but allowed to mark
all speech as incomplete and suggestive. Elite lineage is
not an essential prerequisite for this: Kesava Pillai’s
humble origins are foregrounded in the opening of
Dharmaraja, and his close blood ties with
Perinchakkodan come up in a dramatic confrontation
between them in Ramaraja Bahadur. The dewan’s
utterances are marked by restraint, reflectiveness, and a
control of emotions, even as conflict reaches its highest
pitch.
These registers of restraint are distinguished by the
absence or at least the subduing of signs of regional
origin or blood belonging in caste or religious
community. N. Krishna Pillai, who studied the styles of
conversations in C.V.’s novels in detail, regards Kesava
Pillai’s language—in his boyhood, youth, and middle age
as dewan—as unique in its freedom from regional
markers. 65 Unmarked language is the new mark of
dignity. It is only a few Nayar characters who qualify for
this unmarked subjecthood, which most of the others
continue to display in the speech signs of their region
and origins. The use of an unmarked language was
quickly becoming a sign of good breeding in C.V.’s own
time, in educated urban interaction and in the emergent
public sphere, in print and debate. A normative
insistence on restraint in expression had gained ground
in political debates, gradually replacing the supplicating
idioms of royal petitioning by a dignified language of
political criticism, moderated by respect for royalty. The
emergent political public sphere, however, was not
entirely a domain of stable peace: excess was present at
the borders, as K. Ramakrishna Pillai’s expulsion from
Travancore showed. 66 C.V.’s own political essays in
Videshiyamedhavitvam tried to bring into the controlled
domain of public speech the energy and resonance of a
self-consciously high register. Interestingly, if we look for
its antecedents in C.V.’s novels, we may arrive at the
political speeches of figures like Haripanchanan rather
than the more pronounced self-restraint of Raja
Kesavadas. The characters who show control in gesture
and speech anticipate the language of public expression
of the future. They combine a sense of individual
integrity and selfhood with unstinting, taciturn loyalty to
the country and its symbolic embodiment in the king. It
is then not surprising that communication in the royal
presence is the typical extreme of rarefied discourses in
C.V.’s novels, as the king occupies the apex of a system
of characters sketched according to strategies of self-
control. However, the king’s parsimony in speech does
not refer us to a personal interiority of private affective
memories. As in the case of visibility, the king marks the
inner limit for the world of discursivity as well. This tells
us why kings do not appear as the real protagonists in
any of C.V.’s novels, in spite of their prominence in the
titles. Individuated lives of turbulent emotions, painful
attachment, suppressed grief, and the joys of love
belong to the new subjects; the role of the king is to
allow and authorize idioms of sub-jectivation through
which individuated heroes are forged.
Since C.V.’s novels by and large rely on techniques of
exteriority, individuation, and identification also are
matters of external signs. These may be based on
objects handed down in noble Nayar families: the ring
that Tripurasundari from the destroyed Kazhakkuttam
house sells to the gold merchant Annavayyan plays an
important role in Dharmaraja, as does Kesavan
Unnithan’s stylus discovered on Annavayyan’s corpse.
But heirlooms or objects with personal inscriptions are
not the only bearers of lineage, ownership, or memory;
the more privileged signs are inscribed on the body.
C.V.’s novels, especially the later ones, are
preoccupied with a particular kind of bodily marking: the
delicate inscription of family resemblances on faces. The
puzzling opening chapter of Martan-davarma, the
unconscious wounded body of Anantapadmanabhan is
carried away by a group of Muslim traders at the
instance of a young man in the group who was struck by
the resemblance in countenance between the victim and
his former wife. The momentary sensing of natural
inscription holds the key to hidden kinship relations vital
to the novel and puts in motion the narrative with which
C.V. supplements Travancore history. This is not the only
instance where an imprecise sensing of family
resemblances is experienced by characters as
inexplicable elective affinity. 67
Physiognomic similitudes acquire momentous
narrative significance in Ramaraja Bahadur. Kesavan
Unnithan’s suspicions about his wife’s chastity and his
daughter Savitri’s actual parentage are decisively
reinforced by the daughter’s facial features which
suggest a different, unidentifiable lineage. Towards the
end of Dharmaraja, Anantapadmanabhan trains the
young Kesava Pillai to recognize the similarities between
Savitri’s and her grand-uncle Haripanchananan’s facial
features by using the yogic exercise of trotak: this helps
him bring two distinct visual images before his mind’s
eye for comparison and analysis. 68 Family
resemblances, the novel tells us, obey nature’s laws of
iteration, which skip a generation in manifesting
antecedents.
 Physiognomy is only the most apparent level of
transmission within the family; one’s character—inner
propensities and emotional makeup—also bears the
family’s signature inscribed in blood. Importantly, it is in
the rebel lineage of the Kazhakkuttam house that this
finds its most exquisite development. Tripurasundari
admonishes a tearful Meenakshi for lacking the
steadfast courage of their family. Even destructive royal
punishment—the horrific execution of men
(kazhuvettam) and the selling of women and children to
fisherfolk (thurakettam) are matters of glory for the
lineage with unflinching hearts (vadakkaralkonda
kulam). C.V.’s later novels are deeply invested in signs of
such natural transmission in body and inner mettle.
They are a matter of difficult decipherment, but they
unveil a banished, precious inheritance of Nayar valour.
The survival of the Kazhakkuttam house in the face of
royal rage commands respect from the elders on the
king’s side as well. The seeming stigma of execution and
destruction only serves to add ‘a kind of glory’,
conferring on the lineage an aura of counter-sacrality.
Women are the bearers of this difficult inheritance:
Tripurasundari, Meenakshi, and Savitri assume it with a
pride and a courage that is almost involuntary.
But there are other sorts of external marks too: those
that do not come from the inheritance of blood. Raja
Kesavadas is again the best example of this: of humble
origins, he possesses no heirloom or regalia as talisman;
it is the scar of a humiliating wound received as a boy
from Arathamappilla Thankachy, the mistress of the
house where he worked. The scar in some sense stands
at the opposite end of signs of lineage; it marks a
beginning, not an end: the humiliating incident is the
commencement of Kesavan’s subsequent self-made life
and rise to glory. In later years, the dewan will touch this
scar at moments of crisis in order to control his turbulent
emotions, and inspire himself with strength and resolve.
Unlike schematic signs that connect characters to
exterior elements, the scar is a private personal mark,
an automnesic external signifier deriving its force from
an individuated life history.
Among autobiographical talismans are usually found
gifts and souvenirs of a beloved or a dead friend,
memory markers that refer to close personal
connections. However, unlike in Indulekha or other
novels invested in modern idioms of intimacy and
domesticity, objects do not frequently appear in C.V.’s
historical novels as bearers of a personal, intimate
signature: no equivalent of a knit cap or a fiddle in his
fictional eighteenth century. Of course there are
exceptions to this: Trivikrama Kumaran in Ramaraja
Bahadur presents the veerasrnkhala he received from
the king to his beloved Savitri. Schematic and personal
economies intersect here: the royal reward belongs to a
system of ceremonial objects but, turned into a lover’s
gift, it enters a space of personal intimacy. This
intersection is not accidental: it points to a deeper
reliance on royal authorization for affective individual
lives, underlining the close links in C.V.’s fictional
universe between sovereign authority, personal lives,
and the articulation of affect.
The preceding pages have tracked the ways in which
the perceptual universe in C.V.’s novels is laid out and
how characters appear in them. Schematism,
performance routines, techniques of disguise, and a
variegated and unstable field of visibility are central to
the making of their distinctive world. Events from only a
hundred years distant from the time of writing appear
here as if they took place in a different epoch. Past-ness
is not a matter of chronology; it is experienced as a
modal difference, and its most apparent sign in the
novel is the mythical attenuation of realism. The
improbable postures and styles of visual representation
which Chandu Menon carefully tried to avoid are brought
back by C.V. and given a prominent aesthetic function.
Their aim is not to document ways of living and thinking
in the past, but rather to produce the past as a divided,
conflicted inheritance.
Our point of departure was the differentiation between
two sorts of characters: those who appear in dramatic
idioms of excess and exteriority and those sketched in
attitudes of restraint in speech and action. The
difference between them regulates their relationship to
the present, their modal proximity and distance. Excess
produces fear and awe at its most grandiose instances
and contempt or condescension at its low ebb.
Chantrakkaran and Ugra Haripanchananan, resurgent
remnants of Ettuveettil Pillamar, evoke much of this
spectrum of affects. The Pillamar themselves appear in
Martandavarma in their secretly held confabulations.
C.V. drew on Shungoonny Menon’s history and other
royalist accounts in presenting them as cruel and violent
in their murderous deeds against the royal family. T.K.
Velu Pillai has subsequently argued that this picture of
the Nayar lords was historically inaccurate and that
many of the horrific deeds attributed to them were
contradicted by historical evidence. Critics have
suggested that C.V.’s more respectful treatment of the
Kazhakkuttam house reflects a change in his estimate of
the Pillamar. Kazhakkuttathu Pillai, however, was
presented in positive terms already in Martandavarma:
he was shown opposing the proposal to support
Thampimar’s claim to the throne and suggesting,
instead, reconciliation with Prince Martandavarma,
provoking a hostile reaction among other Nayar lords.
His steadfast commitment to the group in spite of his
disagreement is perhaps the most significant element in
his valorization; from later novels we understand that he
kept his word and faced his execution with unflinching
courage. Kazhakkuttathu Pillai’s speech and dignified
restraint in behaviour single him out in the Pillamar
sabha.
Restraint, in contrast with excess, inspires a dimension
of respectful adoration in narration. Nuanced
biographical elaboration of characters finds its place
within this strand. One may say that Raja Kesavadas is
not just the best example of this; he is arguably the only
object of properly biographical investment in C.V.’s
novels: Dharmaraja and Ramaraja Bahadur track his life
from its childhood and show him at different points in his
life and achievement. More importantly, the experience
of a life lived in its extensity with memories, emotions,
and a self-conscious inhabitation of relationships—is
important in his presentation. A space is created for all
this, often obliquely and by suggestion, in C.V.’s
aesthetic procedures of exteriority. We get glimpses in
Meenakshi and Subhadra of a reflective relationship with
personal life. Subhadra is introduced through a
description of her physical beauty, noting her
resemblance with Raja Ravi Varma’s portraits of women,
but features are filtered through a semiological reading
aimed at deciphering her inner nature. 69 A brief
biographical summary follows, which converts the
details of her life as publicly known into potentially
significant, uninterpreted traces. Her character unfolds
temporally through subsequent events and suggestive
snatches of her inner reflections which we are allowed to
overhear. Kesavan Unnithan’s life is sketched in fuller
terms but does not form a biography in this sense:
defined through a fundamental failure at understanding,
he is exteriorized as an object of condescension rather
than respect.
The legacy of the Ettuveettil Pillamar was the difficult
core of historical inheritance in C.V.’s novels. The
unspeakable treason mentioned in royalist histories also
represented an earlier form of sovereignty exercised in
ties of honour and kinship. Kazhakkuttathu Pillai, while
leaving the sabha of the Pillamar refers to the twenty-
four idols of Sastha installed on the hills to protect the
region. They mark the territory as bound not just by
geography; the Pillamar as protectors are bound by this
originary institution of sovereignty. It is not accidental
that the myths of Keralolpathi surface repeatedly in this
chapter. These foundational rituals combine Vaishnavite
and Saivite elements, as also local forms of worship of
the goddess. The oath of secrecy administered at the
Pillamar sabha begins by invoking Sree
Padmanabhaswamy but swears also by the fierce Kali
who reigns over the clan (ikkulamalum karunkaliyane)
not to reveal their common resolve. 70 The Tamil
phrasing of the oath embodies a form of sovereignty
distinguished from the language of royal exchanges in
the novel.
The only Pillai family to survive was the Kazhakkuttam
house; that too because a branch of the family escaped
destruction by leaving the country. The distinction made
in Martandavarma between Thevan Vikraman Pillai of
the Kazhakkuttam house and the other Nayar lords
reappears as a division within the next generation. While
Ugra Haripanchananan represents the violent assertion
of the claims of an earlier sovereignty, Meenakshi and
Savitri—and to an extent Tripurasundari and Santhan—
are inheritors of the valour and self-control of Thevan
Vikraman. While inheriting their lineage with pride, they
do not see themselves as enemies of the king’s
sovereign power. Meenakshi thinks about her family’s
old conflict with the royalty: ‘Were they evil acts? Could
those valiant antagonists of royalty not be considered as
the whetstone which through friction against the rock of
royal power revealed the magnificent light of the
precious diamond within?’ 71 The king and his Nayar
lords are united by this contestatory relationship: the
inner worth of sovereign power is revealed only in
moments of intense agonistic extraction.
Anantapadmanabhan and Raja Kesavadas displace the
contestatory model in favour of a unified one. The king
and the Nayar minister are united not in a relationship of
domination and subservience, but in a fusion of
sovereignties. The attenuation of Martandavarma’s
veeryam is not accidental: the king’s belligerent
qualities are displaced on to the physical courage and
tactical acumen of his Nayar lieutenant. In Dharmaraja
and Ramaraja Bahadur the gentle, compassionate king
rules through the Nayar dewan in whom warlike qualities
are turned into dignified, resolute authority in
governance. ‘In those days,’ says the narrator of
Ramaraja Bahadur, ‘the engine of Vanchi Rajyam worked
calmly like a submarine steered with skill by two experts
in the art of governance, united as master and disciple
in a single soul.’ 72 Nayar sovereignty is detached from
its contestatory exhibition of violence. A disciplined
containment of violence, which can erupt in situations of
conflict, defines it. Submission to the king is the external
sign of this containment. Worship of the king is a ritual
affirmation of the martial quality of the Nayar. Raja
Kesavadas’ exchange of vocatives with the king
epitomizes this new configuration. Under the quasi-
sacred countersignature of the king the Nayar legacy of
sovereign violence finds its new, disciplined expression.
 His preoccupation with the magic of royal
endorsement distinguished C.V. from the Nayar reform
novelists of Malabar. Chandu Menon’s Indulekha, for
example, attempted a reconciliation of English and
Indian virtues of femininity by redefining and redeeming
Nayar custom and by investing it with a modern
affective dimension. Sambandham is transformed
through the affective supplement of monogamous love
into modern matrimony. 73 Self-fashioning in the Malabar
Nayar reform novel drew substantially upon the world of
English education. A colonial space of possibilities,
involving a new territorial imagination, forms of
domesticity, and styles of appearance and behaviour
marked in these novels the space of the new subject.
C.V. caricatured these contemporary styles in his farces
(prahasanam) and in his satiric social novel
Premamrtam. The comic mode of Premamrtam arises
from an application of the literary apparatus of C.V.’s
historical romances to contemporary society.
The schematic dimension of the historical novels here
becomes pure and arbitrary form without any foundation
in a quasi-sacral moral universe. Techniques of
gigantism and stylization serve only to produce the
effects of farcical incongruity. The Western-educated
new Nayars of Premamrtam are shown as incapable of
negotiating the delicate relationship between custom
and innovation. Their inability to interpret the objects
and signs of a complex universe of custom lead to
erroneous projections. Premamrtam presents this as a
problem in negotiating the distance between Indian and
Western models of perception —identified in the novel
with adhyaropam and empiricism. In the affective
universe of the novel, this is no less than the question of
negotiating a harmonious equation between Indian ideas
of pranayam and Western ideas of love. 74
 C.V.’s formulation and narrative resolution of the
problem in Premamrtam remained inadequate, and this
may be considered a sign of the unviability in his own
times of the narrative model he developed in his
historical romances. No countersignature from the
sacred realm could validate a novelistic representation
of contemporaneity. For novelists from Malabar, the
modern institutions of marriage, family, and the law
court held out the promise of restoration and validation
in the modern world. In C.V.’s work the vocabulary of law
remains inadequate, based as it is on evidence gathered
according to an empirical organization of perception.
However, the royal decrees which could split
structures of Nayar power no longer existed as moral
resources in C.V.’s time. A pronounced colonial presence
had hugely reduced the sovereignty of the king. The
politics of the court hinged on the relations between the
king, the resident, and the dewan—who was very often a
non- Malayali Brahmin. The significance of the Nayars as
a jati began its decline, and attempts to consolidate
their political presence took the form of forging a
Malayali identity through the notion of the Nayar
samudayam. C.V.’s historical romances offered an
aesthetic working through of the conflicted inheritance
of the Nayars in relation to state power. On the
countenance of the new disciplined Nayar subject
prepared to sacrifice her life in battle appear the facial
features of Ugran Kazhakkuttathu Pillai, the fearsome
embodiment of older Nayar sovereignty. Political time is
not only the time of state forms, institutions, and rightful
claims by communities; it is also the time of the iterative
transmission of bodily features and inner propensities. It
is in its layers and interstices that C.V. found idioms for a
contemporary formulation of historical inheritance.
 In turning to C.V.’s historical novels in detail, we have
been concerned with the idea of the human subject that
they seem to presuppose. It may be a mistake to identify
this with specific characters valorized in the novels. The
figure of the subject should rather be sought at an
anterior level, in the mechanisms by which characters
are differentiated, made intelligible, and endowed with
their performative potency. C.V.’s character system, as
we saw, is dependent on an orchestration of modes of
visibility, performance, and speech. These work by a
continuous negotiation between flamboyance and
restraint, performative exuberance and controlled
gestures, and diverse idioms of exteriority in the
interstices of which a space is carved for individuation
and inner feelings. The forms of subjectivity that
underlie C.V.’s novels ought to be sought precisely in
such negotiations. The difficult tensions between the old
and the new is the stuff of this subject. The old is
simultaneously valued and renounced: it is praised as a
glorious age worthy of emulation in the declining
present; however, the past can be praised thus only
after it is subjected to a transformation which involves
the suppression of vital dimensions. A narratable past
emerges by the excision of inheritances that cannot be
directly assumed and inhabited. Ties of blood that do not
obey the rules of individual autonomy are surrendered in
favour of new allegiances to the king and the state. The
disciplined Nayar minister emerges from the sacrifice of
rebels and their claims. It is on the ashes of a
community of earlier obligations that the new state is
erected. C.V.’s subjects are produced at that difficult
intersection where mourning for the old meets eulogies
of the new. These cannot coexist on the same plane of
the fictional world. C.V.’s challenge was to find an
aesthetic procedure for allowing them to coexist by
occupying two different levels in the subject’s existence.
 One form of the subject’s relation to the past is
oriented towards narration. The other remains
unavailable for direct avowal or articulation, manifesting
indirectly in forms that appear archaic within the
fictional world. This induces a complex temporality:
while the actions and events narrated in the novel are
already distant in time from the present of the reader,
an even older, seemingly mythical world makes its
spectral presence felt in the atmosphere the novels
powerfully conjure up. The latter is an object of explicit
disavowal, but it holds a secret attraction within the
fictional world, making the narrative turn to its charged
proximity time and again in rapt fascination. The
iteration of rebellion and its suppression—the repeated
sacrifice of one form of sovereignty for another—is a
sign of this movement in C.V.’s plots. In the intimacy and
disjunction between these two impulses we may find the
figure that C.V.’s novels put forward as the subject of
historical inheritance. This figure stands at the junction
of two strands: on one hand, narratable, avowable
histories linked to the state with its new forms of
subjection and identities; on the other, a less articulate,
archaic past which inheres in the intensities of affect.
Therefore, the subject of C.V.’s novels can narrativize its
historical location only by paying an unavowable
homage to the turbulent forces that reach out to it from
the past. History is both narration and passion for this
subject; the prominence of performance routines and
forms of lamentation in C.V.’s work is not accidental.
His historical novels articulated this complex structure
of inhabitation of the past through an aesthetic work of
fictional organization. Later, writers of autobiographies
would engage the relationship between individual lives
and their historical dimension more directly. They too
faced difficulties in narrating their inhabitation of history
in its conflicting dimensions, but their solutions were
different from C.V.’s. It is to them that we turn in the
next chapter.
6

Incomplete Inhabitations History’s

I Autobiographical Signature N A novel
from early-twentieth-century Kerala
—V.I. Manna- diar’s Kamalam (1924)
—the protagonist Venugopalan
decides to suppress his love for the
beautiful Kamalam, a difficult but
necessary task, since he is unsure
whether she reciprocates his feelings,
or perhaps even rebuffs them.
Further, her caste status is superior
to his, and her family has thus far
only made alliances with Brahmins
and members of the royal family.
Venugopalan’s is an anxiety familiar
from many of the romantic novels of
Kerala at the turn of the century
(including Indulekha): After his
conversation with his mother,
Venugopalan’s resolve became even
firmer. He vowed not to let such
 perverse intelligence possess him. He
got up, went and had lunch. Instead
of going back to his room to lie down
again, he walked about in the
verandah. After some time, he went
into his room and picked up an old
copy of an English book famous by
the title The Biography of Napoleon.
He opened the doors and the
windows well, sat down upright in a
chair and began reading. 1
Time and time again in early-twentieth-century Kerala
we encounter biographies, mostly from the Western
world, serving as models for thinking through one’s
personal dilemmas and living out one’s social and
interior projects. Such use has an obvious relationship
with the spread of modern education and movements for
social reform. An unusual example can be seen in the
following episode from the autobiography of the Nair
reformer Mannathu Padmanabhan: It was around that
time that C. Krishna Pillai’s sixtieth birthday
(shashtyabdapurthi) was celebrated . . . On occasions
like these and for other religious ceremonies the practice
among the Nairs was to read the Ramayanam or the
Bhagavatam over a period of seven days. This was
known as the Saptahaparayanam. However, the social
reformer C. Krishna Pillai called a few people and some
of his friends some days before his birthday, lit a
ceremonial lamp (nilavilakku) and arranged the
recitation—instead of the Ramayanam—the biography of
that great negro leader Booker T. Washington. 2
The use of a modern autobiography from English in a
Hindu ritual recitation captures the paradoxical space of
life-writing here; Krishna Pillai’s time saw a growth in
genres of life-narration such as biography,
autobiography, the personal diary, and letters with a
biographical or autobiographical intent. 3 By recounting
individual lives, these forms contributed to the setting
up of new normative models for personal conduct and
community service; they also participated in the making
and modification of historical memory.
In 1939, at the age of seventy-five, K. Kannan Nair, a
well-known figure in the Nayar reform movement,
decided to write his autobiography. At the outset, he
reassured his readers about the sources on which he had
based his account: As advised by my teacher Sri
Selvanayakam in 1879 when I was a student of Class
Five—the Fifth Form of today—I took up the habit of
writing ‘my diary’ regularly from 1888. This practice
continued till 1932. My teacher felt that it would be a
good means of literary training on an easy subject
matter. On some occasions, conversations were also
recorded in the diary, in the respective languages. The
details included in this autobiography
(swajeevacharitram) for the period from 1888 to 1932
are summaries of those diary entries. Those for later
years have been written on the sole basis of memory. 4
Kannan Nair belonged to the first generation of the few
Malayalis who adopted the new habit of committing their
daily experiences to paper and ink. As his case shows,
the practice of diary writing, in its early days, was often
linked to new projects of education. In addition to its
usefulness as a mnemonic aid, the diary helped cultivate
literary competence and prompted a disciplined survey
of one’s everyday activities. Some of the new writers,
the poet Kumaran Asan for example, wrote their diaries
exclusively in English, while others like Kannan Nair used
primarily Malayalam. 5 These diaries were hardly a
space for intimate confessions: Asan’s mainly recorded
ordinary events from his daily life; others recorded
amusing incidents from real life to entertain themselves
and potential readers. 6 In the latter half of the
nineteenth century coherent autobiographical narratives
began to be written in Malayalam, leading to the
development of a distinctive genre in the twentieth
century. Like the novel, the autobiography too appeared
on the literary scene as a new expressive form
associated with modern public-print cultures.
I begin here by examining two early autobiographies in
Malayalam. One of them is a rudimentary
autobiography, or Atmakatha, written by a traditional
Brahmin scholar, Vaikkathu Pachu Moothathu (1815–83),
while the other is a text prepared for a public reading at
a religious function by an upper-caste convert to
Christianity, Yakob Ramavarman (1814–58). Pachu
Moothathu was a renowned Sanskrit scholar,
grammarian, poet, and Ayurvedic physician, and the
author of one of the first histories of modern Travancore.
7 His autobiographical narrative begins with an account

of his birth, an event that normally defies first-person

recollection. For Moothathu, however, this poses no
problem, as he begins by adopting an external,
supervening perspective: Written by Parameswaran,
according to remembrance . . . Birth on 25 Edavam in
the year 989 of the Kollam Era [Malayalam calendar; CE
1814] at the convergence of Suryavaram (Sunday),
Pooradam [Purva Ashadha— twentieth nakshatra in the
Indian astrological system], Aparadwiteeya (in the
Candrapaksham) [the second day of the lunar fortnight]
and Shubhranama nityayogam [based on calculations of
longitude of the sun and the moon] at Kuleeradi
drekkana samayam [based on divisional charts of the
zodiac sign] in Vaikkam Padinjaredathu house.
Upanayanam [ritual initiation to brahmacharya] in 999
Edavam. Samavarthanam [ritual conclusion of
brahmacharya] in Edavam 1000. Until then, due to
negligence, only the alphabet could be learnt. 8
The individual’s life is plotted on a larger astrological
map: appropriate, one might say, for an autobiographer
who was also a renowned astrologer. Astrology was an
integral part of Ayurvedic practice in Moothathu’s time:
both these systems treated the individual’s location in
time and place as vitally significant. It has been
suggested that astrology, in offering a partial
cosmology, ‘projects the individual into an open future;
but it is a future in which every individual has a
determinate place.’ 9 Moothathu’s autobiographical
account pointed to a truth that could not be articulated
solely in terms of the individual’s experiences. His
personal remembrance did open a gateway to the truth
about himself, but it would still need validation from a
source that exceeded individual—or even human—lives.
We see an instance of this in his account of an illness
that almost stole his life. While in his mid-twenties,
Moothathu was afflicted by an illness attributed to
vitiated blood (raktadosham). Various remedies were
tried and physicians consulted, to no avail. Finally, he
undertook a year-long routine of ritual austerities known
as valiya bhajanam (the major devotional offering) at
the Siva temple at Vaikom. Moothathu gives a detailed
account of this demanding routine: divided into nine
mandalas of forty days each, valiya bhajanam
prescribed elaborate austerities whose strictness forced
many devotees to abandon it midway. 10 Pachu
Moothathu successfully completed it but the ailment was
not entirely cured. On the contrary, he found himself
afflicted by the far more dangerous smallpox.

