The Shanar Revolts, 1822–99

This article focuses on the Shanar revolts, a series of subaltern uprisings in nineteenth-century South Travancore, for the right to wear upper clothes over the bosoms of Shanar women. In the parlance of official accounts and modern histories, these revolts are mere disturbances or controversies and the subaltern rebels in these struggles were always pretenders. Contrary to this, an attempt is made here to document and explicate the becoming of the pretender and to demonstrate that historiography may well be implicated, all too easily, in generating the very precarity of the pretender by opposing any movement towards reform.