This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's “suicide capital” of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impulsively suicidal children. Experiences of accelerated time through consumption in “modern” Kerala parenting practice reflect ideas about the threats of globalization that are informed both by national economic shifts and by nostalgia for the state's communist and developmentalist histories, suggesting that late capitalism's time–space compression is not a universalist phenomenon so much as one that is unevenly experienced through regionally specific renderings of the past. I demonstrate how experts position the Malayali child as uniquely vulnerable to the fatal dangers of immediate gratification, and thus exhort parents to retemporalize children through didactic games built around the deferral of desires for everyday consumer items. Teaching children how to wait as a pleasurable and explicitly antisuicidal way of being reveals anxieties, contestations, and contradictions concerning what ought to constitute “quality” investment in children as temporal subjects of late capitalism. The article concludes by bringing efforts to save elite lives into conversation with suicide prevention among migrants to draw out the ways distinct vulnerabilities and conditions of precarity situate waiting subjects in radically different ways against the prospect of self-destruction.

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MAKING TIME FOR THE CHILDREN: Self‐Temporalization and the Cultivation of the Antisuicidal Subject in South India

Masculinity and the structuring of the public domain in kerala: a history of the contemporary

The paper attempts to work out the link between the structuring of the public domain and hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Kerala, South India. Using the debates around an incident of sexual harassment that happened in 1999, it argues for a conjunctural understanding of the contemporary where various events and moments in history are replayed through narrativization and popular memory. The paper goes on to analyse the debates around the incident that produce a ‘narrative public domain’, to foreground the various notions of masculinity that construct and structure it in relation to notions of female sexuality and changing structures of family. These notions of masculinity could be, the paper argues, a starting point for a historical inquiry into Kerala's modernity – an inquiry that would throw light on the past and the ways in which the contemporary is produced through its historical legacies.

PE Usha, hegemonic masculinities and the public domain in Kerala: on the historical legacies of the contemporary

The Basel Evangelical Missionary Society came to India in 1834 and established its first school two years later. Through the formation of a carefully structured and disciplined pedagogic community ...

Missionary pedagogy and Christianisation of the heathens: The educational institutions introduced by the Basel Mission in Mangalore

This article seeks to explore the stories that women’s studies in India tells about itself—its beginnings, trajectories and situations in the contemporary. Deploying the term ‘feminist storytelling...

Equivocations of Gender: Feminist Storytelling and Women’s Studies in the Contemporary:

My sister-in-law used to live in Trivandrum. Women used to wear blouses there, and she also began wearing them. My misfortune, when she came home, she brought me a couple of blouses. Two glittering blouses. How the blouse suited her! I also liked the blouses, and wore one at once. It looked good, but I felt ticklish wearing it. I took it off, folded it carefully, and brimming with enthusiasm, showed it to my B

Udaya Kumar

Papers

Self, body and inner sense: Some reflections on Sree Narayana Guru and Kumaran Asan