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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.