How Women Made Kerala Literate

Governments and Culture: How Women Made Kerala LiterateAuthor(s): Robin JeffreyReviewed work(s):Source: Pacific Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 447-472Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British ColumbiaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2758883 .Accessed: 17/03/2012 17:30

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Governments and Culture: How Women Made Kerala Literate*

Robin Jeffrey

A SINGLE IMAGE dramatized Kerala's literacy for me. I was on a bus lurching northwards out of Ernakulam early on a monsoon morning

in July 1968. Heavy rain bubbled into the red laterite soil and surged down the sides of the road like strong tea. The canvas window-curtains were let down to keep out the rain, and the inside of the bus steamed. At the first stop, I lifted the curtain to let in some air. A few metres away, an old woman dressed in white sat dry and comfortable on the narrow verandah of her house. What startled me was what she was doing. She peered intently through thick spectacles, and propped expertly against her crossed leg was-her morning newspaper.

I had been teaching in a high school in Punjab in north India for about a year at that time, and among 150 boys who were my pupils, only one wore spectacles. Newspaper-reading, even among men, was not something I commonly saw, and I could not remember having seen an old woman reading a newspaper. This was the beginning of my perplexity about what made Kerala literate. Though I could not have known it then, female literacy in Kerala in 1971 proved to be 54 percent; in Punjab, only 26 percent (Table 5).

This essay tries to explain why Kerala is India's most literate region. According to the census of 1981, 69 percent of all Kerala's people were literate, though the all-India rate was a mere 36 percent. Maharashtra, the most literate state after Kerala, had a rate of only 47 percent.' (For the problem of defining "literacy," see the Note at the end of this essay.)

I have long agonized over any short explanation of what made Kerala literate. Was it the persistent policies of far-sighted governments or something peculiar to Kerala's culture? My best proposition would be: governments and their policies affected the timing at which particular groups of people in Kerala became literate; but culture2-and the most important

* The writer is grateful to a number of people for commenting on this essay, but especially to Rod Church of Brock University for a painstakingly constructive reading of an earlier version.

I Economic and Political Weekly, 11 April 1981, p. 644. 2 This is to use "culture" in "its wide ethnographic sense": i.e., "that complex whole

which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. " See Edward B. Tylor, quoted in Encyclopae- dia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills, ed., vol. III (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1968), p. 527.

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aspects of old Kerala's culture were the attitudes towards women and women's attitudes about themselves-explains the eagerness with which they acquired literacy.

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KERALA, pre-1947 Showing British administrative Districts and the Princely States of

Travancore and Cochin

Kerala-the region on India's southwestern coast where the Malayalam language is widely spoken-was divided under three different governments from about 1800 to 1949. (See Table 1 and Map.) Travanlcore and (Cochin were princely states under their own maharajas, overseen by a British "resident" or "political agent." Malabar was directly ruled by the British. Its chief official was the "collector" or "deputy commissioner" whose superiors were in Madras City, the capital of the vast Madras Presidency.

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How Women Made Kerala Literate

The fact that a single linguistic region was divided among three administrations provides an opportunity to examine how a similar culture responded to different governments. Specifically, it will allow us, I hope, to distinguish the role of educational policy from that of cultural factors in making Malayalis literate.

TABLE 1 MALABAR, COCHIN, AND TRAVIANCORE, c 1940

Malabar Cochin Travancore

Population, 1941 3,929,000 1,423,000 6,070,000 Area (square miles) 5,800 1,400 7,700 Percentage of:

Lower-caste Hindus 48 45 40 Muslims 30 8 7 Higher-caste Hindus 20 19 21 Christians 2 28 32

Sources: Census of India, 1941, vol. xix, Cochin; vol. xxv, Travancore; vol. ii, Madras.

The first part of the essay examines what the three governments did, from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards, to make their subjects literate. Those efforts were often substantial, yet alone they do not explain Kerala's literacy: similar policies in other parts of India did not produce the same results. The second part of the essay therefore explores the role of Kerala's culture, especially the place of women and the alacrity with which they learned to read and write.

