Devika Jayakumari | Centre For Development Studies (original) (raw)
Papers by Devika Jayakumari
Carceral feminism and the punitive state in Kerala State, India
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, May 14, 2024
The Defence of Aachaaram, Femininity, and Neo-Savarna Power in Kerala
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated pro... more This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. The term savarna refers to the privileged caste-communities that, from pre-colonial times, controlled land and other material resources and ritual practices, and continued to do so to a large extent even later. Avarna refers to those oppressed groups that laboured for the savarna and were subjected to degradation through such practices as untouchability and unseeability, and whose exclusion from social power continues in different ways despite these groups having achieved economic presence and education. Following a Supreme Court verdict in September 2018, which struck down the Sabarimala taboo, Kerala was shaken by violent protests led by neo-savarna and SanghParivar organisations. Through a close reading of the Fac...
Aspects of Socioeconomic Exclusion in Kerala, India: Reflections from an Urban Slum
Critical Asian Studies, 2016
ABSTRACT This article probes the intersection of spatial, caste, and gender axes of power in shap... more ABSTRACT This article probes the intersection of spatial, caste, and gender axes of power in shaping contemporary inequalities in Kerala, through mixed-method research in an urban slum. Relying largely on qualitative data, it constructs a history of work in the slum for lower caste men and women against the backdrop of Kerala politics from the 1940s until the present. It examines the role of widening gender gaps, the persistence of secularized caste, and flagging working-class politics and discourse in shaping contemporary socioeconomic exclusion in urban areas.
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated pro... more This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. This is an early version of the work I am further fine-tuning.
![By doing so, these women reiterate the general gender conservatism in Kerala which recommends strict gender segregation and insists that the presence of female bodies acts as a temptation to men (essentially the rapist’s defence in patriarchy the world over), and often claim that he prohibition is not for Ayyappa but for the male devotees. A RTW supporter asks in a video, ‘Do women have the permission to enter a hostel in which only bachelors live? Or, we know, in ashrams male and female celibates live apart ... Each Ayyappan [male devotee of Ayyappa] akes a tough 41-day vow to control all desires and wishes. We young women do not go because we want to respect their vow and their celibacy’. For another, the waiting is an act of sentimental commitment: it is about perfecting love. She compares it to a woman’s dedication to her family that makes her patient and ‘adjusting’.** The significant extent to which the RTW women’s understandings of](https://figures.academia-assets.com/64571634/figure_001.jpg)
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This is a study of the widespread denial of the damaging impacts of intense industrial pollution ... more This is a study of the widespread denial of the damaging impacts of intense industrial pollution at Eloor, Kerala, which has been named one of the world's most toxic hotspots by Greenpeace in the 1990s. It examines the history of the region and of governance there, and of environmental struggles there.
Aspects of Socioeconomic Exclusion in Kerala, India: Reflections from an Urban Slum
Modernity with Democracy?: Gender and Governance in the People's Planning Campaign, Keralam
This paper takes advantage of the possibility of a critical perspective afforded by the feminist ... more This paper takes advantage of the possibility of a critical perspective afforded by the feminist perspective in analyzing the interactions between political and civil societies in the shaping of specific developmental interventions by the state, to examine the People’s Planning Campaign (PPC) in Keralam. The objectives of this paper go beyond reporting on the degree of success/failure of the effort at mainstreaming gender concerns in the PPC, though it draws upon many such reports. It will raise a few questions essentially historical in nature: given the fact that political society in Keralam has never displayed any acute concern for gender justice, and that this was a marginal issue even within civil society here, under what conditions did it come to be acknowledged as a key element in a political experiment as momentous as the PPC? [CDS Working Paper 368, February 2005]
Being “in-translation” in a post-colony
Translation Studies, 2008
... 190 J. Devika Page 10. much more. ... I draw my example from the speech of a senior activist,... more ... 190 J. Devika Page 10. much more. ... I draw my example from the speech of a senior activist,KP Rugmini Amma, who has recently been in the forefront of organizing women who have lost their husbands, or who are aged widows living with their children. ...
A Tactful Union': Domestic Workers' Unionism, Politics
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2011
Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising n... more Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising numbers of women entering the labour force as domestic workers, who have remained at the rock-bottom of the working-class hierarchy here. SEWA Kerala’s union displays marked differences from mainstream unions. This article reflects upon the agency of the SEWA domestic worker in contemporary Kerala through the
Memory's Fatal Lure: The Left, the Congress and'Jeevan'in Kerala
Economic and Political Weekly, 2008
... Liberation Struggle Memories Perhaps it is memory's fatal lure. ... Maybe the opposi-tio... more ... Liberation Struggle Memories Perhaps it is memory's fatal lure. ... Maybe the opposi-tion's effort, despite present misgivings within the Congress, is to build an anti-communist coalition similar to the one that successfully ousted the communists in 1959. ...
