Print and the Novel in 19th Century Kerala: Reconsidering Colonial Modernity

The book demonstrates how the early novel can be seen as a good site to think about what was effected by the print technology in the last decades of the 19th Century in Kerala. It was in the novel that changes that occurred in diverse fields in the print space came together and displayed themselves as such. This is also the reason why the early Malayalam novel is a useful site for thinking about Kerala's modernity. The story that unfolds in this book is about the newness of the nineteenth century novel and of a specific formation of modernity that emerged in Kerala at that time. This modernity included within its domain formations of diverse and new entities – social, political, cultural, linguistic, and literary. They shall not be seen as separate or as forming distinct modernities with their own distinct constituency; instead they need be seen as constituent elements of a particular modernity shaped in the final decades of nineteenth century. The books develops a new way to look at these elements and seek their story within the larger space of Kerala's print culture and then return to the novels and see how they work in these texts. The book persuades to change the conceptions about the early novels and formation of modernity in Kerala considerably, and enable new ways to look at contemporary social, political and cultural issues. Read more