egalitarian developmentalism, communist mobilization, and the

Egalitarian Developmentalism, CommunistMobilization, and the Question of Castein Kerala State, India

J. DEVIKA

The article critiques the “Kerala model,” which holds up Kerala State, India, as amodel that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of itsremarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala hasoften claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as amodel for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired thestatus of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced marginalized people inKerala, particularly the lower-caste Dalits and tribals, to a state of abjection.The present effort seeks to show how the marginalization of these socialgroups and their confinement to governmental categories was not a historicalaccident, but the effect of political strategies on the left that led to their exclusionfrom productive resources, and of the assertion of upper-caste agency in left-ledanticaste struggle.

KERALA STATE IN SOUTHWESTERN India was formed in 1956, uniting the threeMalayalam- speaking regions—British Malabar and the princely states of

Travancore and Cochin. Until the 1970s, Kerala was regarded as one of themost “backward” and politically turbulent parts of India. However, developmentresearch in the 1970s found that it presented a “paradox,” challenging establisheddevelopment wisdom about economic growth and social development (CDS/UN1977). Kerala combined very low levels of economic development with highlevels of social development—extraordinarily high levels of literacy and longevity,low infant and maternal mortality, falling birth rates, a strong public health system(Heller 1999; Parayil 2000; Ramachandran 1998). The extraordinary strengthof the communist movement in Kerala—when the communists were electedto power in the Kerala State in 1957, soon after the state’s formation, it madeheadlines throughout the world—made the state a favorite site for Western pol-itical scientists and observers. From the 1940s, the left enjoyed almost unques-tioned hegemony in Kerala’s cultural and political domains until the mid-1980s.

Since the 1970s, a huge literature hailing Kerala as a desirable and replicablemodel of social democracy in the third world has accumulated; much of the credit

J. Devika ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala, India.

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 69, No. 3 (August) 2010: 799–820.© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2010 doi:10.1017/S0021911810001506

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for this has accrued to communist politics and public policy (for an overview, seeJeffrey 2003; Parayil 2000). Not surprisingly, “Kerala,” as it is constructed in thesewritings, mirrors the conceptual shifts within social democratic discourse in theWest since the 1970s, especially the increasing proximity to liberal positions,and the shift from the “social” to the “community.” Thus, Kerala has appearedto be a veritable haven for different desirable qualities—“social development”first and, later, “human development” and “social capital.” The present inquiry,however, is rooted in contemporary political debates within Kerala, focusingon caste and gender exclusions.1 While the social democratic construction ofKerala as a near-egalitarian paradise may have a certain utility in anticapitalist pol-itical work in the West, it obscures the exclusion of the lower castes (Dalits) andcoastal and tribal communities, and works against their struggle for resources andcitizenship, heightened in the present. Briefly put, this article opens up to criticalscrutiny an idea that is often repeated in the laudatory literature on the “Keralamodel”—that caste and gender exclusions represent the “incomplete agenda” ofKerala’s social democracy.

Welfarism in Kerala certainly is older than radical politics. It has been arguedthat the progressive interventions of the state in Travancore and Cochin since thenineteenth century—that is, the expansion of “infrastructural state power” (Mann2003)—represent an important historical context in which Kerala’s unique post-independence welfarist state policies may be understood (Desai 2005). Nationalpride came to be associated with “development” in these contexts by the mid-twentieth century, evident in the early interactions of newly formed politicalunits (such as the unit formed through the amalgamation of the princely statesof Travancore and Cochin) with the Union government at the time of Indianindependence. For instance, such self-projection was evident in the protestsmade by legislators in the Travancore-Cochin Legislative Assembly against theUnion government’s alleged discrimination in food subsidies to Travancore-Cochin in 1951 (Proceedings of the Travancore-Cochin Legislative Assembly1951, 1623).

Though such pride took a beating in the later decades, with Kerala earningthe opprobrious epithet of “problem state” (Singh 1959), by the 1970s, theassociation between development gains and national pride had waxed,

1The feminist critique of the “Kerala Model” has gained considerable visibility in academic circles(Devika 2008a; Eapen and Kodoth 2003; Mukhopadhyay 2007; Saradamoni 1996). Dalit critiquesare powerfully articulated in Malayalam, the major language spoken in Kerala (Baburaj 2008; Raj2003), but not so much in academic discourse in English, with some exceptions (Ayrookuzhiel 1990;Kunhaman 1989; Lawrence 1998). I focus on the question of caste here. Lower-middle-classwomen from “communist families” make up the women’s mass organizations of the left, especiallythe All-India Democratic Women’s Association, which is affiliated with Kerala’s most powerfulcommunist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which subscribes to a strikinglylimited conception of “women’s liberation,” centered on sexual self-discipline and responsibilitiestoward community and family (Erwer 2003).

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strengthened by a further claim of social development through the equitableredistribution of resources and extension of public services. In other words,Kerala’s developmentalism seemed to be of a different color. Here, strongearly anticaste movements and the communists’ extension of these egalitarianpolitical thrusts seem to have led to social democratization, finally harnessingdevelopmentalism to egalitarian political goals, creating wide-ranging welfaremeasures guaranteed by the state and by the strength of an active left (Franke1993; Heller 1996; Jeffrey 2003; Ramachandran 1997). From being the“problem state,” Kerala became the “model” for third-world development, andcompeting notions of Kerala’s exceptionalism, notably those based on matrilinyand communist mass politics, were progressively absorbed into narratives ofKerala’s unique social development. It was noticed, even in the 1970s, that “ega-litarian developmentalism” had left out many sections of people (Sivanandan1976); a fuller critique of such exclusion was forthcoming only in the late1980s and thereafter. Within Kerala, communists have claimed the major shareof credit for progressive state policy and politics; the “Kerala model” literaturereiterates the claim in international arenas.

