The Hindu Business Line : The myth about Kerala women

Not surprisingly for a government initiative, it offers platitudes through sweeping generalisations, such as this: "Kerala presents a positive picture as far as women's development is concerned. Women's awareness, women's movements at the grassroots level, greater mobility, education and women and child health interventions have all led to the overall development of women in Kerala."

Rather than offer any new insight, such a statement just about manages to raise the "feel-good" factor at a time when Kerala has little to be truly proud of, socio-economically speaking. While it is undeniable that women in Kerala enjoy liberties and freedoms denied to their sisters in other parts of India, to over-romanticise their level of development and achievement is to pull wool over people's eyes.

Perhaps it takes a true romantic, not a statistics-laden economist, to appreciate the finer nuances of the real state of women in Kerala. Thus, last week, the poet K.G. Sankara Pillai, pricked one fantasy balloon when he said that the much-bandied claim that women in Kerala used to enjoy a superior status in the past is only a myth and has no grounding in reality or history.

Sankara Pillai was delivering the Dr E.C. Antony Memorial Lecture on `Feminism and Poetry' at a government college near Thrissur. The professor explained that even though a matriarchal form of property inheritance had been prevailing in Kerala in the past, the male members of the family were able to manipulate the conveniences of that system and transform Kerala society into a male-dominated one.

The professor reminded his audience that Kerala was a society that had even denied the right of education to women, and it was only through a series of hard struggles and many social reform movements that the women in Kerala were able to win some fundamental rights.

Yet, the professor lamented, Kerala society continues to neglect the women leaders who had made sterling contributions in aggressive struggles like the Kayyoor agitation and the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising as well as in Gandhian movements.

As an example, Sankara Pillai pointed to the late Arya Antharjanam, known to most Keralites as the silent wife of veteran Communist leader, the late E.M.S. Namboothirippad. She was much more than an appendage to EMS, the professor said. She used to take classes for women at Kayyoor during the historic agitation there.

Even in contemporary Kerala, Sankara Pillai pointed out, women outnumber men in the teaching profession, indicating their paramount role in knowledge generation. But all these contributions are being neglected in male-dominated discussions, the poet-professor rued.

The very same Economic Review quotes the second National Family Health Survey that 23 per cent of Kerala women have no say in how they use or spend their own earnings, while only 42 per cent make their own decisions.

In The Performance of Gender, social anthropologist Cecilia Busby, after studying everyday life in a Kerala fishing village, writes: "An important aspect of women's identity is their ability to handle money, to nurture and build up the household resources."

In reality, though, Kerala's women appear to have a long way to go before they can proudly assert their unique identities.

The writer can be contacted at kg@tug.org.in

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