Mukkuvar women : the sexual contradictions of capitalist development in a South-Indian fishing community

Abstract

Situated at the fringes of agricultural Hindu society, the Mukkuvars, a Catholic fishing community, offer the student of South Asian Society a fresh perspective on the cultural construction of work, gender, sexuality and religion. Their distinctiveness does not follow on in any simple way from the nature of their occupation or their Catholicism. Significant elements of Mukkuvar culture - features of marriage and kinship, and patterns of religious devotionalism - can be viewed as manifestations of more widespread regional peculiarities of Tamil society. However, the Mukkuvars' relationship to this wider society is marked by sharp discontinuities. Their Catholicism, for example, cannot be viewed in terms of syncretism across religious barriers. Instead, their relationship with Hinduism is marked by the embattled hostility of a minority group. The Mukkuvars are locked in antagonistic dialogue with a non-Sanskritic popular Hinduism dominated by cults of the goddess. This selectivity in cultural interaction is related in the thesis to the contradictory position of Mukkuvars as fisherpeople in caste society. On the one hand, by virtue of their association with the killing and sale of flesh, they are a polluted caste. On the other hand, their occupation frees the Mukkuvars from the dense network of social obligations and dependencies on land-holding castes experienced by landless, polluted castes involved in agriculture. Far from being

a simple economic activity, the work of fishing generates conflicting cultural characteristics - those of a polluted and inferior status on the one hand, and on the other, those of a semi-autonomous community, self-defined as independent, tight-knit and innovative. In the thesis, I explore the way the lives of Mukkuvar women are shaped by the ambiguous position of the community as a whole. It is argued that the sexual division of labour cannot be understood in purely economic terms any more than the work of fishing can. The division of labour allocates men to fishing, and women to the drying and selling of fish, and the weaving of nets, as well as the work of domestic reproduction. However, * the primary consideration for Mukkuvars is not what sort of work women perform - whether this is domestic or extra - domestic, whether it brings in cash or not - but rather, the nature of the space on which it is performed. Women are confined to the land. If they are young, they are confined even more stringently to the spaces in and around the home. The cultural view of female sexuality and the female body underlying this gender-based allocation of space, constructs women not as polluted and domesticated, but as powerful and dangerous. The particular inflections of gender ideology derive partly from the social distance between Mukkuvars and orthodox, Sanskritic Hinduism. They are also buttressed by the crucial contributions by Mukkuvar women to the reproduction of the fishing community. The male dominated work of fishing is fluctuating and uncertain. In this situation, women's responsibility for domestic reproduction expands well beyond the sphere of 'the domestic', as ordinarily interpreted, to encompass a wide range of activities underwritten by the peculiarities of Mukkuvar kinship, marriage, household formation and village settlement.

In the thesis, I examine the profound dislocations in male/female relations and in relations between the community and the outside world, which have resulted from the impact of capitalism. Work, household formation and marriage payments are in a process of rapid transformation. However, Mukkuvar culture and in particular, the powerful construction of feminine sexuality and the female body, continue to act as a kind of filtering process. The process of proletarianisation therefore has fundamentally different cultural and sexual meanings for men and women.