My Thesis Abstract

RISING DAUGHTER, SILENT MOTHER, AND FADING GRANDMOTHERS: A STUDY OF FEMALE SEXUALITY WITHIN A NORTH MALABAR NAYAR FAMILY STRUCTURE

by Rekha Govindan Kurup 

Degree of Master of Arts in Women’s Spirituality

Sofia University, formerly Institute of Transpersonal Psychology Palo Alto, California

Abstract

Rising Daughters, Silent Mother, Fading Grandmother

This research is my journey as a modern-day city-bred daughter of Kerala, India, to redefine, reclaim and re-inform my female sexuality through the discovery and investigation of matrilineal Nayar practices. In my journey to womanhood, my relationship with sexuality had undergone numerous struggles that made me question everything—gender perceptions, cultural and social conditioning, the “do”s and “don’t”s of a feminine identity, the age-old dogmas defining womanhood, the shame, disgust and silence surrounding body and sexuality, and most importantly the direct and indirect influences of mother-centered and father-centered cultures on my relationship with body and sexuality. A series of events led me to the doorstep of my matrilineal Nayar ancestry of Kerala where, for the first time, I learned that for untold centuries, the Nayar people had celebrated the sexuality of their daughters through rituals meant to ensure the fruitful blossoming of a daughter into a sexually mature adult woman; yet in my own life, I never experienced these rituals. Using the transpersonal qualitative research method of organic inquiry, I interviewed my mother and 3 grandmothers about their lived feminine experience in a North Malabar Nayar family structure and the various factors that influenced their relationship with body and sexuality as they blossomed from a young girl into an adult woman. Through the lives of the three generations of grandmothers, mother and daughter, it was apparent that in the last century, Kerala made the shift from a sexually open socially safe mother-centered joint-family matrilineal life to a sexually uptight socially unsafe father-centered patrilineal nuclear family culture. One of the most significant influences of this shift is the disappearance of the menarche ritual from the life of a woman and the emergence of marriage as the most defining ritual in a woman’s life. Furthermore, women’s relationship with body and nudity also shifted from a natural embodied experience in the mother-centered social organization to an unnatural objectified experience in the overtly male-dominated culture of today’s Kerala. Through these women’s stories my relationship with body and sexuality shifted in a positive way, and I hope that these stories will likewise inspire daughters everywhere to stand tall in their sexuality and also, re-define, re-engage and re-claim their own stories around body and sexuality, and also, those of their mothers and grandmothers.