In the past weeks, the Malayalam press has been abuzz with a case of gruesome murder — by a young, highly-educated woman named Greeshma who plotted murder to end a relationship that she did not wish to continue. In 2022, she poisoned her boyfriend who was apparently reluctant to end the relationship. He died a slow and painful death.
It was subsequently found that the murder was a family conspiracy — and that the woman’s mother and maternal uncle were accomplices. The police investigation revealed that Greeshma had committed premeditated murder; the Neyyatinkara Sessions Court awarded the 24-year-old the death sentence, calling the murder “brutal, gruesome, diabolical, and revolting.”
Not surprisingly, men’s rights groups, now quite normalised in Kerala, celebrated the verdict. On the other side of the spectrum of public opinion, some young women said, half-seriously, that she was probably aiming to ‘throw a stone ahead of the running dog’ — that is, to take ‘advance measures’ to protect herself, given the news of killings of women by jilted lovers in the recent years.
They pointed out that the murder of female partners had become common enough. It no longer qualified to be ‘gruesome’, ‘diabolical’ and so on even when the act was perpetrated before the couple’s little children. Indeed, femicide, even the brutal murder of female babies, does not make men’s groups go wild with rage — the Kerala police just solved such a case from nineteen years back.
I even found grudging admiration in some young women’s words — one of them told me laughingly how she had warded off a sexual harasser in a train by simply offering him some fruit juice — an obvious reference to Greeshma’s murder-instrument of choice. But then, the rising numbers of femicide, worrying in itself, does not let us shut our eyes to the enormity of this crime.
Both these positions view the Greeshma murder case as a manifestation of a gender war, of ‘men vs. women’. Greeshma, then, is a ‘woman’ who finished off her boy friend, a ‘man’, sparking outrage among men who hang on to their masculine identity with pathetic desperation.
While no women I know defend the killer, they still believe that part of the problem is that the murder of ‘women’ partners is so very familiar in the Kerala public now, it does not really appear so gruesome or revolting as to be considered ‘rarest of the rare’ anymore. The power of ‘men’ punishes an erring ‘woman’ more stringently.
There is no denying that the murders of women have been as or more gruesome than the one that got Greeshma a death sentence. However, perhaps that does not permit us to ignore the politics of caste that seems to have shaped the killing. I claim that this crime is a variant of caste-protection murders, popularly, if wrongly, referred to as ‘honour killing’ (thanks to Inderpal Grewal for pointing this out to me in their comment below).
A caste protection murder is an event which is as much about caste as it is about gender. Only that it is a reverse-romance. In many honour killings, the young couple choose each other defying caste hierarchies, only to be punished for their choices by their families and caste authorities.
In this case, the killing is about reversing the romance: the partner oppressed-caste origin sought to end the relationship and return to the security of her caste-fold. The family, embedded in caste, planned the murder along with her; she executed it.
I decided to write this post when a non-Malayali friend asked me why such a highly-educated young woman whose roots are in the legacies of progressive gains in women’s empowerment could choose to do something so hideous.
To this friend, the woman’s college degrees seem to somehow guarantee her incapability to engage in caste-protection murder — and so it feels as though some other explanation of the heinous act, such as what many have called her — a ‘born-criminal mind’ — might be necessary.
I want to contest this popular perception. I want to argue that in the history of modern Malayali society, women who step over the boundaries of caste have been the exception, not the rule. That is, Greeshma’s attachment to her privileged-caste roots is the rule among women of all sorts, educated or otherwise.
The early twentieth century social churning in Malayali society that is often referred to as the ‘Malayali Renaissance’ brought into prominence two closely-related ideals of elite femininity — the Kulasthree (the woman at the centre of the elite caste family) and the Navoddhana Mahila (the ‘Renaissance Woman’).
The Kulasthree actually goes back to the eighteenth century, to the works of the Malayalam poets Unnayi Warrier and Kunchan Nambiar, for example, to the Damayanthi of Warrier’s Kathakali play or the Attakkatha, Nalacharitham. In a society which was shaped by janma-bhedam or difference-by-birth, Warrier’s Damayanthi provided the ideal of a chaste and obedient wife much before the Victorian missionaries.
Indeed, the proof of her chastity was her astute adherence to the love of her husband who had abandoned in the middle of a terrifying forest, stealing from her even her clothes. Left mostly naked and alone in the menacing wild, distraught with grief, Damayanthi is threatened by a snake. She is saved from it by a forest-dweller.
Enchanted by her beauty and moved by her sorrow, the man offers both love and protection in the tenderest terms. But Damayanthi, being the chaste wife, takes offense and her anger turns him into a heap of ashes.
