‘Strangers in our own land’: Shashi Tharoor on the heritage of Malayalis who live away from Kerala

As a Keralite who was a “Marunaadan Malayali” for most of his life, I can say that we are, for the most part, conscious – some would say inordinately proud – of our Malayali cultural heritage. But as we are cut off from its primary source, the source of daily cultural self- regeneration – Kerala itself – we have to evolve our own identities by preserving what we can of our heritage and merging it with those of the others around us.

As we grow up outside Kerala, we know that we are not the Malayalis we might have been if our parents had never left Kerala. In due course, Onam becomes only as much a part of our culture as any other holiday, and we are as likely to give a younger relative a Christmas present as a Vishukkaineettam (Kerala New Year gift). We, Malayalis without our Mathrubhumi or Manorama newspapers, who do not understand the Ottamthullal folk dance, and have never heard of the great poets Vallathol or Kumaran Asan – are, when we come to visit Kerala, strangers in our own land.

I am such a Malayali – and in towns and cities around India and across the world, thousands more are growing up like us. Our very names are often absurdities in Kerala terms. In my case, my father’s veetu-peru (house name, the family name handed down from his mother and her female forebears in the Nair matrilineal tradition) has been transmuted into a surname in the Western manner.

We speak a pidgin Malayalam at home, stripped of all but the essential household vocabulary, and cannot read or write the language intelligibly. I tried to teach myself the script as a teenager on holidays in Kerala, gave up on the koottaksharams – joined letters – and as a result can recognise only 80 per cent of the letters and considerably fewer of the words. (When an Indian ambassador in Singapore wanted discreetly to inform me of his imminent replacement by a Kerala politician, he passed me a clipping from a Malayalam newspaper and was startled at my embarrassed incomprehension of the news.)

Malayalam books and magazines may be found at home, but they are seen by us as forlorn relics of an insufficiently advanced past and are ignored by the younger generation, whose eager eyes are on the paperbacks, comics, and textbooks of the impatient and westernized future.

What does it mean, then, for Keralites like me, who have lived most of our lives outside Kerala, to lay claim now to our Malayali heritage? What is it that we learn to cherish, and of which we remain proud, wherever we are?

Non-Malayalis who know of Kerala associate it with its fabled coast, gilded by immaculate beaches and leafy lagoons. But my parents were from the interior, the rice-bowl district of Palghat, nestled in the last major gap near the end of the Western Ghats. Palghat – or Palakkad – unlike most of Kerala, had been colonised by the British, so my father discovered his nationalism at a place called Victoria College.

The town of Palghat is unremarkable, even unattractive; its setting, though, is beautiful. My parents belonged to villages an hour away from the district capital, and to families whose principal source of income was agriculture. Their roots lay deep in the Kerala soil, from which have emerged the values that I cherish in the Indian soul.

As Malayalis, the beauty of Kerala is bred into our souls; it animates our very being. Hailing from a land of forty-four rivers, innumerable lakes, and 1,500 kilometres of “backwaters”, the Keralite bathes twice a day and dresses immaculately in white. Kerala’s women are usually simple and unadorned. But they float on a riot of colour: the voluptuous green of lush Kerala foliage, the rich red of fecund earth, the brilliant blue of life-giving waters, the shimmering gold of beaches and riverbanks.

Yet, there is much more to the Kerala experience than natural beauty. Since my first sojourn as a child in my ancestral village, I have seen remarkable transformations in Kerala society.

This success is a reflection of what, in my 1997 book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, I call the “Malayali miracle”: a state that has practised openness and tolerance from time immemorial; which has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its daily life rather than a source of division; which has overcome caste discrimination and class oppression through education, land reform, and political democracy; which has honoured its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling, and empowered lives. Indeed, Kerala’s social development indicators are comparable to those of the US, though these have been built on one-seventieth the per capita income of America.

