Kerala 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 Reference Heller1999; Parayil Reference Parayil2000; 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 political scientists and observers. From the 1940s, the left enjoyed almost unquestioned 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 for this has accrued to communist politics and public policy (for an overview, see Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2003; Parayil Reference Parayil2000). 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.Footnote ¹ While the social democratic construction of Kerala as a near-egalitarian paradise may have a certain utility in anticapitalist political 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 Kerala's 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 Reference Mann, Brenner, Jessop, Jones and McLeod2003)—represent an important historical context in which Kerala's unique postindependence welfarist state policies may be understood (Desai Reference Desai2005). 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 government's 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 Reference Singh1959), by the 1970s, the association between development gains and national pride had waxed, 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 Reference Franke1993; Heller Reference Heller1996; Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2003; Ramachandran Reference Ramachandran, Drèze and Sen1997). 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 “egalitarian developmentalism” had left out many sections of people (Sivanandan Reference Sivanandan1976); 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 Reference Menon1994, 120). The national Congress leaders’ abhorrence 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 Reference Desai2002; Rangaswamy Reference Rangaswamy1981, 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 Reference Gopalan1976). 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 (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1946a).

To sum up: the rise of the much-lauded communist “egalitarian developmentalism” in Kerala, it is widely argued, rested on two important political successes: the communist extension of anticaste struggles (e.g., Desai Reference Desai2001), 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 Reference Deshpande2000; Kurien 1995; Lindberg Reference Lindberg2001) 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 Reference Heller, Sandbrook, Edelmann, Heller and Teichman2006, 66) need to be heavily qualified, precisely because they assume too much, for the “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 exception, 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 Reference Devika2008b). Again, a rise in welfare handouts does not mean either the end of caste inequality in political 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” (Reference Dean1999, 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” ideology ignored unequal relations between social groups, and thus proved noninclusive 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 recognized 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 hegemonic 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 benefited from the remarkable extension of public services, which has improved their access to health care and education; second, the Kerala Land Reforms Act (1969) provided the largely Dalit landless laborers with minimal amounts of land for housing and domestic consumption (Krishnaji Reference Krishnaji2007; Ramakumar Reference Ramakumar2006). From the Dalit perspective, these may appear to be two sides of a single exclusionary strategy, in which their exclusion from the radical redistribution agenda was “balanced” by the extension of the state's infrastructural power oriented toward bettering social development.

The provision of housing land concealed the denial of land as a productive resource to Dalits, despite the fact that pre–land reform agricultural censuses had revealed them to be the actual tillers; peasants who employed family labor alone in their farming were few, but the tenants gained the major share of productive land through Kerala's land reforms in the early 1970s (Krishnaji Reference Krishnaji2007). The Kerala Agricultural Workers’ Act of 1974 improved working conditions and ensured better wages and welfare benefits. However, over the years, the decline in agriculture, the successful conversion of farm land to real estate by the new owners (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2003), and the stagnation of wages (although real wages increased in the late 1970s) has deepened their exclusion (Isaac and Mohanakumar Reference Isaac and Mohanakumar1991). Some have argued that with the provision of housing plots, Dalits “were able to bargain better for wages, for a public distribution system, and better school education and health care” (Tharakan Reference Tharakan, Ramachandran and Swaminathan2002, 358). However, the same author admits that while absolute wretchedness has been prevented, this has not enabled Dalits to compete on equal terms with the better-off groups (Tharakan Reference Tharakan, Ramachandran and Swaminathan2002, 359). It has also been observed that the fruits of militant and successful leftist trade unionism have often been reaped better by the upper castes (Pillai Reference Pillai1992). Nor does it seem to have brought many Dalits into the leadership of the left parties (Oommen Reference Oommen1985, 165–66). However, the extension of welfare and public services was crucial in preventing a worse scenario, evident 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 Reference Oommen1990), and for whom the extension of state infrastructure was less effective.