GOVERNMENTS AND THE TIMING OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE

The governments of Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar did not "mod- ernize" at the same time. The British imposed a rudimentary bureaucracy on Malabar early in the nineteenth century, but its scope was limited. From the 1860s, however, Travancore dramatically expanded the taxing and spending activities of its government; Cochin followed from the late 1 880s. In part, the two princely states were seeking to gain renown for conducting "progressive" administrations. They were responding to the increased interest that the expanding world economy showed in the rich cash-crops that flourished on a tropical coast.

Guided by that most remarkable of nineteenth-century administrators, T. Madhava Rao (1828-91), Travancore determined in the 1 860s to promote primary education in Malayalam. It was "evident," wrote Madhava Rao, "that the education of the masses of the people must be conducted through the medium of the Vernacular language." Since Travancore "abounds with indigenous schools," it was the task of government to turn these

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popular centres of old-fashioned, often superstitious, learning to modern ends.3

This policy contrasted strikingly with those of British India, which emphasized higher education in English. Rather, Travancore aimed to create a regulated system of vernacular, primary education-well-con- structed buildings, regular hours, centralized curricula, travelling inspectors, standard examinations, and, perhaps most important of all, printed textbooks. Practical reasons-notably the vigor of the old village schools- helped to determine Madhava Rao's preference. They also highlight the importance of the cultural base on which Kerala's impressive literacy statistics later rose.

In a pioneering article in 1968, Kathleen Gough argued that in pre- British times Malayalis were strikingly literate: 50 percent of men and 25 percent of women.4 Under British rule, local schools withered away, and literacy declined steeply as a result. The censuses of the 1870s found only 5 or 6 percent of Malayalis literate.

There are good reasons for presuming that literacy was more widespread in Kerala than elsewhere in India in the eighteenth century. Throughout the world, coastal trading areas tend to have higher rates of literacy.5 Moreover, as Gough argued in 1968, Kerala society was highly stratified. The regular rains and reliable, profitable crops demanded less effort from the bulk of the population. Higher castes could avoid all menial tasks and leave cultivation to lower castes who were considered to pollute their superiors not merely by touch but on sight. The children of high-caste families had the leisure to attend village schools which their families had the wealth to support.

Two points, however, need to be made. First, it seems very doubtful that the percentages were as high as Gough estimated; second, the local schools in Kerala did not collapse completely-as they appear to have done in many other places-in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was these local schools that so enthused Madhava Rao in the 1860s.

Schools need not promote literacy. They can-and in India before the late nineteenth century, they did-have other aims: the teaching of cus-

I Travancore Administration Report (hereafter, TAR), 1866-7, (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1868), p. 78.

Kathleen Gough, "Literacy in Kerala," in Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Tradition Socie- ties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 132-60; P.K. Michael Tharakan, "Socio-Economic Factors in Educational Development. Case of Nineteenth Century Travan- core," Economic and Political Weekly, 10 Nov. 1984, pp. 1915-16, like me, finds Gough's estimate unreasonably high.

I Harvey J. Graff, ed., Literacy and Social Development in the West (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1981), p. 8; Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 153; Evelyn S. Rawski, Educa- tion and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1979), p. 9.

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toms, religious stories, handiwork. Before the introduction of the printing press, widespread literacy was neither possible nor particularly desirable.6 Moreover, even if children did learn their letters, they had little opportunity to retain the skill if there was nothing to read. G.W. Leitner, the historian of pre-British education in the Punjab, asserts that Maharaja Ranjit Singh, having finished studying at the age of nine, "had forgotten his letters."7 Loss of literacy is fairly common among people who have no reason to use the skill, even in societies where reading material is widely available.8

To be sure, the evidence suggests that high-caste (and wealthy Syrian Christian) Malayalis (see Table 1) were likely to have been more literate than other Indians before printing was introduced. However, the proportion of literates would not have been great. Given the fact that the local schools continued to function in Kerala in the nineteenth century, the literacy figures of roughly 5 or 6 percent of the total population (20 percent of Nayar males),9 arrived at in the censuses of the 1870s, may have been about right for earlier times as well.