And what is striking is that every Kerala woman reads. As a child, I grew up listening to my paternal grandmother read aloud from her venerable editions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And I saw, too, my maternal grandmother running a big house and administering the affairs of a large brood of children and grandchildren with firmness and courage.

In both cases, they had been widowed relatively young, but in neither case was their gender a disqualification in their assumption of authority. Keralites are used to seeing women ruling the roost. My own mother, now over eighty-five, still drives her own car to our ancestral home in a Palakkad village, scorning male help. She likes to be in charge.

“In the exceptional nature of Kerala’s social achievements,” Amartya Sen has written, “the greater voice of women seems to have been an important factor.” The literacy of Kerala women has produced a lower birthrate than China’s, without the coercion China needed. A girl born in Kerala can expect to live twenty years longer than one born in Uttar Pradesh, and she can expect to make the important decisions in her life, to attend college, choose a profession, do what others might consider “men’s work”, and inherit property (something which, before the law was changed in 1956, Indian women could not expect to do, unless they were Malayalis following the “marumakkathayam” matrilineal system).

When MF Husain painted a series on Kerala for our co-authored book, God’s Own Country, I was struck by what, in his striking style, he chose to depict: the violence and the idealism of the leftist movement, the calm spread of literacy, the turbulence of the quest for rights of the downtrodden, the vivid masks of the Kathakali dancers, the palpable air of tranquil fraternity in village Kerala. And everywhere there were the women: striding confidently through the green, holding aloft their miniature elephants, steering their boats through a storm, and simply – how simply! – reading.

The mere fact that every Kerala girl above the age of six can read and write is little short of a miracle, in a country where more women are illiterate than not. Kerala’s women have become doctors and pilots, Supreme Court justices, ambassadors; they have shone in sport, politics, armed forces. “If Kashmir is all about men and mountains,” Husain said, “Kerala is all about women and nature.”

His work in this series has been dubbed “Kalyanikuttyude Keralam” – Kalyanikutty’s Kerala – with Kalyanikutty, the emblematic Kerala woman, an enlightened modern figure steeped in her traditional culture, rising from it to conquer new worlds while remaining comfortable in her own.

Fittingly, it was a woman ruler, Rani Gouri Parvatibai, then queen of Travancore, who in 1817 decreed that “the State should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them, that by diffusion of education they might become better subjects and public servants.” Her royal successors followed the policy, and, after Independence, elected communist governments in the state, enshrined free, compulsory, and universal education as a basic right.

Today, Kerala outspends every Indian state in its tax outlays on education, and Keralites support over fifty newspapers. No village is complete without a “reading room” that serves as a community library, and the sight of villagers reading their newspapers in public, is a ubiquitous one in Kerala, whether on the verandas of their homes or in the “chayakadas” (tea shops) where animated arguments around the day’s news over steaming sweet cups of tea are a regular feature of daily life.

Keralites have a deep-rooted love of books and reading, and the slightest village boasts a “reading-room” or library, sometimes both. The writer MT Vasudevan Nair told me that “copying texts neatly and artistically was a very common and dignified pastime for middle-class housewives until the first quarter of last century”. Books were borrowed, copied by the women of the household, and then circulated to family and friends – not great for an author’s royalties, but wonderful for the transmission of literary culture.

The public library movement is strong in Kerala, with some 3,000 libraries in the state, many dating back to the nineteenth century and created by the governments of Travancore, Cochin, and Madras. The long and sustained involvement of the state in library affairs has contributed immensely to the educational, social, and economic development of Kerala. Reading both reflects and shapes Kerala’s open mind.

It is not accidental that a typical Husain painting of Kerala depicts young and old sharing a home life; family bonds are strong in Kerala, though nuclear families are on the increase there as everywhere; however, the older generation has an honoured place in the lives of the young, who accept the responsibility to care for them.

