Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  • • •

  In few places on earth today are the outward signs of left-wing politics as flamboyant as they are in Kerala. Beside almost every major workplace, even the temple the maharajah attends, a sign marks the office of a union of its employees. Hammers and sickles, or sometimes a sickle and sheaf of grain, are painted on walls everywhere. Rare was the day when a group of people was not sitting in or fasting in protest against something in front of the main state office building. Posters of Marx and Engels abounded; once in a while their bearded faces were joined by Lenin and Stalin. Almost every day some chanting group carried red banners through downtown Trivandrum, incongruously crossing paths with the occasional temple elephant. When a taxi I was in came upon a march of labor unionists one morning, I expected them to be hostile. But foreigners are a great rarity in the city; one marcher peered through the cab window curiously, then threw me a grinning salute.

  It took several months for another of Kerala’s paradoxes to fully dawn on me: the state’s vocal politics of the Left coexist with a deep-rooted social conservatism. Even more unexpected, most Keralites, as they call themselves, don’t see this as a paradox. There is no notion that the personal might be the least bit political. Few people thought it surprising, for example, that the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the longtime Kerala chief of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), plus all four of his children, had all had arranged marriages within their own Brahmin caste.

  For centuries, Kerala had the most rigid and complex caste hierarchy in India. When Dutch fortune-seekers killed more than four hundred members of the Nayar warrior caste in battle in 1662, a Dutchman was startled that “fishermen, and other classes, apparently of the same nation and country, looked on with indifference.” Kerala had not only untouchables, but unseeables: people considered so polluting that they could not even be seen close-up by a Brahmin. In 1924, a missionary reported that he saw a Brahmin walking along a road with a man in front of him armed with a stick, to ensure all outcastes would be more than thirty yards away when the Brahmin passed. Gandhi himself came to Kerala the same year to join a massive protest against laws that kept lower castes from using roads near certain temples.

  Today, all this has long since been reformed; untouchables are officially no more, and one speaks of “former untouchables.” Indeed, the current president of India, the ceremonial head of state, is a former untouchable from Kerala. But, as with slavery and segregation in the United States, no heritage of centuries can be legislated out of people’s minds in a generation or two.

  Gradually I began to understand how important these divisions were. A bitter factional dispute in the ruling Communist Party that made headlines, for instance, was partly connected to conflict between its mostly lower-caste rank and file and mostly upper-caste leadership. And my wife and I came to see some caste scars in our own neighborhood, an area where many former untouchables lived.

  A few weeks after we moved in, the power line outside our house was struck by lightning. Wires sparked and sizzled, light switches leapt out of the walls, and everything went dark. We needed an electrician. Happily one lived with his extended family just three houses away. After he fixed the wiring, he and his wife came for tea several times. He was a former untouchable and seemed immensely pleased to be visiting this house we were renting from a Brahmin doctor. But he keenly felt a vast gulf between the “little people,” as he put it, and his upper-caste neighbors, the “big people.” Recently, he said, his father had suffered an accident and needed to be rushed to the hospital. The electrician had no car and no telephone to call an ambulance. He had raced from house to house on our street, begging for someone with a car to drive his father to the hospital. No one would do so, he said, even though perhaps a third of the homeowners on the street were doctors or nurses at a nearby complex of hospitals. He had to run a mile to the nearest taxi stand.

  The worst effect of any kind of discrimination is the way it gets internalized. Another former untouchable in the neighborhood was a young man who often visited our house to talk. But when we offered him something to eat or drink, I noticed, he always took it outdoors, as if he would somehow offend us by eating in our presence.

  Sometimes you see how pervasive something is in one society when people make the assumption that it exists everywhere. For many people, we were the first Americans or Europeans they had met, and once we got talking with a man who came to install some screens on our windows. He asked, “Are the two of you of the same caste?” We explained, of course, that America did not have castes. But after he left, it occurred to me that yes, we really were of the same caste. Castes in India have their roots in ancient occupations: priests, farmers, scribes, warriors, and so on, and we both do indeed belong to the caste of scribes. A marriage between a scribe and a warrior in California would be as rare as one between a Brahmin and an untouchable here.

  Kerala is also deeply conservative when it comes to gender. Any time I went to lecture to a university class, the women always sat on the left side of the room as they faced the speaker, the men on the right. The same was true at a large political rally I attended where, despite its being staged by the state’s left-wing government, among more than a dozen speakers over the course of three hours, not one was a woman.

  Women factory workers are routinely paid less than men. (When a researcher friend of ours asked a union official about this, he said disapprovingly, “Comrade, you are criticizing us!”) At construction sites, women do the hardest labor, carrying baskets of dirt and sand on their heads. And women do much of what looks like the toughest work of all in Kerala, sitting by the side of the road in the unbelievably hot sun, using hammers to break large rocks into gravel. Kerala women hold few high political posts and constitute only a small percentage of the membership of the ruling Communist Party.