In sum, it appears that while left politics and public policy have tackled traditional forms of caste oppression and eliminated absolute deprivation among the Dalits, 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 educational and training facilities, more employment, and better infrastructure and housing for Dalit people (Oommen Reference Oommen1985, 235–36); it is these unions that spearheaded the “land grab” and “excess land” agitations of the early 1970s, which aimed at identifying surplus land. But they have not demanded land as a productive resource (Oommen Reference Oommen1985, 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 economic field in the past and social superiority continue to develop faster in achieving 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 independence, 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 possibility of disputes arising, even, between farmers and agricultural labourers. So bringing them under the same organization may create weakness within” (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1937, 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 transformation was to be undoubtedly the (largely upper-caste) communist leader. Caste oppression was to be ended, but that did not entail recognizing the landless tiller's claim to land, similar to the peasant's. 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 Reference Oommen1985, 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 Reference Bhaskaran2000, 30).

The communists’ attempted resolution of the caste question also departed from the early twentieth-century anticaste perspectives in other ways. It is important 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 Reference Devika2007). 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 necessitated 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 Reference Awaya, Mizushima and Yanagisawa1996; Devika Reference Devika2007; Lindberg Reference Lindberg2001; Velayudhan Reference Velayudhan and Oommen1999). 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 disinterested agent of anticaste struggle in leftist political discourse was achieved by contrasting him (mostly conceived as male) with the educated and better-off leadership of contemporary anticaste movements, which were negotiating with the states of Travancore and Cochin for representation in legislatures, employment, and other issues (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2003). These efforts were condemned as the self-seeking activity of an exploitative bourgeoisie.Footnote ² In contrast, the true “leaders of the masses” were duty-bound to attack both caste discrimination and caste mobilization, to create mass movements of the “poor” unmarked by caste (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1936, 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1936, 92–93). Finding “economic disabilities” 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1936, 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 construction 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1943, 300).

The widely documented, numerous instances of such self-sacrifice by largely upper-caste leaders (Desai Reference Desai2002; Kannan Reference Kannan1988; Lindberg Reference Lindberg2001; Menon Reference Menon1994) 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” (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 widespread poverty of the state and the unbowed and self-confident manner of the people (e.g., Mankekar Reference Mankekar1965). 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 landlord's 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 benefited 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 Reference Devika2007).

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 communist 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 reinscribed 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 Reference Menon1994). 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 Cherukad 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 Reference Pisharady1974, 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 Reference Kunhikrishnan1996, 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 Reference Jeffrey2003, 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 Reference Jeffrey2003, 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 Reference Vijayan and Vijayan2002a, Reference Vijayan and Vijayan2002b).

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 Reference Lindberg2001, 161). Besides, many aspects, “like the caste division of labour and endogamous marriages, were left unchallenged and unchanged” (Lindberg Reference Lindberg2001, 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 Reference Zacharias, Devika, Basu and Roy2006).

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 “community and religious associations” together, argued that they “concealed the real unity of interests of the public,” and urged workers to resign from all such organizations (Cheriyan Reference Cheriyan and Cheriyan1999, 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 militancy 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 categories 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 Reference Lindberg2001). The new forms of social and cultural alternatives that communists sought to produce were by no means unambiguously oppositional. Oommen notes the same for the different caste components of the agricultural workers’ union and small farmers’ association of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), in its most militant phase, the early 1970s, in the highly radicalized Alappuzha district (Oommen Reference Oommen1985, 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 fostered class solidarities that exceeded the narrow, immediate locality (Kunhikrishnan Reference Kunhikrishnan1996). 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1944a, 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 Reference Menon and Ali1999). This work was severely criticized by leftist fellow traveler Joseph Mundassery (who found it extolling “feudal socialism”) and the radical anticaste intellectual P. K. Balakrishnan 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 literature 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 communities; they are truly national” (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad1967, 46). Besides, the art forms of other (non-Hindu) communities were derived from this Brahmanical “core” of styles and techniques (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad1967, 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 Reference Nigam2000). As for left cultural production of the 1950s, it subtly reinstated caste inequality, continuing to foreground upper-caste agency in political revolt, and the sacrificial status of subalterns, in imagining the egalitarian developmentalist subnationality of Kerala (Menon Reference Menon and Thorner2002).

