Kinship as a ‘public fiction’. Substance and emptiness in South Indian inter-caste and inter-religious families

ABSTRACT

This article explores inter-caste/religious (ICR) marriages in Kerala (South India) and focuses on the meanings and experiences of kinship when the latter is devoid of its expected emotional and relational substance, to become a ‘public fiction’. With this expression, I refer to kinship relations accepted in the public sphere, but which denied affective and material foundations in the everyday life. ICR marriages hold an important socio-political role in Kerala as symbols of the State’s development, and family ostracism is scrutinised as a form of backward communalism. However, relatives are not always willing to build relations with ICR kin. This leads to ICR families managing situations where public kinship tolerance co-exists with the negation of its real emotional and intimate possibilities. The article maps how the reality of ICR marriages is turned into a fiction by persisting unspoken norms. It suggests the importance of linked discussions on fiction/ reality in the domestic sphere to the public/political role that kinship and families hold in modern postcolonial Kerala.

KEYWORDS:

• Fictive kinship
• class mobility
• inter-caste and inter-religious marriages
• migration
• Kerala

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anindita Majumdar,Yoko Taguchi and two anonymous reviewers for the useful comments on earlier draft of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term purogmanam refers to the ‘modern’ conceived more as something taking place in the present and introducing novelties with respect to the past. Its meaning in everyday discourse is not necessarily pejorative.

2 According to 2011 Census of India figures, 54.73% of Kerala's residents are Hindus, 26.56% are Muslims, 18.38% are Christians, and the remaining 0.32% follow another religion (Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist) or have no religious affiliation.

3 The Varma and Ambalavasi include a set of caste groups who hold an intermediate Kshatyra status between the Nair and the Brahmins. Traditionally, marriage between Varma, Ambalavasi and Nair was allowed. The term ‘Kammala’ refers to a composite set of traditional artisans caste groups, categorised as Other Backward Castes (OBC). The Ezhava community hold a lower status, in between the OBC and the ex-untouchable scheduled castes (SC).

4 Traditionally, Syrian Christians hold a higher status as they claim descent from converted Nambudiri families. Differently Latin Catholics hold a lower status and they gather angler families converted during the Portuguese colonial expansion.

5 Muslims traditionally occupied the lower ranks of Malayali social ladder to the point of being assimilated to OBC or SC castes.

6 Until the first half of the XXth century, among upper caste families the unity of illakkar (lineage members) was partly assured through a relatively rigid principle of primogeniture and differential marriage system (adhivedanam) between the firstborn and the cadets. The eldest son could enter into endogamic marriages (veli) while for younger sons sambandham represented the only option. Children born out of sambandham were excluded the father’s caste membership and from inheritance rights. In 1956, with the Hindu Succession Act, equal inheritance rights are formally granted to all members of a lineage and to their children over joint and individual property.

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Ester Gallo

Ester Gallo is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Trento. She works on migration, gender and religion, and on colonial history, kinship and class formation with reference to South Asia and Southern Europe. Her work has appeared in international journals like Global Networks, Sociology, Critique of Anthropology, Emotions, Space and Society, International Journal of Comparative Sociology and Gender, Place and Culture. A Journal of Feminist Geography. She has edited Migration and Religion in Europe: Comparative Perspectives on South Asian Experiences (Routledge, 2016). She is the author of The Fall of the Gods: Kinship, Memory and Middle Classes in South India (Oxford University Press, 2017). With Francesca Scrinzi, she has co-authored a monograph titled Migrant Men, Masculinities and Reproductive Labour: Men of the Home (Palgrave MacMillan – Migration, Citizenship and Diaspora Series, 2016).