Sherin B.S.

This study analyses the women’s periodicals that were in circulation among the Muslims of Kerala, South India, during the early twentieth century. They were published by small-scale print houses and Muslim women associated with these periodicals as writers, editors and publishers, shaping a highly porous public sphere unlike the nationalist and colonial homogenous imaginations of the public. These early writings from Muslim women expose the entanglement of imagined rights and community identity embodied in faith and piety in colonial modernity. They ought to be studied to understand how social identity drew considerably from the domains of religion and community, if not region, and that gender and nation played less significant roles in their imagination of modernity. Moreover, their engagement with the West was not determined in the context of resistance to colonial administration alone, but also in a deeper and more complex history of Islam’s encounters with it.

This is a translation of S. Sithara's story in Malayalam. I found it interesting, as it was written in the context of 90s discourses on rape and sexual assault in Kerala, and also because of the nuanced engagement with identity it espoused.

The recasting of women in the context of colonial modernity in India invariably projected the upper caste Hindu woman as the ideal Indian woman. Historians over the years have engaged with this problematic domesticating of women. However, there are very few studies that engage with the complex terrain of gender among communities imagined outside the contours of the mainstream ‘national.’ Women’s movement in these communities had to engage with both the phantasm of othered masculinities as threat to the ideal Hindu women and also the alienation they felt from the image of a nation that was imagined in the form of a goddess least resembling her selfhood. This essay attempts to trace the engagement of Muslim women with modernity in Kerala, with reference to Muslim reform movements. I argue that the exclusion of Muslim women’s engagement with modernity from nationalist histories presages the predicament of Muslims in the postcolonial nation as antithesis to the ‘national modern’ and from feminist histories as victims without subjecthood.

Key words: Kerala modernity, Muslim women, Reform Movements, nation, minority

This paper situates the impulse to criminalize triple talaq at the intersection of three interrelated debates: universal human rights through homogenized citizenship, law reforms in modern nation-states and the question of community identities in representative democracies. Even though each has historically produced different narratives of the uniformity of law, they do not account for the conflicts and contestations each of the fields produces. Analysing them in terms of the demand for a uniform civil code in India, this essay investigates the political understanding of the rights’ debate as revealed through the debate on Triple Talaq. It argues that, given the disconnection between the imagined uniformity and the actual practices of law in the everyday experience of Muslims as Indian citizens, the tangential factors that produce the banal violations of constitutional rights are framed in extra-juridical terms. Demanding that it requires an inquiry into the cultural terrain of law and the hierarchies that constitute the discourse of rights, this paper raises questions that the Triple Talaq debate poses to Indian feminism.

Through counter narratives of Malayali modernity autobiographical writings of Nalini Jameela and C.K Janu puncture Kerala’s claim to an egalitarian social structure. By exposing the hypocrisy of modern Malayali society these narratives challenge the hierarchical constitution of intellectual elitism in Kerala and also reject a modernity that alienates and excludes communities in the margins of this ‘progressive’ state, demystifying the ‘Kerala model of development’ thesis. My attempt here is to closely read Nalini Jameela’s autobiography, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, and see how it deviates from the self narratives which are often hailed as representative writings of Malayali modernity. The varied reception to these works also shows the conscious choices and appropriations in mainstream histories to synthesize a homogenous image of the elite modern and the ideal feminine in Kerala.

