Caste and Kerala

Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in
Kerala State, India

Author(s): J. DEVIKA
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 69, No. 3 (AUGUST 2010), pp. 799-820
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
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The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 69, No. 3 (August) 2010: 799-820.
© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2010 doi:10.1017/S0021911810001506
Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist

Mobilization, and the Question of Caste
in Kerala State, India
J. DEVIKA
The article critiques the "Kerala model," which holds up Kerala State, India, as a
model that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of its
remarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala has
often claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as a
model for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired the
status of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced marginalized people in
Kerala, particularly the lower-caste Dalits and tribais, to a state of abjection.
The present effort seeks to show how the marginalization of these social
groups and their confinement to governmental categories was not a historical
accident, but the effect of political strategies on the left that led to their exclusion
from productive resources, and of the assertion of upper-caste agency in left-led
anticaste struggle.
State in southwestern India was formed in 1956, uniting the three

Malayalam- speaking regions - British Malabar and the princely states of
Travancore and Cochin. Until the 1970s, Kerala was regarded as one of the
most "backward" and politically turbulent parts of India. However, development
research in the 1970s found that it presented a "paradox," challenging established
development wisdom about economic growth and social development (CDS/UN
1977). Kerala combined very low levels of economic development with high
levels 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 strength
of the communist movement in Kerala - when the communists were elected
to power in the Kerala State in 1957, soon after the state s formation, it made
headlines 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 replicable
model of social democracy in the third world has accumulated; much of the credit
J. Devika (devika@cds.ac.in) is Associate Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala, India.
800 J. Devika
for this has accrued to communist politics and public policy (for an overview, see
Jeffrey 2003; Parayil 2000). Not surprisingly, "Kerala," as it is constructed in these
writings, mirrors the conceptual shifts within social democratic discourse in the
West since the 1970s, especially the increasing proximity to liberal positions,
and the shift from the "social" to the "community." Thus, Kerala has appeared
to 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, focusing
on caste and gender exclusions.1 While the social democratic construction of
Kerala 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) and
coastal and tribal communities, and works against their struggle for resources and
citizenship, heightened in the present. Briefly put, this article opens up to critical
scrutiny an idea that is often repeated in the laudatory literature on the "Kerala
model" - that caste and gender exclusions represent the "incomplete agenda" of
Keralas social democracy.
Welfarism in Kerala certainly is older than radical politics. It has been argued
that the progressive interventions of the state in Travancore and Cochin since the
nineteenth century - that is, the expansion of "infrastructural state power" (Mann
2003) - represent an important historical context in which Keralas unique post-
independence welfarist state policies may be understood (Desai 2005). National
pride came to be associated with "development" in these contexts by the mid-
twentieth century, evident in the early interactions of newly formed political
units (such as the unit formed through the amalgamation of the princely states
of Travancore and Cochin) with the Union government at the time of Indian
independence. For instance, such self-projection was evident in the protests
made by legislators in the Travancore-Cochin Legislative Assembly against the
Union governments alleged discrimination in food subsidies to Travancore-
Cochin in 1951 (Proceedings of the Travancore-Cochin Legislative Assembly
1951, 1623).
Though such pride took a beating in the later decades, with Kerala earning
the opprobrious epithet of "problem state" (Singh 1959), by the 1970s, the
association between development gains and national pride had waxed,
lrThe feminist critique of the "Kerala Model" has gained considerable visibility in academic circles
(Devika 2008a; Eapen and Kodoth 2003; Mukhopadhyay 2007; Saradamoni 1996). Dalit critiques
are powerfully articulated in Malayalam, the major language spoken in Kerala (Baburaj 2008; Raj
2003), 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-class
women from "communist families" make up the women's mass organizations of the left, especially
the All-India Democratic Women's Association, which is affiliated with Keralas most powerful
communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which subscribes to a strikingly
limited conception of "women's liberation," centered on sexual self-discipline and responsibilities
toward community and family (Erwer 2003).
Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization 801
strengthened by a further claim of social development through the equitable

