Kerala, the south Indian state where we spent a long weekend, is one of the three states in the country that has an elected Communist government, which has served it splendidly well in the last fifty years. After the Communists came to power here in 1957, there was massive land redistribution from the landlords to the people; in the next decade, there were also conversions to Protestantism by the former lower-caste poor Hindus (effectively, these were former plantation slaves).
While neither measure has worked to really shatter the well-entrenched caste system here, it has produced a more equitable society in comparison to other Indian states. The government here also takes good care of its poorest with abundant state stores where those below the poverty line can buy staples like rice at heavily subsidized prices.
(To my horror, the cutoff for being considered below the poverty line turns out to be a salary of below $12 a month; yet it is true that most households here are self-sufficient, growing their own coconuts--the main fruit and food ingredient in this land--and bananas, and having their little rice paddies). The houses are more prosperous and bigger than in the north, the people look healthier, and everyone appears satisfied to be leading a quiet, peaceful village life in these extremely scenic tropical backwaters.
While most of Kerala is now Hindu, there is a large percentage of the population that is Syrian Catholic (as well as later Portuguese converts), back from the 1st century when St. Thomas the Apostle came here; their Christian temples look nothing like any others you've seen and have their own iconography, such as the cross on top of the lotus flower.
The Hindu temples here have their own style as well, resembling open Balinese ones more than Indian ones... just like the long, boat-shaped and straw-covered houses here kept reminding us of Indonesia--a country that seems to have more in common culturally with this place than the Indian north.
Yet Kerala is also a place that has been marked by its many cultural contacts, from being the hub of the spice trade for centuries. The picture at the bottom, for instance, shows the cantilevered "Chinese fishing nets" (a legacy of 15th-century Chinese traders) put in the water in the morning and evening. The main historic town, Cochin (or Kochi), has a number of Portuguese seventeenth-century houses and also the so-called Jew Town at its center--the Jewish population is believed to have come here back during the destruction of the Second Temple, and just a few of their descendants have survived to our days. There is still a 17th-century synagogue that looks more like a Dutch Protestant church, with Chinese Delft-style white and blue tiles.
Kerala has produced many gentlemen farmers and intellectuals, including the writer Arundhati Roy, who don't seem at all eager to leave these parts--the owner of the idyllic homestay we lived in is a descendant of landlords and priests who looks like a cross between Toulouse-Lautrec and a Marxist intellectual and can converse professorially, for hours, about Keralan history, yet says with pride that he has never left southern India and has no desire to.
It is a nice life here and a nice vacation can be had on the ubiquitous houseboats--made in the shape of traditional rice barges--that ply the backwaters (a recent tourist invention, they have shot up in popularity), going for ayurvedic massages and eating the delicious local food.
Kerala is not exactly undiscovered: everywhere you go in the central parts, there seems to be a blissed-out pink face smiling at you contentedly from a bicycle or the prow of a houseboat. Yet it's still one of the most singular and culturally distinctive of Indian destinations--as I'll talk about more in the next posts
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