Abstract
In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as hostile to the shaping of full-fledged modernity in Malayali society. By the 1960s, however, family planning had come to be identified with disciplined, abstemious, bourgeois domesticity. This article explores some dimensions of this transformation. Rather than see this shift as the continuous expansion of ‘enlightened consciousness’, we turn to less-noticed transformations in notions about the functions of sexual activity, the family, etc., to highlight the calcification of modern patriarchy in a socio-cultural milieu in which bourgeois values were inching towards hegemony. The article also shows how the Family Planning Programme itself served to further modern patriarchy in Kerala. This is evidenced in the authority claimed by educated men in designing and overseeing the process of ‘women's liberation’. In thus highlighting the ambiguities of the ‘liberation’ of women via modernity in Kerala, I seek to challenge the historical linearity that is so firmly entrenched in the ‘Kerala Model’ of social change.
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