Book review: Ester Gallo. 2017. The Fall of Gods: Memory,Kinship,and Middle Classes in South India

Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala are well known for a kinship system in which primogeniture was followed in inheritance and only the eldest son was allowed to marry endogamously. Younger sons were expected to enter into sambandham ¹ relations with matrilineal Nair women, and their children were considered Nairs with membership in the Nair tharavad. ² This system of marriage and inheritance was to prevent the fragmentation of property in order to bolster caste power and privilege. Nambudiri women were to observe extreme seclusion; many remained unmarried or—as a result of marriages with much older men—were left widowed at a young age. From the late 19^th century, with social reform movements among both Nambudiris and Nairs, this system was critiqued and slowly began to change. Gallo’s book looks at this somewhat unusual history of kinship practices among the Nambudiris, coupled with Kerala’s distinctive social and political history, to tell a fascinating and complex story about memories of the past and the ways in which it shapes contemporary kinship relations and the formation of a middle class identity—a story that has received scant attention.

In the book’s seven chapters bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion, Gallo explores the ‘relation between colonial history, kinship memories, and contemporary middle classes in India’ (p. 5) and in doing this, she engages with a range of themes in contemporary Indian society such as social reforms in the early 20^th century, arranged and self-arranged marriages, endogamy and inter-caste marriages, and domestic space, architecture and social relations.

The book is based on three rounds of intensive fieldwork first done between 2000 and 2002 (for her PhD dissertation) and then between 2004 and 2005 and in 2008. In the ‘hybrid urban-rural ethnography’ (p. 19) as she calls it, she moved between an ‘urban village area’ called Krishnapuram on the outskirts of Kochi, adjacent rural areas, and the city of Kochi. She also conducted fieldwork in different cities in India where migrants live—Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Pune, and through short-term visits abroad—London, Rome, Edinburgh and Dubai.

The Fall of the Gods is ethnographically rich and lucidly written and was hard to put down! In looking at a complex set of processes through which Nambudiri Brahmins transformed ‘from an aristocratic elite enjoying holy status to a more anonymous middle class of modern citizens’ (p. 4), Gallo employs the conceptual frame of memory, a frame that has gained considerable importance in kinship studies in the last two decades. Through this focus, she interrogates both present narratives as well as the material objects that may structure people’s memories— diaries, genealogies, artefacts, houses or food (p. 7). In doing this, Gallo stresses the importance of considering internal differences among the Nambudiris, most significantly the difference between higher-status and lower-status Nambudiris.

Kinship practices of Nambudiris prior to the social reform movement are seen as a dark past, responsible now for the small population of Nambudiris and linked to this, the somewhat marginal position that they occupy in contemporary Kerala. Gallo points to how the burden of this past structures the present and is elaborated in relationship to different aspects throughout the book such as conjugality, inter-generational relationships, or the architecture of homes. Forging a modern status was done through radical kinship reform so that for younger sons, marrying endogamously was an act of rebellion and critique, as was registering a sambandham as marriage and bringing his Nair wife and children to live in the illam (ancestral house of Nambudiris). In relation to a past in which illams had very few children because only the eldest son’s children lived in the illam and other children were not allowed there, Gallo captures sensitively the way her interlocutors juggled their desire to hear the sound of children in the house with aspirations for middle class identity.

In exploring the transformations through the 20^th century, Gallo focuses on how kinship is made over time through a range of social and political processes in different sites. This approach to kinship is a departure from earlier approaches that saw kinship as a given, defined primarily through structural relationships of lineage or marriage. Instead, Gallo shows how ‘alternative ways of conceiving kinship have emerged, based on the idea of collective suffering and sacrifice, as well as on the necessity of territorial, caste and religious mingling’ (pp. 28–29). In chapter 3, Gallo draws from written memories—diaries and published autobiographies—to look at how writers construct themselves in relation to memories of kinship relationships. The discussion is very interesting for the way it shows how the very meaning of kinship shifts over time.

Chapter 4 is a fascinating discussion on houses and how the architecture of illams structures memories and the meanings ascribed to present middle-class houses and the way they are inhabited. In particular, she focuses on space and gendered kinship relations, particularly gender equality. Thus, she looks at the way ‘middle-class women are today actively drawing from memories of the spatial constraints of illams to question the relational boundaries of contemporary dwellings’ (p. 129). In chapter 7, Gallo seeks to unravel discordant voices across generations on issues of caste exclusivity and the construction of history, by paying special attention to irony and scorn. She argues that irony ‘is particularly valuable in grasping how people elaborate and cope with “emotional dissonance” arising from conducting lives across (sometimes) conflicting affective codes and temporalities’ (p. 245). In this, her analysis speaks to an inter-generational discordance that goes far beyond the Nambudiris.

This is a special book for several reasons: for exploring a social history on which few anthropologists have written; for the focus on memory and middle class identity when most studies of the new middle classes are synchronic; more generally for the way she brings out the importance of kinship and kinship memories for a class analysis; for the exploration of how memories of the past shape kinship relationships in the present; for the intra-caste differences highlighted; for the way Gallo skilfully presents the very varied and complex ethnography; and for the way she gives voice to both men and women and to changing inter-generational relationships. This book will be of interest to a wide range of students and scholars and should be put onto reading lists for social science students interested in kinship, social stratification, a social history of Kerala and also methods of social science research.