The paper argues that the formation of modern gender identities in late 19th and early 20th Century Keralam was deeply implicated in the project of shaping governable subjects who were, at the one and same time, ‘free’ and already inserted into modern institutions. Because gender...

Micro-finance and its (purported) capacity to empower women is by now a well-explored field all over the world. We now have several tools by which micro-finance programmes may be assessed. However, here we attempt to critically assess the claims of the Kerala government's poverty eradication...

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...

The desire for development - often defined vaguely, working as a catch-all term for economic growth, social welfare, and socialistic redistribution of resources- has been intimately linked to the construction of the idea of a `Malayalee People' as a distinct socio-cultural entity in the...

The paper tries to unsettle the naturalized association often assumed in the existent literature between the modern family and the small family in 20 th century Malayalee society. Instead, it attempts to trace out the shaping of certain life-options in discourse from the mid-19th century onwards...

The paper argues that the formation of modern gender identities in late 19th and early 20th Century Keralam was deeply implicated in the project of shaping governable subjects who were, at the one and same time, `free' and already inserted into modern institutions. Because gender appeared both...

In the early debates on the desirability of artificial birth controlin Malayalee society, artificial birth control was often opposed on thegrounds that it undercut some of the crucial conditions for the usheringin of full-fledged modernity, which was frequently conceived of inentirely...

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...