In 1907, aged nineteen, the writer Katherine Mansfield set out on a camping trip that was for her arguably the New Zealand equivalent of the European Grand Tour in that it functioned as a rite of passage into the independence of adulthood and as a way of educating herself about her country's indigenous peoples. The route taken by the small group of friends she travelled with was through an extremely remote and hilly part of the North Island known as the Ureweras, a region inhabited by the Tuhoe people who had retreated there after the Land Wars of the 1860s. Undertaken in two horse-pulled roofed coaches, the trip also took in the Rotorua Lake district where Maori commandeered a booming tourist industry, the Huka Falls and Taupo. Throughout the voyage Mansfield kept a notebook which she filled with evocative descriptions of the landscape and of Maori but it was clearly not intended for publication, being more of a space to experiment with different writing styles and even forge a distinctive writing style of her own.

In this chapter, I examine Mansfield's Urewera Notebook, as it is commonly known, as an example of a particular form of travel writing from the early modernist period — one that is associated with the cultivation of aesthetic taste and with the preservation of high culture.

Introduction: Where exactly are the Balkans?

The name of the Balkan peninsula was coined by the German geographer August Zeune in 1809, in his book Gea: Versuch Einer Wissenschaftlischen Erdbeschreibung. Zeune called the peninsula Balkanhalbeiland, using the name of the Balkan mountain range, known in classical times as Haemus, in present-day Bulgaria. The term soon gained wide currency because of the need for a convenient way of referring to a region and a diverse collection of peoples — and, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, new countries — which had previously lurked little noticed under the cloaks of the Austro- Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires. The Balkan territories of the Ottomans, which comprised some two-thirds of the peninsula, were commonly referred to as ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ or the ‘Near East’, a term whose ghostly presence is felt — like the twitching of a severed limb — in the way we continue to refer to the Middle and the Far East even today. As an increasing number of Western travellers visited the Balkans and wrote about the peninsula, and as the independence movements gradually achieved their objectives in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the region's collection of borderlands and peripheries slowly crystallized into a new Balkan identity in what resembled a version of a geo-political Rorschach test.

Chewing on slavery

American Notes, Charles Dickens's account of his trip to the United States between January and June 1842, still provokes strongly negative feelings more than a century and a half later. In a dismissal involving a familiar dig at travel writing, Laura C Berry pronounces that: ‘The “plot” of American Notes, and perhaps this must be accepted as simply endemic to travel accounts, is as rigid as a set of railroad tracks, and just about as tiring’ (Berry 1996, 213). Noting that Dickens's ‘monotonous’ text (212) has rarely been ‘treated at length’, Berry opines that: ‘The superficiality of Dickens's reading of America has defied any truly good reading of American Notes’ (213). Berry's argument, immersed in theories of the body, is that Dickens encounters in the United States a commingling of classes that discomforts him since the British context that generates and consumes the narrative is one of social tensions. Dickens's concern that ‘increased social circulation might be a necessary result of industrialism and its effects’ is focused — or projected — on the spitting he finds everywhere in the United States (Berry 1996, 212).

Introduction

When — in the famous Disruption of the Church of Scotland, in 1843 — Thomas Chalmers and his evangelical supporters walked out of the General Assembly to form their own breakaway organization, their most pressing task was to raise money. Over a third of its ministers and up to half of its lay members declared allegiance to the new body, which, although not an established church, had high hopes of fulfilling the same role: a national church that would care for the spiritual and educational needs of the whole population. While the voluntary and dissenting churches could support themselves from the contributions of their congregations, they were only viable in the wealthier areas of the towns. In working-class districts and in the country, a church required additional sources of income. For the Free Church of Scotland, with no church or school buildings to call its own, the financial problem was acute.

A huge fund-raising programme was set in motion, at home and abroad. Representatives were dispatched to England and Ireland the same summer, and, later in the year, a deputation set sail for North America, where they reaped the benefit of long-standing links with the Presbyterians there. Reporting back on the visit to the Assembly of 1844, Dr Cunningham estimated that £3,000 had been raised in the United States before the deputation left and £6,000 since, with a few thousand perhaps still to come.

