Whats New: Check EVENTS to sign up for art workshops, Janal Talks, Film Screenings & More! Whats New: Check EVENTS to sign up for art workshops, Janal Talks, Film Screenings & More! 
Register here for the JANAL LECTURE
Medium of talk: English
Date: Saturday, 18th October, 2025
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: Kerala Museum, Edappally
About the talk:
Bringing gender and caste into conversation with the material and spatial practices of Namboothiri and Nayar Tharavads, this talk explores the everyday lives within these homesteads through an interdisciplinary methodology. Drawing on both architectural formal analysis and the anthropology of dwelling, we look at the Tharavad through the lens of material and dwelling cultures.
Devi Nayar unpacks how caste-based concepts contributed to the construction of material and spatial practices, producing and coproducing social meanings both inside and outside the Tharavad. She reveals how gender, ritual and the organization of Kerala’s agrarian courtyard house inform how we might think about an architectural edifice from an anthropological perspective.
About the speaker:
Devi Nayar is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the combined degree program of Architecture and Anthropology at Yale. Prior to this, she received her Master’s degree in the Master of Environmental Design program from the Yale School of Architecture. Her research interests include transnational architecture and the anthropology of dwelling in the Indian Ocean network and the intersection of space, gender, religion and everyday spatial practices in the Middle-Eastern and South Asian contexts.