The communists also claimed the moral authority to speak for Kerala’slinguistic unity and national identity. In Malabar in the 1930s, the socialists inthe Indian National Congress—the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), who laterformed the communist party in Kerala—“represented a local reaction againstnational identity, in view of the subordination of local politics to the exigenciesof the national party” (Menon 1994, 120). The national Congress leaders’ abhor-rence of “communal demands” and their reluctance to intervene in the princelystates contrasted sharply with the CSP activists’ eagerness to intervene in politicaland labor struggles in Travancore and Cochin (Desai 2002; Rangaswamy 1981,136–37, 190–91). It is hardly surprising that communists could claim to be thetrue champions of unity of the Malayalam-speaking areas (Gopalan 1976). Itwas from this position of political advantage that they dismissed the Cochinmaharajah’s moral authority to call for the unity of Kerala in the 1940s (Namboo-diripad 1946a).

To sum up: the rise of the much-lauded communist “egalitarian develop-mentalism” in Kerala, it is widely argued, rested on two important politicalsuccesses: the communist extension of anticaste struggles (e.g., Desai 2001),and their hegemonization of the movement for linguistic unity amongMalayalam-speaking regions. However, both recent struggles over land bytribal and Dalit people, and research (Deshpande 2000; Kurien 1995; Lindberg2001) reveal that caste inequalities continue to be rampant here. Indeed, suchcoupled statements as “the upper-caste landlords, who once ruled with absolutesocial and economic authority over Kerala have disappeared as a social class, andthe caste system, though still an important source of identity and social life, nolonger mirrors political and economic power hierarchies” (Heller 2006, 66)need to be heavily qualified, precisely because they assume too much, for the

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“disappearance of the landlord class” is not the same as the disappearance of casteas an axis of political power in modern Kerala. Such statements consign therecent major land struggles by Dalit and tribal people in Kerala to the realmof “identity and social life.”

The disappearance of traditional caste practices from the public cannot betreated as evidence of the extinction of caste culture. “Secularized casteism” isa general feature of both civil and political societies here, and the left is no excep-tion, as revealed in March 2008, when members of the women’s wing of Kerala’sdominant left party conducted the traditional adicchutali—an upper-caste“pollution-cleansing ritual”—against alleged sexual indiscipline in a protestevent supporting the Dalit land struggle at Chengara (Devika 2008b). Again, arise in welfare handouts does not mean either the end of caste inequality in pol-itical movements or the recognition of the specificity of subaltern interests. Thepostmillennium subaltern struggles in Kerala reveal both the intolerance of thedominant left to the subaltern assertions of group interests, and their insistenceon treating the latter as passive (responsibilized) welfare-receiving governmentalcategories. Perhaps the tension between subaltern group identities and the will toreduce them to governmental categories may be understood in terms of thecomplex relation between liberalism and biopolitics: as Mitchell Dean remarks,“At one level, liberalism is a version of bio-politics; at another, it exists in akind of permanent tension with bio-political imperatives” (1999, 113). Certainly,following, in fuller terms, the transformation of such tension from the mid-twentieth century to the present may yield considerable insight into history ofthe dominant left’s assimilation of the subaltern in Kerala. This, however, is alarger task that is merely hinted at here.

In the following sections, I reflect on (1) how “modern caste power”emerged, “secularized” in and through precisely the powerful anticaste strugglesby communists since the 1930s, which destroyed the traditional caste order, and(2) how mid-twentieth century communist “egalitarian developmentalist” ideol-ogy ignored unequal relations between social groups, and thus proved noninclu-sive and hence fragile. In each section, I follow these themes through a criticalexamination of the writings of E. M. S. Namboodiripad—who not only is recog-nized as the undisputed leader and theoretician of the communist movement inKerala (and in India), but also was the chief minister in Kerala’s first communistministry of 1957. (Namboodiripad is referred to hereafter as EMS.) Given thatthe issues opened up by the themes I have chosen to discuss are both numerousand complex, the foregoing strategy of focusing on the writing of one, if highlyinfluential, communist may be useful only to that extent. EMS’s writingsunfolded in a period in which upper-caste ideas, practices, and institutionswere being revised and modernized in subtle ways, which finally became hege-monic in both Kerala’s nascent civil society and political field. I do not try toprovide a full account of these processes. However, the trajectory of EMS’swritings followed here does give some intimation about the same.

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RECASTING CASTE THROUGH THE SELF-SACRIFICING COMMUNIST

The literature on the “Kerala model” highlights two specific ways in whichpostindependence state policy has addressed the Dalits: first, they have benefitedfrom the remarkable extension of public services, which has improved theiraccess to health care and education; second, the Kerala Land Reforms Act(1969) provided the largely Dalit landless laborers with minimal amounts ofland for housing and domestic consumption (Krishnaji 2007; Ramakumar2006). From the Dalit perspective, these may appear to be two sides of asingle exclusionary strategy, in which their exclusion from the radical redistribu-tion agenda was “balanced” by the extension of the state’s infrastructural poweroriented toward bettering social development.