Another reveals an outdoor market, a street scene in which the people are surrounded by bananas, coconuts, fish, and tapioca, the great staples of Kerala cuisine. Men and women are equally present in the painting; indeed, the women seem to be in the position of economic power. It is striking that in the one picture in which Husain depicts the thundering force of the monsooon (which hits Kerala first before it takes on the rest of India, and with such force that it is often described as an invasion of grey elephants, a metaphor the artist underscores), he shows a woman rowing a boat, standing up to the forces of nature.

My paternal grandmother would read the Ramayana from start to finish during the rains, and my maternal grandmother would dispense her herbal potions and pills, averring that they would be most effective if taken at this time of year. The monsoon buffets the people but replenishes the land; it affirms life and hope even as it sweeps away the frail and the weak before it. In its awesome impact it offers a clue to the resilience of Kerala’s culture.

Part of the secret of Kerala is its openness to the external influences – Arab, Roman, Chinese, British, Islamist, Christian, Marxist – that have gone into the making of the Malayali people. More than two millennia ago, Keralites had trade relations not just with other parts of India but with the Arab world, the Phoenicians and the Roman empire, so Malayalis have had an open and welcoming attitude to the rest of humanity.

Jews fleeing Roman persecution found refuge here; there is evidence of their settlement in Cranganore in 68 AD. And, 1,500 years later, the Jews settled in Kochi, where they built a magnificent synagogue that still stands. Kerala’s Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. (And when St Thomas, one of Jesus’s twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl!)

St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins. Islam came not by the sword, but through traders, travellers, and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people. The new faith was peacefully embraced and encouraged: for instance, the all-powerful Zamorin of Calicut asked each fisherman’s family in his domain to bring up one son as a Muslim, for service in his Muslim-run navy, commanded by sailors of Arab descent, the Kunjali Maraicars.

In turn, Malayalis brought their questing spirit to the world. The great Advaita philosopher Shankaracharya was a Malayali who travelled through India in the eighth century AD, laying the foundations for a reformed and revived Hinduism. To this day, there is a temple in the Himalaya whose priests are Namboodiris from Kerala.

Keralites never suffered from inhibitions about travel: an old joke suggests that so many Keralite typists flocked to stenographic work in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi that “Remington” became the name of a new Malayali subcaste. In the nation’s capital, the wags said that you couldn’t throw a stone in the Central Secretariat without injuring a Keralite bureaucrat.

And there was none of the ritual defilement associated with “crossing the black water”. It was no accident that Keralites were the first, and the most, to take advantage of the post-oil-shock employment boom in the Gulf; at one point in the 1980s, the largest single ethnic group in Bahrain was reported to be not Bahrainis but Keralites. The willingness of Keralites to go anywhere to do anything remains legendary: when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, my father’s friends laughed, he discovered a Malayali already there, offering him tea.

But Keralites are not merely intrepid travellers. They have also behind them a great legacy of achievement. In the fifth century CE, the Kerala-born astronomer Aryabhatta deduced, 1,000 years before his European successors, that the earth is round and that it rotates on its own axis; it was also he who calculated the value of pi (3.1416) for the first time. In a totally different discipline from another era, the first great modern Indian painter, the prince Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), was a Keralite. (Ravi Varma revolutionised Indian art by introducing the medium of oil on canvas and incorporating into his style a distinctively Victorian European realism.)

But a recitation of names – for one could invoke great artists, musicians and poets, enlightened kings, learned sages throughout history – would only belabour the point. Kerala took from others, everything from Roman ports to Chinese fishing nets, and gave to the rest of India everything from martial arts (some of which appear to have inspired the better-known disciplines of the Far East) to its systems of classical dance theatre (notably Kathakali, Mohiniattam, and the less well-known Koodiyattom, hailed by UNESCO in 2008 as a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity”). And I have not even mentioned Keralite cuisine and traditional medicine, in particular the attractions of Ayurveda, the great health system of ancient India, with its herbs, oils, massages, and other therapies, now revived and attractively presented at dozens of locations around the state.

Excerpted with permission from Pride, Prejudice and Punditry: The Essential Shashi Tharoor, Aleph Book Company.