Making up Pious Women: Politics, Charity and Gender among Muslims of Kerala

This article looks at black and white photographs of poor rural Muslims that appear in advertisements and newspaper reports circulated for seeking charity. They appear in the Malayalam newspaper, Chandrika , which is the mouthpiece of the Muslim League, a Muslim-identity-based political party in Kerala, South India. The article attempts to connect politics, charity and gender by looking at photographs in the context of the history of charity in the region of Malabar. Based on oral narratives from Ponnani, a coastal town in Malappuram district, Kerala, and written history, the article analyses how political and social aspirations are historically gendered among Muslims. This is visible in the visual culture which is forged when the material culture of dress and the ways of covering the body inform political and social aspirations of communities, contestations in status and modes of gendering. The photographs are discussed as images that broadly invoke religious meanings, cultural values and memories of the past, especially for those to whom they are addressed—rich male Muslim readers located either in the Gulf or in Kerala. In brief, the article explores how the intersection between politics and charity casts women as objects of reform and sympathy for which women are presented in certain moral ways.