The Decline of Nair Dominance

The Crumbling Matriarchy: A Story of Social Change in Travancore

This book tells the story of how a longstanding matrilineal society, in which women provided the reference point for the control of property, began to crumble in the late nineteenth century, eaten away by the demands of a modernized state and ridiculed by foreign missionaries and Hindu critics from elsewhere.

When the book begins in 1847, high-caste families, mostly Nairs, still held slaves, controlled most of …