Firstpost ·
Manu Joseph’s ‘republic against fun’ gets Keralam’s modernity wrong
Manu Joseph’s provocative caricature overlooks how education, social reform and collective action created the foundations of individual freedom in modern Keralam
In a recent podcast, writer and journalist Manu Joseph described Keralam as a “republic against fun”. It is obvious that such a description is deliberately provocative. Nevertheless, the problem with such quips is that they are based on a familiar misunderstanding of the state. Keralam is judged against a caricature of the Keralam of an earlier era, and its distinctive path to modernity is mistaken for evidence that it has not modernised. The irony is that many of the things that once made Keralam look “un-modern” — mass education, social reform, political mobilisation, trade union organisation, strong public institutions and a culture of collective action — were precisely the forces that transformed it and created the Keralam of today.
Joseph’s argument has two connected elements. First, he points to the persistence of social conservatism: moral policing, neighbourhood surveillance, respectability and restrictions on individual behaviour. Second, he argues that Keralam’s impressive educational achievements have not been matched by an equally strong economic transformation, with educated Malayalis often seeking opportunities in Bengaluru, other Indian cities and abroad. Both observations contain something worth discussing. But neither establishes the conclusion that Keralam is somehow a “republic against fun” or that its modernity is fundamentally incomplete.
There is certainly a Keralam in which social regulation remains powerful. Small-town and suburban life can be intrusive. Families can be conservative. Young people can encounter moral policing, particularly around relationships, sexuality and women’s autonomy. These realities should not be romanticised. But they also should not be mistaken for the defining character of contemporary Keralam. The Keralam of today is a far more educated, mobile, globally connected, socially heterogeneous and individually autonomous society than the one from which these stereotypes originate.
More importantly, Keralam need not be embarrassed by the social history that produced this transformation. Its extraordinary commitment to education, the expansion of public health and schooling, social reform, the weakening of caste hierarchies, mass political mobilisation, trade union organisation and the development of strong public institutions did not represent a failure to become modern. They represented a distinctive route into modernity. Keralam did not initially become modern through the metropolitan package of consumerism, nightlife, individualistic lifestyles and private affluence. It became modern through the expansion of human capabilities and through changes in the social and political power of ordinary people.
This is a history that Keralam has every reason to be proud of. The insistence that children should be educated, including girls and children from historically disadvantaged communities, was not a sign of cultural backwardness. Nor was the organisation of workers into trade unions or the political mobilisation of ordinary people. These processes challenged inherited hierarchies and expanded people’s capacity to participate in society. They created the social foundations upon which later forms of individual autonomy and mobility could develop.
The irony is that the society sometimes caricatured as restrictive also produced generations of people with extraordinary capacities to escape its restrictions. The Malayali student went to Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai; the nurse, construction worker and technician went to the Gulf; the engineer, doctor and academic went across the world. Women entered universities and professions in large numbers. Families became geographically dispersed. Television, the internet and social media weakened the old authority of the neighbourhood and community. Rising incomes and migration exposed Malayalis to social worlds far beyond the confines of their place of birth. The society that produced the old constraints also produced the education, mobility, income and social confidence with which later generations could challenge them.
This is also why freedom needs to be understood more broadly than the cultural freedom implied by the phrase “against fun”. Freedom certainly includes the ability to determine one’s personal relationships and lifestyle without social coercion. But it also means having the real capacity to study, work, earn an independent income, organise collectively, migrate, participate in public life and challenge inherited forms of authority. By that measure, Keralam’s history is very much a history of expanding freedom.
Joseph’s economic argument points to another important contradiction, but it needs to be stated carefully. Keralam is deeply integrated with the economies of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and Bengaluru in particular has provided important employment opportunities for educated Malayalis. Ironically, it also remains true that, of all the in-migrants in Keralam in the last census of 2011, about 48 per cent came from Tamil Nadu and about 17 per cent came from Karnataka. In other words, integration is not the same as dependency. Keralam has a substantial economy of its own, with important strengths in services, construction, tourism, trade, finance and a range of smaller industries.
The more interesting issue is an internal imbalance in Keralam’s development. The state’s expansion of education, health and social capabilities has historically run ahead of the growth of certain kinds of productive employment within the state. Keralam created a relatively educated and mobile population whose aspirations for employment and incomes could not always be matched by the structure of the local economy. Some of that labour therefore found opportunities elsewhere, including in Bengaluru, other Indian cities and the Gulf. Outward mobility is consequently not evidence of an absence of modernity. It is partly a way in which a socially advanced economy has responded to limitations in its own productive structure.
The limits to Keralam’s production structure are real and deserve serious attention. Keralam needs to strengthen productive investment, diversify its economic base and create more high-quality employment within the state. But the contradiction should not be presented as one between a “modern” outside world and an economically backward Keralam. It is a contradiction within Keralam’s own development trajectory: social and human development have advanced very substantially, while productive transformation has not always kept pace with them.
The deeper problem with the “republic against fun” formulation is therefore its implicit definition of modernity. Modernity is increasingly represented through a particular metropolitan package: individualism, consumerism, nightlife, cafés, start-ups and lifestyle liberalisation. Keralam increasingly has all of these things, especially among younger and urban populations. But they are not the only measures of modernity, nor were they the foundations of Keralam’s transformation.
Keralam’s route was different. It involved mass education before mass consumerism, social reform before lifestyle liberalisation, collective organisation before the celebration of individual choice, and public provisioning alongside private aspiration. The individual freedoms that have expanded in Keralam today did not emerge despite this history. They were made possible in significant part by it. It is one of the principal reasons why Keralam possesses the social capabilities it does today.
Today’s Keralam is substantially and substantively different from the Keralam of the 1970s or 1980s. The old structures of authority have not disappeared, but they coexist with much stronger capacities for individual choice, mobility and self-determination. Today’s young Malayali inhabits a world of global migration, digital communication, international education, new forms of consumption and rapidly changing social expectations. All these would have been difficult to imagine for earlier generations.
There is therefore a useful question hidden inside Joseph’s provocative phrase, but it is not quite the question he appears to be asking. It is whether our understanding of modernity has become so narrow that we recognise it only when it appears in the cultural form of metropolitan consumerism.
Keralam’s experience tells us that modernity can be built through education, social reform, collective organisation and the expansion of human capabilities — and that these very processes can eventually produce forms of individual freedom that the earlier society itself could not fully accommodate.
(The author is an economist and a Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Views expressed in the above piece are personal. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)