READING: "The Enigma of Kerala" by Bill McKibben (Utne Reader, March/April 1996)
Read by Mary Bennett, Executive Director, Canadian Unitarian Council.

Kerala, a state of 29 million people in southern India, is poor -- even for India -- with a per capita income estimated by various surveys to be .... about one-seventieth the American average. When the American anthropologist Richard Franke surveyed the typical Keralite village of Nadur in the late 1980s, he found that nearly half the ... households had only cooking utensils, a wooden bench, and a few stools in their homes. No beds -- that was the sum of their possessions. Thirty-six percent also had some chairs and cots, and 19 percent owned a table. In five households he discovered cushioned seats.

But here is the odd part:
* The life expectancy for a North American male, with all his chairs and cushions, is 72 years, while the life expectancy for a Keralite male is 70.
* After the latest in a long series of literacy campaigns, the United Nations in 1991 certified Kerala as 100 percent literate. Your chances of having an informed conversation are at least as high in Kerala as in [Kitchener].
* Kerala's birth rate hovers near 18 per thousand, compared with 16 per thousand in the United States -- and is falling faster.

Demographically, in other words, Kerala mirrors the United States on about one-seventieth the cash. It has problems, of course: There is chronic unemployment, a stagnant economy that may have trouble coping with world markets, and a budget deficit that is often described as out of control. But these are the kinds of problems you find in France. Kerala utterly lacks the squalid drama of the Third World -- the beggars reaching through the car window, the children with distended bellies, the baby girls left to die.

Development experts use an index they call PQLI, for "physical quality of life index", a composite that ....... combines most of the basic indicators of a decent human life. In 1981, Kerala's score .... far exceeded all of Africa's, and in Asia only the incomparably richer South Korea ...., Taiwan ..., and Japan ... ranked higher. And Kerala kept improving. By 1989, its score had risen [even further]. It has managed all this even though it's among the most densely crowded places on earth ....... Not even the diversity of its population -- 60 percent Hindu, 20 percent Muslim, 20 percent Christian, a recipe for chronic low-grade warfare in the rest of India -- has stood in its way.

It is, in other words, weird -- like one of those places where the starship Enterprise might land that superficially resembles Earth but is slightly off. It undercuts maxims about the world we consider almost intuitive: Rich people are healthier, rich people live longer, rich people have more opportunity for education, rich people have fewer children. We know all these things to be true -- and yet here is a countercase, a demographic Himalaya suddenly rising on our mental atlas. It's as if someone demonstrated in a lab that flame didn't necessarily need oxygen, or that water could freeze at 60 degrees. It demands a new chemistry to explain it, a whole new science.

REFLECTION: Miracle in Kerala
When I read what you've just heard about Kerala, I was very excited. Like some of you, perhaps, I get a bit depressed at times about what seems to be the widening gap between rich and poor in the world and about the apparent impossibility of alleviating poverty without increasing energy consumption to the point of more damage to the Earth. The story of Kerala seems to suggest that it's not impossible, and of course I wanted to find out how it happened and how it might happen in other places. Bill McKibben, who wrote the article, also wanted to find out those things. He's tried to identify the factors that have made Kerala the way it is and which might be transferable to other situations, rather than unrepeatable flukes.

Kerala has been an identifiable state since the 8th century -- that's a long time -- and for most of its history the economy was based on the spice trade. By the end of the 18th century, a thousand years later, Kerala was controlled by the British, and one of the accidents of history which may have contributed to its current situation is that in the southern two-thirds of the state the local princes, or rajahs, were allowed to manage affairs without outside interference. The rajahs knew that if they wanted this to continue they needed to satisfy the British that they were good managers, so they offered tax breaks for such things as reclaiming swamps and marshes, and they gave tenant farmers more control over the land they were farming. Deliberate policies for economic development didn't exist in most of the world until the 1940s at the earliest, but historians have been able to see the roots of a rational development policy in Kerala from the beginning of the 19th century.

Like just about everywhere else in the Hindu world, the caste system was deeply entrenched in Kerala. There were four main castes, with the Brahmins at the top and the untouchables at the bottom. Within the castes there were complicated subsets, and very strict, minutely-detailed codes of conduct which governed the interactions between the groups and within each group.

Kerala is now less caste-ridden than any spot in the Hindu world, and this in itself is miraculous, in the sense that no single explanation can be found for such an amazing transformation. Some of the change can be traced to economic conditions. For instance, the British and the rajahs encouraged cash crops instead of subsistence farming, and as more and more tenant farmers became involved with that market, the need for education grew and some of the old customs became financially ruinous. But still, the great mass of people accepted caste distinctions as part of the natural order of things and most of them couldn't even dream that any change was possible.

So what did it take to overturn the caste system and set the stage for a way of life in which there was more equal treatment and opportunity? Those who've studied Kerala's history are agreed that one important factor was the emergence of charismatic personalities, the equivalents of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. One such personality was Sri Narayana Guru, born in 1856 to an Ezhava family, the next-to-lowest caste.

