Introduction

We move on to discuss the role of work in the production and assertion of Malayali male subjectivities. To suggest that colonial and post-colonial modernity—and concomitant processes of capitalist development and state-formation—not only impact the lives of men and women in different ways but also entail a substantial redefinition of gender relations is perhaps to argue the obvious. Over the past 20 years these issues have been explored extensively in the historiography and sociology of south Asia, but, as we have seen in the Introduction, debates and discussions have been somewhat lopsided, focusing primarily on women and more specifically on the (re)production of subordination and inequalities within historical configurations of patriarchy. Research on work from the perspective of gender has followed a similar path. We know a great deal about how women's working lives—in the fields, households or factories—are shaped by and in turn transform specific gender ideologies in that they are inflected by historically contingent hierarchies of class and caste/community (see e.g. Fernandes 1997; Sen 1999; Kapadia 1999). Yet in their relationship to work, men have been generally treated, as Cecile Jackson argues, as ‘universal ungendered subjects, rather than as gendered beings in which male identities shape relations with other men and women’ (2000: 7; cf. Heuzé 1992; Parry, Breman and Kapadia 2000).