At a time when there was no smallpox anywhere

around, I contracted the disease in 1020, and it
became steadily worse. Those who saw me felt that
recovery was impossible, and I fell into an
unconscious state for three days. Some people
insinuated that my illness was the result of mistakes
I made while performing the valiya bhajana. On the
third night, in the fourth yamam, I saw the figure of
Shiva next to me, with a bright glow and with four
arms and the signs mentioned in the puranas. With
him was a short and beautiful young figure with a
stick in his hand, with the bhasmam (sacred ash),
the rudraksham beads and some ornaments. Even
now I feel blissful whenever I remember the joy I felt
while seeing these figures. He sprinkled some
bhasmam on me. Immediately I saw some horrifying
and ugly shapes running away from near me. Then
the figure faded away after sprinkling some
bhasmam around my bed . . . Since then, the illness
began to lose its intensity. 11

This is an exceptional moment of vindication for

Moothathu: an act of divine intervention confirms the
truthfulness and rectitude of his devotional practice
against public misperception. The mode of veridiction
invoked here has some tropological similarities to the
ordeal, where the purity of the person is revealed
through a difficult or unusual outcome in a trial. P.
Bhaskaran Unni has listed several instances of the
ordeal—such as satyapariksha (trial of truth),
jalapariksha (trial by water), agnipariksha (trial by fire),
and thukku pariksha (trial by weight) used in Kerala in
the nineteenth century. 12 The incidence of smallpox,
seen by others as punishment for laxity in the
performance of austerities, is presented in Moothathu’s
autobiography as a variant of the ordeal. The vision of
Siva and Subramanian remains private for the narrator,
but the abatement of the illness is for all to see.
However, for all its power, the moment of divine
intervention—as in the case of miraculous outcomes in
ordeals—reveals nothing new to the narrator about
himself; nor does it transform him in any significant way.
When Pachu Moothathu continues his narrative, it is to
speak again about journeys, patients, and
remunerations, about more deaths and marriages in the
family. It is about rise and fall, fortune and misfortune,
without integrating them into an account of his own
evolution or growth. Moothathu’s account of his ordinary
business of life conveys a strong sense of repetitiveness
at the level of the everyday, even though this allows for
individuated variations. The places one travels to are
different, the illnesses, the patients, the students—all
are different; yet they turn out to be minor variations
when mapped on a deeper plane of time, that of
planetary positions and stages in a person’s life. The
temporal scheme, which renders human life intelligible,
remains outside the purview of human action and
reflection. We must, however, be wary of seeing in this a
simple denial of human agency. Divine intervention, as
we saw, appeared in Moothathu’s narrative precisely to
vindicate the human agent. An astrological or religious
explanation of events may enable or endorse a
particular way of performing actions in the world. The
encounter with the divine in an exceptional moment of
oneiric veridiction, however, does not mark in
Moothathu’s account any significant personal
transformation or any substantial alteration of his
relations to the world.
 However, by the time Moothathu was writing his
autobiographical text, efforts were already being made
in Malayalam to write the story of one’s life as a
narrative of transformation. This strand appeared
prominently in narratives of conversion to Christianity. In
fact, the earliest modern autobiography in Malayalam is
an account of his conversion by Yakob Ramavarman,
written in 1856, published first in the journal
Keralopakari in 1874, and subsequently printed as a
book in 1879 by the Basel Mission Press in Tellicherry 13
Ramavarman’s autobiographical account was written for
a public reading on the occasion of his hastarpanam
(ordination as a preacher) in 1856. 14 Samuel Hebich
and Hermann Gundert, the most prominent figures of
the Basel mission, were present on the occasion. 15
Ramavarman’s story finds mention in biographies of
Samuel Hebich who was probably the most active
missionary at work among the poor and in their
conversion. 16 Gundert’s biography, published by the
Basel Mission, speaks of Ramavarman as one of the few
converts of Gundert whose subsequent life as a Christian
was a matter of joy for him. 17
Ramavarman was the son of the Raja of Cochin, Veera
Kerala Maharaja. He received a Sanskrit education as a
child and soon demonstrated his aptitude for learning by
mastering several kavyas and lessons in astrology at a
very young age. His devotion to the Hindu gods was,
however, shaken by a theft from the Trippunithura
temple, seemingly by none other than the priest, who
disappeared with precious ornaments used for
decorating the idol. Another theft—this time that of the
family idol used for worship by Ramavarman’s father—
conclusively destroyed his faith in idol worship: ‘the idol
is not God, it is a mere doll, bereft of life and sense.’ 18
Disengagement from idol worship coincided in
Ramavarman’s narrative with his encounter with a new
kind of sacred object, the Gospel. Gifted a copy of the
Gospels he was, despite his sense of wonder at seeing a
printed book in Malayalam for the first time, put off by
the unfamiliar names used in the Biblical narrative. 19
There is also at this time an interesting change in
Ramavarman’s taste in reading—he avidly turns to the
treatises on the erotic, to Kamasastram. This is
accompanied by a reckless amoral posturing in everyday
life: ‘I should obtain whatever takes my fancy; this is the
truepurushartha.’ 20 However, this new faith—or the lack
of it—also receives a jolt: death appears as a frightening
spectacle before Ramavarman to shake him out of the
certitudes of sensual indulgence. The premature death
and agony of the last moments of his young niece come
to him as a wake-up call. Using the vocabulary of the
Hindu puranas, he begins thinking about the four
hundred hells in which he will languish after his death.
Around this time he is given a second copy of the
Gospel. He opens himself to this unfamiliar narrative,
largely in response to the favourable impression made
on him by the missionaries and their message: he
identifies readily with their criticism of idol worship.
A desire for conversion to Christianity begins to take
root in Ramavarman’s heart through a process of
identification. Once, listening to a sermon on Isaiah, 53
—‘he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for
the transgressors’—he begins to feel that the verse is
addressed to him: ‘It showed me clearly that I was that
transgressor, that Jesus Christ prayed for me, that he
continues to pray for me still, and that he offers eternal
salvation to those who believe in him.’ 21 Instances of
the trial, similar to the one encountered in Pachu
Moothathu’s narrative, follow: a boat which carries
Ramavarman is about to capsize and stabilizes upon his
promise to convert; a painful abscess in his stomach is
healed on praying to Christ. These events, protecting
and binding the subject in promises of faith, lead to the
moment of baptism, the final relinquishing of ties with
family and community, and the adoption of a new way of
life.
The acts of conversion and baptism, however, are not
the telos towards which Ramavarman’s narrative moves;
they mark only the midpoint. There are further trials
before he reaches the moment of hastarpanam, the
occasion that the autobiography bears witness to. These
new trials are primarily about the subject’s conscience,
indicating the emergence of a new kind of self-
relationship. The silent prayer as an inner practice is a
crucial site where this is explored: At that time I neither
knew nor had heard of praying by heart. Since I was not
satisfied with reading the ordinary prayer book and the
book of family prayer printed at Kottayam, I talked to my
friend Joseph Fenn about this. He told me that God looks
not at the book but at one’s heart. I could look at the
prayer book when I go to the church, like everybody
else. I began following this advice from then on, and
began feeling much happier about it. 22
The discovery of prayer by heart took time: as on earlier
occasions of self-transformation, it alters the relations in
which the subject is embedded. Ramavarman’s narrative
speaks about a sin committed by him while living in
Belgaum: ‘At this time I committed a grave sin
(kathinamaya oru thettu vannu).’ The syntax of the
Malayalam is interesting: a literal translation would read
‘a grave wrong came to me’. The subject is implicated in
a mode of passivity, which is carried through in the
ensuing passage: All of a sudden I became like a
madman. Recalling that I had not been through such
misery in the past ten years, I pleaded remorsefully
before God, sweating and shivering, but I did not get any
peace or joy. A few days later, when the white
missionaries (sayippanmar) came to know and asked me
about this, I boldly contradicted them. When they asked
me to leave, I left with much pride and anger. Although
some enemies of the mission asked me to stay, I did not
relent, on account of my shame and anger. 23
Madness, misery, remorse, shame, and anger: these are
the initial affective stations on Ramavarman’s path
towards the act of self-re-velation, which marks the
climax of his narrative. Among these, shame occupies a
crucial position, for it works as the trigger or cause of
the other affects. Shame has a crucial relationship to
visibility and exposure. It has been regarded as an
experience of improper exposure where the subject
wishes to escape from the domain of visibility but is
unable to. As we saw in chapter 1, Levinas considered
shame as arising ‘from the radical impossibility of
feeling from oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably
binding presence of the I to itself’. 24
This reading of shame is important for Ramavarman’s
autobiographical account as the trope of shame works
within an ensemble of acts of exposure. It was some
years later, in 1847, that Ramavarman confessed his sin
and opened his heart to a new relationship with God and
himself. This crucial incident is presented over two
moments. At a sermon, some members of the
congregation publicly confessed their sins. Ramavarman
was deeply affected by this and retired to the
missionary’s room to weep in solitude. When he
returned to the congregation he heard a voice within,
admonishing him: ‘You tough one, open your heart too!’
In the evening he made a public confession before the
congregation, though remaining silent about the shame-
ful incident in Belgaum.
 Next Sunday when I was sitting in the church and
listening to the sermon, I felt something hitting me in
the heart like a fireball. In a moment, it burned my
entire heart down. It descended to my bones and
burned them down. My entire body began glowing in
the fire and a fountain started all on its own from my
eyes. Certain that this was the fire of hell, I wailed
aloud and decided to vomit the poison inside me.
However, I desisted thinking that this would interrupt
the sermon. After the sermon . . . I went to lunch and
began eating but unable to bear it any more I rushed
towards Hebich Sayippu with unwashed hands and
cried aloud: I am being destroyed; in Belgaum I
committed such and such a sin; when they asked me
I got angry and lied. I also spoke about many other
sins which came to my memory then. God opened
my eyes immediately: I saw for myself Jesus on the
cross in Golgotha, shedding his precious blood for
me through his five wounds. He granted me grace to
throw my burden beneath his cross and to bathe in
his stream and to wear his shroud. 25

This experience of self-dissolution serves as the true

moment of initiation into the practice of prayer by heart,
which appears here as an unseating of the heart from its
habits, a moment of dramatic opening to the divine in an
unabashed act of public self-exposure. The state of
being riveted to oneself inescapably in oppressive self-
exposure is turned into the positive act of public
confession.
In Ramavarman’s autobiographical narrative several
concentric circles of self-transformation lead to this final
moment of acknowledging one’s past and freeing
oneself from it. Each circle involves the appearance of a
new semiological object, an attempt to come to terms
with it through a new mode of reading, and then finally a
disavowal of the object in favour of a more expansive
horizon. This took the form of learning the Hindu
puranas, rejecting idol worship, reluctantly reading the
Gospels, and finally, disavowing the exterior experience
of reading for an infinite and dramatic opening of the
heart. Autobiography, for Ramavarman, is the record of
these moments of rupture, which are also the points of
new beginnings.
I have referred to the autobiographical accounts of
Pachu Moothathu and Yakob Ramavarman to indicate
two idioms of speaking about the self available in
autobiographical writing in Kerala at the turn of the
nineteenth century. Both accommodated personal and
everyday experiences within a framework of larger,
divine coherence. For Moothathu, the personal and the
cosmological in their momentary encounter left each
other largely unaltered. Ramavarman was concerned
precisely with the nature of this encounter and the
irreversible transformation it effected on him. The divine
might be manifested in miracles in both narratives, but
Ramavarman’s aim was to measure himself against his
experiential knowledge and examine the mark it left on
his heart. The realm of the inner, hidden from others and
at times even from oneself, is produced through
strategies of concealment and confession: the ‘grave
fault’ at Belgaum both refuses and incites speech. The
public, autobiographical narrative read out on the
occasion of Ramavarman’s ordination is not the same as
the act of confession: we do not know the nature of the
grave sin committed at Belgaum from Ramavarman’s
account. The autobiography records his acts of
confession and redemption rather than the primary
experience of sin. The theme of the autobiographical
narrative is an interior drama—that of concealing
sinfulness and the final letting go which alters his
relationship with truth and God.
These personal narratives of Pachu Moothathu and
Ramavarman show different examples of the
autobiographical truth-game. Though both invoke the
divine as the ultimate source of veridiction,
Ramavarman’s account converts the experience into a
rupture in the fabric of the subject. Stable structures of
subjectivity are torn apart, and it is in destruction that
the new truth of the subject is apprehended. This is
mirrored in Ramavarman’s almost involuntary act of self-
articulation, the public, theatrical ritual of confession.
Unlike Pachu Moothathu’s narrative of continuity
countersigned by the divine, Ramavarman’s
autobiography seeks to develop a narrative frame for
the temporal experience of rupture. Life is sliced
irremediably into a past and a present by the event of
interruption.
The experience of a self-transforming moment of
rupture reappears in the autobiographies discussed
below. The pivotal event, though, no longer assumes
forms of divine veridiction. Ruptured personal lives
reveal, hereafter, a historical space—the zone of
intersection of private experience and processes of
social change.

II
I look closely now at two texts which conceive the
autobiographer’s task in relation to experiences of
historical and social change. Both were written by
Nambutiri Brahmins. Our first author, Kanippayyur
Sankaran Namboodiripad (1891–1981), was born in a
renowned and wealthy Nambutiri household in
Kunnamkulam near Trissur. A well-known Sanskrit
scholar and astrologer, Kanippayyur authored a Sanskrit
—Malayalam dictionary and texts on traditional
conceptions of architecture and the rituals of the
Nambutiris. He also wrote several books on Kerala’s
history as well as a three-volume autobiography entitled
Ente Smaranakal (My Reminiscences). V.T. Bhattatirippad
(1896–1982), our second author, was probably the most
prominent leader of the Nambutiri reform movement in
Kerala. He was born in Mezhathur in Ponnani. Severe
financial difficulties made V.T. (as he is popularly known)
take on work as a priest in a temple near Shoranur in
1913; eventually, through much hard work, he also
managed to get himself a further education. He became
active as the leader of a radical youth faction within the
Nambutiri social movement in the 1920s. V.T. appears as
a major figure in the narrative of critical modernity in
Kerala, which traces its origins to social-reform
movements and evolves towards nationalist and the left-
secular forms of cultural politics in the state. He wrote
several well-known stories and essays, a historically
significant reform play, and a series of autobiographical
texts. His self-narratives, especially the first volume,
Kannirum Kinavum (Tears and Dreams, 1972), has
acquired canonical status in discussions of the
autobiographical genre in Malayalam.
In spite of their shared caste and regional locations, it
is difficult to think of two more contrasting authors or
autobiographical narratives: while Kanippayyur appears
as a traditionalist who justified caste differentiation and
untouchability in terms of an earlier system of societal
harmony, V.T. occupies an emblematic position within
movements which challenged and transformed orthodox
practices. These differences appear symptomatically in
the way they saw their respective autobiographical
projects. Both begin by posing a curious problem—the
difficulty of narrating the life of a Nambutiri Brahmin.
Kanippayyur’s Ente Smaranakal locates this in the
ordinariness and monotony of his own everyday life:
Shri. Kuttippuzha Krishna Pillai demanded that I write my
autobiography. I felt like laughing. Would anyone like to
read autobiographies by ordinary people and not by
great personages? . . . Therefore, I wrote in my reply to
him: ‘It is not difficult in the least to write my life history.
Bathed in the morning, had breakfast, lunch, a coffee in
the afternoon, and dinner at night, slept: now the history
of a day is complete. If you change the date, and write
‘ditto’, the history of the following day is done. I am now
sixty-eight years old. If you write down the dates in all
these years and a ditto against each of them, my life
history will be complete. However, I do not have the
audacity to publish this. If some friends are ready to
print and circulate it, I will happily give away the
copyright for free.’ 26
V.T. resorts to a similar image at the outset of
Kannirum Kinavum. It is not the reassuring predictability
of everyday life, but the monotony of the drab,
uncreative life of Nambutiris that poses a problem for
life-writing: it was all too easy to narrate the life of a
Brahmin, especially an Apphan Nambutiri. The term
‘Apphan’ referred to younger male members of a
Nambutiri family, who, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, were not entitled to marry within the caste and
inherit family property. The ease of narrating their lives
also meant that the project was not worthy of effort:
There is no job easier than writing the biography or the
autobiography of an Apphan Nambutiri who lived half a
century ago. Born on such and such a day of such and
such a year under such and such a star (nakshatram).
Named Vasudevan, but was nicknamed ‘Ittyasu’ at
home. At an aus-picious moment, priesthood hunted him
down, opened his mouth and inscribed with the ritual
stylus the fifty-one letters of the alphabet on his tongue.
Opened the rusty door to knowledge and made him
enter. There he passed inside a golden cow
(hiranyagarbham) called upanayanam (the ritual of
wearing the sacred thread) and transformed into a
brahmachari. 27
V.T. goes on to sketch further landmarks of a typical life:
tasteless Vedic training, the ritual samavarthanam that
marks its conclusion, a faint whiff of freedom, nocturnal
love relationships, meaningless years of adult life, then
death. ‘A Nambutiri’s life is so uneventful that no author
can really stretch it beyond half a page.’ 28
We can see similarities between Moothathu’s account
of his life and V.T.’s poignant caricature. The
repetitiveness of the traditional Nambutiri way of life,
which we saw in Moothathu’s summary account of his
childhood, made it difficult to stretch a Nambutiri’s life
narrative beyond a paragraph. The avowal of difficulty
was not a constraint on the project of autobiography; in
fact, it functioned as the essential productive condition
of self-narration for Kanippayyur and V.T. Both wrote
voluminously in the mode of self-narration. The
autobiographical gesture of these writers comprises
moves that turn the sense of impossibility into a ruse for
autobiographization.
For Kanippayyur, the principal contrast is between
extraordinary persons—makers of history—and ordinary
people such as himself whose lives do not merit public
narration. Writing up one’s life to provide an account of
well-known events in the past has been most common
among people who played an active role in public life.
Prominent bureaucrats, political leaders, and social
reformers have justified their autobiographies in this
vein. 29 Kanippayyur, however, overcame these hurdles
posed by his unremarkable life: he wrote three volumes
of his memoirs and published them from a press of his
own, the Panchangam Book Depot. His strategy was to
turn the uneventfulness of his individual life into the
space for a different kind of memory-work.
Kanippayyur’s lifetime had been witness to enormous
‘changes and transformations . . . in the lives of the
Malayalis—especially the Hindus, the upper castes in
particular, and more specifically the Nambutiris.’ This
meant that ‘almost everyone below the age of forty or
forty-five’ had no idea how their predecessors lived. The
older generation, along with the Kerala they inhabited,
would soon disappear from collective memory, making it
necessary to ‘record, at least as history, those practices
and traditions and the changes that happened to them.’
30

It is this project of historical documentation that brings

Kanippayyur back to the possibility of an autobiography.
‘If I write my life story, some of these historical facts
may be brought into it. And, writing in an
autobiographical mode will be more convenient for
describing them adequately.’ 31 Nonetheless,
Kanippayyur felt that his humbler labour of
documentation should keep its distance from the grand
aspirations of nationalist autobiographies; he decided
not to use the title ‘Autobiography’ and chose ‘My
Reminiscences’ (Ente Smaranakal) instead. 32 Studies of
nationalist autobiographies in the colonial world have
sometimes seen an allegorical relationship between the
individual and the emerging nation, often with a
paradigm of progress and development linking the two.
33 Kanippayyur’s unremarkable life did not claim such

parallels; but he had his own perspective on the times of

change that he had lived through.
 The basic compositional impulse in Ente Smaranakal is
descriptive rather than narrative; accounts of rituals,
caste practices, objects of everyday use, attire, and
jewellery fill its three volumes. Documenting practices
ranging from the gesture with which a Nayar greeted a
Nambutiri to the details of the ritual trial of Nambutiri
women charged with adultery, Ente Smaranakal has
become, over the years, a standard reference in
discussions of nineteenth-century Kerala. Kanippayyur’s
descriptions are often accompanied by photographs or
drawings. Many of the pictures, like those that
accompany colonial ethnographic texts, have a staged
quality to them: people from the present are dressed up
in anachronistic attire to play the role of ‘proxy-
witnesses’ from a lost world. Autobiography is turned
into an ‘auto-ethnography’ of the past, and the life of
the author-subject, bereft of interest or significance in its
own right, is reconfigured as the site of a historical
rupture.
The witness, as a character, observes himself: not in
his uniqueness, but in his community, in his immersion
and engagement in the world. This seemingly modest
move of auto-witnessing is not for the great heroes who
make history: the passion for history belongs to the
ordinary. These gestures of humility may appear odd in
Kanippayyur, the famous head of a grand Brahmin
family renowned for its riches and scholarship. However,
non-uniqueness grounds the subject even more firmly in
the domain of tradition. In fact, for Kanippayyur, the less
unique you are, the greater your access to the truths
and the authority of tradition, especially at a time when
those truths are changing. The autobiographer’s task is
to write a narrative of the non-unique: to make his life
the object of an auto-ethnographic description. 34
 Unlike the usual ethnographer, Kanippayyur does not
refer to a present, but to a world which has almost
disappeared, and which can only be re-presented
through the images of his memory, sometimes
laboriously reconstructed in photographs and drawings.
The photographs used in Kanippayyur’s text show
people wearing ornaments or attire no longer worn by
later generations or enacting gestures or simulating
customs and clothing from an earlier time. These are
masquerades of the past, with the naturalism of the
photograph conferring a sense of immediacy on the
simulated postures of the figures represented. They
serve as illustrations, but also claim a greater
approximation to the ethnographic register by virtue of
their ‘reality effect’.
Kanippayyur’s autobiography is made possible by the
transformation of the ordinary details of his life and
world into elements of a historical discourse. Not
accidentally, his historical texts repeat the same
inaugural gesture as his autobiographies. His four-
volume book on early Kerala history, Aryanmarude
Kutiyettam (The Aryan Immigration), has this to say
while describing the details of everyday life in a
Nambutiri house: What is discussed in the first eleven
chapters of this book (all except the last two chapters)
has not yet entirely become history. I have been familiar
with most of these things from my youth. Not only the
heads of families, but also those belonging to Sudra
castes like the Nayars who served in Nambutiri
households, the people of the villages, and members of
prominent Nayar taravads were all familiar with these. If
I had set out to write about them at that time, it would
have appeared foolish. This is because these matters
were considered mere everyday activities at that time;
they had not become history. ‘Got up in the morning,
brushed one’s teeth and bathed, had breakfast.
Maidservants swept and swabbed the floors, and
cleaned the courtyard. Menservants cut firewood’—does
anyone write these everyday occurrences down? Is there
any need to do that? Would it not appear foolish if one
did this? 35
Both autobiography and history arise out of a break in
time, a fading away of custom and practice. For a
practice to become history, contemporary society has to
begin to forget it; its reappearance, or reminding, will
then be accompanied by a sense of unfamiliarity and
wonder. ‘What happened here?’, Kanippayyur asks when
he begins his self-narrative, inquiring into the nature of
the event that made it necessary. World wars, natural
calamities, epidemics—no such spectacular event took
place in Kerala; then, what was the momentous event
that came to pass?

