In every index of social development — life expectancy, literacy, public health, environmental awareness, women’s education, housing, transportation, and sanitation — Kerala stands at the forefront among Indian States. Yet we must not forget that the State also leads in unemployment among the educated, in alcohol consumption, in mental morbidity, and in suicide rates associated with these issues. So, we have reasons both to take pride in ourselves and to be self-critical.
PART 1
Let us first consider what Kerala has to offer the rest of India. The foremost among these offerings, beyond question, is our tradition of religious harmony and universality — the very soul of our culture. Until quite recently, Kerala was praised as a living example of communal amity. Festivals like Onam, accepted and celebrated by the whole State, are striking proofs of this inclusiveness. The situation is no different with Thrissur Pooram and other such festivities. There are few places in India where people of different faiths live so closely together and invite one another to weddings and celebrations.
From our architecture to our dance and music, the imprint of multiple religions is evident. The skyline of Kerala is woven together with the domes of temples, the minarets of mosques, and the Gothic steeples of churches. The nalukettu and ettukettu houses — traditional wooden mansions — were built alike by Hindus and Muslims. Even today, art forms like Thiruvathirakali and Mohiniyattam, Mappilappattu and Oppana, Kolkkali and Duffmuttu and Margamkali — all continue to share a common stage in youth festivals. Classical dances like Kathakali and Ottan Thullal evolved not as sectarian arts but as collective cultural expressions.
It was in the festival grounds of Kerala that progressive ideas often spread — through storytelling, theatre, and public performance. The very prose of Malayalam was shaped through Bible translations; the first dictionary, grammar, and travelogues in the language were the works of Christian missionaries. Writers like Moyinkutty Vaidyar and T. Ubaid enriched mainstream Malayalam with an Arabic-infused literary dialect. Even though Buddhism, Jainism, and Judaism no longer have living communities in Kerala, their philosophical and literary contributions continue to flow through our artistic landscape. Added to this are the influences of Mahatma Gandhi and Karl Marx.
Our writers were never divided along religious lines. Even the sectarian tendencies of cultural organisations never decisively affected artistic or literary value. Malayalam itself — an amalgam of many languages including Sanskrit, Tamil, Arabic, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and English — stands as a symbol of our deep-rooted pan-nationalism. Malayalam language has been a unifying force that transcends religious, regional, and political divisions, holding Kerala together across centuries. Our language and culture grew through commercial and cultural exchanges with distant lands. This gave our civilization an openness — a cosmopolitan character that few other Indian regions share. We have embraced masterpieces from other languages in India and abroad as if they were our own, and such manifold influences have kept our literature and thought continually modern.
As Octavio Paz once said of Latin America, in Kerala too, progressive ideas — beyond particular political parties — have become integral to our worldview and the very language of our politics. Another remarkable contribution of Kerala is our innate sense of rebellion. This is visible not just in modern history — from the Coonan Cross Oath to the Malayali Memorial — but also in our myths. The legend behind Onam itself embodies protest: unlike other regions where Vishnu is worshipped, here we celebrate the return of the Asura king Mahabali, who was pushed down into the underworld by Vishnu’s avatar, Vamana. People deck their homes with flowers and feasts to welcome back a fallen asura — that is the spirit of Kerala. (It should be noted that certain reactionary groups today try to redefine Onam as “Vamana Puja.”)
Thunchath Ezhuthachan, revered as the father of the Malayalam language and celebrated as a Vedic teacher, was, by the Brahminical order, a Shudra forbidden from studying the Vedas. Almost every major figure in our literary tradition — from Kunchan Nambiar, Kumaranasan, Edassery and Vailoppilly to Potheri Kunjambu, Chanthu Menon, Basheer, and O. V. Vijayan — stood in opposition to the prevailing order in one way or another. Our culture itself was forged through waves of resurgence — the Kerala Renaissance, the Congress-led national movement, the socialist and communist struggles that grew from it, and the literary awakening known as ‘Jeevatsahitya Prasthanam.’ Thinkers like Sree Narayana Guru, who redefined the Vedas from below and consecrated the mirror and the Ezhava Shiva (Shiva for the oppressed); rationalist Sahodaran Ayyappan; Dalit reformer Ayyankali; social rebels like Poikayil Appachan, Vakkom Moulavi, Makti Thangal, Abraham Malpan, and Dakshayani Velayudhan — all gave our renaissance its grassroots character.
