The Enigma of Kerala

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Caste did not crumble immediately, however. Sri Narayana Guru and many other reformers spent their lives campaigning for more rights--more opportunity, the right to enter and worship at all temples--for the various castes. But all the prosaic struggle for civil rights went on in an atmosphere of spirituality; more than the simple assertion of power by a group too large to be ignored, it was also the assertion of a moral ideal, a view of human dignity against the oppressions both of feudalism and of faith. 'One caste, one religion, one God for man,' was Sri Narayana Guru's rallying cry.

Since oppression and religion were so intertwined in Hindu culture, social progress depended on religious reform, which could only come from religious leaders; there's a sense in which activists like Sri Narayana Guru had to be both Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. He knew the freedom struggle was about much more than political independence. When a student of his said once that if all the Indians merely spat at the same time, the Englishmen would be drowned, the swami replied, 'That is true. But the mouth becomes dry on seeing an Englishman.' He was building new people as much as a new politics.

In the morning, every road in Kerala is lined with boys and girls walking to school. Depending on their school, their uniforms are bright blue, bright green, bright red. It may be sentimental to say that their eyes are bright as well, but of all the subtle corrosives that broke down the old order and gave rise to the new Kerala, surely none is as important as the spread of education to an extent unprecedented and as yet unmatched in the Third World.

Though Christian missionaries and the British started the process, it took the militance of the caste-reform groups and then of the budding left to spread education widely. The first great boom was in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in southern Kerala, where the princes acceded to popular demands for ever more schools. When leftists dominated politics in the 1960s, they spread the educational programs into Malabar, the northern state that had been ruled directly by the British, and began granting scholarships to untouchables and tribal peoples. By 1981, the general literacy rate in Kerala was 70 percent--twice the all-India rate of 36 percent. Even more impressive, the rural literacy rate was essentially identical, and female literacy, at 66 percent, was not far behind. Kerala was a strange spike on the dismal chart of Third World literacy.

The government, particularly the leftists who governed for much of the late 1980s, continued to press the issue, aiming for 'total literacy,' usually defined as a population where about 95 percent can read and write. The pilot project began in the Ernakulam region, an area of 3 million people that includes the city of Cochin. In late 1988, 50,000 volunteers fanned out around the district, tracking down 175,000 illiterates between the ages of 5 and 60, two-thirds of them women. The leftist People's Science Movement recruited 20,000 volunteer tutors and sent them out to teach. Within a year, it was hoped, the illiterates would read Malayalam at 30 words a minute, copy a text at 7 words a minute, count and write from 1 to 100, and add and subtract three-digit numbers. The larger goal was to make people feel powerful, feel involved; the early lessons were organized around Brazilian teacher Paolo Freire's notion that the concrete problems of people's lives provide the best teaching material. 'Classes were held in cowsheds, in the open air, in courtyards,' one leader told the New York Times. 'For fishermen we went to the seashore. In the hills, tribal groups sat on rocks. Leprosy patients were taught to hold a pencil in stumps of hands with rubber bands. We have not left anyone out.' For those with poor eyesight, volunteers collected 50,000 donated pairs of old eyeglasses and learned from doctors how to match them with recipients. On February 4, 1990, 13 months after the initial canvass, Indian prime minister V.P. Singh marked the start of World Literacy Year with a trip to Ernakulam, declaring it the country's first totally literate district. Of the 175,000 students, 135,000 scored 80 percent or better on the final test, putting the region's official literacy rate above 96 percent; many of the others stayed in follow-up classes and probably had learned enough to read bus signs. The total cost of the 150 hours of education was about $26 per person.

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