The provision of housing land concealed the denial of land as a productiveresource to Dalits, despite the fact that pre–land reform agricultural censuseshad revealed them to be the actual tillers; peasants who employed family laboralone in their farming were few, but the tenants gained the major share of pro-ductive land through Kerala’s land reforms in the early 1970s (Krishnaji 2007).The Kerala Agricultural Workers’ Act of 1974 improved working conditionsand ensured better wages and welfare benefits. However, over the years, thedecline in agriculture, the successful conversion of farm land to real estate bythe new owners (Narayanan 2003), and the stagnation of wages (although realwages increased in the late 1970s) has deepened their exclusion (Isaac andMoha-nakumar 1991). Some have argued that with the provision of housing plots, Dalits“were able to bargain better for wages, for a public distribution system, andbetter school education and health care” (Tharakan 2002, 358). However, thesame author admits that while absolute wretchedness has been prevented, thishas not enabled Dalits to compete on equal terms with the better-off groups(Tharakan 2002, 359). It has also been observed that the fruits of militant andsuccessful leftist trade unionism have often been reaped better by the uppercastes (Pillai 1992). Nor does it seem to have brought many Dalits into the leader-ship of the left parties (Oommen 1985, 165–66). However, the extension ofwelfare and public services was crucial in preventing a worse scenario, evidentif one considers the plight of tribal people in Kerala, who lost land to settlersfrom the plains supported by both left and centrist parties (Oommen 1990),and for whom the extension of state infrastructure was less effective.

In sum, it appears that while left politics and public policy have tackled tra-ditional forms of caste oppression and eliminated absolute deprivation among theDalits, the caste divide has been recast in strikingly modern terms. In the 1970s,the militant left labor unions began to include specific demands for greater edu-cational and training facilities, more employment, and better infrastructure andhousing for Dalit people (Oommen 1985, 235–36); it is these unions that spear-headed the “land grab” and “excess land” agitations of the early 1970s, whichaimed at identifying surplus land. But they have not demanded land as a




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productive resource (Oommen 1985, 235). This was pointed out early enough byeconomist P. Sivanandan, who termed the extension of state infrastructuralpower “protection policy,” arguing that this did not ameliorate the condition ofthe Dalits, and that “communities with a high level of achievement in the econ-omic field in the past and social superiority continue to develop faster in achiev-ing higher levels of education, employment and income than those with poorbackground” (1976, 4).

It is important to recognize that this left anticaste strategy was not the resultof the stalling of the progressive agenda by rightist forces after Indian indepen-dence, as some Kerala model theorists claim; it had already crystallized earlyin the history of communist mobilization. Writing in 1937 about “peasants inMalabar,” EMS advanced three arguments to justify different organizationalstrategies and political goals for “peasants” and the largely Dalit “landlesslaborers”: first, the latter were a “large section of people,” but they do notbelong within the term “peasant” as it is used in Malayalam. Second, they takeon not just agricultural labor but any other form of work that is available, andso are closer to the urban workers. Third and most important, “there is the possi-bility of disputes arising, even, between farmers and agricultural labourers. Sobringing them under the same organization may create weakness within” (Nam-boodiripad 1937, 221). However, attacking traditional caste oppression wasimportant. As early as 1935, EMS wrote about “laborers” in Malabar, admittingthat they were the single largest group within the agrarian population (43percent), and outlining a three-pronged anticaste strategy—eradication of allsevere, public forms of caste discrimination; extension of the state infrastructurefor modern schooling and health care to Dalits; and the transformation of Dalitsinto a modern working class through regularization of wages and the ending offeudal labor (Namboodiripad 1935, 206–7). The central agent of such transform-ation was to be undoubtedly the (largely upper-caste) communist leader. Casteoppression was to be ended, but that did not entail recognizing the landlesstiller’s claim to land, similar to the peasant’s. This was in sharp contrast withearly twentieth-century Dalit leaders such as Ayyan Kali in Travancore, whodemanded both agricultural land and modern education (Oommen 1985, 64),and the anticaste reformer Sree Narayana Guru, who advised Dalit people toengage in the “acquisition of both knowledge and wealth” to escape theirplight (Bhaskaran 2000, 30).

The communists’ attempted resolution of the caste question also departedfrom the early twentieth-century anticaste perspectives in other ways. It is impor-tant to read these proposals alongside the specific sorts of power relations withinwhich anticaste struggles were conceived by communists. Indeed, they share aremarkable resemblance with other early twentieth-century reform proposalscirculating in Kerala, such as those that aimed at women (Devika 2007). Insuch projects, women were to be freed from traditional patriarchal oppressionand thoroughly modernized. However, the agents of such effort were to be

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reformist men, who, it was suggested, possessed true insight into the past and thepresent of the community, and the capability to shape the future. This necessi-tated and authorized nonreciprocal and nonreversible didactic ties and relationsof power between the reformer man and the woman he was to reform. Theseformed the core of modern patriarchy in Kerala (Awaya 1996; Devika 2007; Lind-berg 2001; Velayudhan 1999). Full agency can be conceded to the woman, itseemed, only after she had undergone significant self-transformation; untilthen, she was to be under the reformer man’s tutelage. Rendering the oppressedpassive, I argue, was a technique of wider significance in Kerala; closely followingthe leftist discourse on anticaste struggle from the 1930s into the 1940s and after,its overwhelming presence is hard to miss.

The setting up of the communist activist as the self-sacrificing and disinter-ested agent of anticaste struggle in leftist political discourse was achieved bycontrasting him (mostly conceived as male) with the educated and better-off lea-dership of contemporary anticaste movements, which were negotiating with thestates of Travancore and Cochin for representation in legislatures, employment,and other issues (Jeffrey 2003). These efforts were condemned as the self-seeking activity of an exploitative bourgeoisie.2 In contrast, the true “leaders ofthe masses” were duty-bound to attack both caste discrimination and caste mobil-ization, to create mass movements of the “poor” unmarked by caste (Namboodir-ipad 1936, 88). Writing on the distinctness of the anticaste work to be undertakenby CSP workers in Malabar in 1936, EMS was careful to contrast the active “self-sacrificing” agency of the CSP worker with the “self-seeking” educated Tiyya(lower-caste) leader (Namboodiripad 1936, 92–93). Finding “economic disabil-ities” to be the root of caste, he told the CSP worker to “instruct” the poorthat they “are not divided by differences of community” (Namboodiripad1936, 94). The CSP worker, here, is the exact counterpart of the reformerman, out to rescue women from the throes of tradition through self-sacrifice,and to “uplift” her through correct training, guidance, and instruction. Such con-struction of communists as “selfless public servants” is also constructed vis-à-visother selves deemed undesirable—for instance, the modern self defined byconsumption (Namboodiripad 1943, 300).