The response to this question is interesting. Human

beings began to interact with one another as man
and man rather than like men and animals (e.g.
temple entry). Growing or removing one’s hair and
beard became matters of personal preference in
which others could not interfere (e.g. the cutting of
the kuduma or the customary tuft of hair indicative
of caste). The Government stopped the practice of
preventing women from entering public places if
they had covered their breasts (the wearing of
blouses) . . . Are these what we call revolution! . . .
On closer examination, these revolutions turn into
storms in a teacup! People differ from each other in
their views as in their looks. The world has immense
variety. That is all we can say. 36

Kanippayyur discounts the magnitude of the

transformation, even as he seems to endorse the
legitimacy of the changes. His narrative does not
propose a simple anti-reformist subject; his aim is to
inhabit the past through recollection, while accepting the
changes that brought in his own era.
Historical change is not merely a break in custom and
practice, in lived experience; it is also the site of a
production: that of a new relationship to one’s past, a
new mode of remembrance tinged with wonder, the
experience of new sorts of emotions. ‘Now I shall
describe the daily routine of Nambutiri women folk at
that time,’ Kanippayyur announces, ‘not only strangers
but even young Nambutiri women and girls will be struck
with wonder if they listen to this.’ 37 However, wonder
does not belong solely to the onlooker from the modern
world: within the foreign territory of the past too, there is
space for the marvellous. This arises in relation to the
new objects encountered in the past for the first time.
‘At that time travelling on a bicycle was more dignified
than travelling in a car nowadays. People used to feel
such wonder and respect for it. It must have been
difficult to ride bicycles then. [Unni Raja] used to
struggle for breath after getting off his bicycle. However,
the bicycle was a rare and wonderful vehicle and
inspired too much respect to make one notice that
difficulty.’ 38 These dual senses of wonder, one emerging
from the past and moving towards its future (which is
the present of writing) and the other coming out of the
present and gazing at a past that one never lived (as in
the case of the younger generation), are the coordinates
of temporal experience in Kanippayyur’s theatre of
historical reminiscence.
The wonder felt by the subject of his autobiography
when he meets modern objects is mirrored in another
emotion that appears several times as its structural
counterpart—a feeling of unease (vallayma). Novelty,
instead of leading the subject to a state of pleasure, can
also threaten his sense of stability. While innovations in
the material realm offer the experience of wonder to
Kanippayyur, transformations in the social realm—in
caste practices—are recognized as a source of deep
unease: [It was in a friend’s house that] I saw for the
first time Nayar women wearing blouses (ravukka) while
working in a Brahmin household . . . I have not forgotten
the unease (vallayma) I felt then. It was similar to what I
felt later when I saw young Nayar men and Nambutiris
with cropped hair, without the traditional tuft (kuduma).
I had felt as if all this was an insult to us . . . It is normal
to feel a sense of discomfort or displeasure when you
see unfamiliar practices for the first time. Would anyone
agree to people entering a temple for worship wearing
trousers and coats and hats? 39
The opening of Ente Smaranakal had attributed a sort of
natural legitimacy to many of the changes in customs,
including the wearing of blouses. However, the rational
acceptance of change comes up against a difficulty in
the affective sphere: change may appear natural to
reason but may still remain unacceptable in the light of
what is felt as natural by virtue of habit. The sense of
unease arises from an unconscious, embodied realm of
memory, and experiences innovation as an ‘insult to us’.
Here the individual autobiographer merges into a
collective: The ‘we’ of Kanippayyur cannot be defined in
the abstract as custodians of tradition; it refers more
specifically to the self-identity of the Nambutiri Brahmin.
Events that announce modern transformations in
histories of Kerala—changes in legislation and
institutions, and the emergence of community
organizations and political parties—are not directly
discussed in Kanippayyur’s text. Instead, Ente
Smaranakal teems with descriptions of customs, rituals,
and objects of use in the past. These also provide silent
testimony to an empty space in the present world
created by the disappearance of all that is described.
This sense of emptiness is constantly matched by the
irremediable promiscuity of modern spaces: Kanippayyur
finds new multitudes of people and things crowding into
the world. He notices this newness at times with
fascination; but they are not the proper objects that he
wishes to describe and document. 40 ‘Nostalgia’ may be
too simple a word for his attitude, if it is understood as a
longing to return to the past and occupy a space that
the work of time has made unavailable. Kanippayyur
saw transformation as inevitable. In fact, he took
advantage of opportunities created by modernity, as his
ventures in printing and publishing clearly indicate.
What preoccupies this Nambutiri Brahmin in changing
times is a problem of unredeemed debt in contemporary
memory. The principles of coherence that shaped the old
world, he feels, are all too easily forgotten; what appears
to the present as absurd and unjust belonged to a
coherent, meaningful world in the past. Kanippayyur’s
aim is to represent the past world of Kerala from the
perspective of an insider.
This raises a question of right: who is entitled to give
voice to shared historical memory? When Kanippayyur
wrote his autobiography, a powerful critique of
Nambutiri dominance in Kerala was being made by
scholars such as Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai. 41 In a series
of publications, Elamkulam claimed that the Nambutiris,
who came from outside Kerala, were responsible for
instituting an inegalitarian and exploitative caste society
in the region. After acquiring considerable economic and
effective political power by the fourteenth century,
Elamkulam argued, they imposed new practices that
allowed them sexual access to women from non-
Brahmin upper castes. These contentions must be seen
in the context of shifts in power relations between
communities. From the late nineteenth century, the
practice of sambandham (customary marital alliance)
between Nambutiri men and Nayar women had become
a flashpoint in discourses of reform. 42 Nayar social
reformers, advocating a shift from a matrilineal to a
patrilineal form of inheritance, had sought a redefinition
of the sexual mores of their community, and rejected
sambandham arrangements with the Nambutiris as
primitive, claiming that a morally degenerate Nambutiri
caste had imposed such ‘uncivilized’ practices on other
castes in Kerala. From the 1920s, the Nambutiri reform
movement also began criticizing sambandham, seeking
to limit marital relations to one’s own caste. Although
the Nambutiri and Nayar communities moved to new
arrangements for marriage and inheritance by the
middle of the twentieth century, making sambandham a
thing of the past, the issue continued to possess much
symbolic value in the historical imagination of Malayalis.
Elamkulam, in his studies of medieval Malayalam
literature, noted a preponderance of erotic versification
and attributed this to the moral turpitude of the
dominant caste, the Nambutiris. 43
For Kanippayyur, Elamkulam’s criticisms were
symptoms of a modern inability for historical
understanding. The normative frames of the present
impeded entry into the past on its own terms.
Kanippayyur’s autobiography and his historical accounts
were aimed at remedying this problem and establishing
an alliance between autobiography and the writing of
history. In one of his volumes on Kerala’s history,
Kanippayyur proposed an analogy between history and
biography: Generally speaking, the biography of an
individual is written in order to provide information . . .
on his qualities, how he came to acquire them, what
sorts of difficulties he encountered, and how he
overcame them. Therefore, the task of writing a person’s
biography is usually entrusted to friends who have
affection and esteem for him and had opportunities to
interact closely or live with him . . . Nobody would
appoint as biographer an enemy who tries to humiliate
and malign his protagonist . . . Now let us examine those
who have set out to write a history of Kerala . . . The
people of Kerala have few everyday practices that are
not linked to religion. An accurate history of Kerala, then,
can only be written by those who have seen the core of
these rituals and practices, and who—even if they do not
hold these in respect—are not hostile towards them. In
this light, all will agree that many of the educated
Nayars are not qualified to write a history of Kerala. 44
History, therefore, is like the biography of a society, and
the best biographers are those who know their
protagonists from the closest proximity. Biographies are
here judged from the vantage point of autobiography
where external observation and self-perception merge.
The ideal biography should in this view coincide in
content and tone with the autobiographical mode.
Kerala’s history is best written by the protagonists of
Kerala’s social past, since they alone possess the
insider’s knowledge of the principles of coherence that
shaped caste society in Kerala. In Kanippayyur’s view
this position belongs solely to Nambutiri Brahmins.
This clarifies for us how Kanippayyur could turn his
personal autobiographical project into another sort of
life-narrative: his new project was to write the biography
of the society which he had lived in and known from
within, and which he thought he could describe
intimately as an insider. Thus, the biographical and the
autobiographical referred to distinct but interrelated
levels of authorship: the biographer Kanippayyur was a
Nambutiri from the Kerala of the past; as an
autobiographer, he was the subject of an unremarkable
personal life. The author-subject of Ente Smaranakal was
located at the point where these two planes intersected.
In order to write an autobiography, Kanippayyur had to
assume the roles of biographer and obituarist in relation
to Kerala’s past. This explains the strand of mourning
that runs through his text. However, it moves alongside
a less prominent narrative of his personal enchantment
with new artefacts and technologies. A complex
intermingling of wonder and discomfiture marks the
affective landscape of Ente Smaranakal.
On rare occasions, intimate experiences make a
hesitant entry into this narrative, as when Kanippayyur
comments on his first sambandham to a lady from the
royal family of Kochi. 45 Life at her Kovilakam in
Trippunithura afforded him new comforts, as also
opportunities to study Sanskrit and English. However,
Kanippayyur also felt a growing disparity between this
new life and his own ways (sampradayam), leading him
eventually to end the relationship and leave
Trippunithura. In a rare personal vein, he notes his sense
of pain at ending the sambandham, there having been
no conflict between him and his spouse; in fact, they
were very fond of each other. Intimate personal grief
appears fleetingly as a minor detail in a story of
changing life practices. Although this is entirely in tune
with Kanippayyur’s narrative principles, it is important to
note that the displacement of the personal by the
historical, promised by him in the Preface, is never final;
a new sense of the personal, which derives its value
from the ‘historicality’ of one’s experience, is produced
by his narrative. This is different from the ‘historical’
interest possessed by the autobiographies of great
national leaders.
Yet, interestingly, Kanippayyur’s attempt at countering
the amnesia of modern historical consciousness led him
to new forms of analysis. He argued that two levels of
difference were to be taken into account in dealing with
caste: one is the level of customary nomenclature—the
categories of caste (jati) differentiation that have come
down to our times through history. These categories, in
Kanippayyur’s opinion, have no natural validity. There is
another level, though, where distinctions are ‘natural’—
this is the level of racial (vargam) difference. The
distinction between the Aryan, the Dravidian, and the
Mongoloid racial types is for him an instance of natural
difference. An anthropologist, says Kanippayyur, will not
be able to differentiate between an Ezhava and a Nayar,
but he can perceive a clear natural distinction between a
person of Aryan racial stock, such as a Nambutiri
Brahmin, and a person of Dravidian stock. Races are
primordial, natural, and indestructible; ‘castes are
imaginary creations; they can also be destroyed through
imaginary activity.’ 46
Kanippayyur equates race (vargam) with varna, as
mentioned in the Gita and the smrtis. He argues that
there are only four races in Kerala, in spite of the
contemporary differentiation of Malayalis into a large
number of castes: they are the Aryans, Nagas, Ezhavas,
and Adivasis. The first three groups—all except the
Adivasis (the indigenous tribes)—are immigrants: they
have come in from outside the region. Kanippayyur
argues that while Brahmins are undoubtedly the Aryan
immigrants, the Nayars, the carpenters, the blacksmiths,
and some of the temple-dependent castes
(Ambalavasis) belong to the Naga race brought to Kerala
by the Nambutiris as their attendants during their
immigration. Ezhavas are later immigrants from Ceylon
who entered Kerala after the Aryan settlements and the
new political system were well established. 47 Nagas,
according to Kanippayyur, include castes that occupy
widely varied positions of status in contemporary Kerala.
He explains this variation by the degree of mixture of
Aryan blood in various castes, which in turn is referred to
the polyandrous marital practices of the early Nagas. A
contemporary anthropologist, Kanippayyur argues, will
place all these castes in the same racial category. In
fact, he cites the Malabar Gazetteer and Thurston’s
Castes and Tribes of Southern India to argue that it has
become difficult to distinguish in physical terms the
Nambutiris from those of the Naga race who intermarry
only with the Nambutiris. The rich admixture of Aryan
blood in these castes marks them apart from the
Dravidian population of the Eastern districts. 48 In his
Nayanmarude Purvacaritram (The Early History of the
Nayars), Kanippayyur states this argument in even
stronger terms: ‘What is the present status of [the
Nayars]? Nowadays, “Nayars” has come to signify
“Keralites” and “Keralites” means “Nayars”. If we think
about it, [we can see that] the governance of Kerala
takes place largely according to their interests . . . The
Nayars reached this high status solely because of their
racial mixture (vargasankalanam) with the Nambutiris.’
49 Kanippayyur now makes an interesting move by

interrogating the cultural capital of various castes in

Kerala. He compiles a ‘census’ of well-known writers
from different castes between 500 and 1087 me (ce
1325–1912) and plots them against caste groups
arranged according to their varying distance from pure
Aryan stock, ranging from the Ezhavas who have no
Aryan admixture to the Nayars, Ambalavasis (temple
castes), and Kshatriyas, in an ascending order of Aryan
hybridization. 50 The results range from 2 writers for
every 100,000 people for Ezhavas, to 10 in the case of
Nayars, 688 for Ambalavasis, and 786 for Kshatriyas.
These figures, Kanippayyur claims, demonstrate the
predominance of the Aryan element in the cultural
realm. 51
In this apparently naturalizing argument, Kanippayyur
seems to move away from his earlier account of caste as
a harmonious system of mutual dependence. His own
construction of caste categories reflects typically
modern tendencies that had a major role in the
production and consolidation of caste identities in India
—ethnography, anthropometry, and census as a system
of enumeration of populations. Studies in recent
decades, beginning with the work of Bernard Cohn, have
investigated the role of technologies of colonial
governmentality in producing modern caste and
community identities. 52 In fact, the transformation from
caste as hierarchy and interdependence to caste as
identity cannot be understood without reference to
these technologies and their impact. In the context of
the Nambutiris of Kerala, a clear example of
anthropometric research can be found in a monograph
published by Fred Fawcett in 1900. Using measurements
of the nasal index, Fawcett argued that the Nambutiri
Brahmins of Kerala are the clearest approximation to the
Aryan racial type to be found in southern India: ‘he is
perhaps, as his measures seem to prove, the truest
Aryan in Southern India, and not only physically, but in
his customs, habits, ceremonies, which are so welded
into him that forsake them he cannot if he would.’ 53
Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India also
combined an ethnographic account of the customs of
various castes with anthropometric information.
 Kanippayyur’s reliance on a ‘census’ of literary authors
is no less modern. Census categories and data became
very important instruments in the campaigns mounted
by non-Brahminical castes in Kerala from the early
twentieth century for adequate representation in
government employment and access to education.
Following submission of the Malayali Memorial to the
Travancore Government in 1891, census data was used
by social groups for grounding their claims. Ezhava
campaigners like Dr Palpu, as we have seen early in this
book, drew on census reports for evidence of official
neglect and upper-caste prejudice. 54 Kanippayyur’s
histories belong, in spite of their apparent celebration of
premodern social coherence, to the very sites of
negotiation of modern caste identities.
What then is the relationship between these two
registers in Kanippayyur’s narratives of selfhood and
memory? Is Ente Smaranakal meant to provide an
affective supplement to the arguments of Kanip-payyur’s
historical narratives? We need to take full cognizance, of
course, of the complex nature of a supplementarity that
always exceeds its brief, The narrative of Ente
Smaranakal produces locations and spaces of an
impossible inhabitation. In the real world they bear the
marks of irreversible present-day usage that transforms
inhabitation into acts of possession, access, and
appropriation, tainted irremediably by ways of
classifying, managing, and organizing castes as modern
social groups. It is only in the recollected life of these
spaces and events that Kanippayyur can hope to carve
out a space for caste as ethos, the affective coherence
of which he had to sacrifice in his historical speculations.
The tensions between these two idioms animate
Kanippayyur’s memory project in Ente Smaranakal and
confer on it a rare poignancy. Its narrator—
autobiographer and historian at the same time—is
divided between the unselfconscious habitus of an old
world of caste practices and new narrativizable caste
identities. The task that Ente Smaranakal sets itself,
without stating this explicitly, is to bring the former into
the world of narration without shame and self-
consciousness. Nonetheless, the passage between the
two worlds appears in the text in affective flashes of
wonder and discomfiture, in losses that cannot be
adequately acknowledged and conflicts that sit ill at
ease with harmony and conviviality.

III
Unlike Kanippayyur, V.T. Bhattatiripad embraced the
project of autobiography with readiness: the
transformations over the past halfcentury had, in his
view, given Nambutiri Brahmins unique personal lives to
narrate. V.T.’s autobiographies celebrate this change as
a shift from the meaningless monotonous rhythms of an
impoverished life to a temporality of newness and
vibrancy. From decay and repetition to purposiveness
and innovation: Kannirum Kinavum (Tears and Dreams),
his first major self-narrative, was structured along these
coordinates. V.T. placed at the centre of his story a
vignette saturated with affect. It recounted his first
encounter with alphabetic writing. Like other members
of the elite subgroup of Aadyan Nambutiris who had a
right to Vedic learning, V.T. had trained in Vedic
recitation as a child. This practice of learning, known as
othu padikkal (the learning of Vedic recitation)
comprised repeating after the master verse after verse
of the Rg Veda, thus preparing oneself for the
innumerable incantations that mark an Aadyan
Nambutiri’s adult life. In spite of acquiring intricate skills
in recitation, V.T. was not taught to read and write
Malayalam or any other script. This was not unusual.
E.M.S. Namboodiripad recounts that even after he had
been trained to read Sanskrit texts extensively, he was
not at all adept in writing: at the age of fifteen, when he
was appointed secretary of a community group, he
found it difficult to write out notices and keep records in
spite of several years of education. 55
V.T. began to learn the Malayalam alphabet from a
schoolgirl of the Tiyyadi caste who was a regular visitor
to the village temple where he had found employment
as a priest. He helped her with her sums, and she in
return began teaching him the alphabet. One day, as he
was looking at bold typefaces printed on newspaper
wrappings, he realized all of a sudden that he could
read: When there was no one else in the temple, I began
reading a piece of newspaper in which jaggery for the
payasam had come wrapped . . . While looking through
that torn scrap of paper stained by jaggery, I saw an
advertisement with the picture of an animal standing
with head raised. When I read with difficulty the words
maan-marku kuda (Stag Mark Umbrella) printed in large
letters beneath it, an echo of joy escaped my mind. I
cannot say how many times I repeated the sounds
maan-marku kuda. My eyes become moist with gratitude
when I recall that it was this everlasting flame lit by that
Tiyyadi girl in the surroundings of that Ayyappa shrine
which became the bright light that guided my later life.
56

Initiation into reading and writing is the decisive

moment of rupture in V.T.’s narrative. The acts of
reading and writing—which led eventually to the act of
autobiographical writing—replace earlier forms of
inscription based on ritualized learning. The training in
Vedic recitation is presented in V.T.’s narrative as an
instance of earlier, pre-literate inscription. Both he and
E.M.S. Namboodiripad recall in their autobiographies the
training in Vedic incantation (othu padikkal) as
monotonous, repetitive, and intellectually vacuous.
Competitions such as the Kaduvangattu anyonyam
tested the skills of young Nambutiris in the recitation of
the Vedas; there were contests in reciting the verses
forward and backward jada and ratha), requiring
advanced mnemonic skill. 57 However, understanding
the meanings of the Vedic verses did not figure as part
of the training. 58 V.T.’s famous Nambutiri reform play,
Atukkalayilninnu Arangathekku (From the Kitchen to the
Stage), opens on a Vedic lesson in progress where the
master dozes off and the students trick him by imitating
the incantatory tone of Vedic recitation and carry on a
conversation about other, more entertaining things. 59
Incantation as against reading for meaning: are we to
see in this a simple opposition between an ignorant
repetition that teaches nothing and an intelligent
decipherment aspiring progressively towards total
comprehension? Or are we dealing with two histories
and idioms of teaching and learning? V.T.’s account
stands at the cusp of a change in practices of learning
and writing, where age-old techniques gave way to new
processes. The lesson in Vedic incantation stands
alongside other cultural practices that do not aim at
training the learner to articulate what he or she has
learned: a self-conscious discursive grasp of the object is
outside its scope. Training in traditional performing arts
illustrates this clearly: lessons and techniques do not
primarily focus on producing an articulate, discursive
subject.
At issue here are modes of embodied knowledge that
may be differentiated from those that nurture self-
reflective explanation. Learning by rote had a similar
role in education until recently, and perhaps some of this
has survived even to the present day. This was
prominent in arithmetic classes, where one was trained
to do ‘sums in the mind’ (V.T. could help the Tiyyadi girl
with her sums even though he was unfamiliar with
alphabetic learning). V.T.’s account does not pay
attention to the embodied dimension of Vedic recitation;
there is no recognition of the ‘habitus’ produced by this
training. When Marcel Mauss proposed the term
‘habitus’ to refer to ‘techniques and work of collective
and individual practical reason’, he insisted: ‘there is no
technique and no transmission in the absence of
tradition.’ 60 V.T.’s narrative is about the experience of
an unavailability: it regards the tradition on which the
habitus of Vedic training was predicated as absent or
ineffective in his time and circumstances. Vedic
incantation and alphabetic learning in vernacular
Malayalam indicate, in V.T.’s account, two contrasting
models of inscription. He recounts how ritual initiation
into Vedic incantation led to an inner inscription of
Sanskrit as a caste marker: ‘Malayalam was uncivilized
(mlechham); it was Sanskrit, the language of the Gods,
which was appropriate for the Brahmins. Even if imbibed
along with mother’s breast milk, Amma and Acchhan
[the Malayalam words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’] were
contemptible (nikrishtam), and I began using the
Sanskrit words mata and pita instead.’ 61 Upanayanam,
the initiation rite of the Brahmin when he is given the
sacred thread to wear, transforms V.T. into a dvija (twice-
born) and introduces a split in his conception of himself,
one that is projected onto his picture of the world:
‘Another “I” was born inside me. I felt that this second
“I” was superior to and wiser than the first. This
venerable second “I” was a Brahmin and the other a
mere Sudra. It was thus that I began looking at people
as belonging to two categories—superior and inferior. It
must be thus that I acquired the thought of caste
discrimination—sudram aksharasamyuktam duratah
parivarjayet— which forbade the alphabet to the Sudra.’
62 The ‘inner’, non-literate inscription of Sanskrit severs

the subject from his natural first language as

inappropriate, and differentiates the world around him
according to caste. However, this symbolic and ritualistic
access to the Sanskrit language does not provide
anything but a rudimentary foothold; the initiate does
not possess sufficient mastery over Sanskrit to form
complete sentences or convey his everyday needs. He
can mobilize the beginning of a solemn utterance, but
he soon flounders, unable to complete the sentence.
‘[O]ur speech was dull with perverse usage, as in “mata,
alpam kudi bhojanam dehi” (Mother, please give a little
more food).’ 63
In contrast to this disconnect between the sacred
language and the everyday, the second inscription—that
of alphabetic reading and writing in Malayalam, received
from the Tiyyadi girl and practised in the temple in
solitude—leads to new experiences of language and
time. The training in incantation enabled V.T. to recite
the Vedas in fragments and in preset combinations (back
and forth). Alphabetic learning also works with
fragments (the torn piece of a newspaper, the isolated
letter repeatedly inscribed or deciphered over and over
at night). However, the fragment functions in utterly
different ways in these two models. The learning of Vedic
recitation in V.T. is oriented towards the repeated
production of an identical corpus; it leads to ritualistic
performative acts in accordance with a set of finite,
preformulated rules. Learning to read and write
Malayalam leads in his account to a new set of
performatives directed at non-identical forms of
repetition, as in the deciphering and production of texts.
These new performatives presuppose an open-ended
realm of possible utterances, which can even include a
non-ritualistic repetition of incantatory phrases from the
Vedas, as in the use of the Vedic lesson in V.T.’s play. If
the first form of performance has its example in othu
(Vedic recitation) in his autobiography, the second finds
its paradigmatic instance in the newspaper. While the
first alludes in his text to the immemorial and repetitive
time of the ritual, the second presupposes an open
temporality where each utterance slides into the domain
of memory as soon as it is deciphered.
This is evident in the way the notion of the ‘day’ works
in the contexts of everyday ritualistic performance and
the daily newspaper. Two economies of time are at work.
Newness appears in the former schema only as external
and contingent, as the perversion of the temporal
scheme in kaliyuga, requiring an intensification of the
practice of ritual. In V.T.’s play Adukkalayilninnu
Arangathekku, the grandmother who admonishes young
Thethi for delaying her evening prayers sees it as a sign
of the bad time they live in. 64 Reform initiatives were
seen by conservatives as a foolish attempt to aggravate
an already doomed period: ‘one can’t resist the
onslaught of bad times; but is it not foolish to invite
danger and harm oneself?’ 65 As against this conception
of the present as the time of decay, the daily newspaper
presents the ‘day’ as the valorized space of the present.
The unique difference of the present validates the
newspaper everyday and invalidates it the next day,
making it waste-paper only fit for wrapping things, and
at the same time adding it to an ever-expanding archive.
The second model of inscription—that of alphabetic
learning in V.T.’s narrative—repeats the past through
new forms of appropriation. Ritual is made part of a
repertoire of used signs which one may decipher in
relation to fresh experiences and use in innovative ways.
The verses in the Rg Veda had remained meaningless for
the young V.T. during his ritual training (‘What is the
meaning of agnimile purohitam, what is the purpose of
learning it by heart? Neither the master nor the student
was concerned about that.’). 66 Later he would come to
understand the meaning of the verse, not through
textual hermeneutics but through the experience of
erotic desire. ‘In the temple kitchen the fire burned
again. What excitement! The dry logs and the heat and
glow of the fire ripened the illusions that arose in me. It
was then that I really learned the first sukta of the Rg
Veda, which begins “agnimile purohitam”.” 67
The new insight emerges from individual, personal
experience; this mechanism—where personal affect
illuminates the ritual text—was unavailable to
Kanippayyur’s autobiographical universe. In V.T.’s text
the moment of new learning succeeds the ritualistic and
the alphabetic, and includes all three within a realm of
‘personal life’. The choreography of remembrance is
new: it returns to the past, retrieves elements, and
relocates them. This process effects changes in the
nature of the verse from the Rg Veda for the subject—it
is no longer an indecipherable verse in incantation, nor a
marker that allows him to identify the sacredness of his
present existence as a Brahmin, but a lens for
deciphering the present—for understanding a secular,
erotic experience in terms of the sacred.
A new form of access to tradition is made possible: it is
retrieved as a chamber of resonances that echoes new
experiences. The same move also makes tradition a
ground of intelligibility for the present: in order to grasp
their own location and meaning, new experiences
insistently call in to this chamber for a response.
However, tradition can offer a reply only by
foregrounding an experience of rupture, an event that
moves the subject away from the ambit of ritual and its
corporeal habitus. It is only by discounting the body’s
synchronous carriage of tradition that a narratable
personal life takes shape in V.T.’s autobiography.
Three modes of learning and three modes of
remembrance: the first located in an experience of
indecipherability, the second linked to learning the rules
of combination for an open future, and the third to a
domain of personal life experience. When V.T.’s
autobiographical subject recognizes the meaning of the
first verse of the Rg Veda, he also grasps the secret
strands that connect the lesson in Vedic incantation to
the experience of erotic desire. The production and
comprehension of this connection—the making of a
narrat- able personal life—is the autobiographical work
accomplished in V.T.’s text.
If this were all there was to his autobiography, we
could set it aside as a naive text of modernity. However,
the story gains in complexity as it unfolds further. The
signal addressee of V.T.’s self-narrative is the ‘woman’.
The preface to Kannirum Kinavum is unequivocal in
foregrounding this figure who combines within herself
the mother, the lover, and the sister: ‘I know very well
the heartbeats of she who followed me like a shadow as
my mother, sister and spouse, occupying all levels of
womanhood. I have understood her complaints and in-
adequacies. I have gazed at my own form in her tear-
filled eyes. I have longed for the fulfilment of her
budding sweet desires. In the firmament of life, in the
dazzling glow of male power, this Arundhati bears
witness to the creative universe; let her shine for ever in
my afflicted eyes.’ 68
 The woman is not a conventional muse for V.T: she is
not only a source of inspiration, she is also the object of
his transformative initiatives. On many occasions, he
characterized his attempts to reform the Nambutiri
community as efforts made in the name of Nambutiri
women. 69 What is the status of the woman in his
autobiographical project, then? Is woman the addressee
or the interlocutor of his selfnarrative? Or is the
woman’s life narrative summoned and deflected in the
moves through which his autobiography finds its voice,
holds its authority, and unveils its truth?
V.T. begins his autobiography by recording his birth
which, unlike the auspicious births located in astrological
schema, is presented as a non-event, having passed
without so much as being noticed by anyone. He
explains this as a mark of the inconsequential destiny of
younger male members in a Nambutiri household. In his
time, the patrilineal Nambutiri community allowed only
the eldest male member to marry within the caste. The
younger members often sought alliances among the
Nayars and other upper-caste non-Brahmins. Family
wealth too was inherited only through the eldest male
member; younger male members of not-so-affluent
families led an inconsequential and sometimes
impecunious existence. V.T.’s own account of his destiny
as an Apphan (a younger male member in his
household) highlights the impossibility of finding a life
companion within his caste.
If these younger Nambutiri men condemned to
bachelorhood within their caste form one side of V.T.’s
portrayal of contemporary Nambutiris, the other side is
occupied by the even sadder existence of the Nambutiri
woman, who is often married to a man far older, and
who generally has to share her husband with his other
wives. The women and the younger men in the family
share a common predicament of suffering and
unfulfilment. V.T. writes about the warm proximities he
shared with women in his house during childhood; these
come to an abrupt end with the advent of adulthood,
when the Apphan is banished from the interior of the
household, abandoned to find fulfilment for his desires
elsewhere. One of the principal objectives upheld by the
young faction within the Nambutiri reform movement
was that of sajatiya vivaham (marriage within the caste
for all male members of the household); along with it we
also find a trenchant criticism of adhivedanam
(polygamy), practised often by the eldest male member
of the family.
The desire for sajatiya vivaham in V.T. is not merely a
matter of affect; it also involves a question of property
inheritance, signifying the claim to a legitimate family
life within the ambit of the community. 70 V.T. achieved
this in later years and founded a new space of
domesticity for himself after marrying Sreedevi
Antharjanam in 1930.
The new house, Rasikasadanam, to which he moved
with his family in 1931, became a launching pad for his
public initiatives, including widow remarriage and inter-
caste marriage for Nambutiri women. His sister-in-law
was the first widow to be remarried as part of his reform
agenda, and his younger sister’s marriage to a Nayar
was the first inter-caste marriage he presided over. 71
The name that V.T. chose for his house is no less
interesting than the activities that animated it. The
notion of a rasika, a subject with the ability for tasteful
aesthetic enjoyment not only of works of art and
literature but of everyday practices of life, was at the
heart of his conception of a desirable life. In the
metaphorics of his autobiography, the opposite of the
rasikas were the deformed, ugly, and awkward male
figures who represented the decadence and sterility to
which the Nambutiri community had descended. 72 In
contrast to such infelicitous figures stood the rasikas,
they the young Nambutiris who introduced innovations
in their clothing or adopted unconventional modes of
transport like the bicycle, or the friends that assembled
at V.T.’s new household for a regular session of
vedivattam (animated conversation). V.T. reflected on
the unstructured, but cultured and even revolutionary
energies of vedivattam in later years. He used this word
as the title of one of his collections of essays, and
reflected on this mode of sociality in the title essay: The
immediate lookout of all vedivattam is simple
entertainment. But, when necessary, it can turn into a
pit of fire out of which a revolutionary movement may be
forged. To speak more clearly, the revolutionary
movement within the Nambutiri community developed
from vedivattam. It will not be wrong to say that the
Yogakshema Sabha and the Yuvajana Sangham emerged
from the vedivattam at the southern veranda of Othan-
marmadam in Trissur. 73
In his journey towards the comforts of Rasikasadanam,
V.T. was obliged to abandon other forms of desire and
habitation. In his autobiography, he announces a
confession: I respect the general rule that the life
narrated in one’s autobiography ought to remain loyal to
truth. However, I cannot be satisfied that what I have
written so far is truthful. Whatever the consequences,
the autobiographer should gain the courage to speak out
the entire truth. Do circumstances or one’s inborn
tendencies shape one’s individual self? This question of
biographical analysis is not relevant here. But man is a
strange creature . . . There is something in him that
allows him to rise towards ascetic heights or descend
towards savagery. 74
Against these speculations on the ambivalent prospects
of human life, he presents the story of his first conjugal
alliance (sambandham). His bride Madhavikkutty
Varasiar was from an Ambalavasi caste. His narrative
disowns responsibility for the alliance—a common friend
had arranged it without clear consent from V.T. and,
once the wedding was announced, his refusal would
have tainted the reputation of the bride for life. After
entering the sambandham, V.T. stays away from his
bridal home for a long time, at the end of which the
young wife writes to him that it was time for them to
take a decision about their future. He responds to her
cultured and mature tone, and his next visit to her house
inaugurates his conjugal life in a real sense. A delightful
memory of intimacy recounted by V.T. shows
Madhavikkutty dressing up in the traditional attire of a
Nambutiri bride to make fun of V.T.’s avowed desire to
marry within his caste. This gesture of mockery is also
resonant with the erotic: the masquerade of the Varasiar
creates a new, playful space of desire which fits well
with V.T.’s own ideas of the rasika: ‘She stands behind
the door, shy, looking down. The attire of an
antharjanam (Nambutiri woman). Earring, the small
necklace, brass bangle, pleated dhoti, the mark of new
moon on the forehead, bare breasts—laughter burst, an
uproar. The dinner plate fell down in a rattle.’ 75 V.T.’s
account of their conjugality is fulsome: ‘a disciple of
tender devotion, a loving wife, a friend who captures you
with wit and repartee—she behaved in all these ways,
without reserve. Eventually, she bore a girl child for me.’
76

