Articles by J Devika

The police surveillance on young people in Kerala seems to have risen to new heights with active monitoring of youth lifestyles, which the police perceive to be linked to youth crime. These micro-fascisms only reveal the growing weakness of the pillars of 20th century Malayalee social disciplining. It is up to the politicised youth, however, to turn this into an opportunity for democratic transformation.

This article critically examines the relevance of community-identities in and for the contemporary struggles of the most-disadvantaged sections through two case studies from Kerala’s working-class areas, an urban slum and a fishing hamlet, both in Thiruvananthapuram district. It draws upon local histories of these two places which trace the intertwined histories of land, politics, domestic life, and work since the early-mid-20th century. The slum emerged as individuals from different communities and faiths collected there and set up homes and families but did not automatically generate social bonds that transcended individual interests. In sharp contrast, in the fishing hamlet, contrary to the widespread belief that collective empowerment of the poor, civil and political, requires a breaking down of caste-community identities, the resistance to exploitation and dispossession was and is rooted in invocations of the “community” even as several fisher castes organised around the worker identity.

Scholarship on women and gender in Kerala took a turn in the 1990s, in the wake of economic liberalisation, the debates generated by the anti-Mandal agitation and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and importantly, the erosion of leftist hegemony, accelerated by, among other things, the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and “actually existing” socialism.

This edition focuses on the relations between caste and gender and explores the intersectionalities involved. It includes articles exploring the politics of feminism and dalit activism located in urban spaces, in working class sites, through labour, "traditional" rituals, issues of honour and inter-caste marriage.

The rapidly changing urban scenario seems to have important implications for gendering governance in Kerala. Thus, besides the different histories mediated by caste and community, the spatial location of women leaders in local governance appears to be of central importance in shaping their agency. This article which is based on the research about women leaders in local governance in Kerala in 2005-10 explores the extent to which success in local governance allowed these women entry into politics and gave them a greater presence within the public life. Generally it is seen that successful women leaders are often the bearers of a specific form of power that has been historically associated with the deployment of sentiment and affect, and ideal femininity, and that such power is understood to be crucial to local governance as well. However, an entirely different picture emerged from this study on women leaders of urban governance. Besides gentle power, successful women attribute their success equally to knowledge - of official norms and procedures.