ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the spatiality of contemporary Kerala which emerged as a result of the second wave of social mobilisation in the 1990s. It uses Lefebvre’s less explored work on autogestion—which he developed as a response to the challenges faced by progressive forces under a neoliberal state—to study the decentralisation programme successfully adopted in Kerala in the 1990s, and studies three forms of new social spaces that emerged as a result of this reimagination of civil society in the 1990s: women’s self-help groups, rights-based movements, and cultural movements. By studying them as social spaces, it opens up the possibility to examine not just the “conceived” role that these spaces acquired since the 1990s, but also their “perceived” and “lived” (everyday) roles to explore how they reify or resist hegemonic powers. Using ethnography and interview data, I discuss how these new spaces continue to challenge dominant powers in contemporary Kerala, and the response they elicit from political, economic, and religious forces whose hegemony these new spaces challenge.
