Negotiating Marginality: Women Activists in the People’s Science Movement, Kerala

Abstract

The People’s Science Movement in Kerala is 60 years old and is unique, in that it uses ‘science as a tool for social revolution’. Since its inception and growth in the 1960s, it has acquired a huge membership base predominantly belonging to the middle classes. It has intervened in several important arenas of public life in Kerala, namely in education, health, ecological issues and in the people’s planning experiment in the state during the decade of the 1990s. This paper deals specifically with the experience of women activists in the movement who though middle class in their social location are outnumbered, dispersed and rendered insignificant in several ways within the movement, which boasts of a membership base almost 48,000 strong. As activists, they have to negotiate in both private and public lives in order to remain active within the movement. This paper is an account of a few select activists of the movement and ways in which they attempt to participate meaningfully, negotiating social structure and hierarchy . Abjuring generalisation, this paper goes on to argue that marginality does not necessarily derive from class position; it is recreated and negotiated differently in different contexts.

This paper was written on the basis of fieldwork supported by ICSSR Grant no No. ICSSR-ERC/2014-15/133B.