Abstract
Different from the pre-modern tradition of laughter, the newly educated intellectuals acquired cultural competence in both traditional and modern knowledge through new cultural resources such as modern Western education and print brought about by colonial modernity. Newly educated intellectuals contributed to the development of Malayalam literary lore, which includes novels, essays, short stories, dramas, poems and various genres of print humour which is characterised by satire, parody, irony, epigram, and wit. Humour became widely used as a medium to negotiate the new changes brought about by colonial modernity. Nineteenth and twentieth century Keralam witnessed new developments in the history of gender too. Different from community identity, the modern individual emerging under colonial subjectification was already gendered. With the emergence of a nascent public sphere in Keralam, women’s organizations, club activities, educational and literary initiatives gradually developed and got strengthened. New notions of women and men, family, romantic love, new marriage practices, and property relations evoked home-centred anxieties among the male groups in the patriarchal society. Among the newly emerged intellectuals, ‘progressive/ modern’ and ‘conservative/ traditional’ interests began to gain prominence. The present paper explores these aspects through a comparative analysis of two early Malayalam novels: Indulekha by O Chandu Menon and its burlesque Parangodiparinayam by Kizhakkeppattu Ramankutty Menon.
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References
2. In the broad sense of the term, the ‘public sphere’ is a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans by Thomas Burger & Frederick Lawrence, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992; Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996,
3. O. Chandu Menon, Indulekha (1889; Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademy, 1998). Kizhakepattu Ramankutty Menon, “Parangodiparinayam” (The Romance of Parangodi) 1892; Nalu Novelukal, ed. George Irumbayam, Trichur: Kerala Sahitya Akademy, 1985, pp. 228-269.
4. For example, see, K. N. Panikkar, Culture, Ideology, Hegemony: Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India. New Delhi: Tulika, 1998.pp. 123-144; Udaya Kumar, “Seeing and Reading: The Early Malayalam Novel and Some Questions of Visibility,” Early Novels of India, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), pp. 161-192; J. Devika, En-Gendering Individual: The Language of Re-forming in Twentieth Century Keralam. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007; G. Arunima, “Writing Culture: Of modernity and the Malayalam novel,” Studies in History 13, no. 2 (1997), pp. 271-290. Satheesh Chandra Bose & Shiju Sam Varghese (Ed), Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2015.
5. Kizhakepattu Ramankutty Menon, “Parangodiparinayam” (The Romance of Parangodi)
6. The author mocks at the newly emerged novels like Kundalata, Meenakshi,and Indulekha, and the theme of celebrating modernity through idealizing the image of modern woman and man who are educated and their free choice of marriage different from the traditional style of arranging a marriage. Especially he taunts the novel Meenakshi for its similarity with the frame of the novel Indulekha and ridicules all these novels’ as adaptations of and inspiration from English novels. For instance, Kundalata imitates the English novels of Scott. In the novel Meenakshi the author engages with the issue of women’s education and argues for it. See, Appu Nedungadi, Kundalata, Calicut: Vidya Vilasam Press, 1887; Cheruvalathu Chathu Nair, Meenakshi. 1890. Trichur: Kerala Sahitya Akademy, 1990.
7. By giving folk names, Parangodan and Parangodi, the main protagonists in this novel, the author mentions about the ‘purity’ in the traditional identity of the Nair families that did not mix up with Aryans who came from outside. At the same time, the author justifies the names saying that names such as Indulekha, Madhavan, and Kundalatha are Aryan names, and hence he prefers folk names to specify the ethnic identity. See, Kizhakepattu Ramankutty Menon, “Parangodiparinayam,” pp. 224-225.
8. Ibid., p. 246. All translations from the original text given in this chapter are mine.
9. Ibid.
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