Kerala: Multiple Improbabilities

Thiruvananthapuram, India—Rarely does the Indian state of Kerala capture the world’s attention. It did so in July when a Hindu temple in its state capital was found to contain a royal ransom of solid gold statues and coconuts, piled together in a sealed vault along with sacks of diamonds. The treasure’s value is estimated at $22 billion, which likely makes the temple the richest in South Asia. Still, having recently visited Kerala, a splinter of land at India’s southwestern tip, we wondered whether the excited accounts of the discovery obscured a more relevant and remarkable story.Kerala’s real treasure cannot be measured in dollars, pounds, or rupees. Its true gold is the example it sets—not just for India—of civilized coexistence among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Comity has been abetted by Kerala’s developmental success, made possible in part by the empowerment of women and the export of its most lucrative commodity—its people. Moreover, its feats have been accomplished by democratic means, with the Communist Party often leading the way. Add a final twist: Kerala’s progressive example owes much to its past hereditary rulers and British colonial policies, yet currently depends—perhaps too heavily—on remittances from its million-strong work force in the Arab Middle East.As it happens, we met recently with the incumbent head of the royal family in Kerala’s capital, Thiruvananthapuram, formerly known as Trivandrum. Now 90 years old, Sri Marthanda Varma still makes his daily visits to pray at Sri Padmanabhaswami Temple, where the treasure was sealed in a vault a century ago. His forebears governed this southernmost region from 1663 until 1948, retaining their hereditary titles until 1971, when that distinction was abolished. The ex-maharajah expresses no regrets over his fallen majesty. He recounts with relish his support for progressive reforms and his meetings with Kerala’s chief ministers and visiting celebrities, among them Jackie Kennedy.Kerala’s multiple improbabilities are evident in its geography, along its roadsides, and in its spoken Malayalam language—a chorus of consonants and vowels that roll like the surf on its popular beaches. Consider its current slogan. When New Delhi’s rulers decided in the 1990 s to market their nation as “Incredible India,” their counterparts in Kerala devised a rival brand name, “God’s Own Country,” now imprinted on tourist brochures. Yet for much of the past half-century, Kerala’s ruling coalitions have been headed by the nominally infidel Communist Party. Today, a visitor riding a wobbly auto-rickshaw, adorned with decals depicting Vishnu and Shiva, is likely to glimpse scarlet posters emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. No less ubiquitous are images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, often intermingled with Islamic minarets. Thus the apostrophe in Kerala’s slogan could justly be shifted one space. This is “Gods’ Own Country.”Or so we concluded while traversing Kerala’s narrow corridor in South India—wedged between the Arabian Sea and a nearly 1000-mile mountain range called the Western Ghats—seeking clues to the state’s unusual achievements. Kerala is among India’s poorer states, as measured by its gross domestic product, yet its citizens live longer (averaging 74 years for women, 68 for men) and lead all others in literacy (98 percent). Among Indian states, Kerala ranks first in the United Nations Educational Development Index and its broad Human Development Index, and is deemed “least corrupt” by Transparency International. All this has occurred in a territory of roughly 15,000 square miles (smaller than West Virginia) whose population of 32 million is roughly the same as Canada’s, and a third larger than Australia’s. Overall, Kerala is renowned for its vibrant yet nonviolent politics, and the absence of venom among its predominant faiths, Hindu (55 percent), Muslim (24 percent), and Christian (19 percent).This contrasts with the ongoing bloodletting in Mumbai, India’s largest city, where bomb blasts and interethnic riots recur like malevolent monsoons. Mumbai was still recovering from a seaborne attack in 2008 by Islamic militants (toll: 164 fatalities) when extremists struck again this July (toll: 18 fatalities, precise identity of perpetrators still unknown). One of three bombs exploded near the beach where Jawaharlal Nehru famously pleaded for amity in 1951, with these closing words, “If at all I am a beggar, I am begging for your love.” More horrific yet were faith-inflamed riots a decade ago in the state of Gujarat (Gandhi’s birthplace) that claimed some 2,000 lives, razed 230 Muslim mosques and shrines, and left close to 200,000 Indian Muslims homeless.No comparable pogrom has occurred in Kerala since 1921, when in a bloodletting known as the Moplah Rebellion, Muslim gangs murdered, raped, and forcibly converted Hindus, reversing the victim-perpetrator pattern in Gujarat. Subsequent clashes have been small-scale and readily contained. Characteristically in Kerala, as soon as the temple treasure was discovered, the state’s chief minister, Oommen Chandy, a Christian, asserted that his own Congress Party and its coalition partners had no intention of claiming the bullion. Instead, despite being pressed by deficits, his government planned to hire more police and install a surveillance system to protect the trove. “The wealth belongs to the temple,” he says. “The government will not agree with the view that this belongs to the state.” It is understated testimony to the interfaith empathy that has kept the peace in Kerala.What explains Kerala’s exceptionalism? Why is its recent history so starkly different from that of Mumbai and Gujarat? To seek explanations, we scoured the state’s major cities and questioned a spectrum of intellectuals, physicians, freedom fighters, coir workers (who process coconut husks), party activists, mayors, journalists, feminist activists, believers, and non-believers. In doing so, we discovered an intricate mosaic of reinforcing ingredients—geography and weather, history and culture, the rise of a knowledge society, and the surprisingly paradoxical role of a caste system that has fostered both repression and fundamental reform. Here, too, we found that Kerala’s propitious access to the Arab emirates threw out a financial lifeline to its straitened economy.As striking is the fluency and pungent humor of the Keralites. In the words of C.R. Neekeeandam, a 40-something environmental activist in Kochi (also known as Cochin), “We jokingly say that everything we prepare has to be ‘export quality.’ Like cashew nuts, even our children have to be ‘export quality.’ We send them everywhere for jobs.” This is at once Kerala’s strength, and its vulnerability. More than a million Keralites (also known as Malayalis, after the dialect they speak) toil in the Persian Gulf, mostly as technicians and construction workers. Hence when the economic fortunes of the emirates fluctuate, as when Dubai nearly defaulted in 2009, so do migrant remittances. Schools, hospitals, and corporations across the globe also welcome Keralites, but their gain is often their homeland’s loss. “Kerala is a consuming society, not a producing society,” we were cautioned before we left the United States by an expatriate who preferred to remain anonymous. “People are its exports. If you go to Mount Everest, you’ll find a Keralite running a coffee shop.”“There are several reasons why Kerala is different,” says T. Gangadharan (who like many Keralites, uses only his first initial). Speaking in the northern coastal city of Kannur, using his formal cadenced English, the founder of the Kerala Peoples’ Science Movement continues, “The first, I will say, is geography. On our eastern side, you see, the Western Ghats create a natural boundary, an obstruction, to people from other parts of the country. But the rest of the state is open to the sea. That is why people from the outside, especially the Arabs and later the Portuguese and other Europeans, came first to Kerala. So you see our geographical position contributes to our multicultural aspect.”“Ours is a very mixed history,” Gangadharan adds, “because different parts of Kerala were ruled by different regimes.” Before the Europeans came, Kerala was a maze of “tiny kingly states,” mutable in every sense. Over time, power was concentrated in regional hereditary rulers. In the south, Hindu maharajas governed in what became known as Travancore. In the 17th century, Kerala’s sole Muslim royal ruler, known as the Ali Raja, once reigned in Kannur. Just to the south, Hindu warlords called Zamorins became masters of a thriving Spice Coast. In the central area, ruled by a Hindu monarch, there flourished what was to become Kerala’s biggest city, Cochin, where according to local tradition, St. Thomas the Apostle arrived from the Holy Land to establish the earliest Christian community in Asia. Cochin is likewise home to the Pardesi Synagogue, founded in 1567 by a Jewish congregation whose origins are said to date to the destruction of the Second Temple. Though most members of the community migrated voluntarily to Israel, a scattering of traders and scholars remain.Gangadharan also stresses the role climate has played in shaping Kerala’s “unique trajectory,” observing that “Kerala is where the Indian monsoon enters the subcontinent, and we receive the maximum rainfall, as much as 3,000 millimeters [10 feet] every year.” Thanks to numerous monsoons, the state is drenched by seven months of rainy seasons that stretch from June to December, compared to the five months that the rest of India experiences. Kerala’s farmland is proverbially fecund. “Kera” means coconut, and no crop is more important than this bountiful tree that yields meaty flesh, potable milk, cooking oil, and sap. The soil is also favorable to tea, coffee, rubber, rice, fruits, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove, and cardamom.By the late Middle Ages, Kerala—then known as Malabar—was the prime source of a lucrative trade with Europe. Venetians purchased spices in Egypt or Yemen from Arab traders who obtained their high-value wares from Malabar’s Spice Coast. This created a triangular supply chain lubricated at each link with profit. Socially, the spice trade brought together distinct ethnic and religious groups, including Christians and Jews, into peaceful and mutually beneficial contact. This set Malabar apart. Although there are long-established religious minorities throughout India, Muslims and Christians arrived in Malabar not as conquerors, but as potential business partners. Through the spice trade, all three minority faiths learned to live alongside the Hindu majority. They became familiar with each other’s rites, and crucially, came to speak a common language, Malayalam.These links proved durable. In 1947, when Pakistan was hived off by the exiting British from newly independent India, propelling a massive population exchange that claimed a million or more lives, few Muslims in Kerala joined in the northward flight to the newborn Islamic state of Pakistan. Since then, owing partly to the cultivation of multiple ties between religious communities, peace has prevailed—not total and unbroken peace, but an impressive example of civility.The role of languages has been central to this condominium. “Islam did not come to Kerala by conquest and Muslims are essentially Keralites,” says Professor M.N. Karassery, who describes himself as a “Muslim by tradition.” A widely read columnist, he also holds the prestigious chair in Malayalam studies at Calicut University. Newer Muslims, he observes, “are converts from different (Hindu) castes, mainly lower castes, so they are Malayalis, not outsiders. The main thing is that Muslims don’t have a separate language. Hindus, Muslims, Christians—each and every community speaks the same language, and this is very important. When you go to Bombay (Mumbai) or Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, or Hyderabad, Muslims speak their own language—Urdu. After independence, many in our own communities opened their doors and windows, and everybody came together. You don’t have a special village of Hindus, Muslims, or Christians. In Kerala, you can’t bomb a Hindu or Muslim or a Brahmin area.”Citing a tradition in North India of