Morning Watch: Prabhatam and Socialist dreams in Malayalam in the 1930s

The Malayalam journal Prabhatham was launched in 1935 with the emergence of a Congress Socialist cell within the nationalist party in Kerala. From its inception it was subjected to censorship and surveillance by the colonial government as the newspaper began to create a universe of reporting that introduced a socialist vocabulary into Malayalam, evolved new words for talking about society and equality, and envisaged a new geography of revolution in the world. It was a short-lived newspaper curtailed both by the formation of the communist party as much as colonial repression.