Into the Snares of Chastity:Reading the Smarthavicharam in History and Literature

Through an analysis of the Smarthavicharam of Kriyedathu Thatri (the ritual inquisition, trial and excommunication of an antharjanam or Kerala Brahmin woman), this study attempts to theorize social changes initiated through micro-level, personal rebellions. The trial and excommunication of Kuriyedathu Thatri and her sixty four partners in sin along with their families in 1905 is an episode in Kerala history that continues to intrigue scholars and fascinate writers and artists. Speaking the truth about her transgressions in a ritual trial presided over by a monarch (the Maharaja of Cochin) and veteran brahmin priests deletis was Thatri's strategic challenge to outmoded moral norms sanctioned by textual traditions (smritis and dharmasastras) and social practices. By making her own body the site of protest, Thatri subverted the very notion of chastity by exposing its hollowness and biases. The first part of the paper will read into historical accounts, archival materials and newspaper reports concerning Thatri to contextualize her transgression and confession, a doing - telling rebellion, which I argue had played a key role in abolishing certain customs that had virtually confined antharjanams to a life of suffering. Significantly, after Thatri's trial, there had been significant movements towards improving the conditions of antharjanams. The Nambutiris (Kerala Brahmins) were comparatively insular to the impacts of colonial education, missionary reform zeal and interactions with other cultures. When there happened heated debates, reform movements and negotiations for social mobility in other castes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nambutiri community was somewhat indifferent to cultural readjustments and negotiations. Eminent Nambutiri reformer, V.T. Bhattathirippad compares Thatri to a volcano that had burnt down the fortress of brahminical authority and a nightmare that had woken up a complacent community from their centuries-long slumber. In the second part of the paper, I examine representations of Kuriyedathu Thatri in films and literature as a revolutionary resisting a caste-ridden patriarchal society. Thatri's confession led to her excommunication or symbolic death which had been interpreted as ironic martyrdom. Kuriyedathu Thatri survives her symbolic and real deaths through representation and interpretation.