'Kinship as a public fiction. Substance and emptiness in South Indian inter-caste and inter-religious families'

This article explores inter-caste/religious (ICR) marriages in Kerala (South India) and focuses on the meanings and experiences of kinship when the latter is devoid of its expected emotional and relational substance, to become a ‘public fiction’. With this expression, I refer to kinship relations accepted in the public sphere, but which denied affective and material foundations in the everyday life. ICR marriages hold an important socio-political role in Kerala as symbols of the State’s development, and family ostracism is scrutinised as a form of backward communalism. However, relatives are not always willing to build relations with ICR kin. This leads to ICR families managing situations where public kinship tolerance co-exists with the negation of its real emotional and intimate possibilities. The article maps how the reality of ICR marriages is turned into a fiction by persisting unspoken norms. It suggests the importance of linked discussions on fiction/ reality in the domestic sphere to the public/political role that kinship and families hold in modern postcolonial Kerala.