A behind-the-scenes view of Kerala’s gender-sensitive textbooks  Premium

Kerala board curriculum reforms break gender norms, promoting inclusivity and gender equality in textbooks for all classes.

“Fish curry is made by father himself.” This statement in the Class V Social Science textbook for the Kerala board syllabus, brought out in June, was just one of the changes made to break down gender norms as part of curriculum reforms initiated by the present Left Democratic Front government.

Similar references to gender parity in the textbooks for Classes I, III, V, VII, and IX were celebrated across India as leading the change in the way children are taught in school.

The first chapter of the Class V textbook has a group of friends travelling to their classmate Peeli’s  village where they are served rice, tapioca, and fish caught by her father. The father’s presence in the kitchen was a break from tradition in Kerala’s predominantly patriarchal society — a factor that caused an uproar at the subcommittee meet of the Kerala curriculum steering committee in Thiruvananthapuram in December 2023.

One participant at the meeting asked: “If the father is doing everything, what is left for the mother to do?” “A revolution is set to begin in the kitchens in Kerala,” was another sarcastic jibe. 

The sentence in question, though, remained unchanged in the final draft of the textbook and is now being studied in schools across the State. “That was seen as a victory, but it is tough to describe what we went through during that time,” recalls Anjana V.R. Chandran, academic coordinator of the Class V Social Science textbook development team. 

An image shared by V. Sivankutty, the State’s Minister for General Education, on social media on school reopening day, June 3, had created a buzz. The illustration, from a Class III Malayalam-medium textbook, shows a man sitting on the floor, grating coconut, while his wife does the cooking. 

Positioning the kitchen as a main workspace in the house and depicting the man engaged in a domestic chore was all about sending a message to children. At Government Lower Primary School, Thycaud, Thiruvananthapuram city, Class III students are studying English. Under discussion is a character named Sasha whose father is picturised in the textbook as not only ‘helping’ the woman of the family in the kitchen, but also preparing a not-so-easy-to-make sweet called unniyappam, for Sasha to take to school.