The Malayali sexual revolution: Sex, 'liberation' and family planning in Kerala
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2005
In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as h... more In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as hostile to the shaping of full-fledged modernity in Malayali society. By the 1960s, however, family planning had come to be identified with disciplined, abstemious, bourgeois domesticity. ...
Housewife, Sex Worker and Reformer: Controversies over Women Writing Their Lives in Kerala
Economic and Political Weekly, 2006
... A sex impulse is as natural and noble as another so-called noble impulse" [quoted in Suk... more ... A sex impulse is as natural and noble as another so-called noble impulse" [quoted in Sukumaran 1987: 209]. ... did include a few women writers - for instance, K Saraswati Amma, one of Kerala's first feminist intellectuals, and a well known short story writer [Devika 2002], and ...
Research Article Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India
foreignpolicybulletinmonitor.com
... abandoned their caste names and took others that indicated their status as patriotsprominent... more ... abandoned their caste names and took others that indicated their status as patriotsprominently, VM Vishnu Bharateeyan (Vishnu the Indian ... Dalits from becoming cheap cannon fodder in confrontations with the state, such as at Punnapra-Vayalar (1946) (Vijayan 2002a, 2002b ...
This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed... more This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala's cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu legacies have been privileged implicitly in these and, as a result, hybrid communities can only be perceived as "miscegenated". They are, therefore, excluded from the legacies of national culture. Johny Miranda's recent novella Requiem for the Living (2013), tries to end this invisibility by articulating the present of one such community, the Parankis of Cochin. On the one hand, it both challenges and complicates existing identities such as the "Anglo-Indian" and the "Luso-Indian", revealing their elite moorings and dualistic conception of hybridity. On the other hand, it departs from the long history of the implications of novel-writing in projects of caste-community identity construction in Malayali society. In doing so, it directs our attention towards the possibilities of unearthing "subaltern cosmopolitanism", which may indeed be more appropriate for contemporary challenges in the specific postcolonial context that is contemporary Kerala.
This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thi... more This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid-1990s, when decentralisation and women's self-help groups began a new phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the specific form of marginalisation that the residents of this pocket of extreme disadvantage have suffered since its earliest days, in the mid-twentieth century, which I refer to as 'marginalisation by abjection'. It also examines the usefulness of widely used concepts such as 'political society' to make sense of politics there, and concludes by cautioning against the perfunctory use of concepts such as political society and clientelism.
This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bou... more This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bound up with the histories of migration and transnationalisms in the region. It argues that a distinction can be made between the earlier and later phases of the migratory and transnational experience. The former allowed for the 'cosmopolitanism of ideas' that imagined hitherto-non-existent communities across cultural boundaries and 'competing cosmopolitanisms' in the region. Postindependence, however, altered political conditions that impacted migration and transnationalism and produced the 'cosmopolitanism of duty', which works with fairly fixed ideas about the national and community/family values and aims for flexibility in negotiating these worlds. These have had distinct effects on modernity in Kerala.
Carceral feminism and the punitive state in Kerala State, India
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, May 14, 2024
The Defence of Aachaaram, Femininity, and Neo-Savarna Power in Kerala
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated pro... more This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. The term savarna refers to the privileged caste-communities that, from pre-colonial times, controlled land and other material resources and ritual practices, and continued to do so to a large extent even later. Avarna refers to those oppressed groups that laboured for the savarna and were subjected to degradation through such practices as untouchability and unseeability, and whose exclusion from social power continues in different ways despite these groups having achieved economic presence and education. Following a Supreme Court verdict in September 2018, which struck down the Sabarimala taboo, Kerala was shaken by violent protests led by neo-savarna and SanghParivar organisations. Through a close reading of the Fac...
Aspects of Socioeconomic Exclusion in Kerala, India: Reflections from an Urban Slum
Critical Asian Studies, 2016
ABSTRACT This article probes the intersection of spatial, caste, and gender axes of power in shap... more ABSTRACT This article probes the intersection of spatial, caste, and gender axes of power in shaping contemporary inequalities in Kerala, through mixed-method research in an urban slum. Relying largely on qualitative data, it constructs a history of work in the slum for lower caste men and women against the backdrop of Kerala politics from the 1940s until the present. It examines the role of widening gender gaps, the persistence of secularized caste, and flagging working-class politics and discourse in shaping contemporary socioeconomic exclusion in urban areas.
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated pro... more This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. This is an early version of the work I am further fine-tuning.
This is a study of the widespread denial of the damaging impacts of intense industrial pollution ... more This is a study of the widespread denial of the damaging impacts of intense industrial pollution at Eloor, Kerala, which has been named one of the world's most toxic hotspots by Greenpeace in the 1990s. It examines the history of the region and of governance there, and of environmental struggles there.
