Essays on Politics, Matriliny and the Media in Kerala

Jeffrey notes that by the early decades of the 20th century, the scale of social disintegration in Kerala was unmatched anywhere else in India, generating conditions comparable to China and Vietnam, but narrows down his argument to the collapse of the matrilineal joint family and the undermining of the caste system, which by the early 1900s produced "a generation of deracine caste- Hindus from whose ranks came the leaders of the Communist Party" (p 7). Newspapers and Nationalism Two of the essays in Part Two focus on the expansion of the newspaper industry in India underpinned by commercial interests, whereas a third considers the attitudes and policies that virtually throttled the broadcast sector until the rise of satellite television in the 1990s - a colonial legacy, a puritan streak emerging from the concerns of the nationalist movement and fear of exacerbating social conflict. Though relevant to Jeffrey's question - why multiple language-cultures have not subverted the idea of an Indian nation - the specific social alignments that hold together the Indian nation are subsumed under the primacy accorded to capitalist interests in shaping the robustness of the media. [...]when Jeffrey takes up the question of dalit exclusion from the newspaper industry in a separate essay, he does not consider whether commercial interests and the terms of state patronage too are implicated in it. [...]he underscores the structural and ideological barriers faced by dalits - including sub-division on the basis of caste, region and language, their distribution across the country but in relatively smaller numbers, poverty and deep-seated Hindu prejudice - that make it difficult for them to mobilise around identity and to advance claims.