The lesson is clear: even if abandoned by her man and subject the most terrifying dangers, the Kulasthree is not to be tempted by offers of love and security from outside her elite circles of birth. And the proof of her fealty lies in her ability to turn such men who might offer these into ashes. Indeed, if threatened by them, she may kill them, turn them into mere ashes.
In the eighteenth century, the stories of such models of Kulasthree-hood, from Damayanthi to Sheelavathi, circulated in the caste-elite circles of sudras and brahmins, even though brahmanical gender norms required sudra women to follow a completely different sort of stree-dharmam. The urge to stay within bounds even if one has to kill is thus planted right of the heart to this emergent brahmanical femininity that eventually merged with Victorian invocations of chaste wifehood.
Indeed, Warrier’s Damayanthi is closer to the Victorian chaste wife who relies upon her self-control when in danger of straying. Remember, when Damayanthi encounters the forest-dweller, she is completely unprotected by her husband, social circles or kin; she has to rely completely on her ‘inner powers’ — like the Navoddhana Mahila of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
But the Navoddhana Mahila differed from the Kulasthree in many ways. Her education was modern and she was not necessarily born of the oppressor-caste — or, the Navoddhana Mahila ideal could be realized in any caste that sought to embrace gendered social reformism and embark on the transformation into a caste-community. She was imagined to be open to the world and capable of even a cosmopolitan sensibility.
She was however, as embedded in caste as the Kulasthree, and her fealty to the new endogamous marriage, the modern family embedded in the reformed caste-community was to be as intense as the Kulasthree’s. The Navoddhana Mahila was assigned a number of duties which the Kulasthree could not perform simply because the ways of modern domestic disciplining were unfamiliar to her.
Unlike the Kulasthree whose labour was likely to be more ritualistic and aimed at reproducing the domestic cultures of caste and caste power, the Navoddhana Mahila’s labour was devoted to the shaping of her family members, especially children, into industrious and self-controlled modern subjects useful to the modern nation. Yet the boundaries between Kulasthree and Navoddhana Mahila were never really clear, precisely because the latter was as rooted as the former in caste and family structures embedded in them.
If these roots were left bare in the imagination of the Kulasthree, that of the Navoddhana Mahila ‘secularised’ them. Thus the eponymous heroine of the famous nineteenth century Malayalam novel Indulekha, a woman empowered by modern education and exposure to the world outside the family, claims that she feels no desire at all for an ‘unattainable’ man.
It is not that she desires and then curbs it; rather, she simply does not feel it for such a man. The invisible boundary that bars her is of caste — ‘secularised’ through the silence maintained around it. The culturing of the Navoddhana Mahila in ways that naturalise her self-subjection to the new family- and caste-community-patriarchy is thus of prime importance.
Her education is crucial in her successful functioning as a the manager of materials, emotions, and souls in the modern home. It is also central to strengthening her willing surrender of her body to the interests of caste-community reproduction through procreation. This body is subject to sovereign power which continues to inhere in the modern family.
It is the chief instrument of the reproduction of ‘pure blood’, the process central to the reproduction of the caste-community. If the mythical heroine ‘protected’ herself by calling forth the ‘power of chastity’, the human Kulasthree, located in the interior spaces of family and community, called upon her caste kin to protect her.
The twentieth-century Navoddhana Mahila was to rely on her own empowerment through modern education to stay true to her self-subjection to sovereign power in the domestic domain.
So Greeshma is not the ‘modern woman’ who turned greedy because of her modern orientation. ‘Modern women’ in the pejorative sense as we encounter the usage in the Kerala context refers to women who have sought and claimed radical agency in their life-choices, who have sought emancipation from the bounds which confine the Navoddhana Mahila.
It may be true that by entering into a long-term relationship with a man of a caste deemed lower, Greeshma failed to adhere to the legacy of the Navoddhana Mahila, but what she sought was certainly not radical freedom but a return to gendered membership in her privileged caste-society. The agency she exercised in planning and carrying out the murder too has nothing to with the modern, even with the modernity that the Navoddhana Mahila represents.
Indeed, she exercised precisely the deadly agency of the Malayali sudra (who wields considerable caste privilege in the order of caste in Kerala ) to eliminate whatever is perceived as threat to the order of caste. What she revealed was the manner in which the Kulasthree continues to lurk behind the Navoddhana Mahila, stepping up when the latter fails. And so, the educated and empowered woman may indeed end up killing, after all.
Maybe that is the lesson one could learn from this vile incident. It exposed the banality of this evil called endogamous caste-community, which continues to make the project of building society — in its real sense — impossible in Kerala even in the twenty-first century.
(This article has appeared in kafila.online on January 27, 2025)
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