Kalyanikutty's Kerala
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
November 06, 2005

In this State, the greater voice of women seems to have been an important factor.

STATE ICON: You can see her steering her little boat ... . PHOTO: K.K. MUSTAFAH

I HAVE rarely had quite as many reactions to my offerings in this space as to my two recent columns dealing with Kerala. The first (July 31, 2005) was a disavowal of Kerala chauvinism and an explication of the pluralist roots of the Kerala identity; the second (August 14, 2005), on the eve of Independence Day, talked about the extent to which the Malayali ethos offered an example for a pluralist, progressive, democratic Indian ethos. Both pieces have brought me a flood of e-mails and letters, for which I am grateful (feedback is the lifeblood of the columnist). One letter, from an eminent journalist, celebrates the non-chauvinism of Keralites by compiling an impressive list of Keralite achievers in government service, diplomacy and the arts (but is there not a faint whiff of chauvinist gratification in such an exercise?) Another amply supplements my narrative of Kerala's religious pluralism by providing fascinating details about Christianity and Judaism in my home state. I welcome all of this and hope to return to the subject at a later date when I have sufficiently new things to say.

The archetypal Kerala woman

But for now there is one aspect of Kerala I do wish to touch upon, and that has been prompted by a correspondent who calls herself Ammu, undoubtedly a Kerala moniker if there ever was one, who asks pointedly: "In all your celebrations of Kerala, could you find nothing to say about the women?" Fair enough, and of course I can. A few years ago, when I had the privilege of collaborating with the legendary M.F. Husain on a book about Kerala, I was struck by the extent to which images of women dominated the artist's vision of the State. Everywhere in his paintings of Kerala there is the emblematic figure of "Kalyanikutty", his archetypal Kerala woman: indeed, his series has been dubbed "Kalyanikuttyude Keralam" — "Kalyanikutty's Kerala". And there you see her in each of the paintings, striding confidently through the green, holding aloft the miniature elephants which Husain uses to symbolise the State, steering her little boat through a storm, holding her own at the marketplace, and simply — how simply! — reading.

Every woman reads

The mere fact that every Kerala girl or woman 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, and where a State like Bihar has entered the 21st-Century with only 27 per cent of its women able to decipher an alphabet. Fittingly, it was a woman ruler, Rani Gouri Parvati-bai, 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 50 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, which Husain depicts, is a ubiquitous one in Kerala, particularly 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.

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 closer to 70 than she would like to admit, still drives her own car to our ancestral home in a Palakkad village, scorning male help. She likes to be in charge.

A State "about women and nature"

"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 birth-rate than China's, without the coercion China needed. A girl born in Kerala can expect to live 20 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). Kerala's women have become doctors and pilots, Supreme Court justices, ambassadors of India; they have shone in sport, in politics, in the armed forces. "If Kashmir is all about men and mountains," M.F. Husain once said, "Kerala is all about women and nature." I will leave nature to the painters, and the poets. But today let me celebrate 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.