The Woman’s Question: Negotiating Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Magazines in Malayalam

Abstract

Women’s questions can be defined as discourses within larger movements that focus on improving the women’s condition and status in society articulated not in partnership with or by women in question but by others who speak for them. The woman’s question was of particular importance in colonial Kerala attempting to ‘modernise’ itself. And many of the debates and discussions contained in women’s magazines in Malayalam in the first half of the twentieth century reflect the centrality of ‘woman’ in the contemporary discourses of reform and nationalism. These magazines were vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and reveal how women in particular mediated the binaries of home/world, tradition/modernity, spiritual/material binaries. The cultural anxieties of a changing society led to women being assigned and defined as constituting the home/tradition/spiritual. However, many of the articles analysed reveal the way in which women of the time critiqued and mediated the cultural anxieties and limitations that marked women’s role and rights within the larger discourses of reform and nationalism.