At the turn of this century, the old village schools were still common in Malabar District and Cochin. 10 As we have seen, when Travancore began to develop its government-regulated education system, the Dewan (the Maharaja's chief executive officer) found in 1867 that "the country abounds with indigenous schools."" Indeed, the old schools threatened to frustrate the aim of spreading "the blessings of a sound [i.e., literacy-oriented] education in the vernacular language. "12 Government vernacular schools encountered "great opposition from the indigenous masters . .. who often set up opposition schools in the close proximity of the Government schools and put forth their best efforts to induce the parents of the boys and girls to patronize their own schools. "13

The government's response was to coopt local masters by appointing them to posts in government-approved schools and letting them teach some of the time-honoured subjects- "astrology, vocal singing and poetry, didactic and religious." Such schools were "well attended, the competition being destroyed and the influence of the native master being enlisted in the cause of the new system."'14

6 Consider Benedict Anderson's emphasis on the importance of the birth of "print- capitalism" for Europe in the sixteenth century. See his Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), especially chaps. 2 and 3.

7G.W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab since Annexation and in 1882 [1882] (Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1982), p. 30.

8 Robert Roberts, Imprisoned Tongues (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), pp. 4-5, 145.

9Census of Travancore, 1875 (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1875), pp. 245-46. 10 T.K. Gopal Panikkar, Malabar and Its Folk (Madras: Natesan, 1900), pp. 147-49. "TAR, 1866-67, p. 78. 12 Memorandum by T. Madhava Rao, Dewan, 1866, (Travancore Government English

Records hereafter, TGER), File No. 15982, Kerala Secretariat, Trivandrum (hereafter, KS). "3TAR, 1872-73, pp. 128-29. 14 Ibid., pp. 128-29.

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Four aspects of this passage need emphasis. First, the old village school was popular and had survived seventy years of British overrule. This was in contrast, as we shall see, with Bengal and Punjab, where the local systems had been virtually destroyed within a generation or two of the British conquest.

Second, the curriculum of the old schools stressed learning through recitation rather than through literacy. Teaching people to read and write need not be the main aim of schooling.15

Third, the old schools attracted both boys and girls. The schools testify to the greater freedom enjoyed by Malayali women.

Fourth, the Travancore government chose to offer "modern" education in vernacular primary schools, not English secondary schools. It also permitted the old schools to retain old-fashioned but popular features.

In their original form, these schools were not intended primarily to propagate literacy. Rather, they imbued pupils with the customs of old Kerala. The schoolmaster taught them songs, poems and stories, as well as a little arithmetic, astrology, ayurvedic medicine, and even perhaps "some ornamental sewing."'6 He pierced their ears and initiated them into other social customs.'7

Literacy became a desirable goal only from about the 1 860s onwards as a result of government policy, economic opportunities, and the growing availability of things that could-or had to-be read. In short, literacy became profitable and necessary.'8 Benedict Anderson's "print-capitalism" had arrived.'9 In 1866, the Travancore government appointed a full-time Director of Vernacular Education-twenty-four years before Cochin took the same step. The government also set up a Vernacular Book Committee which by the early 1870s had written, or translated into Malayalam, a number of textbooks.20 It added a further incentive for school-going: the introduction of "a general test to be passed as a condition of employment in the sircar [government] service in any capacity above that of a peon [mes- senger]. "21 Well-to-do families with relatives already working for the government understood the message: see that your wards satisfy the new requirements.

'5 Ananda E. Wood, Knowledge before Printing and After: The Indian Tradition in Changing Kerala (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 7-8, illustrates the importance of memory and recitation.