From V. T. Bhattathiripad and K. Kelappan to Vakkom Moulavi, Chavara Achan, and Mohammad Abdur Rahman, Kerala’s reform and national movements produced some of India’s most secular humanists.
Out of all these currents arose the famed Kerala Model of Development — our third great contribution.
Unlike other development paradigms that emphasise the accumulation of wealth, ours prioritised human welfare: public health, general education, food security, dignity of labour, and social equality. That is what made Kerala’s developmental vision unique.
PART 2
Yet, while we take pride in these achievements, we must also ask whether the very three hallmarks of Kerala’s identity are now in crisis. The long and difficult journey that made Kerala a modern, democratic, and secular society was what we call the Kerala Renaissance. It unfolded through three successive phases — social reform, national liberation, and the pursuit of social equality. In each phase, as noted earlier, the driving force came from thinkers and communities from below. Without them, Kerala’s renaissance might have remained an upper-caste reformist movement like Bengal’s — one that never touched the grassroots.
Still, our own renaissance was not without its shortcomings. The short lifespan of reform groups like the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha and the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham, the limited recognition given to non-Hindu and Dalit reformers, the attempt to use the Vedas themselves to justify Shudra uplift (thereby reinforcing Vedic authority), the idealisation of women solely as homemakers — all these were its blind spots.
When the anti-caste movement weakened, these gaps paved the way for the growth of caste politics, the rise of godmen, the degeneration of Sree Narayana Guru’s spiritual humanism, the return of ritualistic religiosity, and the strengthening of priestly power. The journey from autocracy to democracy, from feudal rule to national unity, from superstition to reason — that journey of renaissance, we must admit, stopped halfway.
The principal elements of Kerala’s present crisis may thus be summarised as follows.
The growth of communalism
Communalism is religiosity stripped of spirituality. Once caste organisations began functioning as bargaining powers, they lost all reformist content and became preoccupied with economic gain. In this condition, it became easy for leaders to channel these spiritually bankrupt caste bodies into the fold of Hindu communalism, since the larger identity of “Hindu” carried more political weight.
Hindutva forces, at the national level, grew rapidly through manipulative tactics: by engineering religious riots, through events like the Babri Masjid demolition and the Gujarat pogrom, by alienating minorities, and by spreading lies through media, including social media. In Kerala and elsewhere, they also “Hinduised” tribal communities who had never historically been Hindu. They granted social legitimacy to newly imported rituals like Krishna Ashtami (a festival that used to be confined to our temples till recently) and Ganesh Chaturthi, and tried to recast Onam — a celebration of the return of Mahabali — as “Vamana Jayanti.”
Through all this — through speeches, propaganda, and selective communal mobilisation — Hindutva politics has grown by making religious coexistence appear impossible. The same intolerance and alienation have, in turn, provided fertile ground for the growth of Islamic extremism. Behind both forms of fundamentalism lies an abundant flow of foreign money.
The widening of economic inequality
As the egalitarian movement weakened, the middle classes grew stronger, and class hierarchy hardened. Today, the bottom 10% of the population owns only 1.3% of total wealth, while the top 10% controls 42%.
It is a proven historical fact that the middle class provides the most fertile soil for fascism. Middle-class values — false morality, hypocritical respectability, and narrow worldviews — have gained dominance. On one side, we see moral policing so extreme that even couples and siblings are not spared; on the other, we witness a surge in sexual violence — both within and outside families.
