We Marunaadan Malayalis are, for the most part, conscious — some would say inordinately proud — of our Malayali cultural heritage. But as we are cut off from its primary source, the source of daily cultural self-regeneration — Kerala itself — we have to evolve our own identities by preserving what we can of our heritage and merging it with those of the others around us. As we grow up outside Kerala, we know that we are not the Malayalis we might have been if our parents had never left Kerala. In due course Onam becomes only as much a part of our culture as any other holiday, and we are as likely to give a younger relative a Christmas present as a vishukkaineettam (Kerala New Year gift). We, Malayalis without our Mathrubhumi or Manorama newspapers, who do not understand the Ottamthullal folk dance and have never heard of the great poets Vallathol or Kumaran Asan — are, when we come to visit Kerala, strangers in our own land.
I am such a Malayali — and in towns and cities around India and across the world, thousands more are growing up like us. Our very names are often absurdities in Kerala terms. In my case, my father's veetu-peru (house name; the family name handed down from his mother and her female forebears in the Nair matrilineal tradition) has been transmuted into a surname. We speak a pidgin Malay-alam at home, stripped of all but the essential household vocabulary, and cannot read or write the language intelligibly. I tried to teach myself the script as a teenager on holidays in Kerala, gave up on the koottaksharams (joined letters) and as a result can recognize only 80 percent of the letters and considerably fewer of the words. (When an Indian ambassador in Singapore wanted discreetly to inform me of his imminent replacement by a Kerala politician, he passed me a clipping from a Malayalam newspaper and was startled at my embarrassed incomprehension of the news.) Malayalam books and magazines may be found at home, but they are seen by us as forlorn relics of an insufficiently advanced past and are ignored by the younger generation, whose eager eyes are on the paperbacks, comics, and textbooks of the impatient and Westernized future.
What does it mean, then, for Keralites like me, now living outside Kerala, to lay claim now to our Malayali heritage? What is it of Kerala that we learn to cherish, and of which we remain proud, wherever we are? In many ways my sense of being Malayali is tied up with my sense of being Indian. I grew up in an India where my sense of nationhood lay in a simple insight: the singular thing about India was that you could only speak of it in the plural. The same is true of Kerala. Everything exists in countless variants. There is no uniform standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way” of doing things. This pluralism emerges from the very nature of the place; for both Kerala and India as a whole, it is made inevitable by geography and reaffirmed by history.
I came to my own Indianness through my Kerala roots. My parents were both born in Kerala of Malayali parents, speakers of Malayalam — the only language in the world with a palindromic name in English — the language of this remarkable sliver of a state in southwest India. Non-Malayalis who know of Kerala associate it with its fabled coast, gilded by immaculate beaches and leafy lagoons (both speckled nowadays with the more discerning among India's deplorably few foreign tourists). But my parents were from the interior of the state, the rice-bowl district of Palghat, nestled in the last major gap near the end of the mountain chain known as the Western Ghats, which runs down the western side of the peninsula like a subsidiary spine. Palghat — or Palakkad, as it is now spelled, to conform to the Malayalam pronunciation — unlike most of the rest of Kerala (which was ruled by maharajahs of an unusually enlightened variety), had been colonized by the British, so that my father discovered his nationalism at a place called Victoria College. The town of Palghat itself is unremarkable, even unattractive; its setting, though, is lushly beautiful, and my parents both belonged to villages an hour away from the district capital, and to families whose principal source of income was agriculture. Their roots lay deep in the Kerala soil, from which has emerged the values that I cherish in the Indian soul.
As Malayalis, the beauty of Kerala is bred into our souls; it animates our very being. Hailing from a land of forty-four rivers and innumerable lakes, with 1,500 kilometers of “backwaters,” the Keralite bathes twice a day and dresses immaculately in white or cream. But she also lives in a world of color: from the gold border on her off-white mundu and the red of her bodice to the burnished sheen of the brass lamp in her hand whose flame glints against the shine of her jewelry, the golden kodakaddakan glittering at her ear. Kerala's women are usually simple and unadorned. But they float on a riot of color: the voluptuous green of the lush Kerala foliage, the rich red of the fecund earth, the brilliant blue of the life-giving waters, the shimmering gold of the beaches and riverbanks.
Yet there is much more to the Kerala experience than its natural beauty. Since my first sojourn as a child in my ancestral village, I have seen remarkable transformations in Kerala society, with land reform, free and universal education, and dramatic changes in caste relations.
It is not often that an American reference seems even mildly appropriate to an Indian case, but a recent study established some astonishing parallels between the United States and the state of Kerala. The life expectancy of a male American is seventy-two, that of a male Keralite seventy. The literacy rate in the United States is 95 percent; in Kerala it is 99 percent. The birthrate in the United States is sixteen per thousand; in Kerala it is eighteen per thousand, but it is falling faster. The gender ratio in the United States is 1,050 females to 1,000 males; in Kerala it is 1,040 to 1,000, and that in a country where neglect of female children has dropped the Indian national ratio to 930 women to 1,000 men. Death rates are also comparable, as are the number of hospital beds per 100,000 population. The major difference is that the annual per capita income in Kerala is around $300 to $350, whereas in the United States it is $22,500, about seventy times as much.
Kerala has, in short, all the demographic indicators commonly associated with “developed” countries, at a small fraction of the cost. Its success is a reflection of what, in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, I have called the “Malayali miracle”: a state that has practiced openness and tolerance from time immemorial; which has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its daily life rather than a source of division; which has overcome caste discrimination and class oppression through education, land reforms, and political democracy; which has honored its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling, and empowered lives.
But that is not all. Kerala's working men and women enjoy greater rights and a higher minimum wage than anywhere else in India. Kerala was the first place on earth to democratically elect a Communist government, remove it from office, reelect it, vote the Communists out, and bring them back again. When the Italian political system saw the emergence of a Communist Party willing to play by the rules of liberal democracy, the world spoke of EuroCommunism, but Kerala had already achieved Indo-Communism much earlier, subordinating the party of proletarian revolution to the ethos of political pluralism. Malayalis are highly politically aware: when other Indian states were electing film stars to Parliament or as chief ministers, a film star tried his political luck in Kerala and lost his security deposit. (Ironically, the first Indian film star to become the chief minister of a state was a Malayali, Marudur Gopalannair Ramachandran — known to all as MGR — but he was elected in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, where he had made a career as a Tamilian film hero.) Malayalis rank high in every field of Indian endeavor, from the top national civil servants to the most innovative writers and filmmakers.