The widely documented, numerous instances of such self-sacrifice by largelyupper-caste leaders (Desai 2002; Kannan 1988; Lindberg 2001; Menon 1994)brought considerable political gains to the communists. Precisely becausedemeaning caste practices were so closely entangled with feudal hierarchy inKerala, struggle against the latter was well-nigh impossible to conceive withoutstruggle against the former. Manali Desai notes that “had the CSP not employedpolitical practices that linked caste oppression to the system of landlordism, itwould not have gained its hegemony and organizational strength simultaneously”

2This position continued to inform the politics of the Communist Party of India in the 1940s in allregions (see Omvedt 1994, 182–83).




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(2002, 642). The end of demeaning caste practices certainly produced a new selfthat was self-respecting in some ways in many social groups. Mid-twentieth-century observers in Kerala have remarked on the contrast between the wide-spread poverty of the state and the unbowed and self-confident manner of thepeople (e.g., Mankekar 1965). Several accounts may be found of how individualsrose from the lowest social positions to mount powerful political challenges to thetraditional order—for instance, A. K. Gopalan’s account of Alora Krishnan, aservant in a Malabar landlord’s house, who acquired literacy through the night-school run by the peasant movement, and who could write poetry and makespeeches (2004, 76). Here again, the parallel is with women in Kerala, who bene-fited from the destruction of most forms of traditional patriarchy, but have beensubjected, in the very same move, to more modern, if no less insidious, lessvisible, forms of patriarchal control (Devika 2007).

However, if we are to understand the persistence of caste inequality inKerala, we need to acknowledge that these political processes also producednew nonreciprocal relations of power between the upper- or middle-caste com-munist leader, who was privileged by his better access to modern education,public sphere debates, and public mores, and the lower castes, who lacked allof these. The active agency of the mostly upper- or middle-caste CSP leader rein-scribed caste power in newer ways. Indeed, that CSP leaders did not fullyrenounce caste privilege, and continued to use it strategically, is also important(Menon 1994). The indisputable success of the left in breaking down traditionalcaste practices in Kerala also brought into being a new form of caste power, basedon the largely upper-caste communist leader’s exercise of pastoral power on thelower castes, working through a “moral right” to transform the latter into caste-neutral “working-class poor.” Innumerable instances of upper-caste leadersadopting techniques that resembled Gandhian practices centered on upper-casteagency have been cited in histories, memoirs, autobiographies, and other textsdocumenting communist peasant and worker struggles in Kerala. A tellinginstance is found in the autobiography of the communist writer and activist Cher-ukad Govinda Pisharady, in which he recounts relief work by communist activistsin a Dalit settlement near Perintalmanna in Malabar. The intense contrastbetween the active, self-sacrificing communist activists, and the helpless,wailing, victimized Dalits (“hapless human creatures”) informs the entireaccount; it concludes with the Dalit elder accepting rice from the leader of therelief worker group, declaring, “Master, you are God our Creator” (Pisharady1974, 430).

Interdining was actively promoted by communists all over Kerala. Forinstance, in Malabar, the celebrated communist leader K. A. Keraleeyaninstructed organizers to accept rice gruel from lower-caste households, insteadof the tender coconut ordinarily offered to upper-caste visitors (Kunhikrishnan1996, 55). A few prominent upper-caste leaders abandoned their castenames and took others that indicated their status as patriots—prominently,

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V. M. Vishnu Bharateeyan (Vishnu the Indian) and K. A. Keraleeyan (the nativeof Kerala) (Jeffrey 2003, 133–34). However, Bharateeyan did not abandon upper-caste cultural capital, continuing to work in a temple, wearing upper-castesymbols, and chanting from sacred texts—these were used to “win adherentsfor peasant organisations” (Jeffrey 2003, 134). Recent Dalit scholarship criticizesthe ambiguous effects of such practices—interdining, it is pointed out, did notunsettle any enduring inequality, nor did they prevent Dalits from becomingcheap cannon fodder in confrontations with the state, such as at Punnapra-Vayalar (1946) (Vijayan 2002a, 2002b).

This appears to be the case in the mobilization of industrial workers as well.Lindberg notes the persistence of caste inequality in Kerala’s highly unionizedcashew industry, even in the 1990s—Dalits continued to perform the lowliestand lowest paid work. The workers she interviewed read the free interminglingand interdining practiced by upper-caste communist leaders as evidence oftheir anticaste commitments. However, “their efforts seem to have beenrestricted to mobilizing workers of different castes into trade unions for jointaction against the factory owners, and failed to address the caste division oflabour … Thus, caste barriers were only broken on particular occasions inorder to fight against capital, but less so in daily life” (Lindberg 2001, 161).Besides, many aspects, “like the caste division of labour and endogamousmarriages, were left unchallenged and unchanged” (Lindberg 2001, 161–63).

Here is a clear parallel with the communist strategy of instrumentalizinganticaste struggles to the mobilization of the “agrarian poor”: attacking thoseaspects of caste that may be obstructive to class formation, leaving untouched“sensitive” internal hierarchies in mobilization (such as that between tenantand agricultural laborer), and relying on the active agency of the (largely higher-caste) leftist labor organizer and the nonreciprocal relation between the (lower-caste) worker and himself. The most common strategy followed by caste groupsfor acquiring presence in the emergent political field in early twentieth-century Kerala was to build modern community organizations that wouldthen negotiate with the state(s) for resources. This strategy was followed byall kinds of caste groups among the powerful (Nairs, Syrian Christians,Brahmins), the emergent (Ezhavas), and the less endowed (Pulayas, Arayas)—with varying degrees of success. As the case of the Arayas demonstrates, lackof economic resources was a major hurdle in the path of the lower-castegroups aspiring to successful modern community formation (Zacharias andDevika 2006).

