Engendering Individuals

This book explores how, in early modern Malayalee society, the emerging notion of the individual (as distinct from an identity based on jati, region etc.) was linked to the vision of a society based on gender differences. The process of individualizing thus also became a process of en-gendering. Social reform claimed to set `free people, to make them free individuals. In fact this process of individualization was implicated in institutions (education, home-making, parenting, political work etc) that were seen to be gender specific. As such men and women came to occupy separate, complementary domains, that were seen as `natural while education was seen, paradoxically, as a way to realize these `naturally gendered selves. The book explores how social reform, notions of the individual, and the creation of a `gendered individual came together in early modern Kerala.