We have all grown up with Indulekha - the heroine of the novel Indulekha - who is poised, articulate and English educated. She has been hailed as the face of 19th-century Kerala’s reform movement - the shining symbol of educated womanhood and literary modernity. Every book on literary history remembers her; every classroom reveres her.
But what if there was another woman from the same era - one who tried to imitate that model, only to be laughed at by the very society she sought to impress?
Enter Parangodikutty - the hilariously misplaced heroine of Parangodi Parinayam (1892). She demanded toast and butter in a nair tarawad, scoffed at native customs and looked down on indigenous art forms in her quest to appear 'modern'. But the laughter she provoked was not just about her - it was aimed at colonial mimicry. Kizhakkeppattu Ramankutty Menon’s biting satire did not parody a person - it parodied a period, a mindset, a misguided modernity.
Parangodi Parinayam was not a mere burlesque. It was a bold, local act of literary resistance - mocking not the woman, but the world that taught her to aspire to colonial standards. Long before theory gave us terms like decoloniality or 'our modernity,' this forgotten novel delivered both - in sharp wit and sharper critique.
Indulekha - you have met her in textbooks, heard her name in genteel drawing rooms, maybe even admired her elegance. The heroine of the first full-fledged novel in Malayalam, Indulekha, she is the polished, English-speaking lady who walked straight into the heart of the 19th-century reform movement in Kerala. Draped in Victorian grace and progressive ambition, Indulekha became Kerala’s literary sweetheart - the poised face of modern womanhood and the gold standard of cultured femininity. Is Indulekha the sole face of femininity carved into our literary memory since the 19th century?
Around the same time that Indulekha was dazzling readers and delighting reformers, another novel quietly poked fun at everything the heroine stood for. A book that dared to laugh loudly at colonial mimicry, haughty snobbery and Victorian ideals of ‘proper womanhood.’ That book was Parangodi Parinayam (1892), and its rebellious heroine, Parangodikutty. The historians of literature did not know what to do with her - a character brilliantly audacious and charmingly off-script. They did not canonise her - they dismissed her outright.
Parangodi Parinayam was not just a burlesque. It was satire as sabotage. A treatise on decoloniality, hiding in plain sight.
Parangodikutty Vs Indulekha: Two Heroines, Two Futures
If Indulekha was the daughter colonial modernity could proudly parade, Parangodikutty was the ugly cousin who made everyone uncomfortable at the family dinner. She was not graceful. She was frivolous. She spoke English but did not quite get it. She demanded toast and butter in her 19th century nair tarawad, refused traditional herbal baths in favour of imported soap and called kaikottikali “ “the devil dance of the African Negroes.” She was not a model citizen of the empire - she was its malfunctioning clone. And that is precisely why she matters.
While Indulekha was ushering Kerala into the parlour of ‘respectable’ modernity, Parangodi Parinayam was calling it out for what it really was: mimicry in borrowed clothes.
Parangodi Parinayam: A Manifesto of ‘Our Modernity’
Most of us think modernity came wrapped in English education, frill skirts and polished silverware. The political theorist Partha Chatterjee observes that Indians did not blindly copy the West, but carved a path by defending what we already knew, valued, and lived. He asks: “Could it be the case that we have been trying all along to say something about the historical experience of ‘our modernity’ which does not appear in the statistical facts of demography?”
This idea is at the heart of Parangodi Parinayam. It does not reject modernity - it rescripts it. It does not mock English just to be funny - it demands that we think critically about what we absorb, and why. The novel’s real philosopher is not the English educated hero Parangodan Marar - it is Pangassa Menon.
Pangassa Menon is not English-educated, he is worldly-wise. He does not see knowledge as something that comes from grammar books or tea parties. For him, education is about learning to discern: what to embrace, what to discard. He chooses to marry Ammukutty Amma instead of Parangodikutty - even though she does not speak English. It is not a rejection of learning; it is a rejection of snobbery.
Colonial Accents and Comic Masculinities
Parangodi Parinayam also gives us one of literature’s earliest memes: Parangodan Marar. He is the ultimate caricature of an English-educated man who has read all the right books but understands nothing of the world. He misquotes, misbehaves and makes a mockery of his own self. He is the warning we ignored: that mimicry without a sense of discretion makes fools of us all.
Matriliny Vs Modesty: Who Gets to Define Progress?
Parangodi Parinayam defends what colonial reform tried to erase - matriliny, native property rights and the style of traditional female dressing. While colonial morality demanded women dress like Victorian ladies, Parangodi Parinayam flips the script. Pangassa Menon defends the ease, freedom and dignity of how women are traditionally dressed in Malabar, heartily teasing English educated men who were ashamed of it. This is one of the sharpest critiques of colonial body politics. That is the genius of this book: it laughs where most would lecture.
Why did We Forget this Novel?
The novel was forgotten because it dared to laugh. It dared to be unserious about things the empire wanted us to take very, very seriously - education, respectability, reform. It did not fit the solemn tone of literary greatness. Indulekha became Kerala’s cultural passport to modernity. Parangodi Parinayam got shelved under satire and was forgotten.
But what if we got it all wrong? What if Parangodi Parinayam offers a truer picture of how we negotiated modernity - not by becoming mere replicas of the West, but by slyly, smartly, resisting it?
Decoloniality Begins at Home
We still think English means intelligence. We still dress like colonial ghosts. We still teach Indulekha and pretend Parangodi Parinayam was just a joke. But the call to decolonise is also a call to remember. To reclaim. To laugh, even. Parangodi Parinayam was not a mistake - it was the message.
Long before Fanon and Mignolo gave us the language of decoloniality, this novel gave us the spirit of it. It celebrated indigenous knowledge. It mocked colonial mimicry. It dared to say no - and then laughed in the face of conformity. It is time we put this novel back on our shelves - not under humour, burlesque or miscellaneous, but under resistance, critique, and cultural survival.
So the next time someone hands you Indulekha as the blueprint of Kerala’s modernity, ask them where they shelved Parangodi Parinayam. In that forgotten laughter, in that mischievous refusal to oblige, lies the earliest pulse of a different modernity - ‘our modernity’. It is time we stopped whispering it as burlesque and started reading it as a decolonial manifesto.
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