Introduction

In this final chapter, we return to thinking about young men—the ‘boys’ or payyanmar encountered in Chapter 2—and to the question that we opened with there: how to make a man? We have seen throughout this book that the status of ‘man’ is something closely tied in contemporary Kerala—as across south Asia—to marriage, fatherhood, house-ownership, providing and consumption. Yet throughout, we have also found that playing a masculine role or being admitted into an arena defined as masculine is not all there is to manliness. Masculinity here certainly also has a categorical flavour to it: a man is what a woman is not. The two realms of aanu (M) and pennu (F) are often drawn upon in discourse and energetically kept separate; how often we have heard the stereotypical statement, which apparently puts and end to all argument: ‘men have moustaches and women have long hair’. But at the same time, masculinity is also deeply implicated in actual relationships between men and women. Here, sexuality and gendering are brought together as masculine and feminine are continually crafted through the structures and dynamics of heteronormativity. Anthropologists have long noticed the strong division made between ‘sisters’ and ‘wives’ in south Asia (e.g. Bennett 1983; Jamous 1991; Good 1991; Busby 1997).