by Umar Nizarudeen
The aesthetic privileging of the feminine along with the political suppression of the same has been a constant factor in the socio-cultural space in modern Kerala. While women have been allotted demarcated zones of beauty and self-care and arenas of feminine sovereignty that draw from tradition, the political realm of visibility is denied to women. The mediatized avatars of politics such as primetime news television largely ignore the political loci of feminism and focus on the aesthetic of the interior. The akam-puram distinction has been a primordial one in Kerala and Tamilnadu since Sangham times, where the puram denoted public space, and the akam denoted an interior space of domesticity. There have been fewer instances of female engagement in public space in terms of statecraft and battle.
The ancient martial art form of Kerala, Kalarippayattu offers a template to extrapolate aesthetic engagement into the political realm. Kalarippayattu which once was banned for its potential subversive tendencies during the British colonial era has in its traditional as well as touristic exotic valences been revitalized in Malabar and Travancore (the northern and southern parts of Kerala). As a result, there have been attempts to aestheticize Kalarippayattu practice. Such aestheticization, unfortunately, attempts to write out the feminine. The female locus of beauty is coopted within the posthuman domain of the male.
POSTHUMAN AESTHETICS
The posthuman practices of the non-linguistic corporeal body have a definitive masculine tinge to it. This can lead to multiple instances of male appropriation of the feminine space of beauty. This can be offset by the counter movement, comprising female assertion in the political sphere of the body. Here the Kalarippayattu sub culture is a significant theatre where the tension between the latent female body politics is confronted by a revitalized male aesthetic. Thus the male crafting of exotic Kalarippayattu has ethical nuances, which in the age of Biennalized artistic and cultural entrepreneurship in Kerala, carries brownie points for soft power. The female space of the body in the Kalarippayattu spaces need to be extrapolated into the wider arena of democratic political participation for it to be made universal across barriers of caste, creed and religion. The enormous potential that Kalarippayattu wields is owing to its primordial stature in the cultural imagination of Kerala.
The retreat of subjectivity, as Foucault has predicted has also seen the rise of authoritarian governments all over the world. The enlightened human subject and its concomitant values have been superseded by the materialist ideologies of neo-liberal capital. Religion and the spiritual eco-system are finding it difficult to mutate themselves to meet the demands of an unprecedented collapse of virtue ethics along with normative religiosity. Buddhism in its Western iterations, once bestowed with certain potentially emancipatory roles, finds itself unable to meet the crisis, let alone avert humanitarian disasters of its own creation such as those of the Rohingya community in Burma. Advances in science, and especially in the biological sciences are meanwhile heralding the rise of a new sort of human, one that sacrifices subjective depth for a universe of material richness that reaches all the way up to the planet Mars. The accelerationist paradigm promotes the exploration of outer space by non-state actors such as Elon Musk, which serves to divert attention from the immediate issues of climate change, poverty, and human survival.
Peter Handke, an Austrian writer condemned for his comments on the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2020. This is but an indication of the way in which literature and the arts have failed to stop the demise of the `human’ as a category, in spite of immense innovations that might even have helped hasten that very decline.
The ethics of subjectivity demands that the `human’ be brought back into the center of this material matrix. Gender relations and intersectionality and a spectrum of feminist politics are striving in that direction. In `Cyborg Manifesto’ we find Donna Haraway expanding the very scope of the category of the `human’ beyond renaissance notions of the same, so as to include machinic articulations of humanity in the form of cyborgs as well.
MATRILINY VS KALARIPPAYATTU
Matriliny is the other focus of feminist reinterpretation of Kerala’s socio-cultural ethos. The high literacy rate and positive female to male ratio that the Indian state enjoy are often cited as emancipatory vestiges of that matrilineal past. But such a notion of an Amazonian past has been majorly critiqued by historians including KN Ganesh. There is an argument that the high literacy rates among Kerala women are a result of the matrilineal tradition. `But even among the matrilineal people, literacy was confined to the gentry’ (Ganesh, Keralathinte Innalekal, p244).
Such legendary crafting of society based on kinship systems is pitted against really existing politics of the body in Kalarippayattu.
Both matriliny and Kalarippayattu as conceptual and material traditions need not necessarily be mutually exclusive. The possibility of a female Kalarippayattu tradition demands a segueing of these two poles of historical possibility.
KALARIPPAYATTU AS SELF DEFENCE
There have been fewer cases of female masters of Kalari. This is perhaps owing to the non-defensive nature of many of the tactics of Kalarippayattu including the `marmavidya’. This comprises the knowledge of certain points in the human body which when tackled with appropriate pressure can produce various states of incapacitation. Such possibilities especially those surrounding the male gonads have traditionally made these esoteric epistemologies inaccessible to female training in unisex or dedicated Kalarippayattu spaces.
For instance, the `vitthu marmam’ (vitthu means seed) when attacked can result in the testicles retracting, which results in loss of consciousness. This will be accompanied by frothing at the mouth. The `thandu marmam’ (thandu means stem) involves hitting the midpoint of the male phallus, resulting in nasal emission and urination. Such tactics can come in handy in potentially threatening situations for women. The esoteric as well as primordial nature of these practices result in them wielding psychological heft in the female thought space and in the civic realm as a whole.
The ancestral knowledge that subaltern communities of Kerala possess have largely been confined to the space of esoteric legend. The democratization and broad-based popularization of such crafts and training of the same is at present carried out at unisex kalarippayattu spaces. The emergence of the ecumenical Kalarippayattu space potentially changes the social consciousness. Scholars of Kalarippayattu such as Zarilli have said that consciousness is phenomenologically a form of attention. `When the body becomes all eyes’ is how Zarilli characterizes Kalarippayattu. The eyes are here substitute for the phallic feminine.
The transmogrification of the vulva into the eye, charts out the trajectory of the male appropriation of feminine spaces of kinship and bodily practices in Kerala. The ancient and early modern martial spaces of Kerala bore allegiance to their matrilineal kinship households. They thus preserved an Amazonian notion of a sorority that survives in various social indices of Kerala. But the distortion of the female phallus into the scopophilia of the male gaze, is an index of the wider masculinization of the Kerala public sphere. The maternal female was reduced into the gaze of the male usurper. This has been reflected across a wider eco-system of masculine appropriation of female traditions, such as in the case of the Edakkal cave petroglyphs. These petroglyphs which perhaps are one of the earliest instances of artistic creative exuberance in Southern India, have been made into an apotheosis of tool use and muscle power of the `caveman’ through narrative distortions and selective crafting of ancient history. As a result, the absence of metallic implements has been squared with the muscular male ownership of the Edakkal cave petroglyphs. Contemporary female domestic practices such as grinding have seldom been extrapolated into that ancient realm. The same absence of the female has been written into the Kerala social space, including Kalarippayattu. Meenakshi Amma, born in 1941, was awarded the Padma Shri in recognition of her efforts towards popularizing the Kalarippayattu amongst women, its rightful inheritors. Born in Vadakara, near Kannur in Kerala, Meenakshi Amma articulates a powerful current in the contemporary performative politics of the state.
The possibility for martial feminism and politics of the body exists in Kerala. It is the foregrounding of the mediatized aesthetic that has created a hindrance to the flourishing of female body politics in Kerala. The martial art space of Kalarippayattu is reclaiming it despite historical contingencies.
About the Author:
Umar Nizarudeen is with the University of Calicut, India. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems have been published in Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection, and also broadcast by the All India Radio.