Getting beyond the Governmental Fix in Kerala

Abstract

This essay argues that the current crisis of feminism in Kerala State, India, has little to do with the hegemony of English. Rather, the difficulty arises partly from the difficulties that feminists encounter in translating feminism between different linguistic layers and partly from local feminism’s relative inability to generate an effective counterlanguage to the depoliticizing vocabulary of gender mainstreaming found in governmentalized feminism. I argue for greater attention to the manner in which feminist political ideas get translated on the ground and to the translation of feminist literary writing, which is currently a very powerful presence in the Malayalam (the dominant language here) public sphere, as ways of generating a politically effective feminist idiom and refurbishing feminist thought and politics for Malayali society. Instead, I suggest that part of the crisis in feminism here comes from difficulty in translating between different layers of Malayalam—between high-intellectual Malayalam and its everyday variant.