redistribution of resources and extension of public services. In other words,
Kerala's developmentalism seemed to be of a different color. Here, strong
early anticaste movements and the communists' extension of these egalitarian
political thrusts seem to have led to social democratization, finally harnessing
developmentalism to egalitarian political goals, creating wide-ranging welfare
measures guaranteed by the state and by the strength of an active left (Franke
1993; Heller 1996; Jeffrey 2003; Ramachandran 1997). From being the
"problem state," Kerala became the "model" for third-world development, and
competing notions of Kerala's exceptionalism, notably those based on matriliny
and communist mass politics, were progressively absorbed into narratives of
Kerala's unique social development. It was noticed, even in the 1970s, that "ega-
litarian developmentalism" had left out many sections of people (Sivanandan
1976); a fuller critique of such exclusion was forthcoming only in the late
1980s and thereafter. Within Kerala, communists have claimed the major share
of credit for progressive state policy and politics; the "Kerala model" literature
reiterates the claim in international arenas.
The communists also claimed the moral authority to speak for Kerala's
linguistic unity and national identity. In Malabar in the 1930s, the socialists in
the Indian National Congress - the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), who later
formed the communist party in Kerala - "represented a local reaction against
national identity, in view of the subordination of local politics to the exigencies
of the national party" (Menon 1994, 120). The national Congress leaders' abhor-
rence of "communal demands" and their reluctance to intervene in the princely
states contrasted sharply with the CSP activists' eagerness to intervene in political
and labor struggles in Travancore and Cochin (Desai 2002; Rangaswamy 1981,
136-37, 190-91). It is hardly surprising that communists could claim to be the
true champions of unity of the Malayalam-speaking areas (Gopalan 1976). It
was from this position of political advantage that they dismissed the Cochin
maharajah'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 political
successes: the communist extension of anticaste struggles (e.g., Desai 2001),
and their hegemonization of the movement for linguistic unity among
Malayalam-speaking regions. However, both recent struggles over land by
tribal and Dalit people, and research (Deshpande 2000; Kurien 1995; Lindberg
2001) reveal that caste inequalities continue to be rampant here. Indeed, such
coupled statements as "the upper-caste landlords, who once ruled with absolute
social and economic authority over Kerala have disappeared as a social class, and
the caste system, though still an important source of identity and social life, no
longer mirrors political and economic power hierarchies" (Heller 2006, 66)
need to be heavily qualified, precisely because they assume too much, for the
802 J. Devika
"disappearance of the landlord class" is not the same as the disappearance of caste
as an axis of political power in modern Kerala. Such statements consign the
recent major land struggles by Dalit and tribal people in Kerala to the realm
of "identity and social life/'
The disappearance of traditional caste practices from the public cannot be
treated as evidence of the extinction of caste culture. "Secularized casteism" is
a 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's
dominant left party conducted the traditional adicchutali - an upper-caste
"pollution-cleansing ritual" - against alleged sexual indiscipline in a protest
event supporting the Dalit land struggle at Chengara (Devika 2008b). Again, a
rise 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. The
postmillennium subaltern struggles in Kerala reveal both the intolerance of the
dominant left to the subaltern assertions of group interests, and their insistence
on treating the latter as passive (responsibilized) welfare-receiving governmental
categories. Perhaps the tension between subaltern group identities and the will to
reduce them to governmental categories may be understood in terms of the
complex relation between liberalism and biopolitics: as Mitchell Dean remarks,
"At one level, liberalism is a version of bio-politics; at another, it exists in a
kind 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 of
the dominant left's assimilation of the subaltern in Kerala. This, however, is a
larger 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 struggles
by 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 critical
examination of the writings of E. M. S. Namboodiripad - who not only is recog-
nized as the undisputed leader and theoretician of the communist movement in
Kerala (and in India), but also was the chief minister in Kerala's first communist
ministry of 1957. (Namboodiripad is referred to hereafter as EMS.) Given that
the issues opened up by the themes I have chosen to discuss are both numerous
and complex, the foregoing strategy of focusing on the writing of one, if highly
influential, communist may be useful only to that extent. EMS's writings
unfolded in a period in which upper-caste ideas, practices, and institutions
were 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 to
provide a full account of these processes. However, the trajectory of EMS's
writings followed here does give some intimation about the same.
Recasting Caste through the Self-Sacrificing Communist
The literature on the "Kerala model" highlights two specific ways in which
postindependence state policy has addressed the Dalits: first, they have benef
from the remarkable extension of public services, which has improved th
access to health care and education; second, the Kerala Land Reforms Ac
(1969) provided the largely Dalit landless laborers with minimal amounts
land for housing and domestic consumption (Krishnaji 2007; Ramakum
2006). From the Dalit perspective, these may appear to be two sides
single exclusionary strategy, in which their exclusion from the radical redistri
tion agenda was "balanced" by the extension of the state s infrastructural pow
oriented toward bettering social development.
The provision of housing land concealed the denial of land as a product
resource to Dalits, despite the fact that pre-land reform agricultural cens
had revealed them to be the actual tillers; peasants who employed family labo
alone in their farming were few, but the tenants gained the major share of p
ductive land through Kerala's land reforms in the early 1970s (Krishnaji 2007)
The Kerala Agricultural Workers' Act of 1974 improved working conditio
and ensured better wages and welfare benefits. However, over the years,
decline in agriculture, the successful conversion of farm land to real estate b
the new owners (Narayanan 2003), and the stagnation of wages (although
wages increased in the late 1970s) has deepened their exclusion (Isaac and Moha
nakumar 1991). Some have argued that with the provision of housing plots, Dal
"were able to bargain better for wages, for a public distribution system,
better school education and health care" (Tharakan 2002, 358). However, t
same author admits that while absolute wretchedness has been prevented, thi
has not enabled Dalits to compete on equal terms with the better-off gro
(Tharakan 2002, 359). It has also been observed that the fruits of militant
successful leftist trade unionism have often been reaped better by the up
castes (Pillai 1992). Nor does it seem to have brought many Dalits into the lead
ship of the left parties (Oommen 1985, 165-66). However, the extension
welfare and public services was crucial in preventing a worse scenario, eviden
if one considers the plight of tribal people in Kerala, who lost land to settlers
from the plains supported by both left and centrist parties (Oommen 19
and for whom the extension of state infrastructure was less effective.
In sum, it appears that while left politics and public policy have tackled tr
ditional forms of caste oppression and eliminated absolute deprivation among
Dalits, the caste divide has been recast in strikingly modern terms. In the 197
the militant left labor unions began to include specific demands for greater e