A few years later V.T. is offered the opportunity that he

had struggled for his community to allow—to overcome
his constraints as an Apphan, obtain a share in his family
property, marry within his caste, and set up a new
home. He meets Madhavikkutty Varasiar late at night
and presents her with an impossible choice: either she
must leave her own family to set up a new home with
V.T., or he will abandon her for a new bride from his own
caste. We do not hear Madhavikkutty’s reasoning in
V.T.’s autobiography, but her response is eloquent: ‘I am
expecting another child. How I wish a Valmiki would
appear to save me now.’ 77 V.T. abandons her, marries
Sreedevi Antharjanam, and sets up Rasikasadanam as
his new home. We know from his narrative that
Madhavikkutty meets him once again before she goes
away with her uncle to Hyderabad, expecting the
change of station to soothe her mind. She dies of
cholera there, and V.T.’s response to the news of her
death is mixed with guilt and anxiety: let this not be a
suicide, he prays involuntarily when he listens to the
tragic news. His self-deprecating confession emerges
from a mixture of self-condemnation and a desire for
exoneration: I am a great sinner who committed an act
of betrayal close to murder. I am a cruel man who
abandoned without fear my pregnant wife of
unimpeachable conduct. The history of the world has
recorded no such instance except that by Sree
Ramachandra, the son of Dasaradha. But he was kinder
than me. He did not remarry even when he performed
the Ashwamedha ritual: he made do with a golden
image of his abandoned wife. But I, even before the
tears on her cheeks dried, I obtained for myself a
Nambutiri woman brimming with youth and five
thousand rupees as dowry.

This incident, which took place in 1105 ME [1930],

was buried in the dazzling fame that I acquired later.
I can pretend to be a respectable in the guise of a
social worker or a humanist. But I have no desire for
 such self-satisfaction. I will not be able to bear the
prick of my conscience. 78

A paradoxical autobiographical move: the gesture of

self-condemnation is also that of self-redemption. In
confessing his guilt and submitting himself to the
reader’s judgement, V.T. also performs an act of
selfexoneration. The public revelation of one’s tainted
self attenuates the shameful mark under display.
Madhavikkutty Varasiar can no longer be the addressee
of V.T.’s discourse: death completes a process, already
under way, of her evacuation from the autobiography.
Affect in V.T.’s discursive world has found its new habitat
in the drawing room of Rasikasadanam. The
community’s contemporary decay is interrogated and
challenged by a new domesticity endorsed by the
community’s altered norms. It is indeed a home set up
by an Apphan, but this younger male member has now
become the new patriarch. His home—the space of a
progressive Nambutiri family—is the new location of
public discussion and private enjoyment. In this
exchange between the family and the community,
Madhavikkutty Varasiar’s masquerade and her cultured
exchanges with V.T. do not find any room for survival.
Like Ammukkutty who, against the glow of the kitchen
fire in the temple in V.T.’s youth, demonstrated the
meaning of the first verse of the Rg Veda for him,
Madhavikkutty Varasiar can only have a figural role: it is
to prefigure, rather than inhabit, the new world of
conjugality. In V.T.’s autobiography the Nambutiri
woman, whose proximity was lost to him along with his
childhood and in whose name his own public initiatives
are launched, is reclaimed in this new space of
domesticity.
 Into his project of reclamation, however, V.T. brings
two female figures who resist and refuse reconciliation.
One of them is Kuriyedathu Tatri, the accused in the last
and best-known ritual trial for adultery, conducted by
the Nambutiri community in 1905. During her
interrogation Tatri is said to have named sixty-five
sexual partners. The lovers, whose complicity in adultery
had to be demonstrated by the accused recounting
verifiable and intimate bodily detail, led to the
excommunication of several well-established Nambutiri
men. Tatri has become in later Malayalam writing the
emblem of a female critique of Nambutiri patriarchy. 79
At the beginning of V.T.’s autobiography, soon after his
invocation of the anonymous and all too easily
forgettable lives of ordinary Nambutiri women, Tatri is
brought in as a sign of the decay of Nambutiri society,
and of the times in which V.T. seeks to refashion his own
life: ‘Let me ask, who was that Kuriyedathu Tatri who
shook the entire Kerala [world] about half a century ago?
Was she not born of the Nambutiri community? What
was the background of that terrible event where sixty-
five boys of the community were invited, disrobed and
insulted to her heart’s content?’ 80
In some of his other writings V.T. speaks of Tatri as the
leader of a movement for cultural reform. 81 Here Tatri’s
sexuality and desire are set aside in favour of a social
movement orchestrated by her. Her relationships cannot
be explained as manifestations of lust or greed for
money and should be seen as motivated by a desire for
revenge against patriarchy. V.T. suggests that some of
Tatri’s so-called lovers may have slept with her maids,
who were instructed to take her place, the lovers having
gone off believing they had shared Tatri’s bed. The
idealization of Tatri as the pure spirit of social criticism
allows V.T. to ignore her life after excommunication.
Although she left unanswered questions before the
Nambutiri community which he ponders over, her
individual destiny ceases to matter. V.T. and his band of
reformers carry forward the criticism voiced by Tatri in
more effective and acceptable ways. Tatri becomes the
sign of a potential danger that lies in wait for all
Nambutiri women if the community does not reform
itself.
Another female figure enters V.T.’s narrative with
disturbing consequences and supplies a contrast to
Tatri’s redeemed rebellion. This is Uma Antharjanam,
later known as Umaben. Her story of Umaben has no
apparent relevance for V.T.’s story of his own life. He
seems aware of this and offers a tenuous justification for
its inclusion: I do not intend to retell an old history. My
theme here is the story of a poor Nambutiri woman who
floundered on her life’s path. It is not my aim to praise
or blame the individuals who find mention here.

This is a part of my autobiography because I have

lived on the banks of river Bharatappuzha. The
greenroom and the stage of this tragedy too is
Bharatappuzha . . . How many stories of rise and fall
have taken place here. The events which I am going
to narrate may also become part of this repertoire. 82
This may appear poor reasoning to justify the inclusion
of Uma’s narrative in his autobiography. Nonetheless,
Uma can be seen as supplementing the spectral
destinies of Nambutiri women with which V.T. began his
autobiography. Unlike Tatri, whose subsequent life story
remained a matter of indifference to him, Uma’s real
existence is a disturbing reminder that needs to be
spoken about and castigated.
 What is the story of Uma? Uma is married to a man
from a renowned and austere Nambutiri household and,
even though her husband married again, she continues
to be the favoured wife. One day, she is abruptly sent to
her parental home; then it is discovered that she is a
kleptomaniac. In V.T.’s narrative, Uma’s unhappiness in
her marital home had to do with her discontent over its
austere routine. Her propensity for indulgence runs as
an unstated thread in V.T.’s narrative. She creates a
scandal by taking lovers, and in an attempt to reform
her ways a Nambutiri social worker, Devaki Narikkattiri,
takes her to the Gandhi Ashram in Wardha. This
experiment fails; Uma resurfaces in Kerala after a year
with a vague set of scandalous rumours trailing her. She
tries to enter into a civil marriage with a non-Brahmin
and seeks V.T.’s help, but he refuses, sensing a plot on
the part of the bridegroom to rob Uma of her property.
V.T. argues, interestingly, that for a ritually married
Nambutiri woman there is no legal exit from marriage.
Uma gets married to a driver called Muhammad and
becomes a Muslim. V.T. has an ugly public confrontation
with Muhammad, who speaks insultingly about his wife’s
inability to cook fish and meat. After a time Uma returns
to her home, is taken to Lahore, and converted back to
Hinduism through the Arya Samaj. She marries a Punjabi
Brahmin and over the travails of Partition moves to Delhi
and settles there. V.T.’s narrative of Uma concludes by
suggesting parallels between her and Kunti of the
Mahabharata, who bore children to different husbands.
V.T.’s retelling of Uma’s life did not go uncontested. He
received a letter from Uma’s daughter-in-law, who
criticized his insensitivity in raking up old wounds
affecting other people. V.T. published his response but
did not address the accusations, merely affirming the
purity of his intent in writing about Uma. His narrative of
Uma is characterized by a lack of generosity: while Tatri
is presented as an avenging victim who sacrificed her
identity as a Nambutiri woman, Uma is shown turning
up, time and again, within the space of the community
to create anxiety and shame. Uma lives with a Muslim
man, and her children dress like Muslims and walk in the
very neighbourhood where they had moved about as
Nambutiris. This, bringing to mind alliances between
Nambutiri women and Muslim men during the Mappila
rebellion, creates a zone of unease in V.T.’s narrative.
Although Uma does not directly make demands on the
community, her very way of life, its unstable identity,
poses a threat to his project of reforming and rescuing
Nambutiri women for new ideals of conjugality.
Paradoxically, V.T., whose discourse of freedom invoked
Nambutiri women as its source, is forced by Uma’s
presence to uphold a doctrine of unfreedom for all
Nambutiri women: for them, there is no legal point of
exit from a ritually consecrated marriage; they are
legally heteronomous spouse-subjects. While Tatri’s
voice—that of an accused in a ritual trial prior to her
excommunication—can make its presence felt in the
world of the reformer, Uma remains inaudible. Listening
to her, taking her voice into cognizance, would involve
an act of recognition that unsettles the links established
in V.T.’s autobiography between the family and the
community of reformed Nambutiris.
This second strand in the autobiography complicates
the story of reform and apprenticeship we encountered.
The thrust of my reading has been to see the second
movement as intrinsic to the confident gestures of the
autobiographer we analysed earlier. The autobiographer
is also a new masculine subject whose desire gives him
access to the truth of his historicality. The path of desire
seemed easy in its reopening of tradition for a secular
experience; however, on a closer reading the very logic
of desire seems to be divided between its affective
reproduction in the familial realm and a larger
engagement with freedom and alterity. V.T.’s narrative
relinquishes the latter in the name of the valued link
between the domestic sphere and the public domain of
the community. The figure of the woman occupies a
special position in his story: she is the link between the
private and the public, endorsing reform, submitting to
its new rules, and countersigning and validating its new
mores through affective reassurance as a companionate
spouse within the domestic and community space. It is
not accidental that one of the signal gestures made by
V.T. as a writer of fiction is to reinvent the Nambutiri
woman as the subject of affective-erotic investment. His
early story, ‘The Gift of Vishu’, shows the heroine appear
in the dissolving darkness of the dawn to imprint her lips
on her young lover’s face. 83 The aim of the story was to
produce a new realm of intensity within the imaginative
life of the community and redeem the erotic from the
vengeful legacies of a Tatri and the ugly and infelicitous
transactions of ageing polygamous patriarchs. However,
in order to devise a language to express this intensity,
V.T. needed to lean on the erotic practices from which he
as a masculine subject drew sustenance—the world of
Ammukkutty and more specifically Madhavikkutty
Varasiar. In the conjuring of these worlds of the intimate
and the erotic as part of a narrative of apprenticeship,
and in their disavowal in a language of self-assured and
self-exonerating confession, we can see the decisive
gestures through which the autobiographical subject in
V.T.’s texts takes shape. The life of this subject can no
longer be told in a linear narrative of progressive self-
realization. It weaves in memory and guilt, destitution
and acquisition, intimacy and sacrifice, in ambivalent
moves. The redeeming gesture of this project of
recollection is entrusted to the act of confession itself
which, initially directed at the woman in general,
eventually ends up redrawing the boundaries of its
audience.

IV
I return now to the use of autobiography as a
historiographical tool. Kanippayyur’s autobiographical
account told us a story of privilege: it was his
advantaged location in Kerala’s caste society that made
him eligible to undertake his memory-work. Around the
same time, other writers lacking privileged status also
began writing about their lives, claiming that ordinary
life experiences in changing times possessed historical
value, this being reason enough for writing them down.
84 It is important to note the timing of these texts.

Debates around the formation of Kerala state and the

movements for its unification produced, in the 1940s
and 1950s, a number of discourses on the social,
cultural, and historical identity of the region. 85 E.M.S.
Namboodiripad’s influential history of Kerala, Keralam
Malayalikalude Mathrubhumi (Kerala, Motherland of the
Malayalis), and the writings of Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai,
belong to this moment. 86 Quite a number of biographies
and autobiographies which now appeared occupied the
same field in their effort to forge connections between a
modern Malayali identity and the differentiated pasts
their authors or protagonists had lived through.
E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s Atmakatha, initially serialized
in magazines and first published as a book in 1969, is an
example of this. Readers interested in Namboodiripad’s
personal life were disappointed by his narrative. Apart
from the early chapters, which dealt with his childhood,
Atmakatha focused almost exclusively on the social and
political movements in which the autobiographer had
played an active role. The personal element was often
confined to a discussion of the positions he took on
important issues. The ‘I’ of Namboodiripad’s narrative
was a political activist whose life outside the political
domain had little relevance for the story. Neither was a
detailed account of the author’s political life offered: the
narrative ended in the late 1930s, when Namboodiripad
became a full-time activist of the Communist Party of
India. In later editions of his autobiography a concluding
chapter was appended, clarifying why the story ended
there. He accepted the criticism that his Atmakatha
lacked an adequate display of the self (atmam) and was
more a political report than the emotional expression of
an individual life: While acknowledging this weakness
without any hesitation, I believe that this story—of how
someone who was born into a ‘world of gods and
demons’ and spent his boyhood in learning the Sanskrit
language and the Rg Veda became a communist—will be
useful to tens of thousands of readers who have no
relationship with that life. Since the book has been
written with this conscious aim, it is better not to narrate
the subsequent tale of my life, which is inseparably
linked to the story of the communist movement.
Historians of the movement will also have to tell the
story of my life from 1938 till my death. Leaving that
task to them, I have been trying to spend the remaining
part of my life in efforts to nurture the movement. 87
As in Kanippayyur, the customs of his time found ample
room in Namboodiripad’s book; but they had a different
narrative function. They supplied elements for building a
framework for ‘properly’ historical explanation.
Atmakatha showed the unreflective child of earlier
chapters turn gradually into a self-conscious political
subject by recognizing this frame. For Namboodiripad,
autobiographical narration was, by its very nature,
marked by the merits and flaws of a ‘subjective
approach’. 88 In terms of its value, an individual’s
autobiography was clearly subordinate to the history of
the society he or she lived in. Once the story of the
emergence of a self-conscious political subject was
completed, there was very little to be told within the
frame of an autobiography; political history then
superseded the claims of personal narration.
A different way of linking autobiography and social
history is seen in Jeevitasamaram (Life Struggle) in
which C. Kesavan (18911969), a leader of the Ezhava
movement and later of the Travancore State Congress,
recounted his life experiences till the 1930s. 89 Unlike
Namboodiripad, Kesavan intended to write about the
well-known chapters of his active political life. He
managed to publish two volumes of his autobiography;
the third and final volume, which was meant to deal with
the peak of his political career, remained unwritten
when he died in 1969. Jeevitasamaram begins by
introducing two interlocking temporal sequences—the
chronology of a personal life, and regional and national
history: I was born in Kollam-Mayyanadu in an Ezhava
household that no one could call prosperous, on a day of
the full moon, Saturday, 23 May 1891, under the star
Anizham. It is startling to think about the enormous
difference between the socio-political situation then and
now. Those were the times when the tremor of political
unrest spread all over India. The Indian National
Congress was formed five years before I was born. The
Malayali Memorial, which marked a new chapter in the
history of Travancore, was submitted when I was one
year old. It was the first instance of a political agitation
in Travancore going beyond caste and religious divisions.
Malayala Manorama began its publication in 1064 or 65
of the Malayalam Era [1889]. In 1067 [1892], the great
scholar Paravur Kesavan Asan founded the
Keralabhushanam Press and the newspaper
Sujananandini. Malayali also started publication around
this time: a turning point in history, marked by the
emergence of class-consciousness (vargabodham). 90
The narrative continues in this vein for another four
pages, bringing into its ambit significant events from the
political and social histories of Kerala, and India, in the
first five decades of the twentieth century. For Kesavan,
this is a narrative of democratization and increasing
egalitarianism; kings, Brahmins, and Parayas enjoy the
same rights today, he says, a situation unimaginable
five decades ago. The events of his lifetime form
‘chapters of a wondrous and revolutionary halfcentury’
and, in the making of this history, Kesavan admits with a
modesty tinged with pride, ‘I too was not without some
small roles.’ 91 The politically active life of the
protagonist ensures the link between the principal
events in his personal life and larger regional and
national histories.
Yet the historical narrative which runs through his
autobiography is not confined to events in which he
played an important part. Much of what he has to say,
especially in the early chapters, presents him less as an
agent and more as an observer, and sometimes as a
mere sign for comments on the larger social context in
which he lived. A macro-narrative of public history is
interwoven with the lesser narrative of events in his
childhood and youth. 92 His first memories of schooling
lead to a discussion of the establishment of a school for
Ezhava children in Mayyanadu, and then to the history of
the education of lower castes in Travancore. Kesavan is
anxious to place his own experiences in a larger
historical frame. On many occasions he cites official
documents or earlier histories. Unconcerned with the
originality of his historical account, he constructs it with
elements from a public repertoire of texts available to
him. This includes state manuals, missionary writings,
and colonial ethnographic works. The passages Kesavan
cites from these texts were used frequently by lower-
caste writers before him. He also rehearses earlier
accounts of the past written by prominent figures from
his community, such as C.V. Kunjuraman and K.
Damodaran. The sense of a public history of Kerala, and
the position of the lower castes within it, forms a
necessary part of his personal narration. In this sense,
the larger history invoked by Kesavan is not entirely
external to his autobiography; it is as if his personal
story could not be told without it.
Throbbing with the energy of reminiscence,
Jeevitasamaram is an exceptionally engaging
autobiography. Although concerned with the
disappearing customs of his society, a marked difference
in spirit differentiates Kesavan’s project from
Kanippayyur’s. This can easily be grasped if we consider
the two strands in Kesavan’s recollection. Firstly, his
account of past customs belongs to a history of injustice:
the sense of unfamiliarity that animates his narration is
not wonder but incredulity and revulsion. The reader is
asked to share a sense of moral unacceptability while
listening to his account of traditional practices.
Secondly, Kesavan’s narrative consistently mobilizes an
energetic relationship to life, even if the specific actions
narrated may be morally open to criticism. While the
first strand assembles as its discursive background a
history of anti-caste writing, the second appeals to
another register of virility and spontaneity that does not
justify itself by appeal to principles. Kesavan’s narrative
negotiates its passage between a moral criticism of
injustice and the celebration of a natural response to
life. His project of shaping his life and speaking about it
is but another name for this process of negotiation.
Kesavan’s early memories are tinged with two hues of
injustice: the discrimination he suffered as an Ezhava
boy in streets and other public places where he was
forced to defer to upper-caste people, and the unjust
exercise of authority by elders and the upper
subdivisions within his own caste. Anecdotes illustrate
this. The interweaving of a personal and historical
narrative with larger political events and micro
occurrences from the everyday locking into each other is
enabled by the historically evolved self-consciousness of
the Ezhava community, an awareness that Kesavan’s
own political positions would come to represent in later
years.
The second strand in Kesavan’s narrative emerges
from the first: stories of his spontaneous rebellion
against injustice provide the first glimpses of this aspect
of his persona. His refusal to step out of the public street
before arrogant upper-caste men and his confrontations
with casteist teachers at school are examples. These
acts of rebellion are presented as emerging from more
fundamental personality traits: a refusal to submit to
authority, a search for pleasure, and a sense of personal
integrity built on an unwavering attachment to the vital
energies of life. Kesavan’s amoral adventures,
sometimes indolent and ignorant, but at other times
knowing and calculated, range from playing truant at
school to causing grief in his early youth to young
women in the village. His account of these events is
often celebratory: even when they are admittedly
indefensible, they receive acceptance on the alibi of
innocence. A sense of unaccountability accompanies
them. Kesavan recognizes this and makes a plea for
what theorists of autobiography would call the claims of
‘epistemological solitude’ at the outset of his narrative.
93

I have a heart which quickly becomes turbulent with

emotion. Forbearance is not part of my nature.
Therein lie the sources of my few abilities and my
abundant weaknesses. Injustice is unbearable for
me; I cannot reconcile myself to it. I am always ready
to stick to the very end and suffer all consequences
in this irreconcilable struggle with injustice. No one
should misunderstand me; I am not flattering myself
either. My heart and my head may have acted in
confusion at times. But I alone—and no one else—
has seen them really for what they are. Therefore, I
have no complaints against those who have
misunderstood me. My aim has always been
constant, and my purpose pure. My own testimony is
enough for me to affirm this. 94

In his narrative the rebellious moral impulse is the

source both of moral action as well as weakness and
instability. There is pleasure in this weakness as it
provides evidence for one’s own impetuous and
ultimately lovable masculinity. Kesavan’s masculine self-
image needs, for its validation, an appreciative
spectator, an adoring gaze. In his early years, theatre
and music provide two contexts for Kesavan to redeem
himself before this gaze. The applause that greets his
entries on stage, the widespread approbation of his
songs, and the admiration he receives in his college—all
these reassure him. As in the case of V.T., this is an
aesthetic gaze: that of a rasika, although Kesavan’s
registers of the aesthetic are more energetic and wild.
He does not appeal to classical traditions of taste; his
claims are based on a memory of accomplished people
within his community and an immediate recognition of
talent, the recognition of a gift that marks him out as
special. Kesavan’s early participation in politics and his
recognition as a popular leader continue this pattern.
The autobiography contains, however, a counterpoint
to this impulsive strand in his life. A prominent example
is the influence that a fellow teacher named Paul
exercises on him. Paul’s morally upright life and sense of
integrity provide a new model in which solitude and
reflection assume importance. Paul lives the life of a
good Christian even though he has very little to do with
institutionalized forms of religious practice. The
encounter with Paul makes Kesavan reflect on the nature
of his own religious consciousness: ‘Paul became a
question mark for me. Who is this man? Does religion
have the power to entrance man? If this trance has been
good for Paul, couldn’t it be good for me too? Do I have
any religion? I am considered a Hindu; I regard myself as
one. But, am I really a Hindu? Do I know anything about
that religion?’ 95 Kesavan’s introspection reveals that his
own sense of holiness consisted solely in a few elements
of popular religion. The obscene songs sung at the
Kodungallur temple, some strotras learned by rote, and
an engagement with local temples based on an
intoxicated enjoyment of festivals and popular rituals—
his religion added up to no more than these.

