Regal Domesticity: Royal Women and the Making of Domesticity in Early Malayalam Magazines

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of royal women in Malayalam-language print media of colonial Kerala during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular focus on the magazine Lakshmibai. It argues that male reformers and writer-idealists strategically deployed the figures of royal women — both contemporary, such as Queen Victoria and the ranis of Travancore, and historical — as vehicles for propagating an emergent domestic ideology centred on the nuclear, patriarchal family. Drawing on life profiles, advice essays, and biographical narratives published in Lakshmibai, the paper traces how these royal figures were systematically decontextualised: stripped of their matrilineal inheritance, political agency, and public authority, and recast as ideal wives, caring mothers, and efficient household managers. The paper further demonstrates that this representational strategy was not incidental but purposeful — the social prestige and popular reverence attached to monarchy made royal women the most persuasive models for domestic emulation. In doing so, the writers participated in the broader colonial and nationalist discourse that constructed the home as the inner sanctum of cultural identity, assigning women the role of its guardians. The paper contributes to scholarship on domesticity in colonial India by foregrounding the specific dynamics of a princely-state context and by revealing how matrilineal social structures were quietly erased in the service of a patriarchal domestic ideal.