Kathleen Gough and Research in Kerala

Abstract

I cannot begin to talk about Kathleen and her work in Kerala without first mentioning a few reminiscences about my own interaction with Kathleen. When I received a grant back in 1958 to go to Kerala to carry out a study of family life and child - rearing practices among matrilineal groups in the Malabar District of Kerala, I asked Mort Fried if I could write to Kathleen. He said, all means. She is a very open and friendly person and you should not hesitate to write to So I went ahead and wrote. Kathleen responded in great detail, expressing not only interest in the work I was doing but also giving me names of people to meet and visit with, suggesting that I might want to work in one or more of the villages where she had gone, and even giving me the name of the man who had cooked for her. As it turned out, I did go ahead and work in one of her villages for the first part of my time in Kerala. It was both good and bad, because I was forever aware of her unique legacy. For example, she was a fantastic walker, never worried about falling down crevices or being besieged by wild dogs, whereas I always had poor balance and eventually ended up using a walking cane. Everywhere I went people had stories to tell about her amazing energy as well as her extreme kindness, and people constantly asked me how she was doing. The young men talked about how she used to come and sit with them in the toddy shop, something I felt less comfortable doing since it was an arena where women usually did not go. They also talked about how she never seemed to get tired, staying up night after night to watch the traditional possession ceremonies during the Theyyam season (when ritual possession ceremonies take place). When I returned from my field work in Kerala, Kathleen suggested that I stop in Ann Arbor so that we could talk about our mutual interests and about what was going on in Kerala. I was totally overwhelmed when she handed me the manuscript of her chapters for the book she was doing with David Schneider on Matrilineal Kinship (1961). I still remember feeling how I could never write anything that was comparable to that, even though my own research had focussed on vastly different issues. Just before I left for my second trip to India in 1962, Kathleen and her young son passed through New York and stayed with me on her way to visit her mother in England. It was a real delight to be with both of them, and Kathleen and I spent many hours talking about Kerala where I planned to go first to study the Namboodiri Brahmins. She carried with her an unexpected surprise, the only copy of her thesis that she personally owned. Since those were the days before xeroxing, I remember staying up half of each night after Kathleen went to sleep so that I could read and take notes from her thesis, which is an excellent study of the lineage system and the effects of legal reforms of the 1930s in the Malabar District (the northern half of present - day Kerala). To turn from the personal, Kathleen Gough was a member of the first corps of British - trained social anthropologists to carry out systematic research after the end of World War II. She went to Kerala immediately after Indian Independence in the late 1940s. This was a period of considerable turmoil in the area. During the 1930s in each of the main regions of Kerala (Travancore, Cochin and the Malabar District of Madras State), a wide variety of legal reforms had been enacted that led to profound changes in the structure and organization of life among the land - owning matrilineal castes. Kathleen was the first to study these changes in detail, as well as the earlier changes that had resulted from contact with the colonizing Western powers, the invasions of Malabar by Haider Ali and his son Tipoo Sultan and the subsequent betrayal of the Zamorin of Calicut by the British which led to British rule in Malabar. Her unpublished doctoral thesis (which is to be published posthumously in India) focussed specifically on the effect of all of these historical forces and the legislation passed in the 1930s in Malabar District (which was then still part of Madras State) and the northern part of the then - separate state of Cochin (which was quite similar to South Malabar). …