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).

Billie Melman has pointed out the connection between Middle East ‘travellers’ individual quests and their particular searches for personal redemption in the desert' with the ‘political dimension’ that developed as a result of their journeys (Melman 2002, p. 114). At the heart of Westerners' travel narratives frequently lay what Behdad calls ‘the travelers’ solitary quest for elsewhere as a response to the onset of modernity in Europe’ (Behdad 1994, p.16). The non-European world also exercised a fascination of connection that cohered around notions of race, history and culture. Behdad's term ‘belatedness’ can be stretched further so as to define a formative aspect of imperial thinking that was imbricated in notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development‘. Habituated to thinking in linearities, such thought placed western society at the head of the continuum and consigned the Oriental, as one might a grown up but very backward pupil, to an elementary class. Nineteenth-century thought in the fields of new human sciences such as sociology and anthropology, not to speak of older areas like history and the philosophy of history, busily erected periodicities establishing ‘phases, stages of evolution in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958, p. 13). While they might appear to accord full recognition to the diversity of cultures, Lévi-Strauss argued, such theories constituted a ‘false evolutionism’ that in reality wiped cultural diversity out, conforming all the so-called stages in human development to the Western model.

Introduction: women travellers, Muslim travellers

Between July and October 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in London featured a special exhibition entitled ‘Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers’. It highlighted the journeys of predominantly British women as they travelled to other parts of the globe between the 1660s and the 1960s. Only in the final section of the exhibition, in a small corner to itself, did it recognize women travelling in other directions, specifically ‘a selection of the world's women who made Britain their destination’. Of these twelve, four hailed from the Indian sub-continent, while just two were Muslims. That these women were included at all is certainly to be commended for its recognition of South Asian and Muslim women's participation in the culture of travel, yet their few numbers and bounded location suggest the marginalization of their experiences.

Over the past two decades, some scholars have sought to redirect attention to these and other marginalized figures. A pioneering effort in this direction was Rozina Visram's Ayahs, Lascars and Princes (1986) which documented the substantial numbers of Indians, many of whom were Muslim and some of whom were female, who resided in Britain as servants, sailors and labourers from the early eighteenth century.

Introduction

We begin with a tantalising question: how do you make a man? This chapter deals with some apparently unproblematic ethnography of processes by which boys are ‘made’ into men—male initiation rituals, practised across south Asia, among Hindu middle and higher castes. This ethnography prompts us to reflect on classic approaches to gender and maturity, such as theories that stress the importance of social role in making gender. Such approaches take us part of the way but they are not helpful across the board. Firstly, only certain communities practise rites of passage, and secondly, we sense that gender is not amenable to one-off ‘achievement’. Lately, following the influence of several theorists, but notably Judith Butler, anthropologists have come to think of gender as more precarious and less straightforward than a status attained.

Societies and cultures often deal with processes of physical maturity, growth and decay through what are commonly called ‘rites of passage’, following the French turn of the 20th-century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. As rituals that deal with transition from one social status to another, rites of passage are often explicitly tied to physiological or maturational milestones in the life-course such as birth, puberty or death. Van Gennep (orig. 1908) undertook the sort of vast cross-cultural survey based upon secondary sources that was common for the proto-anthropology of the time, before the ‘discovery’ of fieldwork.

Kerala's Heterosexual Hegemony

The terrain of south Asian male sexuality and attitudes towards women has been over-determined, since the 1950s, by Freudian psychoanalytic approaches and by one conclusion—that heterosexual relations are approached, from the male side at least, with little short of dread. This we find rather odd, given that it is already clear from what we have said earlier about men's life histories and goals that marriage, fatherhood and householder status are valorized. Heterosexuality across south Asia is presumed, carefully cultivated, strictly policed and utterly naturalized, in a reproductive-based nexus of compulsory (arranged) marriage and parenthood, which is a great example of Rubin's ‘traffic in women’—the means by which gender and sexuality have been yoked together and then, as a system, serve the perpetuation of inequality and power relations (Rubin 1975). We have written elsewhere about the process of arranging and celebrating a marriage, paying a dowry and so on (Osella and Osella 2000a: 81ff). Here, we are more interested in exploring some moments of interaction in which heterosexuality is produced and explored. We follow local usage, which refers to unmarried young men and women as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, though they may be up to 30-years-old. Such terminology is an infantilising move common right across south Asia, which serves to reinforce age hierarchies in general and parental control in particular.

Paradise found

‘Madam’, Dr Johnson rebuked Boswell's wife, who had objected to the two men's Scottish tour, ‘we do not go there as to a paradise. We go to see something different from what we are accustomed to see’ (Johnson 1775, p. 19). His remark summarizes the empirical spirit idealized by eighteenthcentury travellers, but the denial it offers highlights the interpretive temptations beguiling travellers faced with unaccustomed scenes. Inevitably they resorted to descriptive strategies derived from pre-existing ideas, and so it was that when Joseph Banks stepped ashore at Tahiti he hailed it as an ‘Arcadia of which we were to be kings’ (Banks 1962, I, p. 252). The notion of terrestrial paradise was never far from the ocean-weary sailor's imagination, and even in the scientifically-minded ‘season for observing’ (Dening 1996, p. 109) following Captain Wallis's 1767 ‘discovery’ of Tahiti, the discourse of paradise, Eden, Elysium punctuated accounts of South Sea landfalls. Within a few years Wallis was followed by the French gentleman-explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville and then Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage, which served both as England's prototype of a new sort of scientific exploration and as the Grand Tour of a wealthy and imaginative young gentleman, Joseph Banks. Banks and Bougainville had been educated, as the sea captains who traditionally undertook voyages of discovery had not, in the classics and in the primitivist philosophy of Rousseau, and they thus brought to the South Seas a set of cultural assumptions that reinflected sailors’ age-old preoccupation with the paradisal qualities of landfalls.

There is something surreal about these remarks by an aristocratic guest at the inauguration of the Congo railway on 1 July 1898. Did their author really believe that a colony soon to be exposed as perpetrating genocide might become a destination popular with package tourists? What would such a tour have been like? An ‘excursion to hell’, perhaps, as the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus would later call sightseeing trips to the Western Front (Kraus 1921, p. 93)? Or a version of the latterday ‘gonzo tourism’ whose gazetteers have titles like The World's Most Dangerous Places (Pelton 2003)? The very idea that anyone might have wanted to make a pleasure trip to the Belgianrun Congo at the end of the nineteenth century, let alone publish their experiences under the title ‘Impressions of a Tourist’, strikes the modern reader as not just absurd but obscene.