Aspects of Socioeconomic Exclusion in Kerala, India: Reflections from an Urban Slum
Modernity with Democracy?: Gender and Governance in the People's Planning Campaign, Keralam
This paper takes advantage of the possibility of a critical perspective afforded by the feminist ... more This paper takes advantage of the possibility of a critical perspective afforded by the feminist perspective in analyzing the interactions between political and civil societies in the shaping of specific developmental interventions by the state, to examine the People’s Planning Campaign (PPC) in Keralam. The objectives of this paper go beyond reporting on the degree of success/failure of the effort at mainstreaming gender concerns in the PPC, though it draws upon many such reports. It will raise a few questions essentially historical in nature: given the fact that political society in Keralam has never displayed any acute concern for gender justice, and that this was a marginal issue even within civil society here, under what conditions did it come to be acknowledged as a key element in a political experiment as momentous as the PPC? [CDS Working Paper 368, February 2005]
Being “in-translation” in a post-colony
Translation Studies, 2008
... 190 J. Devika Page 10. much more. ... I draw my example from the speech of a senior activist,... more ... 190 J. Devika Page 10. much more. ... I draw my example from the speech of a senior activist,KP Rugmini Amma, who has recently been in the forefront of organizing women who have lost their husbands, or who are aged widows living with their children. ...
A Tactful Union': Domestic Workers' Unionism, Politics
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2011
Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising n... more Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising numbers of women entering the labour force as domestic workers, who have remained at the rock-bottom of the working-class hierarchy here. SEWA Kerala’s union displays marked differences from mainstream unions. This article reflects upon the agency of the SEWA domestic worker in contemporary Kerala through the
Memory's Fatal Lure: The Left, the Congress and'Jeevan'in Kerala
Economic and Political Weekly, 2008
... Liberation Struggle Memories Perhaps it is memory's fatal lure. ... Maybe the opposi-tio... more ... Liberation Struggle Memories Perhaps it is memory's fatal lure. ... Maybe the opposi-tion's effort, despite present misgivings within the Congress, is to build an anti-communist coalition similar to the one that successfully ousted the communists in 1959. ...
The Malayali sexual revolution: Sex, 'liberation' and family planning in Kerala
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2005
In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as h... more In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as hostile to the shaping of full-fledged modernity in Malayali society. By the 1960s, however, family planning had come to be identified with disciplined, abstemious, bourgeois domesticity. ...
Housewife, Sex Worker and Reformer: Controversies over Women Writing Their Lives in Kerala
Economic and Political Weekly, 2006
... A sex impulse is as natural and noble as another so-called noble impulse" [quoted in Suk... more ... A sex impulse is as natural and noble as another so-called noble impulse" [quoted in Sukumaran 1987: 209]. ... did include a few women writers - for instance, K Saraswati Amma, one of Kerala's first feminist intellectuals, and a well known short story writer [Devika 2002], and ...
Research Article Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India
foreignpolicybulletinmonitor.com
... abandoned their caste names and took others that indicated their status as patriotsprominent... more ... abandoned their caste names and took others that indicated their status as patriotsprominently, VM Vishnu Bharateeyan (Vishnu the Indian ... Dalits from becoming cheap cannon fodder in confrontations with the state, such as at Punnapra-Vayalar (1946) (Vijayan 2002a, 2002b ...
This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed... more This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala's cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu legacies have been privileged implicitly in these and, as a result, hybrid communities can only be perceived as "miscegenated". They are, therefore, excluded from the legacies of national culture. Johny Miranda's recent novella Requiem for the Living (2013), tries to end this invisibility by articulating the present of one such community, the Parankis of Cochin. On the one hand, it both challenges and complicates existing identities such as the "Anglo-Indian" and the "Luso-Indian", revealing their elite moorings and dualistic conception of hybridity. On the other hand, it departs from the long history of the implications of novel-writing in projects of caste-community identity construction in Malayali society. In doing so, it directs our attention towards the possibilities of unearthing "subaltern cosmopolitanism", which may indeed be more appropriate for contemporary challenges in the specific postcolonial context that is contemporary Kerala.
This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thi... more This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid-1990s, when decentralisation and women's self-help groups began a new phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the specific form of marginalisation that the residents of this pocket of extreme disadvantage have suffered since its earliest days, in the mid-twentieth century, which I refer to as 'marginalisation by abjection'. It also examines the usefulness of widely used concepts such as 'political society' to make sense of politics there, and concludes by cautioning against the perfunctory use of concepts such as political society and clientelism.
This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bou... more This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bound up with the histories of migration and transnationalisms in the region. It argues that a distinction can be made between the earlier and later phases of the migratory and transnational experience. The former allowed for the 'cosmopolitanism of ideas' that imagined hitherto-non-existent communities across cultural boundaries and 'competing cosmopolitanisms' in the region. Postindependence, however, altered political conditions that impacted migration and transnationalism and produced the 'cosmopolitanism of duty', which works with fairly fixed ideas about the national and community/family values and aims for flexibility in negotiating these worlds. These have had distinct effects on modernity in Kerala.