16 K. Sankaran Nambudiripad, in Wood, Knowledge, p. 39. 17 Mannath Padmanabhan, Ente Jivitasmaranakal (Trivandrum: Nair Service Society

Press, 1957 [?]), p. 3. 18 Tharakan, "Socio-Economic Factors," part 2, pp. 1959,1963-64, emphasizes the impor-

tance of the commercialization of agriculture in making literacy desirable. I would also stress the insistence of the governments of Travancore (from the 1860s) and Cochin (from the 1890s) on "qualified" employees.

19 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 46-49. 20 Shungarasoobyer to Madhava Rao, 10 March 1869, TGER, 290; Madhava Rao to Shun-

garasoobyer, 3 Nov. 1870, TGER, 15982. Details are in Robin Jeffrey, The Decline of Nayar Dominance (London: Sussex University Press, 1976), pp. 80, 149-50.

21Memorandum by Madhava Rao (1866), TGER 15982.

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In the early 1870s, the Travancore government introduced a further innovation: the grant-in-aid. As part of the plan to coopt the village master, schools that met certain standards were awarded a grant based on the number of students on the rolls. Christian missionaries were also quick to tap such assistance. By 1881, Travancore had 600 vernacular schools (with 25,000 pupils) either run by the government or receiving grants. By 1891, the figures had risen to 1,200 schools and 60,000 pUpilS.22 By the mid-i 890s, the Travancore government claimed that 40 percent of the school-aged population-boys and girls-were attending school.23

By preserving the old schools, the Travancore government retained the trust of elders willing to send their charges to institutions run by known and respected masters. But the old masters did not learn new tricks over- night, and literacy only slowly became a goal of such schools. It became a goal, moreover, not so much through the efforts of the old masters as through the growing demands of guardians: by the 1890s, the large majority wanted their charges to learn to read and write because of the profit that could be gained thereby. Commerce and bureaucracy expanded irresistibly, bringing gain to those who had skills and qualifications-and foreshadow- ing disaster for those who had none. People could not ignore such changes: if you did not learn to deal with papers, papers would deal with you.

At the same time, young men, paid by the government and themselves the product of the regulated system of education, began to work side by side with the old masters. Mannath Padmanabhan, for example, discovered that guardians were willing to pay money for the systematic education that teachers like himself were able to give.24

Cochin. The neighbouring princely state of Cochin followed different policies from Travancore. Yet-and this points to the importance of Kera- la's culture-Cochin produced the same levels of literacy and demands for literacy-oriented schooling.

Untouched by new-fashioned Maharajas until about 1890, Cochin was twenty years behind Travancore in "modernizing" its administration and committing substantial amounts of money to education, particularly vernacular education. On the contrary, in the 1870s it attempted to establish a network of district English schools that would channel boys into the High School in Ernakulam. The plan, however, encountered "the unwillingness of parents to send their children to a distant place."25 Movement, even in a small, compact state like Cochin, was still difficult. By 1881, Cochin had only 860 students in government-approved schools, or one student for every

22 Atholl MacGregor, Resident, to the Chief Secretary to the Madras Government, 12 May 1880, Madras Political Proceedings, Government Order No. 304, 9 July 1880, in the Madras Residency Records, National Archives of India.

23TAR, 1895-96, p. 140. 24 Padmanabhan, Ente, pp. 12-13. 25Cochin Administrative Report (hereafter, CAR), 1870-71, p. 16.

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698 people; Travancore's ratio was one student for every 76 people (see Table 2).

TABLE 2 RATIO OF STUDENTS IN GOVERNMENT-RECOGNIZED SCHOOLS TOTOTAL POPULATION.

