When India became independent, the main livelihoods in this region, as in the rest of the country, were based on land. But unlike most other regions of India, a significant and relatively more prominent part of the economy (half or more of the domestic product) was urban and non-agricultural. Non-agricultural did not mean industrial. True, the processing of some commercial products involved non-mechanised factories. Alappuzha (Alleppey) had emerged as a hub of coir production and Quilon (Kollam) of cashew. Some isolated large, mechanised factories employed hundreds of people in one place in chemicals, rayon, paper and a few other lines. Thus, Aluva (Alwaye) had textiles, fertilisers, aluminium, glass and rayon industries, and Ernakulam oil and soap industries. There were also tea estates in the hills. A concentration of plantation businesses in rubber and spices occurred to the east of Kottayam. But collectively, these formed a smaller group than trade and the financing of marketing, which dominated the landscape of non-agricultural employment. All major towns lived mainly on trade and informal banking. Trichur and Kottayam were mostly service-based towns, with a concentration of banks, colleges and rich churches.

Over one-third of the workforce was in industry, trade, commerce and finance. In most large states of India, the percentage was 20–35. The exceptions were the industrialised states of West Bengal and Maharashtra, where factory-based large-scale industrial firms concentrated. Again, a contrast emerged with the rest of India. Most local businesses were small-scale, semi-rural and household enterprises, whereas non-agricultural enterprises in the rest of India were mainly urban.

Further, industrialisation almost everywhere else signified a sharp inequality between the countryside and the city. The former was trapped in low-yield farmland producing grains for subsistence or local markets, and the latter experienced growth of high-wage jobs. In the state, that distance was narrower. The presence of tree crops and their industrial processing made for a narrower gap between the rural and the urban. Many of the landholders were also owners of estates growing tree crops. Agriculture was not necessarily low yield nor subsistence oriented. In this way, agriculture and non-agriculture, rural and urban came much closer here compared with India.

In the early nineteenth century, the region was ruled by three main political entities: the British Indian district of Malabar belonging to the Madras Presidency, Cochin state, and Travancore state. This was what the southwestern coast's political map looked like for 150 years before the three units were merged to form Kerala (1956). Despite this difference in political form, the three units experienced rather similar forces of change since the nineteenth century, such as the commercialisation of farming and plantations that expanded into new land frontiers, the influx and mobility of capital, labour migration, social movements targeting harsh inequalities and the decline of landholder power.

This chapter will describe the change and its legacies in the mid-twentieth century. It is helpful to start with the eighteenth century, when the political balance faced new challenges before settling down.

Trade and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

A serious European engagement with the southwestern coast of India began with Portuguese explorations in the late fifteenth century. From much before, Malabar traded with West Asia and Africa. ‘Nowhere in India,’ wrote D. M. Dhanagare, ‘have foreign trading and commercial and religious interests interacted within the indigenous socio-economic and political institutions more intimately than they have in Malabar.’

The chief exports of Malabar in early modern trade were spices and timber. Teak was abundantly available. A large shipbuilding industry developed, dependent on the custom of local ship-owning merchants. Beypur was the principal port in Malabar, where much of the commercial and shipbuilding activity was concentrated. In 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama landed in Malabar. A subsequent Portuguese attempt to impose a licensing system on coastal trade produced intermittent conflicts with the ruler of Calicut (Kozhihode), his allies inland, and a resistance force created by the Muslim merchants operating in the seaboard. The Portuguese attempt failed in the end, and the centre of Portuguese settlement shifted further north.

The cosmopolitanism of Malabar strengthened further in the second half of the eighteenth century under two forces, one maritime and another inland. In the seventeenth century, Dutch and English traders arrived to take a share of the lucrative spice trade.

While advances in mass health and schooling made Kerala quite distinct from other states in India in the 1950s, this was not a pathway to economic and social mobility, let alone economic growth. The quality of education, especially higher education, was poor. The persistence of gender norms kept many women out of the labour force, and high unemployment forced most skilled people out of the state. Outside the state, Malayalis found work, but in jobs that did not provide a dramatic change in conditions compared with similar jobs back home.