cational and training facilities, more employment, and better infrastructure
housing for Dalit people (Oommen 1985, 235-36); it is these unions that sp
headed the "land grab" and "excess land" agitations of the early 1970s, wh
aimed at identifying surplus land. But they have not demanded land as
804 J. Devika
productive resource (Oommen 1985, 235). This was pointed out early enough by
economist P. Sivanandan, who termed the extension of state infrastructural
power "protection policy," arguing that this did not ameliorate the condition of
the 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 poor
background" (1976, 4).
It is important to recognize that this left anticaste strategy was not the result
of the stalling of the progressive agenda by rightist forces after Indian indepen-
dence, as some Kerala model theorists claim; it had already crystallized early
in the history of communist mobilization. Writing in 1937 about "peasants in
Malabar," EMS advanced three arguments to justify different organizational
strategies and political goals for "peasants" and the largely Dalit "landless
laborers": first, the latter were a "large section of people," but they do not
belong within the term "peasant" as it is used in Malayalam. Second, they take
on not just agricultural labor but any other form of work that is available, and
so are closer to the urban workers. Third and most important, "there is the possi-
bility of disputes arising, even, between farmers and agricultural labourers. So
bringing them under the same organization may create weakness within" (Nam-
boodiripad 1937, 221). However, attacking traditional caste oppression was
important. As early as 1935, EMS wrote about "laborers" in Malabar, admitting
that they were the single largest group within the agrarian population (43
percent), and outlining a three-pronged anticaste strategy - eradication of all
severe, public forms of caste discrimination; extension of the state infrastructure
for modern schooling and health care to Dalits; and the transformation of Dalits
into a modern working class through regularization of wages and the ending of
feudal labor (Namboodiripad 1935, 206-7). The central agent of such transform-
ation was to be undoubtedly the (largely upper-caste) communist leader. Caste
oppression was to be ended, but that did not entail recognizing the landless
tillers claim to land, similar to the peasants. This was in sharp contrast with
early twentieth-century Dalit leaders such as Ayyan Kali in Travancore, who
demanded both agricultural land and modern education (Oommen 1985, 64),
and the anticaste reformer Sree Narayana Guru, who advised Dalit people to
engage in the "acquisition of both knowledge and wealth" to escape their
plight (Bhaskaran 2000, 30).
The communists' attempted resolution of the caste question also departed
from the early twentieth-century anticaste perspectives in other ways. It is impor-
tant to read these proposals alongside the specific sorts of power relations within
which anticaste struggles were conceived by communists. Indeed, they share a
remarkable resemblance with other early twentieth-century reform proposals
circulating in Kerala, such as those that aimed at women (Devika 2007). In
such projects, women were to be freed from traditional patriarchal oppression
and thoroughly modernized. However, the agents of such effort were to be
reformist men, who, it was suggested, possessed true insight into the past and the
present of the community, and the capability to shape the future. This necessi-
tated and authorized nonreciprocal and nonreversible didactic ties and relations
of power between the reformer man and the woman he was to reform. These
formed the core of modern patriarchy in Kerala (Awaya 1996; Devika 2007; Lind-
berg 2001; Velayudhan 1999). Full agency can be conceded to the woman, it
seemed, only after she had undergone significant self-transformation; until
then, she was to be under the reformer man's tutelage. Rendering the oppressed
passive, I argue, was a technique of wider significance in Kerala; closely following
the 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 by
contrasting him (mostly conceived as male) with the educated and better-off lea-
dership of contemporary anticaste movements, which were negotiating with the
states 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 of
the 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 undertaken
by 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 poor
that they "are not divided by differences of community" (Namboodiripad
1936, 94). The CSP worker, here, is the exact counterpart of the reformer
man, 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-vis
other selves deemed undesirable - for instance, the modern self defined by
consumption (Namboodiripad 1943, 300).
The widely documented, numerous instances of such self-sacrifice by largely
upper-caste leaders (Desai 2002; Kannan 1988; Lindberg 2001; Menon 1994)
brought considerable political gains to the communists. Precisely because
demeaning caste practices were so closely entangled with feudal hierarchy in
Kerala, struggle against the latter was well-nigh impossible to conceive without
struggle against the former. Manali Desai notes that "had the CSP not employed
political practices that linked caste oppression to the system of landlordism, it
would 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 all
regions (see Omvedt 1994, 182-83).
806 J. Devika
(2002, 642). The end of demeaning caste practices certainly produced a new self
that 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 the
people (e.g., Mankekar 1965). Several accounts may be found of how individuals
rose from the lowest social positions to mount powerful political challenges to the
traditional order - for instance, A. K. Gopalan s account of Alora Krishnan, a
servant in a Malabar landlords house, who acquired literacy through the night-
school run by the peasant movement, and who could write poetry and make
speeches (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 been
subjected, in the very same move, to more modern, if no less insidious, less
visible, forms of patriarchal control (Devika 2007).
However, if we are to understand the persistence of caste inequality in
Kerala, we need to acknowledge that these political processes also produced
new 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 all
of 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 fully
renounce caste privilege, and continued to use it strategically, is also important
(Menon 1994). The indisputable success of the left in breaking down traditional
caste practices in Kerala also brought into being a new form of caste power, based
on the largely upper-caste communist leader s exercise of pastoral power on the
lower castes, working through a "moral right" to transform the latter into caste-
neutral "working-class poor." Innumerable instances of upper-caste leaders
adopting techniques that resembled Gandhian practices centered on upper-caste
agency have been cited in histories, memoirs, autobiographies, and other texts
documenting communist peasant and worker struggles in Kerala. A telling
instance is found in the autobiography of the communist writer and activist Cher-
ukad Govinda Pisharady, in which he recounts relief work by communist activists
in a Dalit settlement near Perintalmanna in Malabar. The intense contrast
between the active, self-sacrificing communist activists, and the helpless,
wailing, victimized Dalits ("hapless human creatures") informs the entire
account; it concludes with the Dalit elder accepting rice from the leader of the
relief worker group, declaring, "Master, you are God our Creator" (Pisharady
1974, 430).
Interdining was actively promoted by communists all over Kerala. For
instance, in Malabar, the celebrated communist leader K. A. Keraleeyan
instructed organizers to accept rice gruel from lower-caste households, instead
of the tender coconut ordinarily offered to upper-caste visitors (Kunhikrishnan
1996, 55). A few prominent upper-caste leaders abandoned their caste
names and took others that indicated their status as patriots - prominently,
V. M. Vishnu Bharateeyan (Vishnu the Indian) and K. A. Keraleeyan (the native

