Five poems that attempt to foreground the myriad regressive rituals that erase Malayali women’s resistances

The Poet’s Note: These five poems attempt to foreground the myriad regressive rituals that erase Malayali women’s resistances. The first poem, The Brewing, reimagines a traditional Malayali ceremony that ‘celebrates’ the onset of menstruation in girls during their teenage years. However, the ritual is also symbolic of the modesties that the menstruating girl should acculturate in order to fashion herself as the ‘ideal’ wife and mother. Through this poem, I attempt to emphasize and critique the androcentric filters that inform these rituals. The second poem, Nangeli and Rabbit Holes, speaks of the forgotten history of Nangeli — a woman who cut of her own breast to protest ‘upper caste’ men’s insistence that women belonging to ‘lower castes’ must not cover their breasts. The curriculum in Indian schools rarely speaks of the event while being careful to include ‘refined’ Eurocentric literary canons. This poem is a humble attempt to critique the textual erasure of South Indian women’s political resistances. The third poem, irreverently (yet deliberately) titled Whoring 101, is an attack on the practice of arranged marriages that prevail in Kerala and other South Indian states. I attempt to do this through a poetic sacrilege of this custom that has been hitherto celebrated as being the sacred, ‘arranged’ union of a man and woman. By juxtaposing an arranged South Indian marriage with forced sex work, I attempt to disturb revered assumptions about this custom using the same regressive lexicon deployed by patriarchal publics. My final poems, Skatole and Serpentine, give voice to the South Indian woman’s final disavowal of patriarchal familial bonds.