The Persian Gulf migration broke the stagnation, not just by offering more gainful opportunities but in indirect, if powerful, ways. In the long run, the job market in the Gulf demanded progressively greater skills from the migrants. Two periodic reports – India Migration Reports and Kerala Migration Surveys – reveal a trend towards rising skill levels on average, consistent with the diversification of the Gulf economies from oil-based occupations towards financial and business services. Consequently, more jobs opened up in offices in clerical, accounting, sales and supervisory roles. The migration offered those who stayed back in Kerala the scope to invest in human capital. It stimulated growth by increasing construction activity and the consumption of services. It also possibly encouraged business investment, but this link remains under-researched (Chapter 4). A third factor that deserves mention is women's changing roles and economic conditions, both those who stayed back and those who moved out. In both cases, the nature of the migration and mobility link was different from men’s.

The recent globalisation, or re-integration with the world economy, is, in these ways, a story of labour – and not primarily trade, foreign capital inflow, or investments abroad. It would still be a mistake to overstress international migration or even, more narrowly, emigration to the Persian Gulf. The recent history of labour is also a history of occupational diversification, professionalisation, skill accumulation, shifting gender roles, consumption and saving, and demographic transition.

The present chapter tells that story.

The Miracle

In 1981, the south Indian state of Kerala was among the poorest regions in India. The state's average income was about a third smaller than the national average. In the late 1970s, by average income, Kerala was in the bottom third of India's thirty-odd states. In 2022, per capita income in the state was 50–60 per cent higher than the national average. Among those states large in land size, populous and with a diversified economic base, the state was the fifth richest in terms of average income in 2022. Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana were the other four. None of the others saw such a sharp change in relative ranking.

Kerala's economy did not grow steadily throughout these forty years. The acceleration, catching up and overtaking were not more than fifteen years old, twenty at the most. Income growth rates were low for much of the 1980s and the 1990s. The numbers changed sharply only in recent decades. The roots of this extraordinary growth performance, however, were much older. This book is a search for these roots.

It is not a common practice among economists to treat a state in India as the subject of long-term economic history. But ‘Kerala is different’ from all other Indian states. A huge scholarship building from the 1970s and drawing in many social scientists insisted it was different. Although poor, the population of the state lived much longer than the average Indian and had a significantly higher literacy rate than in the rest of India. The scholarship trying to explain this anomaly was mindful of history. But the history had a narrow purpose. It was made to work for a specific question: how did an income-poor region make great strides in human development? The discourse that emerged to answer the question had two critical weaknesses. First, it was too state-focused and neglected to analyse enough market-led changes. Second, it took income poverty for granted. Neither the question nor the answers offered are useful to explain the recent acceleration in income. The explanations could not show how the basic premise of a low income might change someday because the research agenda did not consider that prospect very likely.

About a decade after India began liberalising its economy, arguments over the best pathway to plan for emerged. Kerala acquired a new significance in this discourse. Did the state have lessons for India at large? The most influential commentators on India's record of human development, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, cited the strides in human development, implying that India's policymakers needed to learn lessons from what could be done with limited state resources. A competing view, of which Jagdish Bhagwati was a forceful proponent, said that the accent on human development risked devaluing economic growth. Growth needed competitive markets, which would strengthen the state's finances and sustain the ability to fund welfare and public goods. In this second argument, Kerala was cited as a fiscally unsustainable model. ‘The much-advertised model of alternative development, in the Indian state of Kerala,’ Bhagwati said in a 2004 lecture, ‘with its major emphasis on education and health and only minor attention to growth, had … run into difficulties….’

How sound were these authors in reading the state's history? Not very, one would think. Bhagwati expressed his pessimistic views even as economic growth had begun to surge. His intuition that the model was unsustainable was probably correct but not testable. Drèze and Sen, writing in 2013, did casually acknowledge that economic growth revived and then attributed it to ‘Kerala's focus on elementary education and other basic capabilities’, not going into the details of how these two things were related. Their discussion of the state's recent history almost totally overlooked the most significant force of transformation, a market-driven one: the export of labour. In short, the market-versus-state choices in the 2000s debate were obsolete tools for a historical analysis of the state.

When discussing that history, what should we be looking at? Chronologically, the first major transformation that marked the state out in India was the positive achievements in education and healthcare, which began in the nineteenth century. The second major transition was the declining average fertility and population growth rates in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Since these topics are much discussed, we will be brief and build on a few major works on the subjects.