The left anticaste discourse condemned such a strategy for Dalits as though itwere rendered redundant by the communists’ “moral struggle” against caste.Indeed, in 1937, the twelfth annual conference of the powerful leftist tradeunion the Travancore Labour Association passed a resolution that lumped “com-munity and religious associations” together, argued that they “concealed the realunity of interests of the public,” and urged workers to resign from all such




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organizations (Cheriyan 1999, 537–38). The question of Dalit economicdeprivation was to be “resolved,” but first through anticaste struggles driven byupper-caste political agency, and next through the extension of public servicesto Dalits. This strategy ensured that Dalits would stay at the fringes of communistpolitical organization in Kerala, both literally and figuratively. However, the mili-tancy of the 1950s and 1960s ensured that state welfare was rarely perceived asthe dole; it was identified as the “people’s right”—thus, even governmental cat-egories were perceived in radical terms. The flip side of this was that it maskedthe nontransfer of resources to the Dalits.

Lindberg also notes that while upper-caste workers willingly joined lower-caste workers in trade union struggles under communist leadership, theyretained their caste alliances to the extent that endogamy and other practicesthat were crucial to the reproduction of caste differences remained largelyuntouched, despite much-publicized intercaste marriages in the upper echelonsof the communist party (Lindberg 2001). The new forms of social and culturalalternatives that communists sought to produce were by no means unambigu-ously oppositional. Oommen notes the same for the different caste componentsof the agricultural workers’ union and small farmers’ association of the Commu-nist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), in its most militant phase, the early 1970s, inthe highly radicalized Alappuzha district (Oommen 1985, 157). (After thecommunists split in the mid-1960s into the Communist Party of India and theCommunist Party of India (Marxist), the latter came to control the larger partof the mass organizations, including the agricultural workers’ union.)

Of course, the communists did work actively to set up institutions thatoffered alternate, modern social values and cultural forms that challengedtraditional forms—especially village libraries and youth associations, in whichmostly young men developed critical skills that could be deployed against thefeudal order, the newly independent liberal state, and capitalism, and that fos-tered class solidarities that exceeded the narrow, immediate locality (Kunhikrish-nan 1996). However, that the creation of unambiguously oppositional culture andsociety was not an issue high on the agenda was clear from EMS’s new directionsto party members regarding the conduct of everyday life after the legalization ofthe Communist Party (1942). He remarked that the oppositional lifestylesof communists made them appear as “strange creatures to others.” He arguedthat they must become ordinary folk, leading regular social and family lives—comrades who were fond of (upper-caste) temple festivals, events, and elite artforms ought not to be ashamed, as “we are in a position to initiate a renaissancein literature, music, and all the other arts” (Namboodiripad 1944a, 176–77). Thisexhortation advises peace, not confrontation, with the emergent upper-castehegemonized civil society in Kerala. This claim, which sounds quite neutral,should, however, be read alongside his reinstitution of Brahmanical highculture as the unifying ground for United Kerala, in his historical work KeralaMalayalikalute Mathrubhumi (1948), which sought out unities within the (very

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vocally expressed) differences in Malayalee society (Menon 1999). This work wasseverely criticized by leftist fellow traveler Joseph Mundassery (who found itextolling “feudal socialism”) and the radical anticaste intellectual P. K. Balakrish-nan soon after publication. EMS’s later works, Keralattinte Desheeya Prsanam(The National Question in Kerala, 1952) and Kerala: Society and Politics(1967), advanced the same argument, admitting that classical art forms and litera-ture were elite, but that “these works of literature and art forms have laid thebasis for the creation of a style and technique that go beyond all castes and com-munities; they are truly national” (Namboodiripad 1967, 46). Besides, the artforms of other (non-Hindu) communities were derived from this Brahmanical“core” of styles and techniques (Namboodiripad 1967, 47). However, KeralattinteDesheeya Prsanam (1952) offered a teleological explanation of the origin of castedrawing on not traditional texts, but thoroughly modern methods of justificationand western anthropological research (Nigam 2000). As for left cultural pro-duction of the 1950s, it subtly reinstated caste inequality, continuing to fore-ground upper-caste agency in political revolt, and the sacrificial status ofsubalterns, in imagining the egalitarian developmentalist subnationality ofKerala (Menon 2002).

In other words, EMS’s writings, and the communist anticaste strategy ingeneral, sought to reinstate caste in thoroughly modern terms. Even as traditionalcaste servitude was challenged, upper-caste culture and social norms were notonly largely spared, but actually reclaimed as the “unifying core” of Kerala’snational culture. Indeed, the times during which EMS was instructing cadre tolive “normally” were interesting for attempts by communists to move awayfrom traditional and bourgeois domesticity through communes, rejection of“normal” householder aspirations, devotion to public life, and the reconstitutionof domestic and conjugal ideals, as the autobiographies of several communistleaders testify (Pisharady 1974, 425–27, 414). The instruction to stay “normal”rejected these possibilities.

That the new hierarchies rely on defenses that are modern—on powerrelations built around the exercise of pastoral power, on arguments derivedfrom modern anthropology, on “pragmatic politics”—alerts us to the “seculariza-tion of caste,” which contemporary anticaste writing in India identifies as a majormeans of perpetuating caste inequalities within Indian modernities (Nigam 2000;Pandian 2002). Indeed, it appears that Kerala is no exception to this generaltrend. It is important to emphasize this when we consider the manner inwhich mid-twentieth-century leftist egalitarian developmentalism structured bythe new caste elitism attacked traditional caste.3

3EMS gives a summary account of his political trajectory in the 1930s to 1960s in 1981, in which the“transfer” of the new caste elitism to the leftist egalitarian project is well outlined (Namboodiripad1981, 12–25).




