The southwest coast of India has always been significant within the global network of relations, through trade and the exchange of ideas, commodities, technologies, skills and labour. The much longer history of colonial experience makes Kerala’s engagement with modernity complex.

Kerala Modernity studies these complexities—the various ideas, spaces and practices that weave together the region’s experiences of modernity. The book emphasises the methodological need to re-examine the idea of ‘region’ as a discursive category to explore Kerala’s regional modernity.

This interdisciplinary presentation, complete with a Dalit critique of modernity in the Foreword, is an important contribution to literature on Kerala and debates on alternative modernities in South Asia. It will be of interest to students and scholars of history, sociology, and literary and cultural studies.

Satheese Chandra Bose is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Government Sanskrit College, Pattambi.

Shiju Sam Varughese is Assistant Professor, Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, School of Social Sciences, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar.

Foreword  Introduction Situating an Unbound Region

1. The Routes of Pepper

2. Colonial Intellectuals, Public Sphere and the Promises of Modernity

3. (Re)construction of ‘the Social’ for Making a Modern Kerala

4. Port Building and Urban Modernity

5. At the End of the Story

6. Contemporaneity and the Collective

7. The Politics of Sexuality and Caste

8. Attukal Pongala

9. The Pipe Dreams of Development

10. Archaeology and the New Imaginations of the Past

References Index