Shifting, Contextual Discourse of Power
Susan Visvanathan
THERE COMES PAPA: COLONIALISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF MATRILINY IN KERALA, MALABAR C1850-1940 by G. Arunima Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2004, 223 pp., 450.00
January 2004, volume 28, No 1

This is a tensely argued book, which was submitted perhaps a decade ago in Cambridge, as a doctoral thesis. I have heard interesting snippets of it at seminars, at Teen Murti Library (NMML) and the Institute of Economic Growth since 1995 or so, and have been waiting for it to be in print for many years. Orient Longman has fortunately taken the responsible decision of seeing this work come to general view. There will be many different ways of reading the material provided by Arunima, and for anthropologists particularly, classroom teaching will take on a different hue with the reading of this book. Contentious or not, the attention that this book will receive in the coming years cannot be doubted. It is a complex weaving of legal cases, newspaper accounts, family histories and fiction, of that disturbing period of the colonial confrontation with tradition, when matriliny became patriliny, in the matter of decades marked by sustained litigation.It is indeed curious that judgements in law courts are such a substantial source for history writing or anthropological reading. Perhaps the scrutiny to which law court judgements are always put under, by a knowing and knowledgeable public, makes the judiciary a self aware institution of significant scribes.

Continue reading this review