of Kerala) (Jeffrey 2003, 133-34). However, Bharateeyan did not abandon upper-
caste cultural capital, continuing to work in a temple, wearing upper-caste
symbols, and chanting from sacred texts - these were used to "win adherents
for peasant organisations" (Jeffrey 2003, 134). Recent Dalit scholarship criticizes
the ambiguous effects of such practices - interdining, it is pointed out, did not
unsettle any enduring inequality, nor did they prevent Dalits from becoming
cheap 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 unionized
cashew industry, even in the 1990s - Dalits continued to perform the lowliest
and lowest paid work. The workers she interviewed read the free intermingling
and interdining practiced by upper-caste communist leaders as evidence of
their anticaste commitments. However, "their efforts seem to have been
restricted to mobilizing workers of different castes into trade unions for joint
action against the factory owners, and failed to address the caste division of
labour ... Thus, caste barriers were only broken on particular occasions in
order to fight against capital, but less so in daily life" (Lindberg 2001, 161).
Besides, many aspects, "like the caste division of labour and endogamous
marriages, were left unchallenged and unchanged" (Lindberg 2001, 161-63).
Here is a clear parallel with the communist strategy of instrumentalizing
anticaste struggles to the mobilization of the "agrarian poor": attacking those
aspects of caste that may be obstructive to class formation, leaving untouched
"sensitive" internal hierarchies in mobilization (such as that between tenant
and 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 groups
for acquiring presence in the emergent political field in early twentieth-
century Kerala was to build modern community organizations that would
then negotiate with the state(s) for resources. This strategy was followed by
all 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, lack
of economic resources was a major hurdle in the path of the lower-caste
groups aspiring to successful modern community formation (Zacharias and
Devika 2006).
The left anticaste discourse condemned such a strategy for Dalits as though it
were rendered redundant by the communists' "moral struggle" against caste.
Indeed, in 1937, the twelfth annual conference of the powerful leftist trade
union the Travancore Labour Association passed a resolution that lumped "com-
munity and religious associations" together, argued that they "concealed the real
unity of interests of the public," and urged workers to resign from all such
808 J. Devika
organizations (Cheriyan 1999, 537-38). The question of Dalit economic