The spectacle of development and environmentalism locked in combat is tragic. And those who suffer the most are the poor — the tribals, fisherfolk, and farmers — who bear the first impact of poisoned air and sea, droughts caused by sand mining, landslides caused by quarrying, and climatic disruption due to deforestation. To oppose the sand, forest, or stone mafias is to risk one’s life. The morality of a profit-driven middle class is the cradle of crony capitalism.
French socialist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said that globalization is the greatest violence of our age — not merely because it destroys economies, but because it annihilates languages and cultural identities. Malayalam today faces a crisis of dignity. As poet Kunjunni put it: ‘Janikkum Nimisham Thotten /Makan English Padikkanam/Athinal en Bharyathan Peru/Anginglandil thanneyakki Njan/
(“From the moment my son is born / he must learn English, / so I made sure / my wife gave birth in England.”)
Languages die in just such ways: when each generation gradually abandons them, when other languages are seen as more prestigious, when education, law, and administration are all conducted in alien languages, when words vanish and new ones cease to appear, when cultural decline leads to linguistic decay, when the conditions that nurture language — reading, writing, creative use — disappear, and when knowledge grows but language does not. A language dies when its people are uprooted — and all these processes are happening in Kerala today. With the death of a language, an entire worldview and culture die with it.
The new government policy advocating mother-tongue education is certainly welcome. But unless Malayalam also becomes the language of administration and the courts, unless private educational institutions adopt the same policy, unless there is a deep attitudinal change among parents and the public, and unless Malayalam grows as a language of knowledge, the mere legal directive will not fulfill its purpose.
Male dominance still prevails, at home and in public life. It manifests as aggression, sexual violence, contempt for the weak, hostility toward non-heteronormative identities, suspicion toward love marriages, and divorces without meaningful cause. In literature, women have a strong presence; we have powerful heroines — yet society itself lags far behind. Even in politics, women’s presence remains largely symbolic. Reports of sexual assault, murder, and suicide show no decline — if anything, they rise.
A society where men and women cannot interact freely as friends is a society on the verge of explosion. According to a recent survey, in literate Kerala only 13.2% of women are in paid employment — barely half the national average of 26%. In Mizoram, by contrast, 46% of women earn wages. Programmes like Kudumbashree and MGNREGA have brought some improvement, but the distance to real freedom is long. Even when women earn, the purse strings are often held by fathers or husbands. In public spaces — streets, buses, trains — humiliation of women across all classes remains routine. Even children, as grim recent cases show, are not safe.
Despite 60 years of democracy, the condition of Dalits and Adivasis has not changed as it should have. Reports of starvation deaths among tribal children still surface. Though Dalit self-respect has risen — reflected in literature — their material conditions have not improved proportionately. The plight of the Muslim minority is similar: islands of affluence floating in a sea of poverty.
The crisis in higher education
Our higher education system needs urgent reconstruction. The new national education policy of the central government, designed to produce corporate servants and global labourers, has no interest in holistic human development. Uncontrolled privatisation has turned education into a giant industry. Unless public education improves, the flight of students to private institutions cannot be stopped. Curricula that render class and caste invisible, teaching that excludes participation, examinations that test only memory, the devaluation of regional languages, the failure to nurture ethical creativity, classrooms alienated from social realities, the near absence of genuine research, and the lack of quality journals and libraries — all have weakened higher education.
Sadly, the mere increase in teachers’ salaries has done little to improve educational quality.
The decay of the media
The decline of our media — its prejudiced news construction, its serials that breed hatred, its stereotyping of women, minorities, Dalits, and tribals, its glorification of consumption without production, and its narrow equation of success with wealth — has played a major role in corrupting our culture.
Today, Kerala needs another renaissance — a people’s movement that rises from the solidarity of those for whom life has become an ordeal, a movement that can transform Kerala from its roots and lead us toward a form of modernity that is our own, different from colonial modernity.
And for that, we must hope — and believe — that it will come.
– Translated from Malayalam by Mini Muringatheri
(The writer is a poet, academic, social activist, and President of the Kerala Sahithya Akademy)
This article is part of The Hindu e-book. Kerala: a model State’s paradox
