From Caste to ‘Taste’ - The Unfinished Story of Kerala’s Clothing Protests

Kerala loves its Renaissance. Navodhanam rolls off the tongue in cultural festivals, political speeches, and school textbooks like a badge of collective pride. It is the word that animates our sense of being modern, secular and progressive. A convenient shorthand for a heroic leap from caste darkness into the light of equality. But what if this Renaissance is not the neat, linear saga we’ve been told? What if its symbols - upper cloths, nose-rings and fine cotton saris - tell a more tangled story, one woven not just with reform but with resistance, repression, and erasure?

This blog invites you to read Kerala Renaissance not as a procession of noble reformers but as a contested terrain of bodies, fabrics, and forbidden desires. Through the lens of Foucault’s political technology of the body and Bourdieu’s aesthetics of taste, we peel back the glossy narrative to expose its seams - those stitched together by ezhava women and forgotten rebels like Arattupuzha Velayudha Panickar, with the silent power of cloth that cut across caste and class lines.

If one word has reverberated through the political and cultural landscapes of Kerala in the twenty-first century, it is ‘Navodhanam.’ Celebrated as the political and ethical cornerstone of the state’s modern identity, this term now functions as a shorthand for Kerala’s supposedly linear march from feudalism to progress and caste oppression to the negation of one’s caste identity in public. Any serious engagement with critical theory teaches us, history is not the record of a neat timeline of progress - it is a messy archive of struggles, silences and suppressions.

This blog is an invitation to ‘read against the grain’ of Kerala’s popular Renaissance narrative. It interrogates the politics of visibility and erasure in how we remember protest, particularly through the lens of sartorial revolts led by subaltern women and forgotten caste leaders, drawing from Foucault’s genealogical method and the decolonial critique of modernity.

The Grand Narrative and Its Comfortable Certainties

Every public discussion on Renaissance in Kerala almost ritualistically invokes a few well-known names: Sree Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, Chattampi Swamikal and Poykayil Sree Kumara Guru Devan. The received understanding of Kerala Renaissance is centered on incidents in geographical locales in the south of the state — the Channar Breast Cloth Revolt (1813–1859), Aruvippuram Prathishta (1888), Malayali Memorial (1891), Ezhava Memorial (1896), Vaikom Satyagraha (1924–25) and so on. The northern regions of the state also had similar moments to cite. For instance, the Smarthavicharam of Kuriyedathu Thatri (1905), Athma Vidya Sangham founded by Swami Vagbhatananda (1917) and the Malabar Rebellion (1921). However, these are not usually discussed in the popular narratives on Kerala Renaissance.

From a Foucauldian perspective, this narrative is less about what happened and more about what is ‘allowed’ to be remembered. Genealogies, unlike histories, do not trace the origin of a truth but rather expose how certain truths come to dominate, displacing others.  Rather than offering a linear or heroic narrative, genealogy exposes the ruptures, exclusions and struggles that have shaped the conditions of our contemporary existence.

What the Documented History of the  Channar Revolt Conceals

The Channar revolt - framed as the struggle of nadar women to cover their breasts like upper-caste women - is often read through the dual lenses of gendered dignity and Christian missionary morality. Two reasons are usually foregrounded: (1) to challenge caste restrictions on upper-body clothing and (2) to conform to Victorian notions of decency introduced by Christian missionaries.

But this narrative collapses too many complexities. As B. Rajeevan notes, until the late 19th century, covering the upper body was not a widespread custom in Kerala, cutting across caste and gender. So, if being bare-breasted was culturally customary, how did it suddenly become a site of moral anxiety?

The answer may lie in the overlapping matrices of colonial modernity and caste governance. Victorian morality ‘sexualised’ the native female body, re-coding caste-based customs as not morally sanctioned. Meanwhile, conversion to Christianity offered lower castes an exit route from the Hindu caste hierarchies - but only by entering into a different regime of bodily discipline.

Was the Channar revolt about modesty? Or was it about escaping caste oppression through the embodied norms of Colonial-Christian modernity? The answer is not either/or - but rather that both forces created a complex and ambivalent subjectivity for the lower-caste woman. Freed of the burdens of caste identity yet subjected to sexual morality. The women were liberated yet controlled. 

Sartorial Taste as Technologies of Self 

The clothing and ornamentation protests of nineteenth-century Kerala were not just about fabric or gold - they were rebellions stitched into the skin of caste. These movements signaled a radical reimagining of aesthetics as something far more than beauty or modesty. As Pierre Bourdieu theorised, ‘taste’ is never just about what pleases the eye - it is a form of ‘distinction’, a subtle yet powerful language through which dominant classes assert their cultural superiority. In this framework, choices around dress - who gets to wear what, and where - function not merely as personal preferences but as markers of social capital, policing the boundaries of class and caste under the mask of ‘refined sensibility.’