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 Reference Pisharady1974, 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 “secularization of caste,” which contemporary anticaste writing in India identifies as a major means of perpetuating caste inequalities within Indian modernities (Nigam Reference Nigam2000; Pandian Reference Pandian2002). 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.Footnote ³

A People United in Development

Dilip Menon (Reference Menon and Thorner2002) 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1944b, 137–38). However, the contours of the egalitarian developmentalist utopia had already emerged in the 1940s in EMS's 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 organizations—in his vision of “real” Kerala.

Manali Desai remarks that Kerala's 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 citizenship 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 Kerala's thriving new elite, now enabled to convert these capabilities into “desired functionings,” in Amartya Sen's terminology. In contrast, for the Dalits and tribals, 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 Reference Krishnaji2007, 2173). T. K. Oommen notes that even at the height of labor militancy in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the highly radicalized district of Alappuzha, the leadership tiers of labor unions conformed, more or less, to traditional caste hierarchies (Oommen Reference Oommen1985, 165–66). He writes about the history of the first agricultural labor union organized by the communists in Alappuzha, in which the “superior castes” concentrated on the more prestigious party work, and intermediate-caste and a few lower-caste activists focused on union activities: “one graduates into the former through the latter and this is particularly true of inferior groups” (Oommen Reference Oommen1985, 163–64).

Certainly, homestead land, minimum wage legislation, the public distribution system, and welfare boards reduced poverty in Kerala (Ramakumar Reference Ramakumar2006). 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 Reference Narayanan2003); 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 Reference Basu1986). In the mid-1990s, “responsibilized” and targeted welfare began to replace welfare as the “people's 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 Reference Mohanakumar2008; Noronha Reference Noronha2006). Interestingly, recent efforts to alleviate agrarian distress in Kerala have bypassed agricultural laborers, while social security expected from the Agricultural Workers’ Welfare Fund Board has been minimal (Mohanakumar Reference Mohanakumar2008).

Thus, Dalits and tribals continue to remain deprived as a group, even though poverty levels have declined remarkably in Kerala (Subrahmanian and Prasad Reference Subrahmanian and Prasad2008, 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 Reference Deshpande2000, 325). Examining Kerala's “growth turnaround” in the 1990s, these scholars remark that “it is rather surprising that given the historical background 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 Reference Subrahmanian and Prasad2008, 25). Further, they point out that the scope for trading inequality for growth is limited in Kerala (Subrahmanian and Prasad Reference Subrahmanian and Prasad2008, 29).

Going back to the 1950s, EMS's “egalitarian developmentalist: vision for KeralaFootnote ⁴—outlined in such texts as “Onnekaal Kodi Malayalikal” (One and a Half Crore Malayalees)—laid out a limited utopia for the lower castes. He rejected traditional upper-caste imaginings of linguistic unity (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1946a, 176–201) and drew on another mythical past: Mavelinadu, the very antithesis of the Brahmanical construction of Kerala as Parasuramakshetram—the land created by the Brahmin warrior-sage Parasurama. Yet this “tradition” is immediately dismissed as not a real past, but simply a figment of the imagination to be actualized in the future.Footnote 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1946b, 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 (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad1952, 248–52). Imagining Kerala thus masked real conflicts over redistribution 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 egalitarian 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 brahminhood 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 Reference Raju2002). The Ezhavas and Syrian Christians responded to the economic opening up of Travancore in the mid- to late twentieth century, claiming to have become “productive subjects,” doing their “national duty” (Varghese Reference Varghese2007); but they also made claims in the emergent modern political field (Cairo Reference Cairo2001; Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2003). 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 Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1944c, 309). He upheld affirmative action—quotas to ensure adequate representation of all groups in the government—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 productive 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 indicates that EMS's suggestion for unity would contain not so much the powerful communities, as the Dalits organizing around demands for economic and political equality.Footnote 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 Malayalee culture” (Namboodiripad Reference Namboodiripad and Pillai1946a, 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 Reference Rammohan1996, 271–78)—that the extension of state welfare to Dalits would remedy the lack.

The author of “Onnekaal Kodi Malayalikal” is no traditional Brahmin aristocrat. To borrow Aditya Nigam's 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). 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 drought, crop failure, war, food crises, and the decline of Nehruvian national developmentalism in India. Throughout the decade, the “Malayalees” emerged in the Malayalam press as a rancorous unity, brought together by a widespread sense of outrage against the Union government's alleged discriminatory practices (Devika Reference Devika2008a, 139–69). However, this never grew into full-fledged anti-Indian rhetoric (Devika Reference Devika2008a, 155). Besides, after the 1970s, both the gains from egalitarian developmentalism celebrated in the Kerala model and national feeling began to feel the pressure of other forces—consumer citizenship fueled by remittances from large-scale migration from workers from Kerala to Arabian countries (Osella and Osella Reference Osella and Osella2000) and the critiques of excluded groups (Dietrich and Nayak Reference Dietrich and Nayak2002). As the clout of the new resource-rich social groups increased through gains from migration, the protective role of the dominant left toward Dalits became increasingly hard to sustain—as the history of the “save rice field agitations” in Kerala since the 1980s show (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2003).

There were, however, efforts to resuscitate the egalitarian developmentalist dream through “decentralizing developmentalism,” by Kerala's left-oriented People's Science Movement (Zachariah and Sooryamoorthy Reference Zachariah and Sooryamoorthy1994). Kerala's widely publicized experiment at decentralizing development and governance in the mid-1990s, which replaced (the unfulfilled) egalitarian developmentalism with “responsibilized” and targeted welfare, was a further effort (Isaac and Franke Reference Isaac and Franke2000). Some studies of decentralized governance in Kerala have been enthusiastic about the fact that the People's Planning Campaign of 1996 for political decentralization and local-level planning, though advanced by the left, has also been widely accepted by the right-of-center opposition and the bureaucracy (Heller, Harilal, and Chaudhuri Reference Heller, Harilal and Chaudhuri2007). Such enthusiasm is blind to the fact that both the left and its opposition in Kerala have historically been open to the expansion of the state's infrastructural power in its different versions—postindependence welfare improvements have been demonstrated to be the result of “competitive politics” (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2003, 204–7). Indeed, the basic difference has been around the agenda of radical redistribution of productive resources, which has been muted since the millennium.

The transformation of egalitarian developmentalism has been an important condition for the emergence of new and militant political subjectivities. Rallying against the un- or redoing of the radical agenda of land redistribution, their protest actions have ranged from long-drawn picketing of central areas in the state capital to large-scale “encroachment” of government land, such as the struggles initiated by the Adivasi Gotra Sabha (Bijoy and Raman Reference Bijoy and Raman2003) in 2001, and the ongoing Dalit-tribal land struggle at Chengara under the Dalit organization Sadhujana Vimochana Munnani (Kapikad Reference Kapikad2008). The CPM, currently in power, has responded with promises of land redistribution to Dalit and tribal people, most of which remain unfulfilled or unsatisfactory (Janu Reference Janu2005). 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 Reference Pattomkary2008).

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 incidental or indicative of an unfinished agenda—or as made bearable by the present minimum entitlement dispensation (e.g., Heller, Harilal, and Chaudhuri Reference Heller, Harilal and Chaudhuri2007). 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 developmentalism 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 campaigns were the same as those deployed to shape the “new woman” in elitist community 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 processes at work in the “secularization of caste.” Third, diverse processes that repositioned 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 importance of current critiques of “methodological nationalism” (Beck Reference Beck2000, 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.