Caste as Performance: Ayyankali and the Caste Scripts of Colonial Kerala

Abstract

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body cloth. While a few young women wore printed blouses, many, particularly the older women, wore no upper-body clothes except for large, beaded necklaces made of red-colored stones. Most people, with the exception of the men who clothed their upper body, walked along the sides of the road, leaving the path clear for the occasional bullock cart. These bullock carts, also known as villuvandi, carried young men-about-town, almost exclusively landowning, upper-caste Nairs. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, white mundu, and matching white turban, the Nair riding his villuvandi assumed the haughty air of a master surveying his subjects; out to observe his inferiors as much as be seen as a superior. These Nairs, and other upper-caste men and women, had the exclusive right of way, on bullock cart or on foot, the right to wear clean white clothes, and, of course, the right to ride a villuvandi. These rights were codified through caste-based rules or norms known as jati maryada, which governed all aspects of social behavior.