  As in all of India, someone is expected to marry a person of the same caste, and the vast majority of marriages are arranged. Kerala may vote for the Left, but the Sunday newspapers’ matrimonial advertisements were classified by caste. We heard innumerable stories of people being ostracized by their families for marrying someone from another caste or for a marriage that was not arranged. One woman told me that an uncle of hers “simply will not come” to any wedding that is a love match, no matter who is getting married. This woman, now a graduate student, got to meet her own husband only once before her wedding, and that in the presence of many other people. “This will not happen to my daughter,” she said.

  All these practices, curiously, cut across political and educational lines. One Kerala friend of ours, a professor who was once head of the international scholarly association in his field, was busily arranging his son’s marriage. (In this case, the bride and groom were allowed to spend part of a day together before the wedding, a liberal-minded gesture unheard of in older times.) Arundhati Roy’s best-selling 1997 novel The God of Small Things is about a Kerala community’s violent reaction to a love affair across caste lines. And it makes no difference that the woman involved is Christian and therefore supposedly without caste, or that her brother, who is horrified by the affair, is an Oxford-educated communist. On this score, Roy got Kerala exactly right.

  A defiant young man in a magazine advertisement for a line of clothing says: “My parents chose the girl. Her parents chose the date. No one chooses my suit.”

  • • •

  Another Kerala paradox is this: its citizens have no patience for foreign admirers who praise their state for its ability to do more with less. They would like to do more with more.

  We may compare them with the rest of India, but they don’t. They compare themselves with Europe and the United States, where hundreds of thousands of people of Kerala origin are living. And the comparison hurts. Even closer at hand, they compare themselves with the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf, where an estimated five to eight hundred thousand Keralites, from neurosurgeons to stevedores, are contract workers. Indeed, the number of Kerala men away from their wives in “the Gul
f” may be part of the reason why the state’s birth rate is so low.

  Economically, Kerala is less a part of India than of the Arabian Peninsula. From Trivandrum there is one plane a day from New Delhi, the national capital. But four to six planes a day make the longer trips from Kuwait, Bahrain, and other Arab countries, their disembarking passengers bringing home baggage full of radios, video cameras, TVs, and computers. In Trivandrum’s equivalent of a yellow pages phone book, there are twenty-one pages of Gulf listings, plus street maps of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Depending on the job market in the oil states, anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of Kerala’s income, it is estimated, is sent home by Keralites working abroad. People at every class level go to the Gulf for a few years at a time, sometimes for several such stints during their lives: the returned migrants we met just in our neighborhood ranged from doctor to army officer to construction worker and more.

  Whatever your trade, the chances are that you can make three to eight times as much by plying it across the Arabian Sea as you can in Kerala. Competition for Gulf jobs is fierce, and the agents who arrange these positions charge high fees and occasionally abscond with the money. Some attracted to the Gulf get caught up in a sort of Gold Rush mentality. Throughout Kerala stand thousands of “Gulf houses”: huge, concrete, fortress-like structures, occasionally even with crenelated ramparts, that dwarf their neighbors. One I passed on my morning run had a large outbuilding of concrete—servants’ quarters? a guest cottage?—molded in the shape of a houseboat, with bow, stern, a deck, deckhouse, portholes. Construction on a couple of gigantic Gulf houses near us had mysteriously stopped; perhaps the owner had lost that overseas job and now had to make do with a lowly Kerala salary.

  Throughout the world, children are told to stay in school if they want a job; countries invest in schools and universities if they want their economies to grow. This brings us to the next paradox of Kerala: the state, which spends proportionally more on education than any other in India, has the country’s highest unemployment rate, three to four times the national average.

  For one single advertised job opening as a municipal laborer some years back, there were 59,014 applications. At every Kerala shop, office or building site, people with time on their hands cluster about: friends, relatives, job-seekers, people on a waiting list for jobs. When I took a taxi to visit a newspaper editor friend, a dozen people, it seemed, lounging in the building’s courtyard, leapt up to signal to the driver how to turn around. Economic growth per capita is near zero. Although Kerala grows a lot of coconuts, rice, cashews, and rubber, it has very little industry. Indeed, fully half the state’s trade unionists, like those I often saw marching so militantly through Trivandrum’s streets, are directly or indirectly government employees. The Keralites who’ve gone abroad or to other parts of India are not just going for the Gulf-level salaries; they’re going because there’s no work for them at home.

  What happened? Business-oriented critics say that Kerala’s powerful trade unions have priced the work force out of the market. An industrialist can find workers, even literate ones, who’ll work for half as much money in the poverty-stricken state of Tamil Nadu next door. To some extent this is true, and Tamil Nadu and Kerala’s other neighbor, Karnataka, have higher growth rates. But it doesn’t seem the full explanation, for, despite all the marches and red flags, Kerala loses fewer days per factory worker to strikes and lockouts than does the rest of India. And, despite its name, the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) is eagerly putting money into incentives for foreign investors. I was told that it had quietly instructed its union allies that, at a new industrial park in Trivandrum, there were to be no strikes.