TRAVANCORE AND COCHIN, 1870-1 TO 1940-1

Year Travancore Cochin Popula- Popula-

tion Students tion Students (thou- to Pop- (thou- to Pop- sands) Students ulation sands) Students ulation

1870-1 2,300* 3,100 1:742 600* 200 1:3000 1875-6 2,300 20,900 1:110 600 750 1:800 1880-1 2,500 33,100 1:76 600 860 1:698 1890-1 2,600 84,500 1:31 700 2,400 1:287 1900-01 3,000 184,600 1:16 800 17,200 1:47 1910-11 3,400 159,700 1:21 900 39,500 1:23 1920-1 3,900 392,900 1:10 1,000 84,900 1:12 1930-1 5,100 575,500 1:9 1,200 146,000 1:8 1940-1 6,100 747,300 1:8 1,400 177,000 1:8

Sources: Administration Reports of Travancore and Cochin for the appropriate years; Census of India, Travancore and Cochin volumes for the appropriate years; Statistics of Travancore (Trivandrum: Government Press), annually from 1920.

Note: * At 1875 census.

Until the 1890s, Cochin also spent a lower proportion of its annual budget on education than Travancore.26 Thus, while Travancore was spending substantial amounts on cheap, popular, local, vernacular schools, Cochin until the 1890s attempted to promote secondary education in English. It appointed a Superintendent of Vernacular Education only in 1890 and began to distribute grants to private educational bodies only in 1889.27 "Vernacular education," wrote the British Resident about Cochin in 1891, "which hitherto . . . received little or no attention . . . has at last been noticed."28 By 1898, when Travancore claimed that 64 percent of boys of school-going age were in government-approved schools, Cochin's figure was only 42 percent. In further contrast, both were far ahead of the Madras Presidency, where only 27 percent of school-aged boys were said to be studying.29

The two governments worked at a different pace in offering incentives to lower castes, girls, and Muslims. Travancore abolished fees for girls in primary schools in 1896.30 At the same time, it offered incentives for schools

26 Travancore in 1885-6 spent 3.3 percent of its budget on education; Cochin, 2.8 percent. 27CAR, 1889-90, P. 94. 28 Hannyngton to Chief Secretary, 30 April 1891, CARs, v/10/989 (India Office Library). 29J.D. Rees, Resident, to Chief Secretary, 30 July 1898, CARs, 1896-97 (IOL). 30 Travancore Government Gazette (Trivandrum: Government Press) (hereafter, TGG),

vol. XXXIV, no. 22 (2 June 1896).

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established for the "backward castes.""31 Ten years later it made primary education free for all lower castes.32 In Cochin, free primary education for girls and lower-caste Hindus came only in 1909.33

The different timing of increases in enrolment shows clearly in Table 2. Travancore's ratio of one student to every 16 people in 1901 was nearly three times greater than Cochin's 1:47. By 1921, the ratio in Travancore was 1: 10, and nearly a quarter of all Travancoreans were literate (see Table 4). Cochin reached the same levels in the next ten years. It is reasonable to assume that these increases resulted from large numbers of lower-caste students going to schools for the first time. In Cochin, for example, the proportion of lower-caste students increased from 7 percent in 1911 to 12 percent in 1920 and 25 percent in 1926.34 In Travancore, the number of "backward caste" students increased from 6,500 to 16,000 in the year after their education became free. By 1910, they represented 10 percent of enrolments.35

Table 3 further clarifies the timing. Until about 1910, Travancore spent more money per person on education than Cochin. This is particularly noticeable in the first twenty-year period. But as late as 1900, Travancore was spending one rupee on education for every 5.6 people; Cochin, one

TABLE 3 NUMBER OF PEOPLE FOR EACH RUPEE SPENT ON EDUCATION,

TRAVANCORE AND COCHIN, 1870-71 TO 1940-41

Year Travancore Cochin Educ. Educ.

