South Asia Seminar Series

Kerala is one of India’s premiere destinations for leisure travelers. Aggressively promoted as “God’s Own Country” since the early 1990s, the state’s robust tourism industry has benetted from an educated workforce, tropical scenery, Ayurvedic treatment facilities, and distinctive performing arts, including classical dance-dramas like Kathakali and visually stunning rituals like eyyam in Malabar. While many studies have examined touristic encounters with stationary hosts, few have explored the mobility of the “toured.” In this paper I trace the passage of Malayan eyyam spirit-medium performers from ritual servants in communities of worship, to artists on proscenium stages in destination branding strategies of corporate Kerala. Drawing on conversations with diverse actors in the industry, including a double-reed player and his high-caste impresario, I examine how global tourism opened new avenues for cultural mobility, as well as how subaltern performers adapted their craft accordingly. At the same time, I also reect on the ways in which these avenues were contingent on ethnicizing caste identity and forging inter-caste alliances, strategies that would appear to run against the grain of socialist Kerala’s sublimation of caste in favor of class.

"Making a Portuguese-Language Herbal Speak: 'Local' Knowledge and the East India Company on the Malabar Coast in the 18th Century"

European knowledge, especially medicine, is usually presented as being "scientific" as opposed to the "empirical", non-theorised, "local" practices of non-European peoples. It is thus a commonplace amongst historians to consider that the former displaced the latter if not into total oblivion at least into marginality during the course of European expansion and colonisation. Preliminary research on a mid-18th Portuguese-language century herbal and pharmacopeia from the Malabar coast allows us to examine this widely-held assumption and helps throw new light on the interaction between European and "local" medical practices as well as on the languages through which they they circulated and interacted with each other. Finally, this research also contributes significantly to our understanding of the commercial, administrative and diplomatic practices of the English and other European East India Companies on the Malabar coast during this period.