introduction 39
- Th e WHO in 1978 defi ned health not as an absence of illness but as a presence of
a sense of well-being, but this defi nition does not appear in recent WHO reports
(1978, 2007a, 2007b). - Th is city is also known by its offi cial Malayalam name, “Th iruvananthapuram,”
although people continue to refer to it as “Trivandrum” when speaking in English.
Th e English and Malayali names of Kerala’s two other major cities are Cochin/
Kochi and Calicut/Kozhikode. - Th is sketch of Kerala history is compiled from Narayanan et al. (1976), Dale
(1990) and Sreedhara Menon (1990). See also Ghosh (1992), who reconstructs
the life of a twelfth-century Jewish Arab merchant who traded with and settled
in this region of South India, and Osella and Osella (2000a, 2000b) on Persian
Gulf migration and social mobility in Kerala. - Th omas Issac, Franke and Raghavan (1998: 17–21) and Parayil ed. (2000).
- For analysis of the Nayar caste, see Gough (1959) and Mencher (1965).
- In 1995–1997, life expectancy was 63 years for all of India, 70 years in Kerala,
and 77 years in the United States; infant mortality was 65 per 1,000 for India,
13 per 1,000 in Kerala, and 7 per 1,000 in the U.S. Adult literacy in 1991 was
52% in India, 91% in Kerala and 96% in the U.S. (from Governments of Kerala
and India and World Bank statistics compiled in Franke and Chasin 2000: 18).
Franke and Chasin (1994) and others claim that literacy in Kerala has reached 99
to 100% since 1991, although the literacy rate among my informants was around
90%. See also Parayil ed. (2000) for analyses of socioeconomic development in
Kerala. - Govinda Pillai (1999). Desai (2005) also links Kerala’s social achievements to
nineteenth-century welfare expansions in the princely states of Travancore and
Cochin. - See Mathew (1997) on unemployment and Halliburton (1998) on suicide.
- Prabodhachandran Nayar (1994).
- Although Kerala has only 4% of India’s population, one of Kerala’s newspapers,
Malayala Manorama, claims to have the largest readership of any paper in India
due largely to high literacy. - Wilce explains that in Bengali the term that translates as “thank you” is also rarely
used, and Bengalis have a “tendency to foreground relationality and background
personal autonomy” (1998: 10) in their interactions. - See Marriott (1976), Dumont (1970[1966], 1986[1983]) and Shweder (1991).
- Mines (1988), Ewing (1991), Wilce (1998: 34–43) and Kusserow (1999). See
also Nabokov’s attempt to reconcile the personal, subjective self and the socially
oriented self that co-exist within the Tamil person (2000: 13–15). - “Th erapy managing group” is the term Janzen (1978) uses in his study of medical
pluralism in Zaire to refer to the network of family, friends and others who are
involved in coping with a person’s illness. - Although the form of the verb can reveal the subject in subjectless constructions
in Bengali, Wilce (1998: 83) explains that some degree of subject ambiguity is
maintained in illness narratives and other “troubles talk” in Bangladesh. - See also Nunley (1998) on the involvement of families in Indian psychiatry.
- Allopathic hospitals had similar facilities for violent patients, but the Government
Ayurveda Mental Hospital where I conducted research in 1997 did not have
such facilities. Th ey could treat people with serious psychopathologies if they
were not very violent. However, when I returned to Kerala in 1999, I found that