  One obvious drag on economic growth is bureaucracy. Government drowns in a sea of paperwork. Getting a telephone installed in our house, for instance, required an odyssey of visits to four separate offices of the telephone company in different parts of town, and waiting for them to send reports to each other. Over the course of our five months in Trivandrum, we had to pay an astonishing ten visits to something called the Foreigners Registration Office, to register, unregister, and get various stamps and signatures and permissions. The dusty, dimly lit room was a scene out of “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Ceiling fans turned lazily above high stacks of ledgers and bundles of files tied with string, some papers spilling out of the bundles. The files had turned limp and moldering in the humidity and looked as if they contained the registration documents of every foreign visitor to Kerala since Marco Polo, who stopped here on his way home from China.

  Besides bureaucracy, there is a routine system of under-the-table payments. The scarcest commodities, jobs, are for sale. It’s an open secret, for example, that it costs you anywhere from two to five hundred thousand rupees (about $5,000 to $12,500) to get a teaching post at a private college, where your salary is paid by the government. Then, if you’re the college president, a high-ranking, frustrated Kerala state official explained to me, “you really can’t fire the fellow, no matter how incompetent he is, because he paid you for the job! Meanwhile, he’s opened a private tutoring business on the side, so he can earn money to pay back the person he borrowed that payment from.”

  However, the paperwork thicket is just as dense everywhere in India, and public opinion surveys rate Kerala as less corrupt, by quite a large margin, than any other state. In our many dealings with officialdom, no one ever asked for a bribe.

  One clear source of Kerala’s economic troubles is its skimpy and uneven supply of electricity. Stagnant tax revenues have left the state government painfully short of money to improve the basic infrastructure, and nowhere has this been more crippling than with power. The proliferation of Gulf houses and modern appliances has surged far ahead of the supply. In much of the state the current goes off for half an hour each night, a blackout that rotates by schedule through different neighborhoods. There are many unscheduled outages as well. Furthermore, the voltage starts going down when thousands of offices put on their air conditioners in the morning and drops still further when millions of homes turn on their lights at night. The ceiling fans in our house moved ever more sleepily as the evening wore on, and revved up to top speed only as midnight approached, when the city’s residents turned off their lights and went to bed.

  Keralites cope with this in a variety of ways. When the state’s governor arrived at a conference I attended, his staff carried a portable generator so that the microphone would not go dead while he was speaking. Our house came equipped with something that looked like a swollen car battery, which (when it was working) captured incoming electricity during the day and then fed it back to certain lights during the nightly power cuts. But you can’t have such a device for an entire factory or have an assembly line that slows down during brownouts.

  Another reason for Kerala’s low growth is the state’s extreme social conservatism. One curious way this shows up is the statistics on what happens to the money Keralites earn overseas and then send home. Less than 6 percent gets invested in any sort of business. More than half of it goes into land or into building or improving homes. There’s no telling what proportion of that is spent by people merely trying to put decent roofs over their families’ heads for the first time (those roofs of coconut palm thatch, however picturesque, have to be replaced after every monsoon season) and what proportion goes for Gulf houses. A glance around any Kerala city tells you that a goodly share goes to the latter. And this conspicuous consumption can’t be blamed entirely on the evils of global advertising. Some of it in Kerala comes from a reaction to the even more caste-bound society of the past, where lower castes were not permitted to wear gold jewelry or, sometimes, even clothing above the waist.

  What else does the Gulf money get invested in? One study found a startling 22.8 percent of it going into “marriage of daughters,” a euphemism for something nominally illegal but still pervasive: dowries. Our electrician neighbor was shortly planning to go off to the Gulf to start earning money he could put away for the dowry of his daught
er—who was now just ten months old. Dowries make having daughters a financial liability. And a huge one, for Indian dowries sometimes can amount to a year or more of a parent’s income. And in Kerala, under the impact of Gulf money, the price is going up. Any “Gulf boy” can command a far higher dowry from a bridal candidate. Furthermore, much of that dowry is likely to be in gold and jewels, which creates jobs for miners in Africa but not for workers in Kerala. In these ways, the feudal past still hobbles Kerala today.

  • • •

  What’s the next step for Kerala? Each new left-wing state government introduces a program to be its hallmark; the last time around it was a big adult-literacy campaign. The current effort, praised highly in a recent World Bank report, is a radical change in the way India usually does business. Of Kerala’s state planning budget—money spent not for recurring expenses like teachers’ salaries or road maintenance, say, but for economic development and new infrastructure—35 to 40 percent is now being turned over to the state’s tens of thousands of villages to spend, within broad limits, as they like. Elsewhere in the country, these funds are jealously monopolized by state governments. For Kerala’s villages, this is the first time they’ve gotten control of such large sums. Village and neighborhood meetings have been held up and down the state, and citizens have worked on inventories of their communities’ needs. “Economic development” can include everything down to getting a goat or some chickens or a coconut seedling for your backyard, so hundreds of thousands of Keralites have applied for grants.