Work Ethics in the Police Force: A Case Study of a Young Malayali Woman (Vinaya)

Indian womanhood is heavily rooted in attitudes of motherhood and domesticity. While the working-class woman has an identity that is constructed based on production, she is equally entrusted with the responsibility of creating a cultural environment for sustaining value systems and rearing children as torchbearers of tradition. The identity of the policewoman within the public space in Kerala is formed precariously as she questions the nature of ‘truly manly’ vocations and the training offered, which is not adept for a woman’s discharge of official duties. In the life writing of a policewoman, unlike other distinctive memoirs on private stress, public life takes precedence. Without intensely focusing on the inner realm, through interior monologue, the memoir does reveal a certain version of the domestic self. Structured historically and culturally apart from the interior drama that she ferrets, it is the public sphere in which she participates that takes center stage, negotiating the public and the private. Her evasive definition of herself about the private mediates and upsurges in her discussions of motherhood and mothering. In an attempt to contemplate the identity of the new woman, Vinaya, the policewoman critiques the private/public schism, offering an insider’s perception of a sphere to which middle-class or elite readers have no access.