We began this book with a question: how do you make a man? Our first answer came by way of assertions from an elite community that their esoteric and exclusivist rituals effect radical transformations by turning low-status boys into hegemonic twice-born elite men. Yet this assertion was immediately undermined: both by the men themselves, who ruefully admit that to be initiated is not enough, that successful and repeated performances of dominant masculinity are needed; and by males from other communities, who manage to claim ‘manhood’ without the practice of initiation and who are moreover oriented towards styles of masculinity quite different from the Brahmin, suggesting that perhaps we should not speak of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in such a richly plural society.

Yet against this fragmenting tendency, Chapters 3 and 4 highlighted over and over the existence of consensus around the set of characteristics needed if one is to make accomplished performances and stake claims to consistent and successful masculine status. We found that earning and bringing money home, providing dependents and making wise use of the money—as in house-building—have become core preoccupations for men across all communities over the 20th century. Brahminical values of renunciation, austerity and purity are sidelined even among Brahmins in favour of decidedly this—worldly demonstrations of masculine competence. This competence is expected to anticipate or realize one's role as heterosexual householder, with sexuality and providing as its twin poles.

Blank spaces

In his narrative of Central African exploration, Through the Dark Continent (1878), Henry Morton Stanley tells his companion Frank Pocock, who was soon to drown on their adventure:

A couple of decades later, Marlow, the protagonist of Joseph Conrad's tale, Heart of Darkness, set mainly in the unnamed but identifiable Congo, would declare:

This book is based upon several lengthy periods of joint fieldwork in a rural paddy-growing area of central Kerala (the panchayat, ‘Valiyagramam’) and some short fieldworks in Kerala's state capital, Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) from 1989 to 2002. We have been indebted over the years to several agencies, which have funded the research: the Economic and Social Science Research Council of Great Britain; the Nuffield Foundation; The Leverhulme Trust; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the Society for South Asian Studies; and to our home institutions—the University of Sussex and SOAS, London.

Parts of this manuscript have been read and commented upon by Radhika Chopra, Shilpa Phadke, Sanjay Srivastava and Muraleedharan Tharayil—we are grateful to all. Thanks to Mahalakshmi Mahadevan for copy editing and some thoughtful comments. As ever, heartfelt thanks to our long-time friend Thampi Chandrasekhar for all his help.

Note on transliteration: in line with increasing informality in transliterating Indian languages (partly due to the decline of the Indological influence on anthropology), we have asked our copy editor Mahalakshmi Mahadevan to transcribe Malayalam terms into their commonly used naturalistic Anglicized forms, which will be easily readable by anyone familiar with a Dravidian language. Thus, meesha will be more recognisable than mīśa.

Versions of some of this material have been published earlier. For their gracious permission to republish parts of articles or book chapters, we thank the following:

Women Unlimited for:

Osella, C. and Osella, F. 2004. ‘Malayali Young Men and Their Movie Heroes’.

Introduction

We consider now some ways in which consumption contributes towards the constitution and expression of recognized masculine statuses and identities. We purposely shift our attention away from consumption as such towards wider orientations on the use of economic resources—cash in particular—which inform consumption practices. Continuing from the previous chapter, we will talk about Kerala migrants. Over the past 30 years, not only has Gulf migration transformed the state's economic and social landscape, but the Gulf migrant—the prototypically successful and above all wealthy man—has come to represent the aspirations of many Malayali payyanmar (boys). Attracting thousands of men with the prospect of rapid economic progress, migration has accelerated their movement along a culturally recognized idealized trajectory towards mature manhood, while accentuating characteristics already locally associated with essentialized categories of masculinity. Exploring masculine orientations towards consumption through the lens of migration, four important local essentialized categories emerge. First, the gulfan, a term that refers to the migrant during his periodic visits home and immediately upon return. A transitional and individualistic figure, defined largely through relationships to cash and consumption, he is typically a deracinated and not fully mature male needing to be brought back into local life. During the period of reintegration and movement towards maturity following return, the gulfan must tread a balance between two extremes.

Introduction

We continue our exploration of Kerala masculinities by considering the role of religious activities and devotion in the production of specific male aesthetics and styles at the intersection between homosociality and normative heterosexuality. We focus on the annual pilgrimage to Sabarimala, the main temple of the Hindu deity Ayyappan, visited every year by millions of—predominantly Hindu—male devotees from Kerala and from south India as a whole. We suggest that this pilgrimage, an almost exclusively male arena of religious performance, highlights masculinity while constructing a particular style of maleness which draws creatively on an antagonistic relationship between transcendence and immanence—between the worldly householder and the south Asian figure of the ascetic renouncer.

