A Pilgrim in Kerala

"Poor but Prosperous" by Akash Kapur, in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1998), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.

It is a land where portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Che Guevara are still plastered on building walls, where small paper flags bearing the hammer and sickle flutter by the roadside. You can get your car fixed (if you are lucky enough to own one) at Lenin’s Auto Parts. Is this Cuba? North Korea? No, it is Kerala, a verdant Indian state with 33 million inhabitants on the subcontinent’s southwest coast. It offers a model for the Indian future, insists Kapur, an Indian resident now traveling on a fellowship from Harvard University.

In 1957, Kerala installed the world’s first democratically elected Marxist government, and Communists have ruled intermittently ever since. Lush plantations of cardamom, pepper, rubber, and tea fill the valleys, criss-crossed by rivers and canals. Land reform in the 1960s gave

1.5 million tenant farmers pieces of this fecund land, and a "generous" minimum wage assures a decent standard of living, at least for those who can find work. Unemployment is high at 25 percent, a result of the fact that industry has largely stayed away from the Marxist Eden.

Kerala is one of the poorest states in one of the poorest countries in the world. The state’s gross domestic product, at $1,000 per capita, is some $200 less than the Indian average. Yet, according to Kapur, the people of Kerala enjoy advantages usually found only in the industrialized world. Life expectancy is 72 years, and infant mortality rates are low. "Perhaps most impressive," he says, is the 90 percent literacy rate, the result of a threeyear literacy drive begun in 1989. More newspapers per capita are read here than anywhere else in India. Keralites are open to new ideas, Kapur says, citing bookstores he found stocked with such titles as Text/Countertext and Intimations of Post-Modernity. Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Columbia University, likens Kerala’s active civic life to Tocquevillean America’s.

Some of Kerala’s advantages derive from its history as a cosmopolitan trading state. Its busy port city of Cochin is called the "Venice of India." Other advantages are of more recent vintage. Stiff national tariffs on imported crops and remittances from Keralites working overseas help sustain the local economy.

Now, with India’s tariffs coming down amid the gradual liberalization of the national economy, Kerala "runs the risk of being steamrollered" by change, Kapur says. But its example, in his view, should remind Indians that success cannot be measured "merely in terms of income and output."