Paul’s conduct in life made me feel that religion is a

Gita written for the edification of man, and that the
text of this Gita can be found in the gospels. I was
impelled to analyse and assess my past life. It was a
vacuous life that I saw behind me. A life without
purpose or seriousness, blown by the wind and dried
 by the sun. I felt as if I were waking from slumber. My
heart felt a tremor, a sweat. I am sure it was Paul
who caused this. That tremor and that sweat have
not subsided. A sense of cool has not spread in my
heart yet. I am still striving for that feel of cool. 96

Kesavan begins to miss order and purpose in his life—a

sense of form, of narrative coherence. Religion soon
ceases to be the language for understanding this
coherence: a quick study of Hindu and Christian
scriptures convinces him that the admirable qualities of
Paul’s life cannot be reduced to the influence of
Christian doctrine. Deeper than any divine command, it
was a fundamental hostility to injustice that determined
Paul’s conduct. This takes Kesavan to an engagement
with Hinduism; he reads the Bhagavat Gita and the
writings of Vivekananda and finds short-lived inspiration
in them. In his later years, Kesavan rejected Hindu
religious practices centred on temples as inappropriate
and harmful to the spiritual and political aspirations of
the lower castes.
Kesavan’s encounter with Christianity contains an
interesting moment of engagement with biographical
writing. He found most accounts of Christ’s life
contaminated by mythological accretions that portrayed
him in the style of a character from the Hindu puranas.
On removing this overlay of exaggeration, Kesavan
found in Christ’s life the story of ‘a lover of mankind who
was born as a poor carpenter boy, and whose life was
sacrificed on account of his grand moral teaching.’ 97
Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus answers Kesavan’s
expectations. He finds a plausible version of the story of
Jesus there, which shows respect for his humanity. In
Kesavan’s autobiography the demythologization of the
Christ story and the search for narrative coherence in his
own life converge. These models are abandoned when
he moves on to speak about his engagement in the
caste movement and public life; we return to stories of
misadventure and spontaneous moral outbursts.
However, the strand of reflection introduced in the
narrative of Paul does not altogether disappear. In spite
of a continuing narrative of misadventures there is a
greater stress on purposiveness and practicability in
Kesavan’s account of the later years of his life. When he
becomes the secretary of the SNDP Yogam, his tries to
introduce financial discipline among its branch
secretaries and organize the community on principles of
public responsibility rather than kinship. 98
Kesavan’s engagement with order and purposiveness
is in tune with some of the ideals upheld by the Ezhava
reform movement. Sree Narayana Guru’s instructions to
the Ezhavas covered not only their spiritual practice and
customary rituals, but also the development of new
material practices. When Sree Narayanan announced
the pilgrimage to Sivagiri, he clarified that it should have
some concrete material objectives. Agriculture,
education, industry, and commerce were among them,
and the pilgrimage would involve lectures on these
themes. 99 Dr Palpu’s initiatives, equally important for
Kesavan’s intellectual formation, involved a more direct
avowal of the ideals of secular modernity. Palpu
organized the first industrial and agricultural exhibition
of the Ezhavas as part of the second annual conference
of the SNDP Yogam in 1905. Kesavan visited this
exhibition and remembered it for the marvellous modern
objects he saw there, which included a manual
typewriter that Palpu’s younger brother operated with
one finger! 100
 A secular vision of modernity was an important strand
in the discourse of reform among the Ezhavas in the
early decades of the twentieth century. Unlike other
idioms of community reform which stressed the loss of
masculine valour and the restoration and cleansing of
sanctified traditions, this strand foregrounded rational
planning at the levels of the individual and the
collective. 101 Democratic organization of the
community, concerted endeavours aimed at a better
future, and attempts to orient individual life in terms of
plans and projects—Kesavan’s autobiography
incorporates these as themes for reflection in the middle
of his narratives of reckless misadventures and
impulsive defiance.
What is distinctive about Kesavan’s account, however,
is the way he tells stories that capture the rich dynamic
of popular practices. The account of his childhood
provides examples. As a young boy he was invited to act
in a play produced by C.V. Kunjuraman and his friends.
Kesavan uses it as a context for describing the state of
theatre arts in Kerala at that time.

Musical plays had not yet arrived on the scene. Tamil

drama troupes had not started rushing into Kerala
from across the ghats. Nor was there any practice of
an actor leaping with a song from the wings to
centre-stage as the curtain rises. Malayalam theatre
was entirely dominated by plays written in
manipravalam (a mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam)
like Valiyakoyil Thampuran’s Shakuntalam and
Mannadiar’s Uttararamacharitam. There were no
songs; only slokas. But these slokas would be sung
according to musical schemes. Perunelliyil Krishnan
Vaidyar was then widely appreciated as a Venmani of
the Ezhavas. Everyone could recite from memory the
 single slokas that he wrote in periodicals like
Vidyavilasini and his intoxicating erotic songs like the
Maranpattu. Several legends had formed around
him. His play Subhadraharanam appeared around
that time. Naturally, it attracted the attention of C.V.
Kunjuraman and others. 102

Kesavan moves away from high-cultural accounts of this

period to focus on popular initiatives in literature and
theatre by Ezhavas, which combined the resources of
manipravalam, popular musical performances, and a
repertoire of erotic versification. This light-hearted and
playful scene stands in interesting contrast with the
literature commonly associated with Ezhava reform
which was to reach its peak in the early decades of the
twentieth century—the disavowal of sensuous eroticism
in the poetry of Kumaran Asan and, indeed, Sree
Narayana Guru. Kesavan’s intimate engagement with
the world of popular entertainment allowed him to adopt
a ‘double vision’ towards the new idioms of cultural
modernity Ezhavas were adopting in his time. This
attitude extended beyond the world of literature. He was
initially not an active participant in the SNDP Yogam’s
activities. Later he became its secretary and led the
Ezhava community into electoral politics. 103 Although in
his youth he supported the efforts of his community to
create a new identity for itself, he also viewed some
aspects of this process with scepticism. He had high
regard for Sree Narayanan but not for his sanyasi
followers, many of whom he thought lazy and covetous.
104 He was more at home in the popular political culture

of virile combat than in idioms of reformed civil conduct:

even as he adopted the ideals of the latter, his did not
fully fit into their new disciplines. This lack of fit allowed
him to observe and record not only the past customs
that contemporary Malayalis were moving away from,
but also the new practices they were embracing.
Like many autobiographies of its time, Jeevitasamaram
contains numerous discussions of the embodied
technologies of caste. Kesavan provides interesting
ethnography on distance pollution (teendal). Unlike
many parts of Kerala, in Mayyanadu, the village in
southern Kerala where Kesavan grew up, the Nayars did
not generally regard Ezhavas as polluting. The Pulayas
and the Parayas, much lower in the caste hierarchy, bore
the brunt of practices of pollution. Kesavan has
interesting anecdotes on casteism, including that of a
teacher at his school who devised a new technique of
punishment for lower- caste students: to avoid all
polluting contact, he would throw his cane at them
rather than hit them with it! Many of his stories evoke
incredulity and disgust in the reader, in marked contrast
to the wonder that Kanippayyur’s descriptions had
aimed at creating.
The practices of his own community occupy many of
Kesavan’s descriptions in Jeevitasamaram. Some of
them are sarcastically critical accounts of features of
community life: traditional roles performed by the vatti
(the barber-priest), the oppressive behaviour of the
elders, the false pride of jatis that claimed a higher
status within the community, and the arrogance of the
new Ezhava elite—all these become the targets of
acerbic humour. Some of his other stories are more
complex, like an account of talikettukalyanam (a
symbolic wedding ritual performed before a girl child
reaches puberty, strongly criticized by the Sree
Narayana movement), and his pilgrimages to the
Kodungallur temple. Kesavan’s description of
talikettukalyanam does not echo the reformists’
rejection, but captures the exuberance of the celebration
through the eyes of an enthusiastic insider. The
perspective of childhood offers some justification for
this, but the energies of the description arguably exceed
the child’s viewpoint. The domain of popular practices,
irrespective of a rational, reformist assessment, seems
to provide Kesavan with an energetic, even if unstable,
space from which the setting in of modernity could be
surveyed. When he writes about the tirandukalyanam
feast, his gaze lingers not only on elements that have
disappeared, but also on practices that were to appear.
The main course at Ezhava feasts in Travancore at that
time was rice alongside a fish curry made with tamarind
and roasted coconut paste. Sambar was popularized
among the Ezhavas by the SNDP Yogam. 105 Kesavan’s
autobiography documents the emergence of many such
everyday practices that were subsequently naturalized
among Malayalis.
His description of the Bharani festival at Kodungallur is
another example of this. When Kesavan was seven or
eight years of age, he accompanied some family
members on a pilgrimage to the Kodungallur temple.
Lower castes were allowed into the temple premises
during the Bharani festival, and drinking and the
chanting of bawdy songs (purappattu) formed a
prominent part of the ritual celebrations. Kesavan and
his companions observed austerities for ten days before
they set out; he counts the boat journey to Kodungallur
as among the most marvellous experiences of his
childhood. As the boat approached Kodungallur, the
pilgrims began singing purappattu. Kesavan memorized
several of these songs and, in all innocence, took to
singing them with gusto. Upon his return he tried one of
them at home, but a stinging blow from his father put a
quick end to his effort! The journey to Kodungallur was
repeated a second time a few years later, during
Kesavan’s adolescence. His participation and enjoyment
were now, as an adult, even fuller. Years later, when he
went to Kodungallur a third time, it was to campaign
against these practices of worship, which had come to
be seen by Ezhava reformers as ‘barbaric’. In the
autobiography, Kesavan’s language oscillates between
his consciousness of relishing the festival over his
childhood and youth, and a critical view of the same
event as a reformer.
In the middle of his description of the festival with its
animal sacrifice and unrestrained, sexually suggestive
behaviour by men and women, Kesavan inserts his views
as a reformer on the history of this practice, echoing the
arguments of C.V. Kunjuraman and K. Damodaran that
the rite commemorated the destruction of a Buddhist
nunnery. 106 In the 1920s and 1930s several Ezhava
writers had suggested that the community possessed a
Buddhist past, using it as an argument in support of
advocating conversion to Buddhism. 107 P. Palpu, as
mentioned in chapter 2, had made this view the kernel
of his petitions and campaign writings, suggesting that
the lower-caste status of the Ezhavas was the result of a
Brahminical usurpation of political power in a
predominantly Buddhist Kerala. 108 The historical
argument invoked by Kesavan is oriented towards a
rational programme of collective endeavours; the
remembered pleasures of his childhood, on the other
hand, are grounded in what one may call a non-
intellectual estimation of popular practices.
Kesavan was not unique in foregrounding this popular,
nonintellectual strand. We find similar moments in the
life stories of A.K. Gopalan from the Communist Party
and Kumbalathu Sanku Pillai from the Travancore State
Congress. 109 Their life narratives privilege spontaneous
moral reactions marked by a good deal of physical
courage and a strong sense of masculinity over
rationally planned actions. Even their participation in
new disciplinary programmes is mediated often by
strong-willed masculine assertion. Both Sanku Pillai and
Kesavan narrate strikingly similar instances in which
they use physical force to control drunken behaviour. 110
Sanku Pillai was an enthusiastic practitioner of physical
exercise and wrestling, even exhibiting his wrestling
skills at Congress conferences. 111 A spontaneous
masculinity, which prevents hiding or controlling just
outrage and turbulent emotion, underlies the conception
of ethical agency in these narratives. Kesavan and
Sanku Pillai were known for the strong language of their
public speeches. One such speech, delivered during the
Nivartana agitation, led in 1935 to Kesavan’s
imprisonment by the Travancore government. These
leaders, in contrast with the educated elite who
dominated state politics, spoke in a language marked by
intense indignation and enthusiasm. The strongest
condemnation in Jeevitasamaram is reserved for some
prominent members of the Ezhava elite. Kesavan was
disgusted by their condescending and unfeeling attitude
towards the poor of the community. He also disagreed
with their style of politics, which for him was far too
removed from popular sentiments and authentic moral
passion.
The presentation of history in Kesavan’s autobiography
is informed by an ambivalent estimation of the
disciplinary dimension of modernity. This allows him to
make visible a level of popular practice irreducible to
public historical accounts. An interesting incident
reported in Jeevitasamaram provides a good example,
and allows us to reflect on aspects of the link between
autobiographical memory and social history. While
discussing changes in the attire and appearance of men
and women in his time, Kesavan writes about the
introduction of the blouse (ravukka) and the upper cloth
(melmundu). He draws on Nagam Ayya’s Travancore
State Manual and correspondence between British
officials and the Travancore government regarding
agitations around women wearing the breast cloth. This
is followed immediately by a personal recollection from
Kochikka—C.V. Kunjuraman’s wife, also Kesavan’s
mother-in-law. 112 In a fascinating conversation recalled
by the autobiographer, Kochikka remembers wearing her
blouse for the first time. Two of her cousins from
Trivandrum, visiting her at Mayyanadu, had brought it
for her as a gift. She tried on the new apparel, felt it
tickled her a little, but found it altogether quite nice.
When she showed it to her mother, however, her mother
warned her never to appear in public so obscenely
dressed. Kochikka tried it on again the following day,
and upon inadvertently emerging from her room was
thrashed by her mother for dressing up like Muslim
women and shameless stage actresses. It was a time
when revealed breasts were the norm for the correctly
dressed woman, a necessary aspect of the ‘proper’
appearance of Ezhava women as well as for women of
other non-Brahminical castes; to wear a blouse was
therefore to be scandalously obscene. Kunjuraman, the
Ezhava reformer, however, rather relished his wife in her
new blouse. Since her mother would not let her wear it
outdoors, Kochikka would wait patiently for night to fall,
and after her mother was safely in bed she would wear
her blouse within her room, where she awaited her
husband’s arrival! 113
How do we understand this fragment from the past,
which presents before us a complex field of visibility and
an equally complex set of performative acts? In an
insightful study of the transformations in female clothing
in the context of caste-reform movements in the
twentieth century, J. Devika highlights a tendency to
clothe women with ‘culture’ and aestheticize them,
producing them as providers of enjoyment for their
modern spouses in monogamous arrangements. 114 She
cites the testimony of Kunjuraman’s wife to illustrate this
movement, contextualizing it in a range of discourses
from the time. The figure of the ‘husband’ in this
passage, she argues, ‘emerges out of a combination of
the images of “Vasanthy’s father”, “Vadhyar” (teacher)
and “Gandharvan” (celestial lover, seeker of beauty,
favouring young virgins). It is for such a man—modern in
tastes and inclination—that the woman in the account
dupes traditional authority and wears the blouse.’ 115
The act of wearing the blouse in the privacy of a
conjugal space at night involved constituting oneself as
the object of the tasteful, modern gaze of one’s
husband. This act was embedded in a range of
disciplinary performatives which produced new forms of
gendered identity in modern Kerala.
Does Kochikka’s recollection, as cited by Kesavan,
possess a dimension that is not exhausted by this
disciplinary paradigm? The passage also seems to bear
witness to the pleasures of a new mode of embodied
subjectivation. Indeed, this is not entirely separable from
mechanisms that produce women as objects of
domestic, marital enjoyment for their partners. The
question is whether the acts of the subject—trying out
this new piece of clothing which covers one’s breasts
and tickles one’s body, turning and twisting to look at
oneself in it, wanting to wear it everywhere, and, when it
proves impossible, rebelliously deciding to confine it to
the indoors at night for approbation by a husband—are
all ultimately reducible to the desire for objectification
before one’s spouse’s gaze. Or could it be that,
alongside this, inseparably entwined with this, we can
also discern a different, if closely related, gesture in the
history of individuation and self-fashioning—a moment
of subjectivation—at work? Is the gaze that we find
Kochikka training on herself solely a disciplinary one, or
does it create a new relationship to herself, the
trajectory of which is not determined in advance nor in
its entirety? These questions could be important for
unravelling the relations between personal narratives
and historical accounts. While embracing novel
disciplines, the subject also performs a certain ‘work’ of
improvisation in negotiating new forms of normativity,
and a fresh set of analytical tools may be needed to
understand them.
But how do we proceed from here? The problem is
complicated by the nature of Kesavan’s text and its
mechanism of citation. It would be naive to consider
Kochikka’s words as having been retrieved in their
original authenticity. The documentary status of her
utterance is produced by strategies of historical
recollection at work in Kesavan’s autobiography. This
makes it difficult to correlate verbal moves in the
passage securely with originary postures adopted by the
subject. In some sense, the passage works as a typical
anecdote in Kesavan’s narrative, with its ironic reversal
of public and private spaces at a time of change. Like his
account of the changing fashions in the shape of
women’s earlobes—growing them long was the preferred
practice earlier, and a modern set of aesthetic norms
and new kinds of jewellery led to their shortening—the
anecdote of the blouse appears as part of an ironic
history of normative practices.
It is difficult to reduce the pleasures of ethico-poetic
acts of self-making to normative prescriptions; in fact,
such pleasures may arise precisely from a temporary
suspension of secure normative frames. Judith Butler,
following Foucault’s work on ‘technologies of the self’,
proposed a distinction between ‘conducting oneself
according to a code of conduct’ and ‘form[ing] oneself as
an ethical subject in relation to a code of conduct’. 116
The latter involves a stylization of the acts and pleasures
of the subject. The acts generated in the context of a
new normative frame may involve forms of stylization at
variance with the rules of conduct foregrounded by the
frame. It is precisely this lack of fit that makes
testimonial anecdotes important for autobiographies
written in changing times.
Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher touched
upon a similar problem when they revisited the status of
anecdotes and the possibilities they open up for
historical understanding. They argued that some
anecdotes compel us with a cluster of individualizing
details that may not fit into the frame of the larger
narrative within which they appear: [T]he undisciplined
anecdote appealed to those of us who wanted to
interrupt the Big Stories. We sought the very thing that
made anecdotes ciphers to many historians: a vehement
and cryptic particularity that would make one pause or
even stumble on the threshold of history. But for this
purpose, it seemed that only certain kinds of anecdotes
would do: outlandish and irregular ones held out the
best hope for preserving the radical strangeness of the
past by gathering heterogeneous elements—seemingly
ephemeral details, overlooked anomalies, suppressed
anachronisms— into an ensemble where ground and
figure, ‘history’ and ‘text’ continually shifted . . .
Approached sideways, through the eccentric anecdote,
‘history’ would cease to be a way of stabilizing texts; it
would instead become part of their enigmatic being. 117
Autobiographies and other genres of first-person
narration are major sites for the production and
circulation of anecdotes: many a time, an
autobiographical voice testifying to an odd detail
supplies the unorthodox historian with a stimulating
combination of eccentricity and authenticity. This
produces two sorts of disturbances: a narratological
disturbance effected by the little story on the big one,
and the presentation of a new kind of subject on the
scene. However, the use of the anecdote by the
historian, for Greenblatt and Gallagher, also risked a
certain paradox: ‘the strong desire to preserve the
energies of the anecdote by channelling them into
historical explanation, which is followed by frustration
and disappointment when the historical project stills and
stifles the very energies that provoked it.’ 118 This
paradox underlies the peculiar pathos of anecdotalism:
‘the (counter) historian clutches the life of the anecdote,
but it expires in his or her grasp.’ 119
Greenblatt and Gallagher’s analysis is relevant for the
fortunes of the anecdote, not only within the writing of
professional historians but also in Kesavan’s own
historical project in his autobiography. Nonetheless, as in
the case of the blouse, some anecdotes in Kesavan’s
text, regardless of the apparent uses to which he puts
them, do allow us some intimacy with the diverse ways
in which modern identities were negotiated in Kerala.
This owes something to the relationship that Kesavan’s
narrative maintains with the domain of the popular,
which enables a suspension of strict normative
disciplining. The popular and the anecdotal have much
in common: popular memory offers a domain where
anecdotes flourish; also, the popular, in manifesting the
workings of a collective habitus, escapes rigid normative
control. The anecdote makes visible odd moments in the
inhabitation of norms and permits a glance into
negotiations that cannot be adequately analysed as
belief systems through concepts like ‘ideology’. What we
see often is not a difference in avowed beliefs but a
distinction between affirmed norms and their
inhabitation through practices of life. If ‘style’ is an
adequate word to point to these inflections, the popular
domain and the anecdote enable a stylistics of
subjectivation. Kesavan’s most profound intervention in
historiography is in carving out a space for style
between the diverse narrative strands of his
autobiography.

V
Did autobiographical writing provide everyone with such
eloquent and entertaining remembrance? Or did it also
introduce for some a new relationship between solitude,
silence, and self-narration? Lalitambika Antarjanam
(1909–1987), one of the most important women writers
of Kerala, did not write a full-scale autobiography,
although C.V. Kunjuraman had encouraged her to write
one even when she was young. She did not heed his
advice, but three decades later brought out a collection
of essays and fragments, some of them previously
published, under the title Atmakathayku Oru Amukham
(An Introduction to [My] Autobiography). A novelist and
writer of short stories, Antarjanam explained her
hesitation to write an autobiography in terms of the new
set of demands that this genre placed on her talents.
Novels might give room to the autobiographical
element, but the fictive had no place in autobiography.
In that genre, art had to give way to truth in all its
nakedness. Antarjanam tells us that she regarded ‘the
hundred-headed serpent of the ego’ as the worst enemy
of self-narratives; as she was unsure of conquering it,
she did not want to venture into this new form of writing.
She also had a more immediately personal reason for
her reluctance: decades after she turned down
Kunjuraman’s suggestion, once she thought of
presenting herself in public through an autobiography
she felt as diffident as a young Nambutiri woman
stepping into the world without the protection of a veil or
a covering umbrella. 120
It is not accidental that the autobiographical act is so
closely linked in Antarjanam’s imagination with her
difficult—and desired—entry into the public realm. In her
youth, girls from Nambutiri families were not even
allowed to exit the inner space of the household after
they had reached puberty. In fact they were not to be
seen even by most male members of their own
household. Nambutiri reformers criticized this practice,
and M.R. Bhattatiripad’s play Ritumati, which focused on
the plight of a pubescent girl, was performed as part of
their campaigns in several places. Lalitambika was
among the early Nambutiri women who shed their
protective veil and umbrella.
The formative years in an Antarjanam’s life, according
to Lalitambika, were spent in the dark recesses of her
house. Her sense of self, even her desire for freedom,
was forged not in an open, collectively shared space, but
in the solitude of her inner rooms. She recalls how, when
she ‘came of age’, everybody at home wept, moved by
the plight that awaited her. Her entry into adolescence
signalled her death to the external world. However,
Lalitambika says that her ‘real’ education took place in
the two and a half lonesome years she spent in the inner
rooms of her house. Her father had gifted her a copy of
Tagore’s Ghare Baire (Home and the World), in a recent
Malayalam translation. 121 Her emotions were nurtured
less by real-life contact than by literature and the
experience of unfreedom. During this period she had
even begun writing a story in the manner of Tagore’s
novel.
Entry into the larger public arena as a new woman put
into crisis the very sense of self that had desired a wider
world. Lalitambika’s way of coping with this new world
was to use the protective veil of her imagination, which
enabled her to speak without speaking as herself. Fiction
allowed a displacement of one’s self by all that one
spoke about: it was possible to reveal things without
revealing oneself, except obliquely. This made
autobiography a difficult genre for Lalitambika. She did
not wish to rid herself of fiction’s protective umbrella
and, she believed, there would be no room for any trace
of fiction in an autobiography. Her response to this was
to incorporate the difficulty into the very form of her
autobiographical text. Instead of an autobiography, one
could have only a Preface to an Autobiography, the use
of a fragmentary form to speak about a difficulty.
This gesture of hesitation, which also became an act of
speech, was Lalitambika’s way of linking
autobiographization with historical inscription. The very
form of self-narration, in its intimacy with solitude and
silence, revealed a historical moment in its amplitude.
Her times entered her autobiography as solitude and
diffidence, and enabled her fragmented self-narration.
This configuration was of course not representative of all
women writers in Kerala in the early twentieth century.
Women from many of the non-Brahmin communities did
not share Lalitambika’s experience in the same way, and
the repertoire of their personal expression from this
period was far more diverse. Essays published in
women’s magazines as early as the first decades of the
twentieth century show the emergence of strong
autobiographical voices which draw upon a range of
sources, including the rhythms of everyday life in the
domestic realm. 122 Such forms of self-narration, used
effectively by several Nayar and Christian women, were
not easily available to Lalitambika. The subject that
speaks in her writing displays an uneasy relationship
with self-avowedly autobiographical performance. Her
preface to an impossible autobiography suggests that
her more elaborate practice of self-narration was in the
‘veiled’ mode of fiction. This aspect of Lalitambika’s
writing challenges historians of autobiographical
practice to redraw generic boundaries and look more
closely at the wider range of expressive forms used by
emergent subjects in modern Kerala to write about
themselves.
7

I Style and the Subject n one of His

longest fictional works—though not
long enough for critics to stop
wondering whether to call it a novel
or a short story—Vaikom Muhammad
Basheer, the great master of first-
person tales in Malayalam, presented
a dream. The narrator finds himself
lying on the bare ground under a
dark sky, bearing witness to his own
impending disappearance. The
body’s dismantling begins with the
eyes: they are plucked out and fitted,
like electric bulbs, on the ‘sides of the
sky’s belly’. Suddenly there is a flood
of light. Next comes the lighting of
the pyre; except there is no pyre, the
body is the pyre: ‘someone set fire to
the big toes. The body is burning like
celluloid.’ As the fire reaches the
knees, a voice asks for the last
words. The burning corpse responds
with metaphysical formulae of
benediction: Om, shanti, shanti. Then
it is all over: All burned out. Some
ashes in the shape of a body. The
wind blew them away. The ground is
empty.’ But this is not the end yet,
something persists: the two eyes
continue burning against the belly of
the sky. ‘Suddenly a deep voice
called: “The Next One.”’ 1 Basheer’s
image of disarticulation, of the body
and the voice, could serve as a point
of arrival at the end of a book on self-
articulation. Our expectations of a
sombre funeral ritual are belied; we
are in the presence of something
machine-like, with plucked-out eyes
serving as arc lights and the corpse a
strip of celluloid to crackle quickly in
the fire. God—or is it an assistant?—
is now a booming voice making a
routine announcement on the
megaphone: Next, Please! Basheer’s
 art strips down not just the body; the
space of language where the self
rules as author and narrator is taken
apart, thrown away, until the ground
is bare, empty. Still, the dream was
but a moment in the twists and turns
of Basheer’s first-person storytelling.

