There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala

This book explores the historical reasons for the legal abolition of matriliny in twentieth-century Kerala, India. Such a legal enactment represented not only an exceptional situation where a pattern of inheritance was outlawed but also state Intervention into a sphere that was hitherto considered private. The focus of analysis here is the changes in family, notions of property, land rights, sexuality, gender and caste. G. Arunima examines these alongside the equally important phenomenon of the evolution of an Anglo-Indian legal morality that legitimised these changes. The book spans a period of almost a century and a half, roughly from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By historicising matriliny, the author takes on more static anthropological models to demonstrate the dynamic and complex transformations that occurred in Nayar matriliny even before its abolition in the twentieth century. She intervenes in ongoing debates on family and kinship and combines concerns that straddle history, anthropology, gender studies and law.

G. Arunima completed her Ph.D.in History from the university of Cambridge, U.K., in 1992, and is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. She is UGC Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Her current work is a social and cultural history that examines the production of an aesthetic of the ‘modern’ in colonial Kerala, and looks specifically at art, literature and satire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other than her interests in the history of the family, and in social and cultural studies, she has also been working on photography, and on a social history of emotions.