This study explores Mappila Muslim men at the intersections of religion, community and masculinity. Drawing on the double life thesis of gender discourses in Muslim societies, it takes into account both indigenous faces and external constructs of Mappila male masculinities. As for the latter, the study looks at the history of their contemporary abjectification, analyzing new ways of reproducing colonial constructs of Mappila masculinity in the contemporary. Indigenous faces of their masculinities, however, problematize their stereotyping. For a comprehensive understanding, these productions of masculinities require them be analyzed along both male-female and male-male axes of gender relations. Hence, this study scrutinizes power relations between men and women in the context mahallu system, an institutionalized form of Muslim public domain, where labyrinthine nature of different Islamic theological dispositions such as traditionalist and reformist complicate gender praxis. It also analyses how different forms of capital act in configuring power relations among differently positioned Mappila men. Further examined are personal and embodied forms of reflexive masculinities with reference to Islamic piety as how it is mobilized as a power resource for transcendent configurations of masculine identities and gender relations. Observing the role of modernity, reformist versus traditionalist tension, upward social mobility, possession or accumulation of different forms of capital, and Islamic religious piety in shaping gender and gender relations, the study argues for an understanding of contingent productions of multiple Mappila Muslim masculinities.

KEYWORDS: Mappila Masculinities, Muslim Men, Kerala Islam, Gender and Religion, Pious subjectivity