This book has discussed the early moments in which a

space was cleared in Malayalam writing for the ‘I’ to tell
its stories; moments when the empty ground had
acquired its initial population, of people and things,
bodies, a world. Basheer’s images of emptiness and a
machine-like assemblage may help place this landscape
under a different sky and permit us to listen with new
ears to the early stutters of a language in its making.
When I began work on this book I was interested in
scanning self-narratives for a distinctive clue to the
specific formation of modernity in Kerala, an
arrangement of things on the surface of which Basheer’s
cheerful laughter would come to fall later. As it has
emerged, however, the book offers neither a map of the
original site where self-narration began nor a narrative
history of its evolution. Instead of a story or a gallery of
portraits we have a series of snapshots; they slice into
time to interrupt and isolate postures, gestures. These
fleeting images do not even qualify as likenesses; they
would find it hard to make it to official documentation as
stable tools for identification. But they do make for a
different gathering of traces, an inscription less vivid
than the well-formed characters of alphabetic writing.
The figures assembled in this book do not always
demand or permit an activity of reading. They exist in an
order of visibility which calls for description and
documentation rather than interpretation. The
compositional choices of this book have been shaped by
a sense of these features; my aim was to seek
arrangements which would expose these snapshots to
the daylight of our present.
Forms of visibility have cropped up as a recurrent
concern during work on this book. They initially
appeared as a matter of tropology: light and vision have
been vital to the imagery in most of the texts studied
here. Luminous bodies and spaces appear in Sree
Narayanan’s poems to suggest states of liberation,
interestingly paralleled by his installation of mirrors in
place of idols in temples, and his elevation of specular
reflection as a paradigm for thinking about the divine.
My discussion of early novels in Malayalam suggested
that configurations of light play an advanced, form-
giving function in them. This is true in a different way of
C.V. Raman Pillai’s historical fiction too, where dramatic
contrasts between darkness, effulgence, and the
misleading visibility of disguise predominate. Novels
written by C.V.’s contemporaries show an obsessive
preoccupation with the activities of seeing, looking, and
reading, and track in their pages a spectrum of visual
experiences ranging from the curious, engaged
observation of new objects to feeling dazzled by the
glare of the marvellous. Reading in varied forms—as
decipherment of signs and as search for the right code—
come up repeatedly, cutting across genres.
What does the prominence of orders of visibility, and
of situations and actions defined in their terms, indicate?
A response may be sought in the links between first-
person utterances and structures of exteriority. This
book has stressed that the public dimension ought to be
seen as playing a constitutive role in autobiographical
enunciation: self-narration carves out a space for the ‘I’
in the field of public utterances. Its grounds are to be
found not in privately experienced moments of self-
intuition but in the experience of being exposed in a
field of perception populated by others. In the
Introduction I pointed to strands in more recent thinking
which argue that claims of singularity are made within
this domain of shared visibility. 2 This insight prompted a
shift in the focus of my analyses from an originary sense
of the inner to the field of exposedness within which the
inner emerges as a mark of certain statements and
claims. Configurations of visibility prominent in the texts
examined called for a closer engagement with this
terrain.
This book uses the figure of visibility in a range of
senses: while it refers to specifically optical
configurations, to acts of seeing and reading, and to
states of being dazzled or being exposed, it also stands
as shorthand for what I referred to as ‘perceptual
economies’. By this I mean the organization of
perceptual relations within which various textual
entities, such as objects or characters, images or
descriptions, acquire their presence. The two chapters
on the novel insistently brought the nature and mode of
existence of perceptual economies into focus. Early
novels in Malayalam were preoccupied with the activity
of differentiation—making distinctions between
communities, genders, emotions, and conceptions of
history. Sometimes these distinctions crop up as topics
of direct discussion between characters or invite
commentary from the narrator. More importantly, they
sometimes appear in the form of an ‘aesthetic’ work,
determining the way people and things are presented in
the narration and seen by characters. The use of the
term ‘aesthetic’ should not suggest that we are dealing
with a problem specific to the arts and that we need a
theory of art for its resolution; our concern is with the
organization of perception. The etymological lineage of
the ‘aesthetic’, as we know, shows its early alliance with
perception. Early novels make extensive use of
perceptual relationships to delineate the orientation of
subjects in the world and establish differences among
them.
We saw, for instance, that the contrast between older
and newer marital norms in the Nayar and Nambutiri
communities resonated with two distinctive orientations
of erotic desire in O. Chandu Menon’s Indulekha. More
interestingly, the novel’s differentiation of modes of
desire, as the discussion in chapter 4 showed, is closely
tied to its presentation of objects and appearances.
Collections of objects, ways of dressing, and the display
of material riches all formed essential elements in an
economy within which subjects of sensation and desire
appeared. It may be tempting to see in this merely the
outer manifestation of an inner, psychological
difference: objects, etc., one may argue, are no more
than mere instruments used for revealing character. This
view treats objects as possessing essentially a
metaphorical function: they are primarily extensions of
character. 3 The analyses in this book suggest, however,
that distinctions established between characters in
terms of their identities rely on a perceptual logic which
permeates the entire fictional world: its scope exceeds
the framework of characters and affects narration and
description. The very possibility of the novel as a
discursive form seems to have emerged out of a new
ability to configure perceptual relationships as a basic
ground for the intelligibility of things, persons, and
actions.
How did language acquire this new ability? We
encountered in earlier chapters dissonances between
schematic descriptions and attempts at verisimilitude,
as well as between various schematisms. The
emergence of print in nineteenth-century Kerala
unmoored and put into circulation a range of
schematisms from various domains of knowledge and
practice. Most periodicals in the late nineteenth century
were religious in nature, and secular news began making
an appearance first as a section in religious periodicals.
4 The domain of print was closely tied to the emergence

of new forms and practices of knowledge strikingly

different from the older ones. The contrast between the
old and the new was complicated by the differential
access possessed by caste and religious communities to
various kinds of knowledge. Autobiographies show that
this was not only an intellectual difficulty; practices of
knowledge acquisition involved modes of embodiment. 5
This has been recognized more clearly in the case of
traditional knowledge practices; but new methods of
instruction, even when seemingly not anchored in the
body, produce their own distinctive forms of corporeal
investment. Kesavan’s autobiography, for instance,
documents the strange newness of bodily experiences:
of sitting on the floor with classmates from other castes,
of the sense of shame produced by disparities in dress in
the classroom, and of improvisation in techniques of
corporeal punishment devised to ensure the
maintenance of rules of untouchability. New discourses
of knowledge, be they of science, geography, or history
—in spite of their claims to factual truthfulness—
acquired their own schematic, magical dimension. They
became objects of marvel and fear, prompting
simultaneously an admission of their powers as well as
generating efforts at taming their newness.
Public discourses in Kerala at the end of the nineteenth
century showed a diversity of norms and practices, with
no settled authority to arbitrate over disputes or
legislate norms. Practices of literary and religious
expression moved out of their earlier habitats to enter
into new, heterogeneous alliances. Compositions which
demonstrated and appealed to literary virtuosity and
specialized skills began losing their earlier addressees;
their new publics were too diverse in their knowledge,
judgement, and literary habitus. In spite of its small size
and enormous exclusions, the print-public sphere
emerged as a diverse and promiscuous space. Objects of
discourses—literary, religious, or social—appeared
incompletely formed, always in need of some form of
supplementation. We saw how early novels presented
female bodies through formulaic head-to-toe
descriptions borrowed from the kavya tradition. This
helped illustrate a point: realistic descriptions promised
by the novel did not seem adequate in themselves and
called for schematic supplementation. Earlier literary
formulae too were inadequate or unconvincing in the
new discursive space of the novel: often they functioned
like a protective screen which allowed public uses of
language to get closer to what they spoke about without
dissolving social barriers and distinctions. The formulaic
nature of head-to-toe descriptions permitted a new
discursive intimacy with the female body. The
preoccupation with perceptual economies was a
symptom of literature’s new status as public discourse;
it revealed an impulse to regulate and at the same time
permit access to all that appeared in literature’s new
space of exposure. Self-narratives fashioned not only
their voices and their audience but also the selfhoods
they spoke about, within this new space. I have
repeatedly addressed questions of visibility to take
account of the dimension of publicness that the
language of self-articulation came to possess at this
time.
In my brief discussion of K. Ramakrishna Pillai in the
first chapter, I examined the complex and ambivalent
manoeuvres through which borders between political
and literary publicity were produced and negotiated at
the beginning of the twentieth century. 6 Ramakrishna
Pillai’s use of scandal as a mode of political criticism
demonstrates how exposure—proper and improper—and
its consequences remained central to such distinctions.
The political charge of exposure brings to light a deeper
dimension of all public visibilization, even when carried
out under the sign of the avowedly non-political activity
of literary writing. Literature as a form of public
utterance acquired the ability to cause individual and
collective hurt and provoke claims for redress in this
period. At the core of this new zone of sensitivity were
caste and community identities and their relationship to
public experiences of shame and humiliation.
Ramakrishna Pillai’s own use of scandal pivoted on
issues of sexuality and corruption; but on a closer look
these appear intimately linked to questions of caste:
sexual improprieties around the palace and the dewan’s
office are implicitly felt in Ramakrishna Pillai’s writing as
offences to the dignity of Nayar women. This was
anticipated in some of his early editorials, where Pillai
had urged reform in a temple custom requiring Nayar
women associated with the palace not to cover their
upper torso while participating in ritual processions. 7
Pillai made a distinction between the devotional space of
the temple and the streets through which the later
phase of the procession progressed. The streets were a
space of public visibility and the onlookers formed a
promiscuous audience; Pillai described this public as
including diverse communities, especially low castes
{hinajati).
Caste matters had an ambivalent status in the public
domain: glorious references to caste histories, produced
by many communities at this time, provoked disputes
when the claims of communities conflicted with one
another, leading to satiric debunking and counterclaims.
But the very mention of the caste identities of authors
could be demeaning in a discursive space predicated on
the disavowal of caste. There were frequent insinuations
of the caste status of authors in the early twentieth
century. 8 I mentioned controversies over the surnames
used by lower-caste writers; some upper-caste critics
saw the very entry of certain communities into the
space of literary writing as presumptuous. Debates over
the literary canon came to be coloured by claims
regarding the cultural capital of communities, demands
for inclusiveness, and disagreements on the quantum of
representation of caste groups. Some of these debates
were carried out in poetry: compositions such as
Kaviramayanam, Kavibharatam, and Kavipushpamala
adopted allegorical devices for formulating literary
canons, by comparing Malayalam poets to characters in
epics or to flowers in a garden. They provoked criticism
and countercompositions from excluded caste groups.
The story that I have tracked is therefore also about
the vital role that caste identities played in the
production of a public domain which worked on the
premise of its disavowal of caste. This had an affective
dimension, with caste humiliation acquiring a new
intensity and visibility in lower-caste writing, and a sense
of caste offence beginning to be experienced by the
privileged castes. Kanippayyur’s autobiography, we saw,
offers elements for a phenomenology of the caste
offence felt by a Nambutiri Brahmin when the norms of
public visibility changed. He felt vallayma (unease) at
many of the changes, which he felt were meant to insult
the Nambutiris. Equality could become a source of hurt.
The disappearance of external signs of caste difference,
for Kanippayyur, did not signify the extinction of caste. It
served, he felt, only to highlight the changing power
equations between castes; he saw in it a public
demeaning of the Nambutiri’s status which drew
attention to the incongruous combination of his high-
caste identity and weak political power. As older caste
markers began to disappear and discourses of jati gave
way to those of samudayam, the language of caste
began to signify the limits of the public domain. At the
same time, through caste community movements, it
also became the major propeller and even a paradigm
for constituting a public. These ambivalences of visibility
indicate the complexity of caste as a form of political
existence in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century
Kerala.
Political existence does not always involve organized
collective effort. The autobiographies considered in the
previous chapter show how deeply individual and
familial experiences were marked by the tensions I
indicated above. Instances of slippage have been noted,
where dominant strands in self-narration were belied by
elements that escaped its direct control. Such slippages
need to be considered intrinsic to autobiographical
enunciation, and, at a more general level, to the social
life of identities. Hannah Arendt, who stressed the public
appearance of human beings in action and utterances,
valorized biographical writing—which reflected how
others saw one—over autobiographies. 9 The distinction
may not be entirely satisfactory: what is actually
visibilized in self-narratives is often not identical with
what the author-protagonist intended to project or avow.
The figure of the subject engaged in the act of self-
exhibition does not stay within the author-exhibitor’s
control or vision but forms a vital component of what is
revealed in self-narratives when they appear in the
public domain. Instances of slippage and incongruence
are a part of the very conditions of possibility of self-
narration; they manifest ambivalences inherent in
political existence rather than a hidden, more authentic
or substantial selfhood.
Judith Butler’s insights into the performative character
of identities and the possibilities of subversion they open
up have been hugely influential in recent scholarship. 10
Her arguments are based on her claim that processes of
identification remain necessarily incomplete, and
thereby prompt constant performative iteration. The
slippages we encountered in self-narration manifest this
constitutive lack of closure in identities. The notion of
‘inhabitation’, as I indicated in chapter 1, offers a useful
way of understanding the complex social life of
identities. The texts that I looked at do not reveal
subjects in stable occupation of their identities. This has
compelled me to move away from a prominent strand in
literary studies which uses representations of social
identities as a privileged tool for interpreting texts. This
book has focused, instead, on a far less stable
presencing of the figure of the subject. As said earlier,
snapshots of gestures and movements rather than
portraits of identifiable faces: these indicate the book’s
trajectory.
As in photography, the snapshots were captured often
through a process of interruption. Interestingly, such
interruption took different forms, partly determined by
the kinds of material we engaged and the habits of
writing and reading associated with them. Narrative
continuities and assumptions about the unity of
characterization were at times set aside in my reading of
novels, to move to a plane of analysis prior to them—
that of economies of perception and utterance. This
generated connections which cut through stories and
characters to reveal other orders of fictional coherence.
My choice was guided by a dissatisfaction with those
modes of literary reading that see in plots and
characters the primary location of a text’s meaning. I
found it useful to regard these and other components of
literary fiction as machine-like elements in an
assemblage; their status is rather like that of props in a
theatrical production or in the performance of a ritual.
They are not bearers of meaning on their own, although
their presence is necessary for the work that takes
place. This is not to suggest that narrative structures do
not matter. I found them particularly useful while
discussing Kumaran Asan’s monologic poetry. Rubbing
the narrative grain against the coherence of poetic
language helped track the fleeting appearance of
subjects caught in liminal moments: of destitution,
infancy, or an incandescence of desire bordering on
death.
This book has returned repeatedly to figures of the
body. Their presence is evident in all its chapters, but
they do not form a single coherent narrative. In my
reading of Sree Narayana Guru’s writings and actions
the body appeared as a crucial link of transmission
between his devotional, metaphysical, and instructional
writings as well as the new practices initiated by him.
This does not however mean that all his writings and
actions can be synthesized and anchored in his
conception of the body. Placing the body at the
foreground of discussions, however, allowed new
connections to emerge, for instance between Sree
Narayanan’s metaphysical works, his writings on caste,
and his pronouncements on the community. This made
possible a close consideration of some of his lesser-
known writings and often unnoticed aspects of his well-
known works. This allowed me, more importantly, to
track fresh, oblique links between the distinct discursive
events associated with Sree Narayanan and Kumaran
Asan. The problem of the body does not offer a vantage
point of privileged critical visibility; it impacted the
analyses here in widely different ways. In the discussion
of Kumaran Asan’s poetry, a focus on corporeality
brought into relief complexities of desire and encounters
with limits and intensities. In the chapters on the novel
and in the discussion on self-narratives, the body worked
in several ways to open the discussion to questions of
sensation, historical memory, and time.
This book does not try to write a history of the body in
modern Kerala; the analyses offered here at times do
touch tangentially the contours of such a project. The
texts discussed emerged at a moment of major
transformation in bodily practices and in the estimation
of corporeality in Kerala. Could we use the body’s
figuration in literary articulation as a lens to re-view
these transformations, singled out often as signs of
Kerala’s encounter with modernity? Recent scholarship,
following Foucault’s crucial insights, has often
highlighted the moves through which the body was
invested with a new regime of disciplinary technologies,
revealing how our experience of individuation is
produced precisely through a deployment of disciplines.
Arguably, we are yet to generate adequate descriptions
of the consequences of these transformations for a
corporeal sense of the past. Modern subjects are also
subjects of remembrance; how do they come to acquire
an articulate language of recollection which also
produces moments of slippage? And how, existing
alongside the disciplinary production of corporeality and
narratives of structured history, do less articulate orders
of memory reveal themselves?
I have not sought answers to these questions in an
account of inner selfhood; I have considered the space
of the inner more as an effect, as produced by processes
which in turn need to be understood and explained. The
attempt in this book has been to see how the
coexistence and overlap of different ways of configuring
the body permits insights into forms of less articulate
retention. C.V. Raman Pillai’s novels present this in
perhaps the most spectacular terms. However, this
dimension is not unique to C.V. and appears in the other
texts examined as well. The complicity between
disavowal and retention may not have been hidden in
the deep recesses of souls; it may be inscribed in the
figuration of the body, in the different grids within which
it is simultaneously placed. The double vision to be
found in Kesavan’s autobiography demonstrates an
ability to see the body in different grids simultaneously.
The sense of their immediate coexistence, the
synchrony of bodily memory, sometimes interrupted
Kesavan’s narrative of evolution and progress to reveal
complex dimensions of historical inhabitation.
We are back to the trope of inhabitation. And here
perhaps my book can end: with a brief reflection of a
concept crucial within it, though not made wholly
explicit, namely ‘style’. Style is but another name for the
discursive presencing of the subject’s inhabitation—of
identities, of the body, of norms, of the world. Style has
not been developed as a stable concept in this book,
and has been seldom named in these analyses.
However, it operates as a running thread, shaping the
questions raised and the connections probed. One may
say that style stands in several oppositional
relationships: with respect to signs, representations,
images, and stories. These oppositions do not acquire
the predictability of stable binaries since style is made
visible precisely in the working of the elements it is
placed in opposition to. The word style has acquired in
our times a late Foucauldian ring, from his studies on
what he called stylizations of the self. 11 My use of the
word leans also on the use of the term in ordinary
language in relation to writing: a certain manner, a way
of working with language or working language, that
cannot be equated with what is being said or written, or
with the tools chosen for the purpose. The space of style
is distinguishable from ideologies and belief systems; by
virtue of its complex materiality, style offers resistance
to its reduction to ideas and representations. The
fleeting movements visible in the snapshots offered in
this book offer a point of entry into the realm of style.
My aim is not to develop a theory of style or propose a
new stylistics as method; it is rather to document the
existence of style as a discursive figure for the subject’s
unstable and variable inhabitation of the self and the
world.
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Periodicals
Atmaposhini
Bhashaposhini
Desabhimani
Dharmam
Kerala Kaumudi
Keralapanchika
Lakshmibai
Mahila
Malayala Manorama
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Notes
Chapter 1
1 Vaikathu Pachu Moothathu’s Atmakatha, written in 1875, was for a long

time regarded as the first modern autobiography in Malayalam. The

rediscovery of Yakob Ramavarman’s personal narrative has altered this:
Ramavarman’s account appears to precede Moothathu’s by nineteen years.
See Moothathu, ‘Atmakatha’; Ramavarman, ‘Yakob Ramavarman’.
2 Kannan Nair was one of the founders of the Changanassery Nayar

Samajam, an early initiative to organize the Nayars and initiate reforms in

their customs and practices. He was the founder editor of the journal Nayar,
published from Changanassery in 1903 and Nayar Samudaya Parishkarini
from Kollam in 1904. See G. Priyadarshan, Adyakalamasikakal, 44–8. Later
organizational initiatives in Nayar social reform are mentioned below. See
also Jeffrey 212–21.
3 K. Kannan Nair, Karuthodi Kannan Nayarude Atmakatha, v. All translations

from Malayalam texts are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

4 See, for instance, Arunima, There Comes Papa; Devika, Engendering

Individuals; Kodoth, ‘Courting Legitimacy’; Dilip M. Menon, Caste,

Nationalism and Communism; K.N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State.
5 See, for detailed discussion and documentation on this, Unni,
Pathonpatham Noottandile Keralam (hereafter Unni).
6 Ibid., 31–4, 743–51. See also Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of

Knowledge.
7 Therenjedutha Rajakiya Vilambarangal, 301–2; Unni, 743, 750.

8 Unni, 751. A royal proclamation of 1818 removed the requirement for

prior permission from the state, but maintained the restrictions on the kinds
of ornaments that various castes could wear. See Balakrishnan, ed., Sree
Narayana Guru, 40.
9 Unni, 751.

10 Ibid., 753.
11 Mitavadi, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1916), 19. See, for a detailed discussion

on Ayyankali’s interventions, Ramadas, Ayyankalikku Adarattode.

12 Unni, 751, 752.

13 Kunjambu, Saraswativijayam, 70.

14 See Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure’; Samarendra, ‘Anthropological

Knowledge’.
15 See, for examples relevant to Kerala, Thurston, Castes and Tribes of

Southern India; Fawcett, Nambutiris; Fawcett, Nayars.

16 For the full text of the petition submitted to the king, see Unni, 756–65.

17 See Panikkassery, Do. Palpu, 44.

18 Chattampi Swamikal, Pracheena Malayalam, 303–460.

19 ‘Adikeralacharitram’. For a discussion of this text, see Nambiar, ‘Print,

Communities and the Novel’, 18–25.

20 For a detailed discussion, see Kumar, ‘Dr Palpu’s Petition Writings’.

21 Phule, ‘Slavery’, 22–99. See, for a discussion of these arguments,

O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, 137–73, especially 143–6. For

Palpu’s correspondence, see Dr Palpu Papers. For a detailed discussion, see
Kumar, ‘Dr Palpu’s Petition Writings’, especially 20–6.
22 Ibid., pp. 27–8.

23 P.S. Variar, Varianmarude Purvacaritra Samkshepam, 8.

24 Palpu, ‘Memorandum: Some Additional Notes’.

25 For a discussion of multiple sovereignties in colonial rule and its

implications for postcolonial India, see Hansen, ‘Sovereigns beyond the

State’.
26 See Devika, Engendering Individuals; Devika, ed., Her-Self.

27 Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 21 and 22.

28 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. For a penetrating discussion of

agency and its use in modern scholarship, see Asad, ‘Thinking About
Agency and Pain’, 67–99.
29 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn.

30 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 166. For a discussion, see Agamben,

Remnants of Auschwitz, 109.

31 See, for instance, Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, esp.

132–6; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 109–12; also Derrida, Of

Grammatology, passim.
32 Levinas, On Escape, 64; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 105.

33 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 105–6.

34 For an excellent discussion of the trope of impossibility in Dalit writing,

see Tharu, ‘The Impossible Subject’. A theoretical discussion on humiliation

and shame in relation to Dalit autobiographies may be found in Kumar,
‘Consciousness, Agency and Humiliation’.
35 Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’.

36 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, One: Thinking, chapter 1: ‘Appearance’;

idem, The Human Condition.

37 Cavarero, Relating Narratives.

38 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 34.

39 See Ranciere, Dissensus, especially ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, 27–44.

40 Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire, 6.

41 Holden, ‘Other Modernities’. See also his Autobiography and

Decolonization.
42 Arnold, ‘The Self and the Cell’.

43 See Aquil and Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’, in idem, ed., History in the

Vernacular.
44 For a brief discussion of some of these figures in the context of early

print history, see Aiyer, Kerala Sahityacharitram, vol. 4, 284–9. For the
impact of print on Kerala culture, see Ramakrishnan,
‘Varthamanappathrangaludeyum Achadiyanthrangaludeyum’. On early
newspapers in Kerala, see Priyadarshan, Kerala Patrapravarthanam:
Suvarnadhyangal.
45 For a biography, see Harisharma, Kandathil Varghese Mappila. A

collection of Varghese Mappila’s editorials on several topics, including the

Malayalam language, may be found in Kerala Navothhanam. For a
discussion of some of his ideas on language, see Arunima, ‘Imagining
Communities’.
46 Pravur Kesavan Asan began publishing the newspaper Sujananandini in

1892; after an interruption, it was revived in 1903 and published till 1907.
47 See Ramakrishna Pillai’s editorial ‘Garhyamaya Nadatta’ (Reprehensible

Conduct), in Swadeshabhimani, 24 August 1910, quoted in Kamalamma,

ed., Swadeshabhimaniyude Sahitya Sapraya, 187.
48 Editorial in Keralapanchika, 22 April 1901, quoted in Bhaskara Pillai,

Swadeshabhimani, 47.
49 Pinto, Between Empires, esp. chapters 5–7.

50 Ramakrishna Pillai, ‘Onnam Pathippinte Mukhavura’ (Preface to the First

Edition), in Kurukkal, Parappuram, iii.

51 See O. Chandu Menon, Indulekha; Padu Menon, Lakshmikesavam. See

also Arunima, ‘Glimpses from a Writer’s World’; Kumar, ‘Kazhchayum

Vayanayum’.
52 For a discussion of some aspects of representation in this novel, see

Kumar, ‘Seeing and Reading’.

53 Ramakrishna Pillai, Karl Marx, 76.

54 Nedungadi, ‘Preface’, Kundalata, v.

55 Ibid.
56 O. Chandu Menon, Preface to the First Edition, in Indulekha, 10. For an

English translation, see O. Chandu Menon, Indulekha, tr. W. Dumergue, xiii–

xiv; and Indulekha, tr. Anitha Devasia, Appendix I, 237–40.
57 The Malabar Marriage Commission was appointed in 1891 by the

Government of Madras to report on the customs of the Hindus of Malabar

related to matrilineal inheritance, family structures, and marital practices.
The novelist O. Chandu Menon was a member of the commission and
submitted a note of dissent with the report.
Chapter 2
1 Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 306.

