Holidays “in the name of”: Mathethara Calendar and its Everyday Rationality

Abstract

Yukthivadam or rationalist thought and movement has been a presence in the south-Indian state of Kerala since the 1920s, campaigning against existing exploitative practices of caste, superstition and religion. The Yukthivadi movement in this region has remained understudied on many accounts and my thesis engages with hitherto unexplored aspects of their social activism. In this paper, I will focus on the material aspects of Yukthivadam and discuss the Yukthivadi mathethara calendar (secular calendar) that the Kerala Yukthivadi Sangham (Kerala Rationalist Group) brings out every year. Calendars form an important part of everyday cultural life of people in South India marking and mapping time through important dates and events, including and often prominently events of religious significance. In Kerala, this mapping can be seen through local festivals/feasts/events/ holidays/ and other days of religious importance. Producing and circulating the mathethara calendar is one of the Yukthivadi attempts at subverting this familiar everyday experience of calendrical time closely embedded in lived religiosity. Drawing on a discussion on the form and content of mathethara calendar, my paper aims to understand this grammar of Yukthivadi politics by discussing how the calendar aims at being an alternative to the dominant religious mode of calendrical time. In doing so, I will discuss the categories and conditions that they produce to house their vision in the calendar, not just by re-imagining the existing religious tropes, but also by shaping secular vocabularies to calendrical time.