Pop. Expend. People Pop. Expend. People '000s '000 rupees per rupee '000 '000 rupees per rupee

1870-1 2,300* 123 18.7 600* 10 60.0 1875-6 2,300 195 11.8 600 20 30.0 1880-1 2,500 184 13.6 600 28 21.4 1890-1 2,600 272 9.6 700 72 9.7 1900-01 3,000 532 5.6 800 99 8.1 1910-11 3,400 742 4.6 900 279 3.2 1920-1 3,900 3,221 1.2 1,000 892 1.1 1930-1 5,100 4,910 1.0 1,200 1,403 0.9 1940-1 6,100 5,129 1.2 1,400 1,899 0.7

Sources: Censuses and Administration Reports. Note: * At 1875 census.

31 J.W. Gladstone, Protestant Christianity and People's Movements in Kerala (Trivan- drum: Seminary Publications, 1984), p. 271.

32 Census of India (hereafter, C of I), 1911, vol. XXIII, Travancore, part 1, Report, p. 163. 33 CAR, 1908-09, p. 50. 34 Report of the Education Survey Committee, Cochin State (Ernakulam: Cochin

Government Press, 1934), p. 24; CAR, 1911-12, pp. 40-41. 35 Gladstone, Protestant Christianity, p. 274.

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rupee for every 8.1 people. The Travancore government thus made an earlier, heavier commitment to education and directed it increasingly from the 1890s towards large, hitherto excluded groups. This helps to explain the sharp increases in the rate of literacy which began to show up in the 1910s. Linking Policy and Literacy. But did Travancore's efforts from the 1860s to coopt the village school make any difference to its later literacy rates? If one looks hastily at the literacy figures in the censuses, one could argue that this strategy simply wasted resources and retarded the spread of literacy (see Table 4). For all its imaginative policies and expenditure, Travancore was considerably behind Cochin in literacy in 1891, and the two states remained roughly equal for the next generation. Only in the decade of the First World War did Travancore appear to surge ahead. Why should it have taken fifty years for its educational policies to show dramatic results?

TABLE 4 LITERACY PERCENTAGES, MALE AND FEMALE COMBINED, 1871-1981,FOR SELECTED AREAS

1871-75 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1941 1951 1961 1971 1981

Travancore 5.7 - 11.0 12.4 15.0 24.2 23.9 47.1 4 Cochin 4.4 - 18.0 13.4 15.1 18.5 28.2 41.0 45.8 Malabar District 5.3 9.9 9.1 10.1 11.1 12.7 14.4 - 30.9

KERALA 40.7 46.8 60.4 69.2 Tinnevelly 8.2 10.0 12.4 13.3 14.8 - 25.7 - 25.7 36.4t Tanjore 8.8 - 23.2 33.7 Madras Presidency 5.0 7.8 6.3 7.5 8.6 9.3 13.0 - 19.3

TAMILNAD 20.8 31.4 39.5 45.8 ALL INDIA 5.8 5.3 5.9 7.1 9.5 15.1 16.6 24.0 29.5 36.2

Sources: Census of India for relevant years. Notes: * Travancore-Cochin state was formed in 1949.

t Kanyakumari area now a separate district (literacy: 48.6 percent in 1961).

There are at least three possible explanations. The first is that the census statistics are totally unreliable. The second is that Travancore's policies in the late nineteenth century-its readiness to accommodate the old type of schoolmaster-may in fact have retarded the spread of literacy. The third possibility is more complicated, but, I believe, more accurate. It is this: that the figures for particular censuses erred; that it took more than two genera- tions for governments to make literacy-oriented education readily available to most sections of society; and that Travancore's gentleness with the village schoolmaster prevented the children of the "respectable poor" from abandoning schooling, as happened to some extent in Cochin when a strictly regulated system was introduced in the 1890s.

My perplextity over the Cochin and Travancore literacy rates in the nineteenth century (see Table 4) was shared by Cochin's census commis-

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sioner in 1891. Why should Cochin have shown a higher literacy rate than Travancore? Cochin, he wrote, had begun to commit its efforts towards vernacular education only eight months before the census was carried out; Travancore had been making similar efforts for nearly 25 years: "one cannot help being surprised.' '36 He attributed the anomaly to underenu- meration of literates in Travancore. To some extent, he may have been right.