The movie Gone Girl brought to the fore a furore over the vindictive evil woman victimizing men and those of us who are familiar with the discourse against feminism are well aware that this doesn't come from an immediate response to the movie, but most of the argument comes from the desire to pigeon hole feminism into a framework of a man-hating enterprise. In India the feminist movement has always faced opposition as a bunch of male hating, bra burning, family breaking, irresponsible women. Any demand for egalitarian status, woman friendly laws, and claim to public space has been treated with this apathy. The general fear that woman friendly laws in terms of rape, sexual harassment at work place and domestic violence may be abused by women does not spring from any rational premise or statistical proof, yet evokes apprehension that women may misuse this to spoil careers, reputation and even normal lives of men. In India, a society premised on heterosexual and patriarchal norms, the prime concern before gender-neutral rape laws may not be a desire for gender neutrality. Feminist lawyers like Flavia Agnes have categorically denied the demand on the basis that in a society where there is no gender parity the demand may only result in abuse and inflicting further trauma to the victim, but it may also result in defeating the very purpose of legal reforms. While reviewing the trauma that rape victims undergo during trials it is evident that the state machinery and the legal system are highly patriarchal and prejudiced against women. In such a system the demand for gender-neutral laws in terms of rape, domestic violence etc. may turn the victim to the status of the accused. The legal mechanism functions tangential to the culture of a society. Rape, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse are so prevalent in the Indian society and each of these categories is tied to notions of culture and honor of societies. Therefore women as safeguards of community's honor become easy targets to all forms of violations. Any reform without addressing this basic reality will not fundamentally alter the prevailing situation. The history of law reforms in India and the demand for better law supporting women had been there since the beginning of feminist movement. But , simultaneously there have been demands for protecting male rights ever since. The interesting fact is that while the demand of the feminist movement have been to counter violence against women with more gender sensitive practices and awareness programs rather than addressing violence with stringent laws, the so called men's rights movements have only turned defensive in terms of law and have never attempted in any manner to join the awareness campaigns. It is as if, the concern was only regarding the laws and gender awareness has never been a concern. While one of the arguments that come up against gender neutrality in law is the question of homosexuality it will be a premature conclusion to arrive at, because most of the male rights organizations are highly antagonistic to homosexuality. While based on concepts like Indian heritage and family values, these men do not even think of accommodating homosexuality into the premise of their discourse. For instance one of the groups that claim the rights of women against women's misuse of 498A and DV Act is named as Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF.)This organization and many other men's Rights forums focus on these laws as exploitative platforms where vicious women break the foundation of Indian family values. Neither are they friendly to the cause of sexual minorities, nor the question of sexual violence. These presumptuous statements spring from treating women as the property of men, a highly

Gendering Minorities: Muslim women and the Politics of Modernity
-Orient Blackswan July 2021
Sherin B.S.
This book engages with the “feminist enterprises” Muslim women from Kerala were involved in at various historical junctures through a complex set of negotiations they had with their religious and cultural identities.  Using this archive, the book also interrogates the dynamics of exclusion as well as homogenous categorizations that ignored or were hesitant to register them as active political agents with self-realization and capable of self-representation.
Over the years in India, Muslim women as political subjects have been constructed through discourses surrounding the demand for a uniform civil code and reform of personal laws.  This image is ahistorical; in Indian reality Muslim women’s status and public life have gone through tremendous changes historically.  Strange alliances between a) right-wing nationalism’s construction of Muslim women’s victimization by religious patriarchy, b) the critical position taken by the Left on minority religious identities, c) the feminist clamour for justice for Muslim women which easily plays into global imperialist islamophobia and d) the right-wing targeting of the community mark the premise from which this book attempts to  re-frame Muslim women as nuanced political subjects.
The study is located in Kerala, India, a state that has a different political history from the rest of India.  Within the contexts of early proselytising movements, early twentieth century reform movements and as subjects of active debates on women’s agency Muslim women unravel a life- world of complex realities. The texts gathered in this archive straddle generic boundaries and cut across disciplines and periods in history.  There are discussions of literature, journal entries, tracts, historical documents and oral narratives that provide insight into women’s articulation, participation, defiance as well as their sense of community.  Each discussion pays special attention to the contexts in which the ‘texts’ originate, and embark on the question of Muslim female subjectivity in Kerala.
This is an effort to knit together various instances where Muslim women have been powerful agents of their action and not mere subjects to the norms of a homogenous religious patriarchy.  It is important to acknowledge these agential acts as a counter-narrative to current ‘feminist’ misreading and ideological distortions. Various chapters look at Muslim women’s role as Sufis, rulers and local practitioners in the spread of Islam, conversions and the formation of community, and as political agents in the early twentieth century reform movements. Countering the victimised status of Muslim women in recent feminist discourses, the book probes further into the problematic contemporary assemblage that brings feminists and right-wing Hindutva groups together. It urges feminism to take notice of practising Muslim women from a totally different angle, incorporating their faith.