On or about December 1910 human nature changed, wrote Virginia Woolf, one of the pioneers of twentieth-century feminism, in her essay 'Character in Fiction. Of course, she was predicting the transformation and renewal that the change in our self-knowledge and the knowledge of the world-wrought by new technologies and the sciences-was going to bring about in our thinking and expression. At around this time, woman's character underwent a transformation in Kerala as well: she began to interrogate the inequalities patriarchy had imposed on her, feel the contours of another society where women are liberated and enlightened, and articulate this imagined woman in dazzling texts that voiced her concerns about prescribed gender roles and entrenched sexual ideologies that lay at the root of the discriminations and the incriminations she had to encounter every day.
Not that there weren't any lonely voices before that. Let's look at N. A. Amma, who in an 1897 article in Vidyavinodini had raised the issue of women's education and countered the status-quoist arguments against women's initiation into modern reason and knowledge. Citing several examples from that of Atreyi of Uttararamacbarita, who had studied the Upanishads with Valmiki, and Kalidasa's wife, who had turned her oaf of a husband into a scholar and poet, to Elizabeth I and Victoria, the English queens under whose governance British civilisation had flourished and flowered-she refutes a male writer's argument that education is useless and even harmful for women. Education is a major theme for debates in the journals of the time. It is more than a point of discussion, an agenda in itself that, in the words of the young researcher T. P. Sabitha, 'discursively produces a new feminine subject who must now deal with the inevitable historical condition of modernity that has arrived with the colonial experience." Sabitha has identified five lines of argument in these debates: the idealist, where knowledge is advocated for the sake of knowledge, as in the words of Padmavati Amma, scholars are respected everywhere"; the rational-humanist, where education is viewed as a humanising force that elevates mankind from beastliness, an argument that later metamorphoses into a plea for civil rights; the pragmatic, where education is deemed necessary not only to intervene in the public sphere but even in the domestic sphere for instance, in the knowledge of hygiene, medicine, nutritional values, child care, etc.; the moral, where education gives women a greater sense of duty, of right and wrong and of independence; the aesthetic, where education-especially in Sanskrit and English-is supposed to refine sensibilities and enable women to engage their husbands in intelligent conversation about books and ideas. All these arguments, let us remember, were raised to counter men's warnings about the perils of women's education. The need for English education and the access it provides to radical European liberal thought is also frequently emphasized.
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