prasad1
Active member
Segregationism and knee-jerk hostility to women who transgress gender boundaries are a shared feature of all powerful communities in Kerala.
The war over misogynist obscenity has been a long one, at least in Kerala. It dates back at least to the early twentieth century, and no woman author of note has escaped it — from Lalithambika Antharjanam to Madhavikutty to K.R. Meera. To an obscene poem that compared her acting of writing poetry to the sexual act, Kadathanattu Madhavi Amma, a poet from Malabar, hit back with a ‘counter-obscenity’, ordering her interlocutor to stop prattling and get on with the act!
The war has intensified today, particularly with Facebook becoming a major platform on which Malayali women now write. We have seen controversy after controversy, with hordes of hostile men — of different political persuasions and social affiliations — ganging up to report and silence assertive women on Facebook. So much so that women active on Facebook — not surprisingly, led by a core group of Malayali women — began a powerful campaign called ‘For a better FB’ against Internet slandering, misogyny, and blocking of women’s profiles through mass reporting.
However, the most recent of such episodes — the blocking of the Facebook profile of a young journalist from Kozhikode, V.P. Rajeena, through mass reporting by hostile men — stands out for several reasons. Ms. Rajeena’s post on Facebook, which reflected on paedophilia in the Sunni madrasa she attended as a child, went viral. Responses ranged from those who made horrifying threats, to those who mocked her as “Kerala’s own Malala (Yousafzai)”. Such attacks are certainly not unknown, especially against non-conformist Muslim women and women identified as “liberal”, but Ms. Rajeena does not belong to these groups. In response to the vicious attacks, she apparently said, “Death threats, uproars, venom spitting, verbal diarrhoea, curses... let all these continue, I am not even a bit scared. I have truth and Allah on my side.”
Her supporters, in turn, were often vague in their identification of her oppressors. To many, it was the “Muslim community” or the faith itself; too many, implicitly or otherwise, saw evidence in it of the inherent violence of “Muslim men”.
The Rajeena episode comes close on the heels of similar incidents of Internet trolling and conservative assertion. The recent arrest of Rahul Pasupalan, formerly associated with the ‘Kiss of Love’ campaign, over suspected involvement in the sex trade was followed by mud-slinging by Right-leaning males and Muslim zealots against women activists of the campaign. In late October, authorities at Farook College in Kozhikode suspended and censured students who flouted their directive that boys and girls sit separately in class, a move that led to protests by civil society.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-...es-in-kerala/article7958642.ece?homepage=true