Sri Narayana was born in a hut, perhaps a little better than a cowshed or a stable, but not much. As a young man, he renounced all attachments and began a wandering life, gathering disciples, meditating, fasting, and consorting with lepers. As more and more people sought him out for healing and advice, he and his disciples felt the need for a regular temple for worship. What makes a Hindu temple a real temple is the installation of an idol, an image of the god or goddess, -- perhaps it's something like an altar or communion table or pulpit for other religions -- but from the beginning of time in the whole world as it was known to the people of Kerala, only Brahmins, members of the highest caste, had ever installed an idol: it was absolutely their prerogative. Only Brahmins could establish a temple, and there were no Brahmins among those who followed Sri Narayana.

At a beautiful spot in a river, one night in 1888, Sri Narayana had his followers build a small canopy of coconut leaves and mango leaves over an altar on a rock jutting out in the water. They arranged improvised lamps made from shells. At dusk the lamps were lighted and a piper began to play devotional tunes. The whole place was soon alive with pious village folk. Sri Narayana, who had been sitting apart and meditating, stood at midnight and walked into the river. As thousands watched silently, he descended into the river and then re-emerged, holding an idol of Shiva. He stood beneath the canopy with it in his arms for three hours, totally absorbed in meditation; finally, at three in the morning, he installed the idol on the pedestal.

This action was the Keralite equivalent of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers, or Rosa Parkes refusing to give up a seat on the bus. When Brahmin authorities arrived to question him about his action, Sri Narayana gave an answer that still makes Keralites laugh. "I have installed only the Ezhava Shiva, the low-caste Shiva," he said; his words, told and repeated by millions of people, were a mockery of the caste system that began to undermine its rotten structure even more surely than his action.

Needless to say, caste did not instantly disappear. Sri Narayana and many other reformers spent their lives campaigning for more rights for all groups of Keralites, and the struggle went on in an atmosphere of spirituality. The struggle for rights was more than the simple assertion of power by a group too large to be ignored; it was also the assertion of a moral and religious ideal, a view of human dignity against religious and political oppression. "One caste, one religion, one God for all" was the rallying cry.

Politics and religion have always been totally mixed up in Hindu culture; social progress depended on religious reform, and that could only come from religious leaders. It had been the Christian missionaries who started the drive for education in Kerala, but it took the indigenous, activist caste-reform groups to spread education widely. By the 1920s and 30s in southern Kerala the rajahs gave in to popular demands for schooling, and by the 1960s educational programmes had spread into Malabar, the northern section that had been ruled directly by the British. When scholarships were granted to untouchables and tribal peoples, it led to a literacy rate, in 1981, of 70 percent in Kerala compared to the all-India rate of 43 percent. Even more impressive, the rural literacy rate was essentially identical, and female literacy, at 66 percent, wasn't far behind.

The governments of the 1980s continued to press for total literacy, and began a huge volunteer programme. In 1988, in one area of three million people, 50,000 volunteers spread out around the district, tracking down 175,000 illiterate people between the ages of five and 60, two thirds of them women. 20,000 volunteer tutors were then recruited and sent out to teach. Classes were held in cowsheds, in the open air, in courtyards. For fishermen, tutors went to the seashore. In the hills, they sat on rocks teaching people. Leprosy patients were taught to hold pencils in stumps of hands, with rubber bands. For those with poor eyesight, volunteers collected 50,000 pairs of old eyeglasses and learned from doctors how to match them with the recipients. Just over a year after the campaign started, the region's official literacy rate was above 96 percent -- and the per capita cost for the average 150 hours of education each person had received was $26! Organizers knew the campaign was working when letters from newly literate people began arriving in government offices, demanding paved roads and hospitals in their districts.

In Kerala the birth rate is 40 percent below that of India as a whole and almost 60 percent below the rate for poor countries in general. In fact, a 1992 survey found that the birth rate had fallen to replacement level. Kerala has achieved this without coercion and without rapid economic growth. The two-child family is the social norm now. The spread of education is probably the biggest factor in this achievement. Literate women are better able to take charge of their lives, and the typical woman marries at 22 in Kerala, compared with 18 in the rest of India. Access to affordable health care has also had a dramatic impact. There's a dispensary every few kilometers where IUDs and other forms of birth control are freely available, and the same clinic provides cheap health care for children.

Just about all mothers breast-feed their babies, and there's a state-supported nutrition programme for pregnant and nursing mothers. Infant mortality in 1991 was 17 per thousand, compared with 91 in low-income countries generally. In a society where girls are valued as much as boys, and where it's expected that children will survive to adulthood, reason dictates that only one or two children are needed. Kerala's attitude to female children is an anomaly in itself: whereas in India as a whole more boys than girls are born and survive infancy (because of selective abortion and infanticide and different care given to the sexes), in Kerala there are more girls than boys, and the female life expectancy exceeds that of the male, just as it does in the developed world.

