Beyond Monolithic Conceptualization of Muslim Societies: Matriliny and Muslim Women’s Engagement with the Transformation of Kinship in the Malabar Coast of South India

Abstract

The legal and religious reforms during the colonial period have modified the property and residential rights of the matrilineal Muslim women of Malabar (North Kerala, India). However, how these women engaged with the transformation, through strategies, negotiations and contestations, seldom received visibility in the mainstream reform scholarship of colonial Kerala. As I have argued elsewhere, while the reforms attempt to foster new forms of gender relations, based on patrilineality and conjugality, the matrilineal women created an alternative space of their own. The entry of Muslim women into colonial education and the formation of Mahila Samajams or women’s organisations in the early decades of the 20th century is indicative of this. In the backdrop of the narratives of senior matrilineal Muslim women from the Malabar Coast, the paper attempts to understand, how women articulated and engaged with the transformation of the matrilineal tharavad (joint household) in the colonial period.