patronizing only establishments run by fellow Muslims or Hindus, Karassery continues, “In Kerala, there is no Hindu water and no Muslim water.” All Keralites celebrate the 10-day New Year and the autumn rice harvest holiday of Onam, which was borrowed from Hinduism. “It doesn’t mean that I celebrate Onam here in my house,” says Karassery, “but we’ll prepare vegetarian food and payasam (a coconut rice pudding that is particular to Onam). “We don’t observe Christmas here, but I will go to a celebration with my Christian friends at Christmas, and they will come here for Eid”—the Muslim festival marking the end of Ramadan.Yes, Karassery acknowledges, flare-ups erupt on occasion. Indeed, the evening we arrived in Calicut, riot police dispersed hundreds of demonstrators belonging to Hindu Aikya Vedi (hav), a sectarian political group. The hav partisans had marched within a hundred yards of an Islamic social a the as an by the to protect the Islamic The had been by a over it as some that as many as Hindu and Christian women had to what one local called the of Muslim Although no that Muslim had of Hindu and Christian to their many to this The city a a riot was and the accounts that the Hindu of hav a Muslim to a in this was the to by both Hindu and Muslim This on more than a common language, and a a leading political has a decade to his and and Muslims in A the riots that out in a in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, and their with an absence of in Kerala’s Calicut, both cities having Muslim accounts for the between peace and not when the the local of between the communities out as the most important of peaceful between between and the ties within groups, and trade the village peace, but in the of Calicut or or its is Although is the of a major Muslim an has its religious In sectarian to and at the food is also at work in Kerala. and his found that were the of caste more than in South India, especially in Kerala, where nearly of the Hindu population was once deemed not just but since it was once a for a lower caste to come within a of Brahmin these in a few being the most in India a century “Kerala is the most in the country. The of and have access to and is now the state will soon be and has been abolished. All this has been in a democratic Kerala’s ranks than the nonviolent or of these a to by caste political trade intellectuals, and religious Sri a Hindu and of the his own and a Brahmin by by and in of a learned in who at the of in was a but later a as a or in of his this One One for his words are on the Kerala that statues of the an Sri proved to be the Brahmin a century after and known until his in by his Although a he the by both the and Communist and his to Kerala’s political Since no or political party could to an common for coalitions on had their first government in by New and its ruling Congress Party into their prime with local as its into a as in he together a he there be with caste the Muslim and rival ties with a he the different to work as not His and in Kerala’s have their from to with Muslims and Christians the of Kerala’s are not as belongs in the of Communist who an from the India, Kerala’s brand of in civilized with its yet the of is by Kerala’s to be than In our own of ethnic many not most to when distinct communities for of the same In as Sri and for of the same When more communities are there is a for as in and the United and but in each have and decided ago that they mutually from In no or has a the more the for and be special to the for the of in Kerala, among them the of nearly a century, and a thriving of and founded in which Just as the maharajas of and Cochin and literacy Kerala’s were by India’s most Cochin percent), and Malabar percent), while the for India as a was Kerala’s caste for and In the Muslims known as their not only the British but their Brahmin In 1921, in what was as a not at all Hindus, a hundred or more Hindu were Among the were and some of in the of in Kerala’s and sectarian in Malabar In this was to the of lower could not the by caste and he of from the political space. and were in this and his played a in the of a coalition in Kerala. It is said to be the first that came to power in a its much to the that and had the of lower castes, Muslims, and capital of a as as its in it was Thiruvananthapuram, “The of Its are over seven by a of with The capital city with of India in the s as impressive are the of hospitals, and Keralites are known for their In and among the the of from Hindu which seek to and water within the have India in but they and is not these will be especially the state’s on remittances and the of monsoons. that who are will home Islamic but so the most has been the with remittances that crop on Kerala is the of its own and the from its own have few that a million or more Keralites, of them Muslims, as construction and in the and that their remittances the state’s from New no more the “Kerala than of its This is the only Indian state where to and where have to of this to Kerala’s which has women on family than their Keralite women have live and at more than Yet women still do not a role in with their there are in Kerala that the current coalition is to the of there is a of of being that for this remarkable This is in the of Sri of Kerala’s with we at his This with also a describes himself as a and in being to part in a He is at once an observing Hindu and a he to out his own tradition, became the I was my than my He readily his with and Jackie as as with Kerala’s leading be the state has yet to are into the while a their to political and But the is as we found in our to a for women, whose everything from to a for a of roughly a The in the capital and partly by the by to the women who and every different and have been one with a Communist who the of a coastal city, we the where his party its since there are more than workers in Kerala. “We welcome the of our he says. does his party from party has an he that also less on a and is a my is a We an We had been Keralite to for important this A the The a and out of for local to a different in this more of Kerala’s more than all its temple

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