When 'Love' Meets Islamic Reformism: Shifting Currents in Marriage, Family and Intimacy in an Indian Ocean Matrilneal Muslim Society

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Dr Caroline Osella, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

This paper comes out of a project which was planted among Muslims from Kerala, south India, and is based on fieldwork both in Kerala and in the Gulf. Kerala’s Muslims have a deep history of transnational circulation with the Gulf region: via intense traffic of people, money, things and ideas (past and present); via cultural imaginings which powerfully entangle the Gulf and Kerala and complicate the notion of border; and via contemporary transnational projects such as Islamic reformism. Kinship, marriage, household structure and expectations of intimacy are all undergoing rapid shifts and the paper focuses on these, as experienced by women. Many families are shifting away from old off-bazaar matrilineal large extended households and into small individual household units with patrilineal emphasis, often in new neighborhoods. Other families choose to remain in the old Muslim area, building large properties and trying to re-constitute matrilineages – an option demanding considerable capital. This paper thinks through processes of change and influences as at work among transnational families. Examples include: new brides born and raised in Gulf states married back to Kerala and rapidly socialized into ‘Kerala style’, something which brides sometimes resist; married women who accompany their husbands who work or do business; stay-back wives who take visiting visas and spend six months in the gulf with their husbands; stay-back wives who know of the Gulf by hearsay and imaginings only; older women married to Arabs, who appear occasionally on visits to their natal families. The paper will also discuss various sites where the ‘new family’ is being produced. These include the boxes of consumer goods sent by absent husbands / fathers; wedding videos; women’s consumption and leisure practices. It will additionally address ways in which the figure of the imagined other – the Arab woman – sometimes appears, most often as exemplar of moral lack and against whom the ‘new Kerala Muslim woman’ crafts herself.

Biography:

Caroline Osella, Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, has worked since 1989 in Kerala, south India and with Malayali migrants in the Gulf states. At SOAS, she teaches courses on South Asian ethnography; Gender, Sex and Sexuality; Ethnography of South Asian Islam; and Migration and Diaspora. Her broadest research interest is that of how projects of identity crafting are brought back to the body, while socially constructed bodies are differentiated to reflect class, ethnic and gender differences and to forge social hierarchies. Her recent work has explored Kerala as an Indian ocean region, questioning the nation bias, and has been interested in the ways in which Kerala and Gulf are entangled. In current research, she is following interests in Self /Other encounters and (especially non verbal) modes of self-making, inter-relating and experiencing the immediate environment.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk