26 chapter
famous as the home of the once-polyandrous Nayar caste, although more
recently investigators have been intrigued by the policies of the state’s com-
munist governments and Kerala’s impressive “quality of life” indicators.^15 With
a per capita income less than India’s national average, Kerala’s achievement of
a literacy rate over 90 percent and life expectancy and infant mortality rates
that are close to that of wealthy nations have turned the head of many socio-
economic development specialists.^16
P. Govinda Pillai, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
and editor of the Malayalam political journal Deshabhimani, claims that com-
munist government and social reform movements emerged from anti-caste
struggles of the nineteenth century. He asserts that for a long period Kerala
was marked by an extremely rigid and oppressive caste system, which eventu-
ally spurred low-caste leaders, such as Sree Narayana Guru (who is said to
have infl uenced Mahatma Gandhi to oppose the caste system as part of his
social reform agenda), to mount popular anti-caste struggles. Th at is, the ineq-
uities and excesses of the caste system, which were particularly pronounced in
Kerala, impelled people at the bottom rungs of society to rebel.^17 Communism
was later adopted as an ideology that complemented this social reform move-
ment. And, as Malayalis like to remind people, Kerala’s communist govern-
ments have always been democratically elected. Th ey have also occasionally
been democratically replaced by the Congress Party. Despite these impressive
achievements, people in Kerala have struggled with high unemployment, which
has resulted in heavy migration to Persian Gulf countries, and high underem-
ployment, which appears to be linked to the state’s high suicide rate.^18
Malayalam, a Dravidian language related to Tamil, is the offi cial language
of the state of Kerala, and over 90 percent of the population speaks, reads and
writes in Malayalam.^19 With 30 million speakers, Malayalam is only the eighth
largest Indian language, but Kerala’s high literacy rate makes it one of India’s
most signifi cant literary languages.^20 Although the current level of literacy is
partly due to late-twentieth-century grassroots and government eff orts, liter-
acy in Kerala is more than a project of modern political movements. Kathleen
Gough explained that this was the most literate region in India during what
she calls the “traditional” period of Kerala history (during the mid-fi fteenth to
the mid-eighteenth century, before the region fell under the hegemony of the
British and the Mysorean empires). Gough shows that each sector of Kerala
society had some reason for becoming literate: high agricultural product-
ivity resulting from the region’s heavy rainfall enabled a signifi cant portion of
the population to develop as literate specialists; the Brahmins brought their
Sanskritic literacy from the North; the matrilineal Nayar caste became liter-
ate in their native Malayalam through their own teachers and most Nayar