Women were treated with Victorian paternalism and not a little misogyny. Institutionally, for instance, women on the Malabar coast who benefited from matrilineal law and enjoyed vast property and social rights, not to speak of bodily autonomy, were pushed to accept patriarchal shackles as the ‘correct’ and ‘moral’ way of living and subject themselves to husbands and sons, physically, socially, and economically. (Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to
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