deprivation was to be "resolved," but first through anticaste struggles driven by
upper-caste political agency, and next through the extension of public services
to Dalits. This strategy ensured that Dalits would stay at the fringes of communist
political organization in Kerala, both literally and figuratively. However, the mili-
tancy of the 1950s and 1960s ensured that state welfare was rarely perceived as
the 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 masked
the 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, they
retained their caste alliances to the extent that endogamy and other practices
that were crucial to the reproduction of caste differences remained largely
untouched, despite much-publicized intercaste marriages in the upper echelons
of the communist party (Lindberg 2001). The new forms of social and cultural
alternatives that communists sought to produce were by no means unambigu-
ously oppositional. Oommen notes the same for the different caste components
of 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, in
the highly radicalized Alappuzha district (Oommen 1985, 157). (After the
communists split in the mid-1960s into the Communist Party of India and the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), the latter came to control the larger part
of the mass organizations, including the agricultural workers' union.)
Of course, the communists did work actively to set up institutions that
offered alternate, modern social values and cultural forms that challenged
traditional forms - especially village libraries and youth associations, in which
mostly young men developed critical skills that could be deployed against the
feudal 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 and
society was not an issue high on the agenda was clear from EMS's new directions
to party members regarding the conduct of everyday life after the legalization of
the Communist Party (1942). He remarked that the oppositional lifestyles
of communists made them appear as "strange creatures to others." He argued
that they must become ordinary folk, leading regular social and family lives -
comrades who were fond of (upper-caste) temple festivals, events, and elite art
forms ought not to be ashamed, as "we are in a position to initiate a renaissance
in literature, music, and all the other arts" (Namboodiripad 1944a, 176-77). This
exhortation advises peace, not confrontation, with the emergent upper-caste
hegemonized civil society in Kerala. This claim, which sounds quite neutral,
should, however, be read alongside his reinstitution of Brahmanical high
culture as the unifying ground for United Kerala, in his historical work Kerala
Malayalikalute Mathrubhumi (1948), which sought out unities within the (very
vocally expressed) differences in Malayalee society (Menon 1999). This work was
severely criticized by leftist fellow traveler Joseph Mundassery (who found it
extolling "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 the
basis 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 art
forms of other (non-Hindu) communities were derived from this Brahmanical
"core" of styles and techniques (Namboodiripad 1967, 47). However, Keralattinte
Desheeya Prsanam (1952) offered a teleological explanation of the origin of caste
drawing on not traditional texts, but thoroughly modern methods of justification
and 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 of
subalterns, in imagining the egalitarian developmentalist subnationality of
Kerala (Menon 2002).
In other words, EMS s writings, and the communist anticaste strategy in
general, sought to reinstate caste in thoroughly modern terms. Even as traditional
caste servitude was challenged, upper-caste culture and social norms were not
only largely spared, but actually reclaimed as the "unifying core" of Kerala's
national culture. Indeed, the times during which EMS was instructing cadre to
live "normally" were interesting for attempts by communists to move away
from traditional and bourgeois domesticity through communes, rejection of
"normal" householder aspirations, devotion to public life, and the reconstitution
of domestic and conjugal ideals, as the autobiographies of several communist
leaders 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 power
relations built around the exercise of pastoral power, on arguments derived
from modern anthropology, on "pragmatic politics" - alerts us to the "seculariza-
tion of caste," which contemporary anticaste writing in India identifies as a major
means of perpetuating caste inequalities within Indian modernities (Nigam 2000;
Pandian 2002). Indeed, it appears that Kerala is no exception to this general
trend. It is important to emphasize this when we consider the manner in
which mid-twentieth-century leftist egalitarian developmentalism structured by
the 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 (Namboodiripad
1981, 12-25).
810 J. Devika
A People United in Development
Dilip Menon (2002) identifies three transformative events in the 1950 (after
the period of radical insurrection in the 1940s) that affected communism in
Kerala: the communists' acceptance of parliamentary politics, the formation of
the state of Kerala (1956), and the election of the first communist ministry in
Kerala, led by EMS (1957). Together, these events intimated a shift of communist
strategy from radical political mobilization to "egalitarian developmentalism" -
the possibilities of which have already been hinted at here (Namboodiripad
1944b, 137-38). However, the contours of the egalitarian developmentalist
utopia had already emerged in the 1940s in EMSs writings. In this section,
I examine the manner in which he proposed to integrate different social
groups - the Dalits, the Brahmins, and the powerful caste community organiz-
ations - in his vision of "real" Kerala.
Manali Desai remarks that Keralas postindependence welfare state needs to be
viewed within the history of the penetration of state power into civil society (2001,
481). In south Kerala, this was particularly far-reaching, especially with the expansion
of literacy. The coming to power of the communists in Kerala in 1957 sutured leftist
radical redistribution to the expansion of the state s infrastructural power. I argue that
a clear distinction may be made between the radical redistributive agenda and the
extension of the infrastructural power of the state, especially given that the latter
seem to be directed more consistently at people denied productive resources. In
the mid-twentieth century, the extension of the infrastructural state expanded citi-
zenship by improving access to new capabilities through education and health
care; the redistributive agenda was actualized through the land reforms of the
early 1970s. Those who gained from these - the upper and intermediate castes -
have become Keralas thriving new elite, now enabled to convert these capabilities
into "desired functionings," in Amartya Sens terminology. In contrast, for the
Dalits and tribais, deprived as they were of productive assets, and denied those in
the 1970s, the expansion of state infrastructure had different implications. They
stayed at the fringes of the communist organizational structure - in trade union
memberships - even in the militant 1970s. The militant struggle for land reforms
in the early 1970s brought them minimal gains in housing plots. The famous militant
"land grab" agitations by landless laborers ( 1972) identified surplus land for the state,
but no direct occupation took place (Krishnaji 2007, 2173). T. K. Oommen notes that
even 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 or
less, to traditional caste hierarchies (Oommen 1985, 165-66). He writes about the
history of the first agricultural labor union organized by the communists in Alap-
puzha, in which the "superior castes" concentrated on the more prestigious party
work, 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 of
inferior groups" (Oommen 1985, 163-64).
Certainly, homestead land, minimum wage legislation, the public distribution