2 Moorkothu Kumaran, Sree Narayanaguruswamikalude Jeevacharitram, 87.

See also ibid., 123. For a critique of the apocryphal character of this
statement, see Rajan and Reghu, ‘Backwater Universalism’, 66–7.
3 Sree Narayanan began wearing saffron robes at the insistence of some of

his disciples before his journey to Ceylon in 1918, ten years before his
death. He is reported to have said that saffron robes had the advantage
that dust did not show on them. Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 352.
4 Kummampilli Raman Pillai Asan (1845–1911) is said to have composed

texts such as Prabodhachandrodayam, Dasakumaracharitasamgraham, and

Pattanattupillayar Pattu. He had a school (gurukulam) in Puthuppally in
Onattukara, where training was given to learners in the Sanskrit language,
Kathakali, and Aksharaslokam—the intricate art of reciting quatrains in
sequence—without discrimination against anyone on the basis of caste and
religion. See Muthulekshmi, ‘Samskrtabhashayude
Navodhanasandarbham’, 9.
5 Biographies of Sree Narayana Guru include those by K. Damodaran

(1929), Moorkothu Kumaran (1930), Pandit K.K. Panikkar (1954), Swami

Dharmanandaji (1965), and M.K. Sanu (1976). Notable among collections of
studies on the Guru are P.K. Balakrishnan’s Sree Narayana Guru (1954) and
K.N. Shaji’s Narayanaguru: Jeevitam, Krtikal, Darsanam (2002). Sree
Narayanan’s life has also been commemorated in novels and films: K.
Surendran’s Guru (1992) is an example of the former, and Narayana Guru
(1985, dir. P.A. Backer) and Yogapurushan (2010, dir. R. Sukumaran) of the
latter.
6 There are notable exceptions to this: see the essays by B. Rajeevan,

reproduced in the section ‘Sree Narayanante Rashtriyam’, in Vakkukalum

Vasthukkalum, 241–347; Reghu, ‘Sree Narayana Prasthanam Keralattinte
Yuvatvamanu’.
7 For a discussion of these biographies, see Kumar, ‘Writing the Life of the

Guru’.
8 See Paravur K. Gopala Pillai, Paramabhattarashri Chattampi Swamikal

Jeevacharitram.
9 For a discussion of Ayya Vaikuntanathar, see Pandian, ‘Meanings of

Colonialism and Nationalism’; P. Sundaram Swamikal and Ponnumani, Ayya

Vaikuntanathar; Patrick, Religion and Subaltern Agency.
10 Pandit C. Ramakrishnan Nair, ‘Chattampi Swamikalum
Trithapadasampradayavum’, 70–1.
11 Ibid., 73.

12 See ‘Anukampa Dasakam’, in Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte

Sampurna Krtikal, 519–21.

13 Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan, 230.

14 See Narayana Guru, ‘Arivu’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal,

522–30; ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’, ibid., 339–40.

15 See for instance, Heehs, ed., Indian Religions, 289.

16 See T. Bhaskaran’s commentary in Narayana Guru,

Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal, 273–9. For a commentary with
more explicitly Advaitin leanings, see Narayana Guru, Sree Narayana
Gurudeva Krtikal, vol. 2, 614–65.
17 Tirumular, Tirumantiram, v. 724.

18 Ibid., v. 725.

19 Ibid., v. 1823.

20 Zvelebil, Smile of Murugan, 234–5.

21 Kamil Zvelebil says: ‘there is a very notable difference between

Pattinattar and the early cittar: they liked their own body, they wanted to
cherish and foster and preserve it, in order to use it for yogic techniques.
Pattinattar, in this sense, is more of a “classical” yogi than a siddha:
according to Patanjali (Yogasutras, II.40), physical purification produces
disgust with one’s own body, and cessation of contact with other bodies—a
point at which “classical” yoga and the “magical”, Siddha yoga differ
significantly.’ Smile of Murugan, 235.
22 Ganapathy, The Philosophy of the Tamil Siddhas, 116.

23 Some have even suggested that Chattampi Swamikal and Sree

Narayanan moved away from Thycaud Ayya after the latter became
engrossed in a strand of Siddha practice similar to alchemy. T. Bhaskaran
attributes this view to Sahodaran Ayyappan. Narayana Guru,
Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal, 274. The oral reminiscence of
Thycaud Ayya’s second son and disciple Pazhani Velayya Swamikal
suggests that Sree Narayanan and Chattampi Swamikal were initiated into
alchemy (rasavadam) by Thycaud Ayya, but disputes that the latter was
interested in making gold through this method for private use. See
Brahmashri Thycaud Ayya Swamikal, 80. For a discussion of alchemy in
Siddha practice in medieval India, see White, The Alchemical Body.
24 Narayana Guru, ‘Siva Satakam’, v. 72, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna

Krtikal, 205.
25 Ibid., 205. Zvelebil cites passages from Pattinattar with similar imagery.

‘[H]e describes the female body as a bag of filth. The belly, compared by
poets to a banian leaf, is a shaking screen of dirt and dregs; the breasts,
compared to lotus-buds, are in fact two hanging dried-up pouches, parched
and full of inner heat, scratched by the finger-nails of lusty men. The neck is
full of sweat and dust and filth, and out of the hellish mouth spouts poison.’
Smile of Murugan, 234–5.
26 Narayana Guru, ‘Mananateetam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna

Krtikal, 270.
27 Narayana Guru, ‘Indriya Vairagyam’, ibid., 225–6.

28 Ibid., 230.

29 Narayana Guru, ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte

Sampurna Krtikal, 334–45.
30 Ibid., 334. See also Narayana Guru, Sree Narayana Gurudeva Krtikal,

vol. 1, 539.
31 For a reading of ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’ that highlights its Advaitic

orientation, see Nataraja Guru’s commentary in Narayana Guru, One

Hundred Verses.
32 Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal, 338–9.

33 See Sankhya Karika, especially xv–xvi and xxii–v, for a discussion of

some differences between Sankhya and Saiva Siddhanta.

34 Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal, 348.

35 Ibid., 368.

36 Ibid., 352.

37 Ibid., 404.

38 Ibid., 34. See Bhaskaran’s commentary on this verse, ibid., 343–4.

39 Sreekanteswaram Padmanabha Pillai, Sabdataravali, 1063.

40 Narayana Guru, ‘Atmopadesa Satakam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte

Sampurna Krtikal, 344.
41 Ibid.

42 Tirumular, Tirumantiram, v. 2905.

43 Thurston, Castes and Tribes of South India, vol. II, 400.

44 Vivekodayam XII: 10 (1915), cited in Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 296–7.

45 Ibid., 297.

46 Rajan and Reghu, ‘Backwater Universalism’, 75. Emphasis in the

original.
47 See ‘Daivachintanam 1’, written around 1881, arguing against the

worship of malignant deities. Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte

Sampurna Krtikal, 616–22.
48 Ibid., 616.

49 Dharmanandaji, Sree Narayana Gurudevan, 359–63.

50 Balakrishnan, ed., Sree Narayana Guru, 129–32.

51 ‘There are several stories about Swamy’s compassionate, and at times

humorous, responses to devotees who approached him for solutions to their

problems. These stories have been recorded by many people with a veneer
of the fantastic.’ Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 127.
52 Dharmanandaji, Sree Narayana Gurudevan, 342–3.

53 Rajeevan, ‘Sree Narayanante Rashtriyam’, esp. ‘Sreenarayanaguruvum

Vedantathinte Nyunapakshavatkaranavum’ (Sree Narayana Guru and the

Minorization of Vedanta), Vakkukalum Vasthukkalum, 249–53.
54 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16. See also

Kumar, ‘Literature and Intensity’, 123–35.

55 Although Saivite deities figure prominently in Sree Narayanan’s

devotional writings, he also wrote some Vaishnavite compositions, e.g.

‘Sree Vasudevashtakam’. Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte
Sampurna Krtikal, 239–42.
56 Balakrishnan, ed., Sree Narayana Guru, 149.

57 Swami Brahmavratan, Maharshi Vagbhatananda Gurudevar, 69–70.

58 Desabhimani, 15 July 1916, cited in Vaidyar, Sree Narayana Guruvum

Kumaran Asanum, 6.
59 Balakrishnan, ed., Sree Narayana Guru, 77.

60 Narayana Guru, ‘Atmavilasam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna

Krtikal, 630. Italics mine.
61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 633.

63 See Zvelebil, Smile of Murugan, 229–30.

64 Balakrishnan, ed., Sree Narayana Guru, 50.

65 Moorkothu Kumaran, Sree Narayanaguruswamikalude Jeevacharitram,

219–20.
66 Ibid.

67 Narayana Guru, ‘Jatilakshanam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna

Krtikal, 505.
68 Fawcett, Nambutiris, 33.

69 Narayana Guru, ‘Pindanandi’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal,

217–24. Bhaskaran suggests that the poem was composed between 1887
and 1897.
70 Chattampi Swamikal, ‘Jivakarunya Nirupanam’, in K. Maheswaran Nair,

ed., Chattampi Swamikal: Jivitavum Krtikalum, 747–71. The text was written
in 1918. R. Raman Nair and Sulochana Devi, Chattampi Swamikal, 441; for
a discussion of the text, see 229–31.
71 Kumaran, Sree Narayanaguruswamikalude Jeevacharitram, 75.

72 Ibid., 218.

73 Narayana Guru, ‘Jivakarunya Panchakam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte

Sampurna Krtikal, 514. A literal translation of the last two lines would be:
‘even with all other virtues, the killer lacks the quality of offering refuge or
protection [saranyata]’.
74 Narayana Guru, ‘Anukampa Dasakam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte
Sampurna Krtikal, 517.
75 ‘Anukampa Dasakam’, vv. 6–9, ibid., 519–21.

76 Moorkothu Kumaran, Sreenarayanaguruswamikalude Jeevacharitram,

183.
77 Narayana Guru, ‘Advaita Jeevitam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna

Krtikal, 1.
78 Ibid.
79 Hermann Gundert’s dictionary defines samudayam as ‘an assembly; a

council of Brahmans, committee for managing common property or the

concerns of a temple.’ Hermann Gundert, Malayalam and English
Dictionary, 1039. Writings published in late-nineteenth-century newspapers
and periodicals often use samudayam to signify human collectivities in
general.
80 Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 349.

81 Narayana Guru, ‘Advaita Jeevitam’, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna

Krtikal, 1.
82 Balakrishnan, ed., Sree Narayana Guru, 98–102.

83 Ibid., 92.

84 Sree Narayana Guru did not always succeed in realizing this objective.

The Jagannatha temple in Tellicherry consecrated by him did not, contrary

to his wishes, permit entry to lower untouchable castes like the Pulayas.
See Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 194–5. Sree Narayanan also had serious
disagreements with the SNDP Yogam in later years. See Bhaskaran, ed.,
Sree Narayana Guru Vaikhari, 264.
85 Vivekodayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1905), 41.

86 Ibid., 41.

87 See Vivekodayam, vol. XI, no. 9 (1915), cited in Sanu,

Narayanaguruswamy, 293.
88 Ibid., 339–42.

89 Ibid., 342.

90 Interestingly, Guru’s admission of Kanikkuruppanmar into the Ezhava

community was contested by some members of the community when one

of the converts was recommended for appointment as a member to the
Municipality. Sree Narayanan issued a certificate to endorse the Ezhava
identity of the person in question. Moorkothu Kumaran,
Sreenarayanaguruswamikalude Jeevacharitram, 178.
91 Ibid., 540. Dr Palpu held a different position on toddy tapping. He

thought that the adverse effects of toddy could be removed with proper
care and that it could be made into a lucrative industry, of great benefit to
the community.
92 Desabhimani, 15 July 1916, cited in Vaidyar, Sree Narayana Guruvum

Kumaran Asanum, 5.
93 For a biography, see Achutan, C. Krishnan.

94 Ayyappan’s conversation with Narayana Guru in 1922, in Shaji,

Narayanaguru, 467–9.
95 See Kunjuraman, ‘Tiyyarkku Nallatu Buddhamatam Tanneyanu’.

96 Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 347–8.

97 See Shaji, Narayanaguru, 459–66, and 467–9.

98 Ibid., 463.

99 Ibid., 233.

100 Ibid., 463–4.

101 Several years before Guru’s promulgation of the motto ‘Oru jati, oru

matam, oru daivam manushyanu’, ‘Atmopadesatakam’, v. 49, used the

phrase ‘immatam ekam’ (this is the only matam), in relation to all human
endeavour being aimed at atmasukham (one’s own happiness, or spiritual
welfare). Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal, 379. I
thank Guru Muni Narayana Prasad for bringing this to my notice.
102 Vaidyar, Sree Narayana Guruvum Kumaran Asanum, 6.

103 Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 440.

104 Ibid.

105 Dr Palpu developed this argument in his letters, petitions and

speeches, in an alternative, speculative historiography of caste in Kerala.

See chapter 1.
Chapter 3
1 Priyadarshan, ‘Alpam Charitram’, 16. See also Harisharma, Kandathil

Varghese Mappila.
2 For a discussion of Arabi Malayalam writing, see Abu, Arabimalayala

Sahityacharitram. An excellent discussion of the Christian contribution to

Malayalam writing may be found in Thomas, Malayalasahityavum
Kristianikalum, and in the annotations therein by Scaria Zacharia. See also
Manavalan, Kerala Samskaravum Kraistava Missionarimarum; Kumar,
‘Shaping a Literary Space’. For an interesting analogous discussion of the
practitioners of Tamil poetry over the late colonial period, see
Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book, chapter 1.
3 See Asan, Kumaranasante Gadyalekhanangal, vol. 1, 75–8, 104–30, 133–

42.
4 Elamkulam P.N. Kunjan Pillai, Lilatilakam. See, for a discussion of this text,

Freeman, ‘Rubies and Coral’; and ‘Genre and Society’. See also M.R.
Raghava Variar, Madhyakala Keralam.
5 For a discussion of these works, see Aiyer, Kerala Sahityacharitram, vol.

1, 442–58.
6 See, for instance, Venmani Mahan Namboodiripad, ‘Srngara Slokangal’,

464–7.
7 The tropes of challenge and conquest are also invoked by Sree Narayanan

and Asan in their ‘vairagya’poems. However, in them the challenge is no

longer in the mode of play. It produces intense fear in the subject, as a
symptom of the ultimate fear—of mortality.
8 See, for example, the presentation of the female figures in Venmani

Mahan Namboodiripad’s ‘Poora Prabandham’.

9 The tendency to present female figures through enticing physical

descriptions, strongly evident in the Venmani tradition, continued—despite

the absence of explicitly erotic themes—in later Malayalam poetry. The
bestknown Malayalam poet among Asan’s contemporaries, Vallathol
Narayana Menon, arguably participated in this strand.
10 Sanu, Narayanaguruswamy, 140–1.

11 Ibid., 143.

12 Asan, Kumaran Asante Sampurna Padya Krtikal, 756.

13 Ibid., 786.

14 Ibid., 756.

15 Ibid., 786.

16 Ibid., 79.

17 As we shall see below, in Asan’s poetry, vasana also appears as a

naturalizing element in the understanding of desire.

18 Asan, ‘Nalini’, Kumaran Asante Sampurna Padya Krtikal, 99–139; ‘Leela’,

in ibid., 149–226.
19 Asan, ‘Chintavishtayaya sita’, Kumaran Asante Sampurna Padya Krtikal,

521–63, and ‘Chandalabhikshuki’, in ibid., 655–76.

20 Asan, ‘Karuna’, Kumaran Asante Sampurna Padya Krtikal, 685–701.

21 Ibid., 685 and 693.

22 Asan, Kumaran Asante Sampurna Padya Krtikal, 129. See the end of this

chapter for further discussion on this.

23 Ibid., 120.

24 Ibid., 133.

25 Ibid., 137.

26 Ibid., 107.

27 Ibid., 143.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 208–10.
30 ‘O, sakhi, no one disappears from this world; the bond that unites the

soul to the body is entwined with love; it does not cease to be when the
flesh is shed . . .’ Ibid., 224.
31 Ibid., 183.

32 Ibid., 184.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 192.

35 Ibid., 193–4.

36 Ibid., 194.

37 Ibid., 195.

38 Ibid., 148.

39 Ibid., 217.

40 Ibid., 523.

41 Ibid., 523.

42 Ibid., 132. The stanza says: as Nalini contemplated Divakaran’s face,

luminous with the divine glow, he told her the meaning of the Mahavakya,
impossible to communicate in words. Sanu’s commentary identifies the
Mahavakya as ‘tat tvam asi’ (thou art that), the well-known non-dualist
proposition.
43 Ibid., 118.

44 Ibid., 194.

45 Asan’s ‘Preface’ to ‘Duravastha’, ibid., 591.

46 Ibid., 592.

47 Ibid., 635–6.

48 Ibid., 646.
49 Asan used the word antakaranam in his Presidential Address at the

twentieth annual conference of the SNDP held in Quilon in May 1923, where
he argued against mass Ezhava conversion to Buddhism or Christianity on
the grounds that conversion goes against the logic of one’s inner sense.
Asan, Kumaran Asante Gadyalekhanangal, vol. 2, 54. See also his
‘Mataparivartana Rasavadam’. For a criticism of Asan’s use of antakaranam
in this argument, see Kunjuraman, ‘Adhakrtarkku Buddhamatamanu
Nallathu’, 4.
50 In the mid-eighteenth century, Benjamin Bailey defined antakaranam as

‘the heart, the mind, understanding.’ Hermann Gundert’s dictionary,

published in 1872, has ‘the inner organ, heart, mind’ in its entry on the
word. Bailey, Dictionary of High and Colloquial Malayalam and English, 25;
Gundert, A Malayalam and English Dictionary, 31. Several articles published
in periodicals in Malayalam in the early twentieth century discussed the
concept of antakaranam. See, for example, K.M., ‘Antakarana Samskaram’;
Embrantiri, ‘Antakaranam’.
51 O. Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 27.

52 Narayana Guru, Sreenarayanaguruvinte Sampurna Krtikal, 352.

53 Chattampi Swamikal, Chattampi Swamikal: Jivitavum Krtikalum, 623.

54 Ibid., 624.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 625.

57 Asan, tr. Maitreyi, 42.

58 Asan, Kumaran Asante Gadyalekhanangal, vol. 2, 137.

59 Ibid., 138.

60 Asan, Kumaran Asante Sampurna Padya Krtikal, 652; Narasu, The

Essence of Buddhism. Asan is also likely to have consulted Paul Carus’ The
Gospel of Buddha, which he cites as a source for ‘Karuna’. Carus’
recounting of the Matangi story stresses her feelings for Anandan. Carus,
The Gospel of Buddha, 196–7.
61 Reviewing one of them, entitled Bharyadharmam, Asan commented with

approbation that the men who happen to read this book would indeed buy
copies as gifts for their wives. Kumaran Asante Gadyalekhanangal, vol. 1,
46. Asan also reviewed M.V. Parvathy Amma’s Sthreedharmam (ibid., 29),
Muloor Padmanabha Panikkar’s book of the same title (ibid., 20–1), and P.M.
Govindan Vaidyan’ Sootikamrtam (ibid, 23.).
62 For a discussion of the social and discursive processes of gendering in

Kerala during this period, see Devika, Engendering Individuals.

63 See, for example, P. Bhageerathi Amma, ‘Vyayamam’; ‘Veettuvela’; K.

Padmavati Amma, ‘Bhartrsusrusha’.

64 Lakshmibai, 1:1 (1905), 5–6.

65 T.B. Kalyani Amma, ‘Streedharmam’, 1.

66 Ammini Amma, ‘Streedharmam’.

67 See, for example, T. Ammukkutti Amma, , ‘Streevidyabhyasam’;

‘Malayalikalum Streevidyabhyasavum’; M.K.; ‘Streevidyabhyasam’.

68 See, for instance, Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation; idem,

‘Streesiksha and Its Terrors’; Geraldine Forbes, ‘Education for Women’;

Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community; Partha Chatterjee, ‘The
Nationalist Resolution’; Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India.
69 For an excellent discussion of women’s essays in periodicals, see

Devika, ‘Introduction’, in Devika, ed. and tr., Her-Self, xix–xxxi.

Chapter 4
1 C.V. Raman Pillai, Premamrtam, 110. (Also hereafter ‘C.V.’) 2 Ibid., 116.

3 Ibid., 117–18.

4 Ibid., 120.

5 For a discussion of the semiology and hermeneutics of jealousy in Proust,

see Deleuze, Proust and Signs.

6 Raman Pillai, Premamrtam, 120.

7 Ibid., 110.

8 The central moment of crisis in Premamrtam arises when the protagonist

wrongly doubts his wife’s chastity. The darkness of the night and unsteady
illumination lead here to a crucial misidentification of bodies. Ibid., 201–2.
See also Kumar, ‘Seeing and Reading’, 180.
9 Parayil, ‘Photography(s) in Twentieth-Century Kerala’, especially chapter

3.
10 Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 7.

11 Ibid., 7–8.

12 Ibid., 3.

13 See Gutman, Through Indian Eyes; Pinney, Camera Indica.

14 See Chatterjee, ‘Critique of Popular Culture’, 172.

15 Pinney, Photos of the Gods, 9. See also Eck, Darsan; Rajadhyaksha, ‘The

Phalke Era’; Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film.

16 Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, 10.

17 Nedungadi, Foreword to the first edition, Kundalata, v.

18 Ibid.

19 Ammaman Raja, Indumatiswayamvaram, 45–6.

20 Chandu Menon, Preface to the first edition, Indulekha, 7.

21 Ibid., 8.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 10. Translation by W. Dumergue, in Chandu Menon, Indulekha: A

Novel from Malabar, xiii–xiv, slightly amended.

24 Ibid., xiv.

25 Dumergue, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Chandu Menon, Indulekha, vii.

26 For accounts of Chandu Menon’s life and work, see Moorkothu Kumaran,

Oyyarathu Chandu Menon; Balakrishnan, Chandu Menon; Sankara Menon,

Makers of Indian Literature; Arunima, ‘Glimpses from a Writer’s World’.
27 Chandu Menon, Preface to the first edition, Indulekha, 10–11.

28 Ibid., 25.

29 Ibid.

30 Ammaman Raja, Indumatiswayamvaram, 21–2.

31 Padu Menon, Lakshmikesavam, 151.

32 Ibid., 143.

33 Kanaran, A Comparative Study, 146–7.

34 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 23–4.

35 Ibid., 24.

36 Pinney, Camera Indica, 77–9.

37 Padu Menon, Lakshmikesavam, p. 153.

38 Kalidasa, Abhijnana Shakuntalam, scene 3: Kshamakshamakapolam, 62.

This sloka is also cited in Indulekha.

39 Chathu Nair, Meenakshi, 74.

40 Kapila, ‘Race Matters’, 503.

41 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 71.

42 Benjamin, The Work of Art.

43 Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India.

44 Kunjambu, Saraswativijayam, 119.

45 Chathu Nair, Meenakshi, 74.

46 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 37–40.

47 See Arunima, There Comes Papa; Kodoth, ‘Courting Legitimacy’.

48 See ‘Appendix IV: Chandu Menon’s Memorandum to the Malabar

Marriage Commission’, in Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 248–62.

49 Ibid., 167.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 167–8.

52 Kojève, An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 5.

53 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 32. The word that has been translated as

‘invest’ is praveshikkuka, which literally means ‘enter’.

54 Nayanar, ‘Bhramam’, 54–6.

55 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 37, 39.

56 Ibid., 51.

57 Raman Pillai, Premamrtam, 151.

58 Padu Menon, Lakshmikesavam, 150.

59 Chathu Nair, Meenakshi, 271.

60 Ibid., 149.

61 Ibid., 118.

62 Raman Kutty Menon, Parangodi Parinayam, 218–69.

63 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 25–6.

64 Ibid., 26.

65 There are hardly any references to the English novel in Indulekha,

although Indulekha’s novel reading is alluded to in Panchu Menon’s bizarre

summary of a ‘false story’ she narrated to him and to Govinda Menon’s
recommendation of a novel to her. Ibid., 71.
66 Padu Menon, Lakshmikesavam, 149.

67 See Kunjambu, Saraswativijayam; Mooliyil, Sukumari.

68 Mooliyil, Sukumari, 330.

69 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 189.

70 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 79.

71 Ibid., 80.

72 Kizhakkeppatt Raman Kutty Menon’s Parangodi Parinayam (1892), which

parodies the emerging formulae of the new genre of the novel, represents
this incongruous object in the figure of a white man riding a horse, which is
mistaken to be a fiendish, centaur-like figure. See Raman Kutty Menon,
Parangodi Parinayam, 229.
73 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 93–4, 104.

74 Ibid., 93–4.

75 Ibid., 102.

76 Ibid., p. 26.

77 Chathu Nair, Meenakshi, 41. See also Padu Menon, Lakshmikesavam,

131–2.
78 Bourdieu, Distinction.

79 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, 108.

80 Ibid., 26–7.
81 Ibid., 76.

82 Ibid., 199–201.

83 Ibid., 207.

84 Ibid., 209–10.

85 Ibid., 189.

86 Ibid., 190.
Chapter 5
1 However, Chandu Menon argued that many Nayar women did possess

Indulekha’s diverse qualities. He wrote to Dumergue: ‘The only thing which

my readers might reasonably take exception to is Indulekha’s knowledge of
English; but as one of my objects in writing this book is to illustrate how a
young Malayalee woman, possessing, in addition to her natural personal
charms and intellectual culture, a knowledge of the English language would
conduct herself in matters of supreme interest to her, such as the choosing
of a partner in life, I have thought it necessary that my Indulekha should be
conversant with the richest language of the world.’ Chandu Menon’s letter
to W. Dumergue, 19 December 1889, published in Chandu Menon,
Indulekha,19–25.
2 Some scholars have made a distinction between the political thinking of

C.V. and C. Krishna Pillai, the other major leader of the Nayar campaigns.
They argue that while C.V.’s conception of the Malayali was more inclusive,
with the Nayars occupying the position of leader-protectors of all native
communities within this frame, C. Krishna Pillai stressed a Nayar rather
than Malayali identity, anticipating the competitive consolidation of caste
communities in later years. See Balakrishnan Nair, Sakshal C.V. Also Vinod
Chandran, ‘The Counter Narratives of Power and Identity’.
3 For a biography of C.V. Raman Pillai, see Parameswaran Nair, C.V. Raman

Pillai.
4 Raja Kesavadas (1745–99) fell out of favour after King Rama Varma’s

death in 1798. He was kept under house arrest and was probably poisoned
to death by a rival group that had gained ascendancy in the Travancore
court.
5 Raman Pillai, ‘Peethika’, Martandavarma, 52.

