More important, Kerala is a microcosm of every religion known to the country; its population is divided into almost equal fourths of Christians, Muslims, caste Hindus, and Scheduled Castes (the former untouchables, now called Dalits), each of whom is economically and politically powerful. Kerala's outcastes — one group of whom, the Pariahs, gave the English language a term for their collective condition — suffered discrimination every bit as vicious and iniquitous as in the rest of India, but overcame their plight far more successfully than their countrymen elsewhere. A combination of enlightened rule by far-thinking maharajahs, progressive reform movements within the Hindu tradition (especially that of the remarkable Ezhava sage Sree Narayana Guru), and changes wrought by a series of left-dominated legislatures since independence have given Kerala's Scheduled Castes a place in society that other Dalits across India are still denied. It is no accident that the first Dalit to become president of India was Kerala's K. R. Narayanan — who was born in a thatched hut with no running water, who as a young man suffered the indignities and oppression that were the lot of his people, but who seized on the opportunities that Kerala provided him to rise above them and ascend, through a brilliant diplomatic and governmental career, to the highest office in the land.
When the artist M. F. Husain painted a series of paintings on Kerala for our joint book, God's Own Country, I was struck by what, in his striking style, he chose to depict: the violence and the idealism of the leftist movement, the calm spread of literacy, the turbulence of the quest for rights of the downtrodden, the vivid masks of the Kathakali dancers, the palpable air of tranquil fraternity in village Kerala. And everywhere there are the women: striding confidently through the green, holding aloft their elephants, steering their little boats through a storm, holding their own at the marketplace, and simply — how simply! — reading. The mere fact that every Kerala girl or woman above the age of six can read and write is little short of a miracle, in a country where more women are illiterate than not, and where a state like Bihar enters the twenty-first century with only 27 percent of its women able to decipher an alphabet. A girl born in Kerala can expect to live twenty years longer than one born in Uttar Pradesh, and she can expect to make the important decisions in her life, to attend college, choose a profession, do what others might consider “men's work,” and inherit property (something which, before the law was changed in 1956, Indian women could not expect to do, unless they were Malayalis following the marumakkathayam matrilineal system). Kerala's women have become doctors and pilots, supreme court justices, ambassadors of India; they have shone in sport, politics, and the armed forces. “If Kashmir is all about men and mountains, “Husain once said, “Kerala is all about women and nature.” His work in this series has been dubbed Kalyanikuttyude Keralam—Kalyanikutty's Kerala, with Kalyanikutty the emblematic Kerala woman, an enlightened modern figure steeped in her traditional culture, rising from it to conquer new worlds while remaining comfortable in her own.
As a child, I grew up listening to my paternal grandmother read aloud from her venerable editions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And I saw, too, my maternal grandmother running a big house and administering the affairs of a large brood of children and grandchildren with firmness and courage. In both cases, they had been widowed relatively young, but in neither case was their gender a disqualification in their assumption of authority. Keralites are used to seeing women ruling the roost. My own mother, now closer to seventy than she would like to admit, still drives her own car to our ancestral home in a Palakkad village, scorning male help. She likes to be in charge.
Fittingly, it was a woman ruler, Rani Gouri Parvati-bai, then queen of Travancore, who decreed in 1817: “The state should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them, that by diffusion of education they might become better subjects and public servants.” Her royal successors followed the policy, and after independence, elected Communist governments in the state and enshrined free, compulsory, and universal education as a basic right. Today, Kerala outspends every Indian state in its tax outlays on education, and Keralites support over fifty newspapers. No village is complete without a “reading room” that serves as a community library, and the sight of villagers reading their newspapers in public is a ubiquitous one, particularly in the chayakadas (tea shops) where animated arguments around the day's news over steaming sweet cups of tea are a regular feature of daily life.
It is not accidental that one of Husain's paintings depicts young and old sharing a home life; family bonds are strong in Kerala, though nuclear families are on the increase there as everywhere, and the older generation has an honored place in the lives of the young, who accept the responsibility to care for them. Another reveals an outdoor market, a street scene in which the people are surrounded by bananas, coconuts, fish, and tapioca, the great staples of Kerala cuisine. Men and women are equally present in the painting; indeed, the women seem to be in the position of economic power. It is striking that in the one picture in which Husain depicts the thundering force of the monsoon (which hits Kerala first before it takes on the rest of India, and with such force that it is often described as an invasion of gray elephants, a metaphor the artist underscores), he shows a woman rowing a boat, standing up to the forces of nature. My paternal grandmother would read the Ramayana from start to finish during the rains, and my maternal grandmother would dispense her herbal potions and pills, averring that they would be most effective if taken at this time of year. The monsoon buffets the people but replenishes the land; it affirms life and hope even as it sweeps away the frail and the weak before it. In its awesome impact it offers a clue to the resilience of Kerala's culture.
Not everyone is equally admiring of the “Kerala model”; economists point out it places rather too much emphasis on workers’ rights and income distribution, and rather too little on production, productivity, and output. But its results in terms of social development are truly remarkable; and as a Keralite and an Indian, I look forward to the day when Kerala will no longer be the exception in tales of Indian development, but merely the trailblazer.
Part of the secret of Kerala is its openness to the external influences — Arab, Roman, Chinese, British; Islamist, Christian, Marxist — that have gone into the making of the Malayali people. More than two millennia ago Keralites had trade relations not just with other parts of India but with the Arab world, with the Phoenicians, and with the Roman Empire. From those days on, Malayalis have had an open and welcoming attitude to the rest of humanity.
The Christians of Kerala belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine, converted by Jesus’ disciple Saint Thomas (the “Doubting Thomas” of biblical legend), one of the twelve apostles, who came to the state in 52 A.D. and, so legend has it, was welcomed on land by a flute-playing Jewish girl. So Kerala's Christian traditions are much older than those of Europe — and when Saint Thomas brought Christianity to Kerala, he made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins. Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it was to do elsewhere in India, but through traders, travelers, and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people. Not only was the new faith peacefully embraced, but it found encouragement in attitudes and episodes without parallel elsewhere in the non-Islamic world; in one example, the all-powerful Zamorin of Calicut asked each fisherman's family in his domain to bring up one son as a Muslim for service in his Muslim-run navy, commanded by sailors of Arab descent, the Kunjali Maraicars.