system, and welfare boards reduced poverty in Kerala (Ramakumar 2006). Yet
developments since then have ensured the confinement of Dalits to welfare
recipient 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, a
development that the left could hardly stem (Narayanan 2003); they were unable to
compete with the upper castes, who held higher stocks of cultural capital. Indeed, it
has been argued that the disproportionately large contribution of Dalit agricultural
laborers to Kerala's remarkable fertility transition of the 1970s was not so much the
result of social development, as an effect of the increased dependence on wage labor
in a stagnant economy (Basu 1986). In the mid-1990s, "responsibilized" and targeted
welfare began to replace welfare as the "peoples right" to basic needs, which
changed the political status of the welfare recipient. Finally, with the devastating
impact of globalization on agriculture, Kerala's heavy dependence on the global
job market for employment, and the alarming increase in inequality levels within
Kerala, such "thin citizenship" is proving all the more flimsy (Mohanakumar 2008;
Noronha 2006). Interestingly, recent efforts to alleviate agrarian distress in Kerala
have bypassed agricultural laborers, while social security expected from the Agricul-
tural Workers' Welfare Fund Board has been minimal (Mohanakumar 2008).
Thus, Dalits and tribais continue to remain deprived as a group, even though
poverty levels have declined remarkably in Kerala (Subrahmanian and Prasad
2008, 27). Examining the occupational ranking among various castes in Kerala in
1976, Sivanandan observed that "the lower a community is treated in the social
order, the more inferior and less remunerative are the occupations it can chose
from" (1976, 10-12). More recently, calculations based on National Sample
Survey Organization data for 1993-94 revealed that "even in a relatively egalitarian
state like Kerala, inter-caste disparities continue to underlie overall disparity." Also,
within-group disparity is comparatively lower among Dalit and tribal populations in
Kerala: "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 the
1990s, these scholars remark that "it is rather surprising that given the historical back-
ground of progressive policies and concerns for distributive justice, Kerala state has
the highest level of inequality in per capita consumption expenditure (used as a proxy
for income) [in India] today under the neo-liberal regime!" (Subrahmanian and
Prasad 2008, 25). Further, they point out that the scope for trading inequality for
growth is limited in Kerala (Subrahmanian and Prasad 2008, 29).
Going back to the 1950s, EMS's "egalitarian developmentalist: vision for
Kerala4 - 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 shape
a more equitable society; underlying it was also the fear of "backwardness" vis-à-vis the rest of South
India, already evident in the writings of prominent intellectuals such as Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai
(1934). Egalitarian developmentalism was projected as addressing both these concerns.
812 J. Devika
Half Crore Malayalees) - laid out a limited utopia for the lower castes. He
rejected traditional upper-caste imaginings of linguistic unity (Namboodiripad
1946a, 176-201) and drew on another mythical past: Mavelinadu, the very antith-
esis of the Brahmanical construction of Kerala as Parasuramakshetram - the land
created 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 be
actualized in the future.5 "Mavelinadu ... in the twentieth century" was "a new
Kerala in which equality and freedom reign, in which poverty and unemployment
will be unknown, will begin to emerge. That Mavelinadu, which exists only in our
imagination, will become a reality in the twentieth century" (Namboodiripad
1946b, 346). Kerala, he felt, was desired by different yet nonconflicting
groups - "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 by
the mid-1940s. In response to widespread discontent over the party s decision to
reduce the number of full-timers in 1944, EMS remarked, "As far as comrades
from the landowning and capitalist classes are concerned, it may be better that
they work to create a group within their class who will work for the country's
economic planning and to improve the people s standards of living, and to
devote their wealth and labour in ways that enhance national pride, rather
than 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 Malayala
Brahmin community movement, Yogakshemasabha (YKS): "[The early leaders
of the YKS] saw that without English education the community would be the
laughing-stock of society - they were willing to sacrifice that amount of brahmin-
hood in order to spread English education. In the same way. . . . Destroy enough
of brahminhood so that each person may be sent to work (destroy it only to that
extent)- this is all I ask" (1944c, 290-92).
However, the possibility of organizing as caste communities to negotiate with
the state was not so easily contained. Many communities in Kerala had fostered
another sense of "development" - economic growth through wealth creation by
enterprising entrepreneurs contributing to the progress of the nation (Raju
2002). The Ezhavas and Syrian Christians responded to the economic opening up
^he Brahminical Parasurama myth attributes the origin of Kerala to the axe-wielding Brahmin
warrior sage, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Mavelinadu refers to the kingdom of the
great 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, Jyotiba