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

For years now, Kerala has had the distinction of being ruled by a communist-partyled coalition. The communist alliance won the first state assembly elections in 1957, lost in 1960, returned to power, and ruled the state in 1967–70 (first under E.M.S. Namboothiripad till 1969 and then under C. Achuthamenon), 1970–77, 1978–79 1980–81, 1987–91, 1996–2001, 2006– 11 and since 2016. In between, there were years when the state was under President's Rule, that is, the federal government governed it. The composition of the left coalition changed. It was never a body consisting of only the ideologically left parties: the Muslim League and some Christian factions allied with the communists. However, the main constituents of the coalition were the Communist Party of India (CPI) until 1964 and the CPI (Marxist), or CPI(M), after the CPI split into two parties.

In no other state of India, except West Bengal (and later Tripura), did the CPI or CPI(M) command a popular support base large enough to win elections. In common with West Bengal, tenants and agricultural labourers in these acutely land-scarce regions formed the main support base for the party. The communists won elections on the promise of land reforms. There was another historic factor behind their popularity. Caste equality movements coalesced around the leftist movement. Because of their commitment to the rural and land-dependent poor, the left delivered land reforms in Kerala and West Bengal in the 1970s. And in both states, ruling left parties indirectly drove private capital out of trade and industry. Ideological differences within the Communist Party of India led to a split in 1964. A faction led by S.A. Dange tended to have cooperation with the Indian National Congress, which then had a good relationship with the Soviet Union. That and the debates on National Bourgeoisie led to the split.

This is not a paradox. The paradox was that from the 1990s, if not earlier, the left quietly turned friendly towards private capital. By then, agriculture was in retreat, the old base of the left was not significant anymore, and the state was rapidly falling behind India in economic growth (and investment rates).

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.

The state's climate is unique among Indian states. Following the Koppen– Geiger classification of climatic regions of the world, over two-thirds of the land in India is tropical savanna, desert or semi-arid. Most of Kerala is monsoonal or highland tropics. The difference is this. The average summer temperature in the former regions can reach levels high enough to dry up surface water. The monsoon rains relieve that aridity, but only for a few months in a year. That dual condition makes water storage and recycling a fundamental precondition for economic growth. It elevates the risk of droughts and diseases from seasonal or periodic acute water shortages. Kerala, by contrast, does not get as fierce a summer as the other areas of India and receives a lot more rainfall. That dual condition implies a natural immunity from seasonal food and water scarcity and a low disease risk.

With its extraordinary biodiversity, this is a vast storehouse for natural resources. The state has a surface area of 38,855 square kilometres and is bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Western Ghats to the east. The eastern highlands, the central midlands and the western lowlands, with 580 kilometres of coastline, can access a wealth of ocean resources and means of subsistence for their fisherfolk and the general populace. Compared with semi-arid India, the benign environment largely explains the head start in life expectancy (Chapters 1 and 6). Further, nature provides industrial resources that cannot be found elsewhere. The highlands have the ideal climate for growing coffee, tea and spices. Low hills are often planted with rubber. The seaboard traded with West Asia for centuries. The state's Gulf connection, thus, had a prehistory. A large tourism business has developed by selling nature.

On the other hand, recent experience shows that climate change and overdevelopment can jointly raise the risk of disasters. In the first three weeks of August 2018, Kerala received 164 per cent of the average rainfall for that time of the year. The following floods were devastating, comparable only to a similar event in 1924. In 2019, extreme weather repeated, now causing landslides. Mining and quarrying, frequent blasting and unscientific changes in land use patterns affected the highland ecology.

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).

In 1956 (and even now), two distinct types of agriculture existed in the state: cultivation of seasonal field crops and cultivation of tree crops. The latter held steady in the long run. But traditional agriculture, especially paddy cultivation, for which the lowlands and the river basins were especially suitable, has seen a relentless decline since 1970. Twenty years into the new millennium, traditional agriculture was an insignificant employer and earner, and for most people still engaged in it, the land provided no more than a subsidiary income. A relative retreat from traditional agriculture is not news. It happened everywhere. In the state the fall was spectacular.