We stress that these categories and relationships are not fixed within an all-encompassing ‘Hindu tradition’. Rather, as we have argued in previous chapters with regard to the householder and to sexuality, they are reference points—ideals which are historically contingent and constructed discursively within specific political, economic and cultural circumstances. Particularly salient here are two issues: on the one hand Gulf migration, recent economic liberalisation and the consequent rise of a new moneyed middle-class, all contributing to a redefinition of appropriate life-styles and consumer needs which require (as discussed earlier) careful negotiation between saving and spending. On the other, a re-masculinization of renunciate celibacy within colonial and post-colonial Hindu nationalist discourse making renunciation a source of (political) potency for the householder (see e.g. Monti 2004; Vasudevan 2004, Banerjee 2005).

Adult Heterosexuality

In the previous chapter, we have seen that before marriage most young people limit themselves to tuning and romance. Before moving on to think about the next stage, that of adult heterosexuality, we need to take a detour into a very specifically south Asian set of issues. Here, we begin with the fact that there is a large body of literature in anthropology and psychology referring to ‘semen-loss anxiety’, a generalized anxiety commonly found among south Asian men and focused around the deleterious effects to health of losing semen, a substance which, when conserved, contributes to physical well-being and strength. This anxiety has been widely taken (by psychology and anthropology alike) as a coded way of speaking about sexual anxieties, and as the central plank of evidence of a pathological fear among south Asian men of mature women and of male reluctance towards sexual activity. We have shown elsewhere at length that ‘semen loss anxiety’ is not necessarily related to sexuality. We also show that it needs to be, as it has not been, clearly differentiated from a separate anxiety, which specifically does refers to sexual performance—‘first night’ apprehensions—young men's anxieties about the wedding night. At the same time, cultural discourses that warn against sexual outlets must be set against those discourses that seek or approve sexual activity, and against the actual practices of young men and women, which often do not coincide with ‘official versions’ counselling and lauding total continence and virginity till marriage.

Introduction

In this final chapter, we return to thinking about young men—the ‘boys’ or payyanmar encountered in Chapter 2—and to the question that we opened with there: how to make a man? We have seen throughout this book that the status of ‘man’ is something closely tied in contemporary Kerala—as across south Asia—to marriage, fatherhood, house-ownership, providing and consumption. Yet throughout, we have also found that playing a masculine role or being admitted into an arena defined as masculine is not all there is to manliness. Masculinity here certainly also has a categorical flavour to it: a man is what a woman is not. The two realms of aanu (M) and pennu (F) are often drawn upon in discourse and energetically kept separate; how often we have heard the stereotypical statement, which apparently puts and end to all argument: ‘men have moustaches and women have long hair’. But at the same time, masculinity is also deeply implicated in actual relationships between men and women. Here, sexuality and gendering are brought together as masculine and feminine are continually crafted through the structures and dynamics of heteronormativity. Anthropologists have long noticed the strong division made between ‘sisters’ and ‘wives’ in south Asia (e.g. Bennett 1983; Jamous 1991; Good 1991; Busby 1997).

About this book

This book draws together work we have written over the last 15 years, which has been concerned with exploring masculinity in a south Asian context. The specific context we have worked in is that of a rural paddygrowing panchayat (which we have anonymized as ‘Valiyagramam’) in the central part of Kerala, South India. We undertook several periods of fieldwork here, from 1989 to 2001. Here, we worked mostly among Hindus but also at times with members of the minority Christian populations (split between various denominations). There were no Muslim families in this village. Since 2002, we have shifted field-site and now work in Calicut town in northern Kerala. Again we are working among the locally dominant community (in this case Muslim traders) and again we are paying attention to ways in which objectifications of identity are projected, for example through the practices of consumption. What has become clear to us, since 2002, is the degree to which several themes found in south Asian ethnography generally and in our own earlier work may be highly specific to rural Hindu contexts. The continuing observance of some forms of untouchability and the belief that character and body-type are strongly correlated would be one (Osella and Osella 1996, 2000b).