Phule used the same "Bali-rajya" (kingdom of Bali) myth in his Dalit utopia in Maharashtra, but
put it to very different use (see Omvedt 2008).
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 made
claims in the emergent modern political field (Cairo 2001; Jeffrey 2003). In an
address to the YKS, EMS reflected on the possibility of an "All-Kerala Communities
Organisation" 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 Kerala
as a whole attain progress" (Namboodiripad 1944c, 309). He upheld affirmative
action - 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 on
the struggle for government jobs" (1944c, 312) and that lower-caste demands
must not exceed the "national interest" (1944c, 313). Community organizations,
therefore, must locate themselves away from arenas of political contestation; after
a fair quota system was evolved, they must devote themselves to the shaping of pro-
ductive subjects for the egalitarian developmentalist utopia. That no distinction is
made between the resource-rich Syrian Christians, Brahmins, and Nairs; the
resource-rich but still stigmatized Ezhavas; and the resource-poor lower castes is
important.
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 political
equality.6 "Onnekaal Kodi Malayalikal" imagines a "real" Kerala, projected into the
future, characterized by heavy industrialization and hydel power, scientifically
managed farms and forests, a rationally deployed labor force, and ample scientific
research and technical education, identified as shaping the core of "modern Malaya-
lee culture" (Namboodiripad 1946a, 346). All communities are assumed to enter and
inhabit this utopia equally. Indeed, it is assumed here - and elsewhere, such as in
the 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 Nigams words, such a self "is modern and in its
self-perception, thoroughly purged of its traditional, caste socialization. Often,
it sincerely believes that the best way to be modern is to erase all thought of
caste and religion from its mind. It is thus the truly liberated self that in
looking beyond the narrow confines of sectarian particularisms, actually
becomes blind to their continuing salience in a myriad new ways" (2000, 21).
This 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 of
spreading 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 into
workers' issues. . . . This tendency, which undermines national economic development and socialist
ideologies, must indeed be checked." (Sugatan 1961, 42).
814 J. Devika
Much of the development studies writing on the "Kerala model" shares this
blindness and perpetuates the impression that caste inequalities in Kerala are
either insignificant, or, if it is admitted otherwise, may be resolved through
more welfare.
The Repressed Return: New Challenges to the Left
"Future Kerala" never materialized, and the 1960s were plagued by drough
crop failure, war, food crises, and the decline of Nehruvian national deve
mentalism in India. Throughout the decade, the "Malayalees" emerged in
Malayalam press as a rancorous unity, brought together by a widespread sen
of outrage against the Union governments alleged discriminatory practi
(Devika 2008a, 139-69). However, this never grew into full-fledged anti-India
rhetoric (Devika 2008a, 155). Besides, after the 1970s, both the gains from eg
litarian developmentalism celebrated in the Kerala model and national fee
began to feel the pressure of other forces - consumer citizenship fueled by re
tances from large-scale migration from workers from Kerala to Arabian coun
(Osella and Osella 2000) and the critiques of excluded groups (Dietrich a
Nayak 2002). As the clout of the new resource-rich social groups incre
through gains from migration, the protective role of the dominant left tow
Dalits became increasingly hard to sustain - as the history of the "save
field agitations" in Kerala since the 1980s show (Narayanan 2003).
There were, however, efforts to resuscitate the egalitarian developmental
dream through "decentralizing developmentalism," by Keralas left-orien
Peoples Science Movement (Zachariah and Sooryamoorthy 1994). Keralas widel
publicized experiment at decentralizing development and governance in
mid-1990s, which replaced (the unfulfilled) egalitarian developmentalism wit
"responsibilized" and targeted welfare, was a further effort (Isaac and Fr
2000). Some studies of decentralized governance in Kerala have been enthusia
about the fact that the People s Planning Campaign of 1996 for political decentraliz
tion and local-level planning, though advanced by the left, has also been wid
accepted by the right-of-center opposition and the bureaucracy (Heller, Hari
and Chaudhuri 2007). Such enthusiasm is blind to the fact that both the left
its opposition in Kerala have historically been open to the expansion of the sta
infrastructural power in its different versions - postindependence welfare imp
ments have been demonstrated to be the result of "competitive politics" (Jeff
2003, 204-7). Indeed, the basic difference has been around the agenda of radi
redistribution of productive resources, which has been muted since the millenn
The transformation of egalitarian developmentalism has been an importa
condition for the emergence of new and militant political subjectivities. Rally
against the un- or redoing of the radical agenda of land redistribution, t
protest actions have ranged from long-drawn picketing of central areas in t
state capital to large-scale "encroachment" of government land, such as