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A PEOPLE UNITED IN DEVELOPMENT

Dilip Menon (2002) identifies three transformative events in the 1950 (afterthe period of radical insurrection in the 1940s) that affected communism inKerala: the communists’ acceptance of parliamentary politics, the formation ofthe state of Kerala (1956), and the election of the first communist ministry inKerala, led by EMS (1957). Together, these events intimated a shift of communiststrategy from radical political mobilization to “egalitarian developmentalism”—

the possibilities of which have already been hinted at here (Namboodiripad1944b, 137–38). However, the contours of the egalitarian developmentalistutopia had already emerged in the 1940s in EMS’s writings. In this section,I examine the manner in which he proposed to integrate different socialgroups—the Dalits, the Brahmins, and the powerful caste community organiz-ations—in his vision of “real” Kerala.

Manali Desai remarks that Kerala’s postindependence welfare state needs to beviewed within the history of the penetration of state power into civil society (2001,481). In southKerala, thiswasparticularly far-reaching, especiallywith the expansionof literacy. The coming to power of the communists in Kerala in 1957 sutured leftistradical redistribution to the expansion of the state’s infrastructural power. I argue thata clear distinction may be made between the radical redistributive agenda and theextension of the infrastructural power of the state, especially given that the latterseem to be directed more consistently at people denied productive resources. Inthe mid-twentieth century, the extension of the infrastructural state expanded citi-zenship by improving access to new capabilities through education and healthcare; the redistributive agenda was actualized through the land reforms of theearly 1970s. Those who gained from these—the upper and intermediate castes—have become Kerala’s thriving new elite, now enabled to convert these capabilitiesinto “desired functionings,” in Amartya Sen’s terminology. In contrast, for theDalits and tribals, deprived as they were of productive assets, and denied those inthe 1970s, the expansion of state infrastructure had different implications. Theystayed at the fringes of the communist organizational structure—in trade unionmemberships—even in the militant 1970s. The militant struggle for land reformsin the early 1970s brought themminimal gains in housing plots. The famousmilitant“land grab” agitations by landless laborers (1972) identified surplus land for the state,but no direct occupation took place (Krishnaji 2007, 2173). T.K.Oommennotes thateven at the height of labor militancy in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the highly radi-calized district of Alappuzha, the leadership tiers of labor unions conformed,more orless, to traditional caste hierarchies (Oommen 1985, 165–66). He writes about thehistory of the first agricultural labor union organized by the communists in Alap-puzha, in which the “superior castes” concentrated on the more prestigious partywork, and intermediate-caste and a few lower-caste activists focused on union activi-ties: “one graduates into the former through the latter and this is particularly true ofinferior groups” (Oommen 1985, 163–64).

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Certainly, homestead land, minimum wage legislation, the public distributionsystem, and welfare boards reduced poverty in Kerala (Ramakumar 2006). Yetdevelopments since then have ensured the confinement of Dalits to welfarerecipient status and to the fringes of party organization. The shift away from labor-intensive crops after the land reforms reduced the incomes of agricultural laborers, adevelopment that the left could hardly stem (Narayanan 2003); they were unable tocompete with the upper castes, who held higher stocks of cultural capital. Indeed, ithas been argued that the disproportionately large contribution of Dalit agriculturallaborers to Kerala’s remarkable fertility transition of the 1970s was not so much theresult of social development, as an effect of the increased dependence onwage laborin a stagnant economy (Basu1986). In themid-1990s, “responsibilized” and targetedwelfare began to replace welfare as the “people’s right” to basic needs, whichchanged the political status of the welfare recipient. Finally, with the devastatingimpact of globalization on agriculture, Kerala’s heavy dependence on the globaljob market for employment, and the alarming increase in inequality levels withinKerala, such “thin citizenship” is proving all the more flimsy (Mohanakumar 2008;Noronha 2006). Interestingly, recent efforts to alleviate agrarian distress in Keralahave bypassed agricultural laborers, while social security expected from the Agricul-tural Workers’Welfare Fund Board has been minimal (Mohanakumar 2008).

Thus, Dalits and tribals continue to remain deprived as a group, even thoughpoverty levels have declined remarkably in Kerala (Subrahmanian and Prasad2008, 27). Examining the occupational ranking among various castes in Kerala in1976, Sivanandan observed that “the lower a community is treated in the socialorder, the more inferior and less remunerative are the occupations it can chosefrom” (1976, 10–12). More recently, calculations based on National SampleSurvey Organization data for 1993–94 revealed that “even in a relatively egalitarianstate like Kerala, inter-caste disparities continue to underlie overall disparity.” Also,within-group disparity is comparatively lower among Dalit and tribal populations inKerala: “if any group has to worry about a ‘creamy layer,’ it is the Others [non-Dalit]group” (Deshpande 2000, 325). Examining Kerala’s “growth turnaround” in the1990s, these scholars remark that “it is rather surprising that given thehistorical back-ground of progressive policies and concerns for distributive justice, Kerala state hasthe highest level of inequality in per capita consumption expenditure (used as a proxyfor income) [in India] today under the neo-liberal regime!” (Subrahmanian andPrasad 2008, 25). Further, they point out that the scope for trading inequality forgrowth is limited in Kerala (Subrahmanian and Prasad 2008, 29).

