This book is based upon several lengthy periods of joint fieldwork in a rural paddy-growing area of central Kerala (the panchayat, ‘Valiyagramam’) and some short fieldworks in Kerala's state capital, Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) from 1989 to 2002. We have been indebted over the years to several agencies, which have funded the research: the Economic and Social Science Research Council of Great Britain; the Nuffield Foundation; The Leverhulme Trust; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the Society for South Asian Studies; and to our home institutions—the University of Sussex and SOAS, London.

Parts of this manuscript have been read and commented upon by Radhika Chopra, Shilpa Phadke, Sanjay Srivastava and Muraleedharan Tharayil—we are grateful to all. Thanks to Mahalakshmi Mahadevan for copy editing and some thoughtful comments. As ever, heartfelt thanks to our long-time friend Thampi Chandrasekhar for all his help.

Note on transliteration: in line with increasing informality in transliterating Indian languages (partly due to the decline of the Indological influence on anthropology), we have asked our copy editor Mahalakshmi Mahadevan to transcribe Malayalam terms into their commonly used naturalistic Anglicized forms, which will be easily readable by anyone familiar with a Dravidian language. Thus, meesha will be more recognisable than mīśa.

Versions of some of this material have been published earlier. For their gracious permission to republish parts of articles or book chapters, we thank the following:

Women Unlimited for:

Osella, C. and Osella, F. 2004. ‘Malayali Young Men and Their Movie Heroes’.