The social reform movements of nineteenth-century Kerala were not abstract calls for equality - they were embodied revolts. To wear an upper cloth, a blouse, or a ‘mukkuthi’, a nose-ring was to engage in what Foucault calls the political technology of the body - a form of resistance that turned the disciplined, caste-regulated body into a canvas of dissent. These were not passive bodies adapting to norms; they were insurgent bodies claiming visibility and value through sartorial defiance.

In this light, we must begin to rethink Kerala modernity - not merely as a product of education, reform, or missionary intervention, but as a complex terrain shaped by aesthetic insurgencies. Taste itself became a battleground, where the politics of caste, class, and sexuality intersected. To fully grasp the spirit of that era, we need to refine our understanding of Kerala Renaissance to include not just the usual heroes and milestones, but the hidden grammar of dress, adornment and desire that restructured the very logic of social distinction.

The Forgotten Radical: Arattupuzha Velayudha Panickar

While the Channar revolt has found its place in Kerala’s modern consciousness, Arattupuzha Velayudha Panickar (henceforth referred as AVP) remains largely forgotten. A towering figure of ezhava resistance in the 19th-century Central Travancore, AVP’s interventions spanned caste, class, and gender - but free of the missionary or colonial framework.

Have you heard of the Achippudava Samaram? In 1858, an ezhava woman near Kayamkulam was attacked by nair men for wearing an achippudava - a fine white cotton cloth with a golden border, traditionally worn by nair women. In response, AVP mobilised agricultural labourers to go on strike until an apology was issued and the right to wear achippudava by women of all castes was accepted  by nair men .

In 1859, AVP led the Ethappu Samaram, demanding the right of the ezhava women to wear upper-body garments. In 1860, he championed the Mukkuthi Samaram, asserting the ezhava women's right to wear gold nose-rings. These revolts reflected not just resistance to caste prescriptions but also a regional imagination of dignity shaped not by Victorian morality, but by  the maxims of equity. 

 AVP’s interventions struck at the heart of an aesthetic regime that policed the bodies of ezhava women. He urged them to tear through the fabric of caste-imposed taste, disrupting the inherited ‘habitus’ that dictated who could wear what, and how. In doing so, he ignited a defiant challenge to the visual codes of caste distinction, turning clothing into a weapon of resistance.

Even before Sree Narayana Guru’s famed Aruvippuram consecration in 1888, AVP had established a Shiva temple for the Ezhava community in 1852 at Mangalam near Kayamkulam - suggesting that Kerala’s reform history did not begin with the Guru but had other pathways not celebrated. 

Questions That Haunt the Renaissance Narrative

Why has AVP been relegated to the footnotes of the Kerala Renaissance? These are my conjectures: 

• Because his rebellions were not guided by English-educated sensibilities but by regional modernities and caste consciousness.

• Because AVP does not fit into the progressive-liberal or Christian-missionary script.

• Because his politics blurred the line between caste and class, mobilising labourers to demand sartorial dignity - articulating what can only be called vernacular Marxism without Marx.

• Because AVP did not spearhead a liberation movement, with thousands of followers to spread his word far and wide. 

So, let us ask:

1. How do we reimagine the teleology of Kerala Renaissance?

2. How do we account for multiple regional modernities?

3. Why is AVP missing from our popular imaginaries, even though he heralded the dawn of many social movements -  the founding of a temple with lord Shiva as deity in 1856 and the right to wear ornaments in the Mukkuthi Samaram of 1860 that resonate with the celebrated interventions of Sree Narayana Guru and Ayyankali in later years. 

4. Why does Achippudava Samaram not enjoy the same discursive currency as the Channar revolt?

5. How do we reclaim the Ethappu Samaram as a distinct sartorial uprising  of ezhava women  against caste politics in Central Travancore, rather than letting it disappear into the shadow of the more widely known Channar Revolt of Nadar women of South Travancore?

6. How do we challenge the prevailing debates on ‘covering the breast’ as decency  and clothing as a caste  privilege?

7. Were caste and conversion in the Channar revolt appropriated by a Victorian sexual logic that obscured the indigenous politics?

Conclusion: Toward a Critical Cartography of Kerala Renaissance

This blog does not aim to discredit the established icons of Kerala Renaissance. Instead, it seeks to ‘broaden the frame’, to make space for the uncomfortable, the untranslatable, and the unsanctioned voices of our past. AVP and the forgotten clothing revolts of Travancore remind us that modernity was not a gift from above but a stiffly negotiated terrain - and that some of the most radical imaginaries of justice emerged not from pulpits or parliaments but from paddy fields and weaving looms.

In the coming posts, I hope to continue exploring this layered history - where caste, class, cloth, conversion, and gender intersect. For now, let us leave with one idea: “What if the true renaissance is not what we remember, but also what we have forgotten?”