the struggles initiated by the Adivasi Gotra Sabha (Bijoy and Raman 2003) in
2001, and the ongoing Dalit-tribal land struggle at Chengara under the Dalit
organization Sadhujana Vimochana Munnani (Kapikad 2008). The CPM, cur-
rently in power, has responded with promises of land redistribution to Dalit
and tribal people, most of which remain unfulfilled or unsatisfactory (Janu
2005). However, the revival of the question of caste in Kerala's politics is
indeed palpable in the CPM s efforts to retake lost ground through the Dalit
Congress 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 by
development studies scholars on social development and political decentralization
in Kerala, which reads existing inequalities between social groups as either inciden-
tal or indicative of an unfinished agenda - or as made bearable by the present
minimum entitlement dispensation (e.g., Heller, Harilal, and Chaudhuri 2007).
The effort here has been to open up a critique, laying out the manner in which
the 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 to
the largely upper- or middle-caste elite. This, I believe, opens up at least three
further leads. The first has to do with the continuities and discontinuities
between the communists and earlier reformisms. I argue that (1) the communist
resolution of the caste question was very different from the earlier Dalit anticaste
struggles, 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 Gandhian
resolution of the caste question, and that of the communists in Kerala. Much of
the writing discussed in this article hints that the difference may not amount to
much. This offers an opportunity to critically rethink the claims to exceptionalism
frequently 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-
tioned Kerala within global currents - of consumer citizenship and global civil social
movements - deserve much greater attention in histories of the rise and waning of
Kerala's communist egalitarian developmentalism. This gestures toward the impor-
tance of current critiques of "methodological nationalism" (Beck 2000, 20) in
forging fresh understandings of the shaping of regional futures. These, of course,
make for a broader interdisciplinary research agenda, one that would pull against
the currently dominant development studies research on Kerala, tied as it is to
indicator-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.
816 J. Devika
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Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in

Kerala State, India

Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist

State in southwestern India was formed in 1956, uniting the three

strengthened by a further claim of social development through the equitable

Recasting Caste through the Self-Sacrificing Communist

V. M. Vishnu Bharateeyan (Vishnu the Indian) and K. A. Keraleeyan (the native

organizations (Cheriyan 1999, 537-38). The question of Dalit economic

A People United in Development

Certainly, homestead land, minimum wage legislation, the public distribution

The Repressed Return: New Challenges to the Left

state capital to large-scale "encroachment" of government land, such as

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and Rights: Ten Daniel Thorner Memorial Lectures, ed. A

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[Collected works of EMS], vol. 5, 1944-45, ed. P. Govinda Pillai

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Sampoorna Kritikal [Collected works of EMS], vol. 5, 1944

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