Abstract
Through the analysis of the novels of C.V. Raman Pillai (1858–1922), this essay seeks to study the emergent discourse of the novel in late nineteenth-century Kerala as a discourse of modernity, and explicate how it becomes embedded in the project of colonial modernity in attempting to imagine and consolidate the relatively new social unit of the conjugal family by systematically erasing traces of its matrilineal past. The novel in a vernacular language like Malayalam thus becomes a locus of legitimacy for studying the processes of gendering of modernity and the fashioning of Nair women from “licentious females” to “chaste” modern subjects.
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