What was this a change from? Although agriculture employed a smaller proportion of the workforce than in India at the start of this journey, it was not a marginal livelihood. Land control secured the political power of the elites in the princely states. A variety of crops were cultivated throughout the state, from monsoon rice to tapioca, ginger, groundnut, sugarcane and pulses. Most were rarely traded outside the region but were vital to sustaining local consumption. Good croplands occurred in clusters. Because of the topography, land available for the cultivation of traditional field crops was less than half the total land area of the state. Alluvial soil occurs in a narrow strip along the coast or in river valleys. Land elsewhere is not as fertile, though frequently suitable for tree crops. Unlike in most regions of India, access to water was not a serious problem. Soil quality and drainage of excess water were bigger problems.

Good land, however, was extremely scarce relative to the population. The exceptionally high population density in the areas of cultivation ensured a level of available land per head that was a fraction of the Indian figure (0.6 acres against an Indian average of 3.1 acres around 1970) and low by any benchmark. Partly, the density reflected high labour demand in lowlands to deal with drainage and seasonal flooding. Paddy yield was very high in these areas, but paddy cultivation needed a lot of people. From the 1940s, this zone in the middle was emerging as a political battleground.

With the Occupy protests in the West, which have lately been superseded by the Black Lives Matter movements, we started telling the stories of protest movements in the Global South, with a focus on Kerala. It would also imply that right-making/state-making dialectics ought to be applied to understand and assess state formation and state performance, including that of the Kerala model of development. After the post-independence state formation, the historical landscape of Kerala, by and large, validates the right-making/statemaking thesis despite shortfalls; it appears that after state formation, and until recently, there have been tendencies on the part of the state to put constraints in the process. It strengthened the case for why the confluence of class and race/caste, with its gender expressions, matters for appropriate politics, particularly in leftist groups. Furthermore, research has shown that different communities have been negatively impacted by global crises like the coronavirus pandemic, with the most marginalized members of society bearing the brunt of this burden because they lack access to adequate healthcare, are malnourished, and live in poverty. Neither the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism nor the pandemic is caste- or class-neutral. All the more important is the livelihood and environmental vulnerability of the marginalized in a state which is otherwise known for its social developments and socialist experiments which in turn demands what has been described in this monograph as political ecospatiality.

Threats and enclosures are additional features of the current world, and the pandemic has made individuals who defend their rights even more vulnerable. Countries of the Global South such as Colombia, Niger, Indonesia, and the Philippines are used as examples of neoliberal predations (Burns and LeMoyne 2001; Lucas and Warren 2003; Iwilade 2012; Quimpo 2009). In the case of India, as argued elsewhere, the modalities of emerging power is by and large constituted by the Hindutva–corporate regime; this is further contrasted with the ‘graduated social democratic state’ as in Kerala (Raman 2023). As we describe the problems of the excluded, the future seems as hazy as ever. Yet the ecospatial struggles we narrated so far are optimistic, and so is ecospatiality in its totality, which is in and of itself politics proper.

Onam, the harvest festival of the Malayalis, marked the moment of departure in August 2001, when the Adivasis of Kerala planted ‘refugee huts’, the kutilkettysamaram, in front of the state secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram in protest against mass starvation deaths in their communities. The protest was historic and innovative; no other protest of this nature has ever been attempted anywhere else in India. What they sought was their right to livelihood resources – land for the landless. While there were several land struggles and movements by Adivasis in Kerala, the immediate provocation for them marching to the state capital was the report of 32 starvation deaths among Adivasis in and around Attappady and Wayanad, the tribal district in the state. They demanded a settlement outside the controversial Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999, passed by the state legislative assembly, which repealed the original Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, 1975. The Adivasi Dalit Samara Samithi (ADSS) argued that of the 75,000 Adivasi families in the state, 45,000 were landless, and the granting of 5 acres to each of those families would require the distribution of 2.25 lakh acres of land. The Adivasis, led by C.K. Janu – an Adiya woman who spearheaded the struggle – conducted their protest in an unprecedented manner. The struggle was considered successful by the ADSS, claiming that their demands for lands were met, at least partly, by the government. When no action was taken by the government to make the promised measures, and instead followed procrastination politics, the tribal alliance renewed their protest, now in the form of Occupy Muthanga. The indigenous people of Wayanad, under the banner of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) – nearly 800 families – entered the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (MWWS) in January 2003 and declared the area their own, a new republic. However, in two months’ time, on 19 February, they were forcefully evacuated with armed police: one Adivasi and a police officer lost their lives; several Adivasis were hurt or injured in the process.