Emancipation from caste, from illiteracy, and from the worst forms of gender discrimination, has given Kerala a distinctive character. For one thing, it's an intensely political place. People gather in tea shops to discuss politics, and the state has the highest newspaper consumption of all India. Strikes and labour agitation are so common as to be almost unnoticeable. One morning during McKibben's visit, the newspapers ran stories on a bus strike, a planned strike by medical students over what they said were "unreasonable exam schedules," and a call by a union leader for the government to take over a coat factory where striking workers had been locked out. By the next day's paper the bus strike had ended, but a bank strike had begun. Worse, the men who perform a traditional dance were threatening to strike and were planning a march in full costume and make-up through the streets of the capital. After several fights in one village, a barbershop posted a sign on the wall: "No political discussions, please." This political vitality is a vivid contrast to the apathy, powerlessness, ignorance and tribalism that governs many Third World communities.

Bill McKibben asks how the Kerala model can spread to other places with different cultures and histories. But he cautions that another question about the future needs to be answered first: can the Kerala model survive even in Kerala, or will it eventually be seen as a short-term outbreak from a prison of poverty? Unemployment has been a major problem for decades; as much as a quarter of the state's population may be without jobs. Although there's a generous social security system, joblessness is still a real morale problem, and young men lounging in doorways with nothing to do are a common sight.

Ironically, success is partly to blame. As unions succeed in raising wages and improving working conditions, they drive factories off to parts of India where labour is cheaper. And education may contribute to the problem. In Kerala, many people believe that a real job means one in a government department. This is understandable, because government service is well-paid, totally secure, and ends with a pension at age 55. Lots of Keralites go into medicine, law and teaching -- they have great success abroad, but they often can't find work at home.

Some development experts see Kerala as a bloated social welfare state without the economy to support it, where the strong commitment to providing health and education has left the state with huge budget deficits. The government has started to recognize the dangers of this situation, and is meeting them in a novel way. Instead of building huge factories to increase employment, or lowering wages to compete with other states, there has been a series of initiatives which have been described as coming close to an incarnation of the "sustainable development" which environmentalists would love to see. One example is a programme in which residents of local villages have begun assembling detailed maps of their area, showing topography, soil type, depth to the water table, and depth to bedrock. With this information, local people could sit down and see, for instance, where planting a grove of trees would prevent erosion, or where farmers might grow vegetables during the dry season between rice crops.

At one co-operative project typical of many in Kerala, as well as engaging in silk- production for high-quality fabric, women learn to repair small motors and transistor radios -- to make things last and build a small-scale community of permanence. The leader of the co-op says, "We don't need to become commercial agents, or to always be buying and selling this and that." He envisions a future at once humble and pleasant, much like the tree-shaded community he has built on abandoned land -- a future rather like the ones envisioned by such people as E.F. Schumacher ("Small Is Beautiful") or Thomas Jefferson or Gandhi. "What is the good life?" he asks. "The good life is to be a good neighbour, to consider your neighbour as yourself."

Many representatives from poor countries are studying Kerala, but it may be as much a teacher for the rich world as for the poor. It suggests a way out of two problems simultaneously -- not only how to put more food in starving bellies and more shoes on feet, but also the emerging, equally essential task of finding how to live lightly on the earth, using fewer resources and creating less waste. Kerala shows that a low-level economy can create a decent life, abundant in the things such as health, education and community which are most necessary for us all. A much smaller income means a much smaller danger to the planet. This is not to say that we could now learn to live on as little as people in Kerala, or even that they should. But we may need to give up our belief that everyone in the world should be as rich as we are -- a belief that seems dangerously deluded in light of our growing environmental awareness. Instead, we might ask ourselves how we can happily live with less, because Kerala shows us it can be done.

I spoke on this subject once before, in another congregation, soon after reading that 1996 article by Bill McKibben. As I prepared to give this talk today, I realized how important it is to me to be able to believe in this miracle of simple living, and how at the back of my mind has been a fear that in the past four years the miracle has been exposed as a sham or a failure. I felt some empathy with people of religions which depend on miracle stories for their faith, and I knew I would be angry with anyone who told me that the story of Kerala can’t be believed. So it was with a great sense of relief and affirmation that I read in the July/ August 2000 issue of the CCPA Monitor (that’s the publication put out by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) that Kerala counts among the 6 ecological wonders of the modern world. The Monitor says:

The state of Kerala, in southwest India, where a population as large as Canada’s inhabits an area the size of Switzerland, is a model of political empowerment. Peasants and labourers there are exceptionally well organized and have been able to elect a government committed to helping them. The state has provided excellent basic education and health care, has reformed land ownership, and expanded access to safe drinking water. Desptie a per capita income less than two-thirds of the Indian average, Kerala’s adult literacy rate is almost twice the national rate. Its people typically live 11 years longer, its birth-rate is one third lower, its infant death rate is two-thirds lower, and inequalities between the sexes -- and castes -- are less pronounced than in any other Indian state.

It’s real! Sharing works! Redistribution has made Kerala a decent place to live, even without much economic growth. And the miracle shows that some of our fears about simpler living are unjustified. It's not a choice between suburban North America and dying at 35, or between big business and starvation, or between 150 channels of television and ignorance. The reality of Kerala implies that there is a way in which we all might be able to share a satisfying life, and it prods us to ask one of the critical questions of our age, How much, for us, is enough?