In an excerpt from Of Men, Women and Witches by B. Jeyamohan, translated from Malayalam by Sangeetha Puthiyedath, family photographs prompt a personal account of matriarchs, marriage, hardship and household authority around Thiruvattar and Nattalam. It is a memoir of the author’s family and region, not a general history of Kerala or Travancore.
Of Men, Women and Witches is a family memoir
Scroll.in published the passage as a book excerpt on February 20, 2025. Jeyamohan’s author-site description says the memoir was originally written in Malayalam and moves between family stories and the history of the region from which he comes, a borderland connecting Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The author’s mother and grandmother are central to its story.
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The excerpt begins in his father’s ancestral house at Thiruvattar, where photographs of two matriarchs hang. When asked why there are no photographs of the fathers, the grandmother replies: “This is my house. Why should I keep their photographs?” The line is her response as recounted in Jeyamohan’s memoir, not an independently documented historical quotation.
What Jeyamohan recounts about his family
Women, authority and remembered relationships
The photographs lead the narrator into memories of women’s authority and family relationships. He describes some women in nearby landed households having multiple relationships, and households in which two husbands could live together. Children, in the English rendering, called them “Elder Father” and “Younger Father.” The passage sets those arrangements beside the more constrained circumstances of his own mother’s family; it does not present one uniform pattern.
#1 Best Overall
His mother’s childhood and marriage
Jeyamohan recalls his mother’s family in Nattalam, including her cousin Dakshayani taking responsibility for children after the narrator’s maternal grandmother became gravely ill and died. He also recounts his mother’s childhood poverty and schooling, her marriage, and her life with a short-tempered husband. These are scenes and recollections from the memoir, rather than independently verified demographic findings.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to read the passage’s account of a matriarchal family
The excerpt offers an intimate view of particular households and remembered relationships. It should not be treated as proof that all families in Kerala, Travancore, or any broader community shared these arrangements. Nor does the passage, by itself, settle how inheritance, residence, or gender power operated across the region. Its value is in the specificity of the narrator’s family history and the contrasts he draws within it.
Rank #2
The book’s title also matters: Of Men, Women and Witches is the memoir excerpted by Scroll. Jeyamohan mentions Ashokavanam in the passage as the name he had announced for a planned lineage epic, which he says he stopped trying to write. It is not the title of this memoir.
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Rank #3
Sources
- Scroll.in’s February 20, 2025 excerpt, translated from Malayalam by Sangeetha Puthiyedath.
- Jeyamohan’s author site, which describes the memoir’s Malayalam origin and family-and-region focus.
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