Aleena Sebastian
Critically engaging with the concept of ‘household’ emerging from kinship and gender scholarship in South Asia, this chapter initiates an ethnographic exploration of the processual dimension of matrilineal joint households of Malabar Muslims. What is pertinent here are the feminist interventions into the existing conceptualization of the household as the latter is inadequate to grasp the complexities of the household from the women's perspective. This paper attempts to understand the household as an evolving social unit which is embedded in regional or context-specific sociocultural, legal, and economic settings, which are constantly in a process of transformation. South Asian feminist scholarship on the household has shown that residential patterns, intra-household relations, control over resources, authority patterns, and gender relations within the household are redefined in the process of this transformation (Risseeuw and Palriwala, 1996; Dube and Palriwala, 1990). The strategies employed and negotiations sought by the household members, especially the women in this context, have emerged as an important field of analysis in the study of the household in South Asia. The matrilineal households of Muslim communities in the Malabar Coast of Kerala (south India) underwent a significant transformation in the twentieth century. As I have argued elsewhere, the matrilineal household of these coastal communities is deeply embedded in the trans-oceanic trade engagements in the Indian Ocean since the pre-colonial period (Sebastian, 2016: 89). The material wealth gained through the Indian Ocean trade enabled them to acquire a higher social status along the coastal belt.