Going back to the 1950s, EMS’s “egalitarian developmentalist: vision forKerala4—outlined in such texts as “Onnekaal Kodi Malayalikal” (One and a

4The communist vision of a linguistically united Kerala was driven by not just by the desire to shapea more equitable society; underlying it was also the fear of “backwardness” vis-à-vis the rest of SouthIndia, already evident in the writings of prominent intellectuals such as Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai(1934). Egalitarian developmentalism was projected as addressing both these concerns.




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Half Crore Malayalees)—laid out a limited utopia for the lower castes. Herejected traditional upper-caste imaginings of linguistic unity (Namboodiripad1946a, 176–201) and drew on another mythical past: Mavelinadu, the very antith-esis of the Brahmanical construction of Kerala as Parasuramakshetram—the landcreated by the Brahmin warrior-sage Parasurama. Yet this “tradition” is immedi-ately dismissed as not a real past, but simply a figment of the imagination to beactualized in the future.5 “Mavelinadu … in the twentieth century” was “a newKerala in which equality and freedom reign, in which poverty and unemploymentwill be unknown, will begin to emerge. ThatMavelinadu, which exists only in ourimagination, will become a reality in the twentieth century” (Namboodiripad1946b, 346). Kerala, he felt, was desired by different yet nonconflictinggroups—“depressed classes” (Dalits), “democratic elements,” farmers, migrants,workers, admirers of Kerala’s culture—different, but not in conflict (Namboodir-ipad 1952, 248–52). Imagining Kerala thus masked real conflicts over redistribu-tion and the advantages to powerful communities.

Besides, the very idea of the “self-sacrificing” party worker was changing bythe mid-1940s. In response to widespread discontent over the party’s decision toreduce the number of full-timers in 1944, EMS remarked, “As far as comradesfrom the landowning and capitalist classes are concerned, it may be better thatthey work to create a group within their class who will work for the country’seconomic planning and to improve the people’s standards of living, and todevote their wealth and labour in ways that enhance national pride, ratherthan sell their assets and hand over the sum received to the party” (1944d,252). Nor was the annihilation of caste a necessary condition for entering the ega-litarian developmentalist utopia, as EMS reminded the members of the MalayalaBrahmin community movement, Yogakshemasabha (YKS): “[The early leadersof the YKS] saw that without English education the community would be thelaughing-stock of society—they were willing to sacrifice that amount of brahmin-hood in order to spread English education. In the same way… . Destroy enoughof brahminhood so that each person may be sent to work (destroy it only to thatextent)—this is all I ask” (1944c, 290–92).

However, the possibility of organizing as caste communities to negotiate withthe state was not so easily contained. Many communities in Kerala had fosteredanother sense of “development”—economic growth through wealth creation byenterprising entrepreneurs contributing to the progress of the nation (Raju2002). The Ezhavas and Syrian Christians responded to the economic opening up

5The Brahminical Parasurama myth attributes the origin of Kerala to the axe-wielding Brahminwarrior sage, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Mavelinadu refers to the kingdom of thegreat Asura king Mahabali, whose boundless charity and benevolence made the gods jealous.Under his reign, so goes the folk-song, “all men were alike/there was no falsehood, no cheating,no lying/no danger to anyone.” The Malayalees, it is said, were his subjects. Interestingly, JyotibaPhule used the same “Bali-rajya” (kingdom of Bali) myth in his Dalit utopia in Maharashtra, butput it to very different use (see Omvedt 2008).

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of Travancore in the mid- to late twentieth century, claiming to have become “pro-ductive subjects,” doing their “national duty” (Varghese 2007); but they also madeclaims in the emergent modern political field (Cairo 2001; Jeffrey 2003). In anaddress to the YKS, EMS reflected on the possibility of an “All-Kerala CommunitiesOrganisation” in which all caste communities were represented, which, he felt,“must be taught how to live as a part of this united Kerala; only then will Keralaas a whole attain progress” (Namboodiripad 1944c, 309). He upheld affirmativeaction—quotas to ensure adequate representation of all groups in the govern-ment—yet felt that each community should be taught “not to focus too much onthe struggle for government jobs” (1944c, 312) and that lower-caste demandsmust not exceed the “national interest” (1944c, 313). Community organizations,therefore, must locate themselves away from arenas of political contestation; aftera fair quota systemwas evolved, theymust devote themselves to the shaping of pro-ductive subjects for the egalitarian developmentalist utopia. That no distinction ismade between the resource-rich Syrian Christians, Brahmins, and Nairs; theresource-rich but still stigmatized Ezhavas; and the resource-poor lower castes isimportant.

The blindness to the unequal initial conditions of different communities indi-cates that EMS’s suggestion for unity would contain not so much the powerful com-munities, as the Dalits organizing around demands for economic and politicalequality.6 “Onnekaal Kodi Malayalikal” imagines a “real” Kerala, projected into thefuture, characterized by heavy industrialization and hydel power, scientificallymanaged farms and forests, a rationally deployed labor force, and ample scientificresearch and technical education, identified as shaping the core of “modernMalaya-lee culture” (Namboodiripad 1946a, 346). All communities are assumed to enter andinhabit this utopia equally. Indeed, it is assumed here—and elsewhere, such as inthe policy declaration by the first communist ministry (1957) (Rammohan 1996,271–78)—that the extension of state welfare to Dalits would remedy the lack.

The author of “Onnekaal Kodi Malayalikal” is no traditional Brahmin aristo-crat. To borrow Aditya Nigam’s words, such a self “is modern and in itsself-perception, thoroughly purged of its traditional, caste socialization. Often,it sincerely believes that the best way to be modern is to erase all thought ofcaste and religion from its mind. It is thus the truly liberated self that inlooking beyond the narrow confines of sectarian particularisms, actuallybecomes blind to their continuing salience in a myriad new ways” (2000, 21).

