CHANGING ROLES AND WOMEN'S NARRATIVES 65 liasons outside, without any obligation to those outside the caste. The junior male Nambudiri had no rights to family property or to establish a family life of his own. However, they were free to enter into as many s^mbandham as they wished with women of the lower, Nair castes, with no obligation from their side towards the sambandham partner or their children. The gender tensions are thus conditioned by a combination of contests for control within the household, over property, unequal rights (even for males) for inheritance, the process of change in property relations, the authority of the landlord-priests (Nambudiris) and other factors linked with the emergence of state and class formations, i.e. conflicts set in motion by colonialism, social reform and nationalist struggles, the cultural impact of English education and the proselytising activities of Christian missionaries. The resistance of Nambudiri women, the highest in the caste hierarchy, take on forms that are more closely interlinked with the radical social reform within the caste while the struggles of women of the lowest castes against some of the worst forms of sexual exploitation imposed on them by the land-lord-serf-agrestic slave relations are realised by combining their struggles with sharp caste and class struggles. For these women, caste struggles provide the background to the development of class consciousness and the emergence of a distinctly forward looking feminist discourse, leading to the formation of women's organisations and committees. Their sphere of activity extends from the household and workplace to the domain of politics. Nambudiri women, too, became active participants for changing their own consciousness and their status within and outside the household through women's organisations, thereby accelerating the process of radical social reform. While the struggles of upper caste women was primarily within their own community, this fact did not make their resistance any simpler. The brahmanical tradition and the cultural symbols that upper caste women are made out to be in caste society made their resistance fairly complex, bringing this resistance in conflict with patriarchal roles presented in the Hindu traditions as laid down in texts such as that of Manu and the Smritis, so dear to the Nambudiris. Thus, their resistance surfaced in both subtle and rebellious forms, from the determined efforts to scale the heights of poetics, albeit in the devotional, Sanskritic forms to that of open political participation in the nationalist struggle, even at the risk of ostracisation from the community. For women of the lowest castes such as the Pulayas, the struggles were often violent as evidenced by the brutal assaults by upper caste men, including rape, the chopping of their breasts and the clipping of ears for refusing to wear the kallu* and mala and daring to wear the Neckless made of stone, a symbol of caste slavery