6 See Venugopalan, ‘ ‘‘Martandavarma”: Srshtiyum Swarupavum’, in

Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 11–50, esp. 33–8. He notes that P. Govinda

Pillai’s attakkatha, Veeramartandacharitam, dealing with the same theme,
seems to have been written around the time C.V. wrote his novel.
7 Moothathu, Tiruvitamkoor Charitram; Shungoonny Menon, A History of

Travancore.
8 Moothathu, Tiruvitamkoor Charitram, 14.

9 Shungoonny Menon, A History of Travancore, vii.

10 Sundaram Pillai, Some Early Sovereigns of Travancore, 4.

11 This argument is made about karanam writers by Narayana Rao,

Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, 100.

12 This text was translated into Malayalam and published in 1873. See

Madhava Rao, The History of Travancore.

13 Bayly, ‘Hindu Kingship and the Origin of Community’, 177–8.

14 Raju, ‘Politics and Culture in Kerala’.

15 Bayly, ‘Hindu Kingship and the Origin of Community’, 190.

16 Ibid., 191.

17 For a description of the importance of paurusham (manliness) in C.V.’s

moral and political thought, see Balakrishnan Nair, Sakshal C.V.

18 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 97.

19 Moothathu, Tiruvitamkoor Charitram, 13.

20 Govinda Pillai, Introduction to the first edition,

Malayalabhashacharitram, xvii.
21 For an account of the refashioning of state architecture in Trivandrum

during this period, see Heston, ‘Mixed Messages in a New “Public”

Travancore’.
22 See Desai, ‘Indirect British Rule’.

23 Raman Pillai, Videshiyamedhavitvam, 1.

24 Ibid., 16.

25 See Shungoonny Menon, 123–4.

26 See C.P. Achyuta Menon’s review of Martandavarma in Vidyavinodini

(1891), reprinted in C.P. Achyuta Menonte Sahitya Vimarsanam, 66–70.

27 However, the Nadars of erstwhile southern Travancore have claimed that

the character of Anantapadmanabhan was modelled on a Nadar of the

same name who shared a close friendship with the king and offered him
protection and support. These, they claim, have been recognized in
subsequent gifts from the king recorded in copper plates. If this is true, the
production of Anantapadmanabhan as a Nayar subject seems to have been
the work of C.V.’s fictional imagination. I thank B. Rajeevan for alerting me
about the possible Nadar origins of C.V.’s Nayar hero. Examples of these
claims can be found in Nation Master, Encyclopaedia, Internet.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Pandiya-Kula-Kshatriya-Mara-
Nadar; http://nadarsangam.com/whoswho.html 28 See, for a discussion of
‘Valiyathampi Kunjuthampi Kathai Padal’ (The Story of the Elder Thampi and
the Younger Thampi], Venugopalan, ‘“Martandavarma”: Srshtiyum
Swarupavum’, 37–8. For a translation and discussion of a performance of
this song, see Blackburn, ‘The Death of the Little Brothers’.
29 For a discussion of Veluthampi’s period as Dalawa and the rebellion, see

T.K. Velu Pillai, The Travancore State Manual, Vol. II: History, 448–97.
30 Parameswaran Nair, C.V. Raman Pillai, 166. Also cited in Venugopalan,

‘“Martandavarma”: Srshtiyum Swarupavum’, 26. C.V.’s notes are in English.

31 Ramakrishna Pillai, ‘Dharmaraja’.

32 Raman Pillai, Preface to Ramaraja Bahadur, 7. C.V. justified his attempt

at an elevated style in Dharmaraja as based on a false estimate of the

progress made by the Malayalam language on account of the new
initiatives of the Travancore government in the field of education.
33 Raman Pillai, Ramaraja Bahadur, 99.

34 Muthulekshmi, ‘Samskrtapadanam Keralathil’.

35 S. Guptan Nair, Gadyam Pinnitta Vazhikal, 88.

36 Sanskrit scholars too engaged in such usage. Guptan Nair cites as an

example the playful correspondence between Chattampi Swamikal and

some of his disciples, an exercise in virtuosity where the Guru and sishyas
vied with each other in complexity and obliqueness. Ibid., 88–9.
37 Krishna Pillai, Jeevitasmaranakal, 708.

38 C.V. was not alone among Malayalam writers in using English in personal

compositions and correspondence. We saw above that his marginal notes

on Keralavarma’s letter were in English. So was the letter itself. Kumaran
Asan kept a diary in English, a habit that was not unique.
39 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 231–3.

40 For a nuanced reading of C.V.’s novels that foregrounds these

complexities, see Bhaskaran Nair, Daivaneethikku Dakshinyamilla.

41 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 266–7.

42 Chandran, ‘The Counter Narratives of Power and Identity,’ 49–114.

43 Balakrishnan, Jativyavasthayum Keralacharitravum, 159–60.

44 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 57. English translation, amended, from

C.V. Raman Pillai, Martandavarma (A Historical Romance), 1.

45 C.V. was not alone in using such calculations in fiction-writing. Such

accuracy seems to have come as no surprise to A.R. Rajaraja Varma who, in

his Preface to Ramavarma Kochu Thampuran’s detective novel Bhaskara
Menon, notes: ‘The author has determined not only the dates described in
the novel, but also the lunar day for each of them. I did not calculate and
verify the accuracy of the lunar calendar. Even though the story is set in the
early days of the month Tulam, the seasonal rains are already fierce in the
novel.’ Kochu Thampuran, Bhaskara Menon, 8.
46 It is said that C.V. did not write the chapters of his novels sequentially.

The oral dictation of Dharmaraja apparently began with chapter 18,

indicating that C.V. had conceived the novel in its entirety and its division
into chapters before he began the actual processes of dictation and
revision. This may also account for the apparent ease with which the novel
moves its temporal and spatial coordinates from chapter to chapter.
Balakrishnan Nair, Sakshal C.V., 233.
47 For instance, in Martandavarma the sudden appearance of the mad

Channan and his force, to save the king from impending death at the end of
chapter 5, is explained at the end of the following chapter. Both these
chapters cover the same temporal span but are located in two different
places. The figures who make a dramatic appearance at the end of chapter
5 are identified as the Channan and his force only in the later chapter.
48 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 122, n.77.

49 Raman Pillai, Ramaraja Bahadur, 122.

50 Ibid., 40.

51 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 78.

52 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 100.

53 Ibid., 422.

54 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 62–3.

55 Raman Pillai, Ramaraja Bahadur, 53.

56 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 418.

57 Ibid., 452.

58 For a discussion of pakarnnattam, see Arya Madhavan, Kudiyattam, 122–

45. Pakarnnattam literally means the play of multiple transformations.

Pakarannu means one to the other and attam means performance.
Combined, Pakarnnattam means “performance by transferring from one to
another”’ (122).
59 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 203–7.

60 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 333–4.

61 See Arendt, The Human Condition, 180; Cavarero, Relating Narratives,

20; Ranciere, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, and idem, ‘Politics of Literature’,

Dissensus, 27–44 and 152–68.
62 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 63, and Venugopalan’s notes, 342, n.12.
63 The best example of this is a stylistic study of conversations in C.V.

Raman Pillai’s novels by N. Krishna Pillai, Pratipatram Bhashanabhedam.

64 Raman Pillai, Ramaraja Bahadur, 163.

65 Krishna Pillai, Pratipatram Bhashanabhedam, 40–1.

66 For a discussion of K. Ramakrishna Pillai’s language of criticism and his

public interventions, see Kumar, ‘The Public, the State and New Domains of
Writing’.
67 Karthiyayani Amma in Martandavarma is drawn to Subhadra by such an

unknown sense of resemblance; Subhadra turns out to be the daughter of

Karthiyayani Amma’s brother Tirumukhathu Pillai.
68 Raman Pillai, Dharmaraja, 348.

69 Raman Pillai, Martandavarma, 172.

70 Ibid., 163.

71 Raman Pillai, Ramaraja Bahadur, 117.

72 Ibid., 88.

73 Chandu Menon’s note of dissent to the Malabar Marriage Commission

report expressed a view about sambandham which the Nayar reformers of

Travancore would have agreed with. C.V., C. Krishna Pillai, and other Nayar
reformers aimed at a legalization of sambandham as marriage while
introducing no substantial change in the system of inheritance.
74 See, for a discussion of the problem of interpretation and misprision in

Premamrtam, Kumar, ‘Seeing and Reading’.

Chapter 6
1 Mannadiar, Kamalam, 180.

2 Padmanabhan, Jeevitasmaranakal, vol. 1, 68.

3 An example of the biographical use of personal correspondence from the

mid-twentieth century is seen in a letter addressed to his young son,

written by Moorkothu Kunjappa, to transmit an account of his father, the
famous writer and social reformer Moorkothu Kumaran (1874–1941).
Moorkothu Kunjappa, Moorkothu Kumaran, 55–61.
4 K. Kannan Nair, Foreword to Karuthodi Kannan Nayarude Atmakatha, v.

Interestingly, in an article published in Bhashaposhini, Kannan Nair wrote

about the importance of a ‘sense of individuality’ (pratyekabhavam) for all
action. K. Kannan Nair, ‘Keraliya Samudayam’, 195.
5 See Kumaran Asan’s Diary. For a discussion of entries from Asan’s diary,

see Prabhakaran, Asante Diarikalilude.

6 Manjapra Ramunni Menon published a selection from his diaries for 1921–

2 as a record of amusing real events. In the Introduction, the wellknown

writer K. Sukumaran, B.A., bemoaned the absence in Malayalam of
accomplished diary writers like Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Manjapra
Ramunni Menon, Rasakkatta, iv.
7 See, for a biography of Pachu Moothathu, Moosad, Vaikath Pachu

Moothathu.
8 Moothathu, ‘Pachu Moothathinte Atmakatha’, 55. Moothathu’s
autobiography is presumed to have been written after 1872 as it mentions
events that took place till that year. It was first published in Samastha
Kerala Sahitya Parishad Traimasikam in 1937. It was also reprinted in
Naduvattom Gopalakrishnan’s Atmakathasahityam Malayalathil. See
Moothathu, ‘Atmakatha’.
9 Kemper, ‘Time, Person and Gender’, 754.

10 Moothathu, ‘Pachu Moothathinte Atmakatha’, 56–8.

11 Ibid., 59.

12 Unni, 468–72. See also Joseph, ‘The Hand Dipping Ordeal’, 110, for a writ

issued in 1627, granting permission to a Nambutiri Brahmin to perform the

ordeal.
13 The Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society, the only Protestant

mission at work in Malabar in the mid-nineteenth century, established their

earliest mission station in the district in Tellicherry in 1839. The Basel
Mission started printing books in Malayalam in Tellicherry from 1847.
14 For a brief discussion of Ramavarman’s life and of the position of his

autobiography in the history of the genre in Malayalam, see Manalil,

‘Malayalathile Adyathe Atmakatha’.
15 Ramavarman sent a report of his ordination to the Mission Committee in

Basel on 11 September 1856. I thank Matthias Frenz for making this report
and other documents related to Ramavarman from the Basel Mission
archives available to me.
16 George N. Thomssen, Samuel Hebich of India, 135–43; The Life of

Samuel Hebich, 176–7.

17 Life of Dr. H. Gundert, 56.

18 Ramavarman, Yakob Ramavarmante Atmakatha, 30.

19 The first Malayalam translation of the Bible, based on the Syrian version,

was published in 1811. Church Mission Society Press, Kottayam, published a

translation of the New Testament in 1829 and of the entire Bible in 1842.
These translations were prepared under Benjamin Bailey’s supervision.
Hermann Gundert’s translation of the Bible, published by the Basel Mission,
Tellicherry, was not published until 1868.
20 Ramavarman, Yakob Ramavarmante Atmakatha, 31.

21 Ibid., 34.

22 Ibid., 38.

23 Ibid., 42. See also The Life of Samuel Hebich, 176–7.

24 Levinas, Of Escape, 64.

25 Ramavarman, Yakob Ramavarmante Atmakatha, 45–6.

26 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Ente Smaranakal, vol. 1, 1.

27 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 131.

28 Ibid.

29 For example, see the autobiographies of figures such as C. Sankaran

Nair, K.M. Panikkar, K.P.S. Menon, Mannathu Padmanabhan, K.P. Kesava

Menon, and Joseph Mundassery. Sankaran Nair has this to say: ‘To be an
octogenarian in a land where this species has become a rarity, and to have
spent over half a century in the front ranks of public life, form, perhaps, a
sufficient excuse for recapturing one’s memories; but to have been in the
citadel of the Government during the most formative period of recent
Indian history, namely the Great War, and to have played a not
inconspicuous part in launching “reformed” India on its course make it
almost imperative to pass on one’s experiences to the public.’ Introduction
to Autobiography of Chettur Sankaran Nair, xiv.
30 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Ente Smaranakal, vol. 1, 7.

31 Ibid., 7–8.

32 Kanippayyur also clarifies how the structure of his narrative will be

different from autobiography proper: ‘In this book, I may speak not only
about my life but also about many other related things, sometimes
according to the context and sometimes even without such connection. I
wish to inform my readers that this is due neither to sloppiness nor
stupidity; this is by design.’ Ibid., 8.
33 See, for example, Holden, ‘Other Modernities’; Arnold, ‘The Self and the

Cell’.
34 For a discussion of ‘auto-ethnography’ and its use in anthropology, see

Reed-Danahay, ed., Auto/Ethnography. I use the term ‘auto-ethnography’ to

highlight the convergence of the projects of autobiography and
ethnography in Kanippayyur’s work.
35 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Aryanmarude Kutiyettam, vol. 2,

i–ii.
36 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Ente Smaranakal, vol. 1, 9.

37 Ibid., 159.

38 Ibid., vol. 2, 55–6.

39 Ibid., vol. 3, 290–1. Translation slightly amended.

40 Two sorts of fascination come up repeatedly in Kanippayyur’s text: his

encounter, as a child, with modern objects such as the bicycle (his adult
experience of air travel does not match this in excitement), and a grudging
engagement with new social spaces such as coffee clubs and tea shops,
which provides opportunities for him to reflect on how others, as well as he
himself, negotiated them.
41 See, for example, the following works of Elamkulam P.N. Kunjan Pillai:

Keralacharitrathile Iruladanja Edukal, Chila Keralacharitra Prasnangal,

Keralabhashayude Vikasaparinamangal, and Janmisampradayam Keralathil.
42 In the late nineteenth century, according to custom, only the eldest son

in a Nambutiri household was allowed to marry within his caste; the

younger sons entered into sambandham alliances with women from the
non-Brahmin upper castes, especially the Nayars and the ambalavasis or
temple-serving castes. For a discussion of sambandham arrangements
among the Nayars, see Arunima, There Comes Papa.
43 Elamkulam P.N. Kunjan Pillai, Sahityacharitrasamgraham, 51–2.

44 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Aryanmarude Kutiyettam, vol. 4,

xii–xiii.
45 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Ente Smaranakal, vol. 1, 339–44.

46 Kanippayyur Sankaran Namboodiripad, Aryanmarude Kutiyettam, vol. 1,

102–3.
47 Ibid., pp. 104–6.
48 Ibid., 132. The same argument is also made in Kanippayyur Sankaran

Namboodiripad, Nayanamrude Purvacharitram, vol. 1, 247.

49 Ibid., 246.

50 Kanippayyur makes a similar comparison between these castes on the

number of historical personages (charitrapurushanmar) to reach similar

conclusions, in ibid., 239.
51 Ibid., pp. 132–3. Kanippayyur even proposes a systematic study of the

races of Kerala, to identify their typical innate characteristics. He argued

that this should involve the segregated nurturing of samples from each
race for a few generations, and can be carried out only with state support.
See Aryanmarude Kutiyettam, vol. 1, 137–8.
52 See Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Castes of

Mind; and Samarendra, ‘Anthropological Knowledge and Statistical Frame’.

53 Fawcett, Nambutiris, 33.

54 See Unni, 755–68; Panikkasseri, Do. Palpu, 23–46.

55 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Atmakatha, 127.

56 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 189.

57 E.M.S. Namboodiripad offers an account of the anyonyam competition in

his Atmakatha, 101–7. For a discussion of details of Vedic recitation and

training, mainly in the context of ancient India, see Scharfe, Education in
Ancient India, 212–51; Wood, Knowledge Before Printing and After.
58 For an account of his experience of learning to recite the Vedas, see

E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Atmakatha, 28.

59 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 347.

60 Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, especially 73 and 75.

61 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 154.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 155. Alpam kudi are Malayalam words.

64 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 374.

65 Ibid., 265.

66 Ibid., 155.

67 Ibid., 202.

68 Ibid., 126.

69 V.T.’s most elaborate statement on this is perhaps his

‘Nambutiripenkidangalku Oru Ezhuthu’ (A Letter to Nambutiri Girls), first
published in Unni Nambutiri, 19 January 1930. See V.T.yude Sampurna
Krtikal, 556–65.
70 See, for discussions on the need to reform practices of marriage and

inheritance among the Nambutiris, back issues of Unni Nambutiri,

published by the Nambutiri Yuvajana Sangham. The Madras Nambutiri Act
of 1933 resulted in significant changes in Nambutiri practices of
inheritance, conferring on all male and female members equal rights in
family property. It gave younger male members in the family the right to
marry within the caste, and enabled the progeny of such marriages to
inherit family property. For V.T.’s own appreciation of the passing of the new
bill by the Legislative Assembly, see his ‘Malabar Billinte Maha Vijayam’
(The Grand Victory of the Malabar Bill), Unni Nambutiri, 11 November 1932,
reprinted in V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 607–8. For a later assessment,
based on the links between the economic problems of the Nambutiri
community and its response to reforms in custom, see E.M.S.
Namboodiripad’s Presidential Address at the 34th annual conference of the
Nambutiri Yogakshema Sabha at Ongallur in 1944: ‘Nambutiriye
Manushyanakkan’, in E.M.S.inte Teranjedutha Prasangangal, 19–61.
71 The widow remarriage took place in 1935, and the inter-caste marriage

in 1940. For V.T.’s accounts of these events, see ‘Vidhavayude Jeevitam

Thaliraniyunnu’ (A Widow’s Life Blooms Again) and
Misravivahaprasthanathinu Oru Mukhavura’ (A Preface to the Movement for
Intercaste Marriage), in V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 295–300 and 307–11.
72 The apparent image of this is the bodily blemish, the wart or palunni,

which evokes disgust in the onlooker. V.T. invokes this image to signify the
blind adherence to tradition in the decadent Nambutiri community. See V. T.
Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 132.
73 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 491.

74 Ibid., 283–4.

75 Ibid., 290.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid., 291.

78 Ibid., 283.

79 See, for instance, Lalitambika Antarjanam, ‘The Goddess of Revenge’;

and Madambu Kunjukkuttan, Bhrashtu.

80 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 132.

81 V.T. Bhattatiripad, ‘Kuriyedathu Tatri—Samskarika Navothana Nayika’

(Kuriyedathu Tatri: A Leader of Cultural Renaissance), V.T.yude Sampurna

Krtikal, 626–7.
82 V.T. Bhattatiripad, V.T.yude Sampurna Krtikal, 322.

83 Ibid., 55–8.

84 T.K. Raman Menon, writing in the early 1960s, suggested that the lives

of extraordinary figures were atypical and partial, and that there is no

reason one should privilege the lives of rulers and politicians over those of
peasants and singers. Vidwan T. K. Raman Menon, Ente Ayushkala
Anubhutikal (My Life Experiences), 1.
85 For a discussion of debates around the unification of Kerala, see Devika,

‘The Idea of Being Malayali’.

86 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Keralam Malayalikalude Mathrubhumi.

87 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Atmakatha, rev. edn, 327–8.

88 In his introduction to the autobiography of Cherukad, a communist

novelist, Namboodiripad argued that the genre of autobiography involved a

self-confessedly subjective description of how a rapidly changing society
transformed an individual ‘who was no more than a point within that
society’, and how this individual in turn contributed to social change. E.M.S.
Namboodiripad, ‘Avatarika’, i.
89 C. Kesavan, born in Mayyanadu near Kollam in Travancore, entered

public life in Kerala as an activist in the Ezhava movement. He became a

prominent leader of the Travancore State Congress and chief minister of
Travancore-Cochin in 1950.
90 C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 19.

91 Ibid., 23.

92 In many of the autobiographies about changing times, accounts of

childhood play an important role, by virtue of their association with

practices that are clearly identified with a past that no longer exists.
Childhood also is a narrative tool of defamiliarization, especially in
criticisms of discriminatory caste practices. The child’s perplexed
encounters with untouchability and distance pollution (ayitham) orient the
rhetorical organization of historical remembrance in many texts. This
tendency is not confined to autobiographies by authors from lower castes
like Kesavan. See, for example, B. Kalyani Amma, Ormayil Ninnu (From
Memory).
93 For a discussion of the concept of ‘epistemological solitude’ in

autobiography, see Cameron, ‘Autobiography and Philosophical Perplexity’.

94 C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 18.

95 Ibid., 194.

96 Ibid., 195.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid., 360–4.

99 Balakrishnan, ed., Sree Narayana Guru, 148–51 and 163.

100 C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 294.

101 There were strands in the Nayar reform movement too which stressed

planning and development. The work of M.A. Paramu Pillai, who drew
inspiration from Booker T. Washington’s experiments in vocational
education, is a case in point. For an account of C. Kesavan’s experience as
a student of Paramu Pillai, see C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 129–49.
Mannathu Padmanabhan’s autobiography combines elements from both
these discourses, in protesting against the emasculation of the Nayar and
in thinking of communitarian economic initiatives. See Padmanabhan,
Jeevitasmaranakal, vol. 1, 50–1.
102 C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 35. Perunelli P.K. Krishnan Vaidyan (1863–

94) authored plays such as Subhadraharanam Bhashanatakam and poems

including Kachacharitam Ammanappattu. He was a fellow student of Sree
Narayana Guru and a close friend of Chattampi Swamikal. For a detailed
account, See R. Raman Nair and Sulochana Devi, Chattampi Swami, 108–9.
103 C. Kesavan became secretary of the SNDP Yogam in 1933. He was one

of the foremost leaders of the Nivartana Movement spearheaded by

Ezhavas, Christians, and Muslims from 1932 to 1937. For an account of the
politics of Travancore at the time of the Nivartana movement, see
Ouwerkerk, No Elephants for the Maharaja.
104 Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 235–40.

105 Ibid., 90.

106 Kunjuraman, ‘Njan’, 140–4; K. Damodaran, Ezhavacharitram, esp. 214–

17.
107 See, for example, Kunjuraman, ‘Buddhamathavadangal’ and
‘Adhakrtarkku Buddhamatamanu Nallathu’.
108 Dr P. Palpu’s correspondence with colonial officials and his memoranda

are replete with these arguments. See, for example, ‘Memorandum: Some
Additional Notes’.
109 See A.K. Gopalan, Ente Jeevitakatha; Kumbalathu Sanku Pillai, Ente

Kazhinjakala Smaranakal.
110 See C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 145–6; Kumbalathu Sanku Pillai, Ente

Kazhinjakala Smaranakal, 43–4.

111 Kumbalathu Sanku Pillai, Ente Kazhinjakala Smaranakal, 99.

112 C. Kesavan, Jeevitasamaram, 73.

113 For a translation of this passage, see Devika, ‘The Aesthetic Woman’,

478–9.
114 Ibid.

115 Ibid., 479.

116 Butler, ‘What is Critique?’, 310.

117 Greenblatt and Gallagher, ‘Counterhistory and the Anecdote’, 51.

118 Ibid., 68.

119 Ibid.

120 Antarjanam, Atmakathayku Oru Amukham, 9.

121 Tagore’s Ghare Baire was translated from an English rendering into

Malayalam by B. Kalyani Amma under the title Veettilum Purathum (Home

and Outside).
122 For a fascinating selection from these writings, translated into English,

see Devika, ed., Her-Self. Mantaraveetil Lakshmy Amma’s essay, written in

the form of a description of the author’s daily routine at home, is a good
example of the malleability and inventiveness of autobiographical forms at
this time. Ibid., 10–21.
Chapter 7
1 Basheer, ‘Mantrikappooccha’, in Basheerinte Sampurna Krtikal, 1221.

2 See Arendt, The Life of the Mind, One: Thinking; idem, The Human

Condition; Cavarero, Relating Narratives; Butler, Giving an Account of

Oneself; idem, ‘What is Critique?’ See chapter 1 for a discussion.
3 For a discussion of the literary critical treatment of objects in novels in

terms of their ‘metaphoric’ and ‘weak metonymic’ functions, see

Freedgood, Ideas in Things.
4 For an account of early print history in Malayalam, see Ramakrishnan,

‘Varthamanappathrangaludeyum Achadiyanthrangaludeyum’. On early

newspapers in Kerala, see Priyadarshan, Kerala Pathrapravarthanam.
5 See Nedumpally, ‘Ways of Knowing’.

6 For a detailed discussion, see Kumar, ‘The Public, the State and the New

Domains of Writing’; idem ‘Ambivalences of Publicity’.

7 K. Ramakrishna Pillai, ‘Tiruvitamkoor Maharajavu Tirumanassukondu

Kalpichu Erppetuttenda Oru Samudayika Parishkaram’ (A Social Reform that

Needs to be Introduced by the Command of His Highness the Maharaja of
Travancore), Keralapanchika, 27 September 1901, cited in K. Bhaskara
Pillai, Swadeshabhimani, 40.
8 For a discussion, see Kumar, ‘Shaping a Literary Space’.

9 Adrianna Cavarero’s comments on Arendt are instructive: ‘The

autobiography would figure, in Arendt’s view, as an absurd exercise, since
the identity revealed by its actions is the very thing that the agent does not
master and does not know. Thus, it will be even more difficult for him to be
able to know and master the story that such actions leave behind.’
Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 24.
10 Butler, Gender Trouble, 163–80.

11 See especially Foucault, The Use of Pleasure.