6This does not mean that the communists accepted the presence of powerful community organiza-tions. Indeed, they were identified as the primary hurdle in forging a united, egalitarian develop-mentalist Kerala. When the Congress government declared Onam Kerala’s national festival in 1961,the noted communist R. Sugathan questioned its moral right to do so, accusing the Congress ofspreading community politics among workers: “The Industrial Age has broken the back of caste-consciousness. But some are trying to inject the dangerous violence of community-politics intoworkers’ issues… . This tendency, which undermines national economic development and socialistideologies, must indeed be checked.” (Sugatan 1961, 42).




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Much of the development studies writing on the “Kerala model” shares thisblindness and perpetuates the impression that caste inequalities in Kerala areeither insignificant, or, if it is admitted otherwise, may be resolved throughmore welfare.

THE REPRESSED RETURN: NEW CHALLENGES TO THE LEFT

“Future Kerala” never materialized, and the 1960s were plagued by drought,crop failure, war, food crises, and the decline of Nehruvian national develop-mentalism in India. Throughout the decade, the “Malayalees” emerged in theMalayalam press as a rancorous unity, brought together by a widespread senseof outrage against the Union government’s alleged discriminatory practices(Devika 2008a, 139–69). However, this never grew into full-fledged anti-Indianrhetoric (Devika 2008a, 155). Besides, after the 1970s, both the gains from ega-litarian developmentalism celebrated in the Kerala model and national feelingbegan to feel the pressure of other forces—consumer citizenship fueled by remit-tances from large-scale migration from workers from Kerala to Arabian countries(Osella and Osella 2000) and the critiques of excluded groups (Dietrich andNayak 2002). As the clout of the new resource-rich social groups increasedthrough gains from migration, the protective role of the dominant left towardDalits became increasingly hard to sustain—as the history of the “save ricefield agitations” in Kerala since the 1980s show (Narayanan 2003).

There were, however, efforts to resuscitate the egalitarian developmentalistdream through “decentralizing developmentalism,” by Kerala’s left-orientedPeople’s Science Movement (Zachariah and Sooryamoorthy 1994). Kerala’s widelypublicized experiment at decentralizing development and governance in themid-1990s, which replaced (the unfulfilled) egalitarian developmentalism with“responsibilized” and targeted welfare, was a further effort (Isaac and Franke2000). Some studies of decentralized governance in Kerala have been enthusiasticabout the fact that the People’s PlanningCampaign of 1996 for political decentraliza-tion and local-level planning, though advanced by the left, has also been widelyaccepted by the right-of-center opposition and the bureaucracy (Heller, Harilal,and Chaudhuri 2007). Such enthusiasm is blind to the fact that both the left andits opposition in Kerala have historically been open to the expansion of the state’sinfrastructural power in its different versions—postindependence welfare improve-ments have been demonstrated to be the result of “competitive politics” (Jeffrey2003, 204–7). Indeed, the basic difference has been around the agenda of radicalredistribution of productive resources, which has beenmuted since themillennium.

The transformation of egalitarian developmentalism has been an importantcondition for the emergence of new and militant political subjectivities. Rallyingagainst the un- or redoing of the radical agenda of land redistribution, theirprotest actions have ranged from long-drawn picketing of central areas in the

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state capital to large-scale “encroachment” of government land, such asthe struggles initiated by the Adivasi Gotra Sabha (Bijoy and Raman 2003) in2001, and the ongoing Dalit-tribal land struggle at Chengara under the Dalitorganization Sadhujana Vimochana Munnani (Kapikad 2008). The CPM, cur-rently in power, has responded with promises of land redistribution to Dalitand tribal people, most of which remain unfulfilled or unsatisfactory (Janu2005). However, the revival of the question of caste in Kerala’s politics isindeed palpable in the CPM’s efforts to retake lost ground through the DalitCongress held at Kochi in Kerala in August 2008 (Pattomkary 2008).

To argue thus is to go against the grain of the very visible body of writing bydevelopment studies scholars on social development and political decentralizationin Kerala, which reads existing inequalities between social groups as either inciden-tal or indicative of an unfinished agenda—or as made bearable by the presentminimum entitlement dispensation (e.g., Heller, Harilal, and Chaudhuri 2007).The effort here has been to open up a critique, laying out the manner in whichthe exclusion of Dalits was not an accident in the history of left politics and devel-opmentalism in Kerala, but was connected to political strategy advantageous tothe largely upper- or middle-caste elite. This, I believe, opens up at least threefurther leads. The first has to do with the continuities and discontinuitiesbetween the communists and earlier reformisms. I argue that (1) the communistresolution of the caste question was very different from the earlier Dalit anticastestruggles, and (2) the techniques of shaping subjects in communist anticaste cam-paigns were the same as those deployed to shape the “new woman” in elitist com-munity reformisms. The second is about the difference between the Gandhianresolution of the caste question, and that of the communists in Kerala. Much ofthe writing discussed in this article hints that the difference may not amount tomuch. This offers an opportunity to critically rethink the claims to exceptionalismfrequently encountered in scholarship on Kerala, and to trace the pan-Indian pro-cesses at work in the “secularization of caste.” Third, diverse processes that reposi-tionedKerala within global currents—of consumer citizenship and global civil socialmovements—deserve much greater attention in histories of the rise and waning ofKerala’s communist egalitarian developmentalism. This gestures toward the impor-tance of current critiques of “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2000, 20) inforging fresh understandings of the shaping of regional futures. These, of course,make for a broader interdisciplinary research agenda, one that would pull againstthe currently dominant development studies research on Kerala, tied as it is toindicator-based research that renders too many inequalities invisible.

Acknowledgments

My deep thanks to all the referees of this paper for their truly insightful comments.I also thank Luisa Steur for her stimulating response.




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820 J. Devika



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