Cochin, however, had characteristics that make it reasonable to suppose it would have a higher rate of literacy than Travancore. First, more of Cochin's people lived in towns-seven percent against 4.2 percent in 189137-and town-dwellers are more likely to be literate.38 Cochin, moreover, was a small state with a larger proportion of functionaries and courtiers than Travancore. It had also long been famous for its port and overseas trade. In earlier times, these aspects would have raised the proportion of literates.

But why was Cochin apparently less literate than Travancore in 1875? There is a plausible explanation. Cochin's administration was then among the most caste-bound and old-fashioned in India. Its census-takers would have been even more loath than those in Travancore to inquire too closely about the attributes of "polluting" castes or the women of "respectable" families. The administrative modernization that Travancore pursued from the 1860s did not happen in Cochin until the late 1880s. Even Malabar District had a more systematic, bureaucratized administration than Cochin. Cochin's census commissioner in 1875 admitted that "there is some reason to suspect that the Enumerators have done their work in a perfunctory manner. Several of my friends . .. have told me that their schedules were filled up without their knowledge.' 39 The commissioner in 1891 contended that earlier censuses had involved "considerable fudg- ing."40 Literates in Cochin may well have been underestimated in 1875 and more accurately calculated in 1891.

Travancore's gentleness towards the old village master encouraged the children of the "respectable poor" to continue to attend school. In old Kerala, high-caste families had often sponsored village schools, to which other, less wealthy (but usually high-caste) families also sent their children. The introduction of a government-regulated school system requiring students to pay fees, buy books, and attend regularly could have made it difficult for the "respectable poor" to keep their children in school. In Travancore, the old village schools were only slowly absorbed into the

36 Census of Cochin (hereafter C of C), 1891, vol. I, Report, p. 88. 37 C of I, 1931, vol. XXI; Cochin, part 1, Report p. 22. 38 Literacy in Travancore's nineteen towns in 1921, for example, was roughly 50 percent

greater than the state average. C of I, 1921, vol. XXV, Travancore, part 1, Report, p. 81. 39 C of C, 1875, p. 16. 40 C of C, 1891, vol. I, p. 25.

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government system, and its rigours were only slowly applied-keeping pace, one may guess, with guardians' growing realization of the necessity of qualification-granting education. Travancore did show a steady increase in literacy between 1875 and 1891 (5.7 to 11 percent). Perhaps we can infer that the children of the "respectable poor" continued to attend the relaxed, but more and more regulated, literacy-oriented local schools. Remaining popular and respected, these schools increasingly provided a desirable commodity-literacy.

Developments in Cochin offer supporting evidence. The Cochin government did not interfere with the local schools until the 1890s. The result was that in the late 1870s and 1880s, as the profitability of literacy became more apparent, the "respectable poor" still sent their children to the local school, whose master continued to enjoy the patronage of pros- perous families. Children became literate, because literacy was now more widely valued. Between 1875 and 1891, Cochin's literacy rose more sharply than Travancore's (even allowing for inaccuracies in the censuses). In the past, more residents of Cochin had reason to be literate. If literacy now was what guardians wanted, the village schoolmaster, in his lax way, was capable of imparting it. The children of the "respectable poor" flowed to school unabated.

In the 1890s, however, Cochin abruptly adopted a system of government regulation in which the old master and his relaxed school found no place. As a result, children of the "respectable poor" often stopped going to any school at all. The village school did not provide the qualifications the government now demanded from those to whom it would give jobs. Afflu- ent families-who had formerly supported the village school and its master-sent their children to the government-regulated schools. For many, the new government schools were too rigid and costly. Thus, in Cochin, literacy fell between 1891 and 1901.

Indeed, the census commissioner in 1891 expected the old schools to wither away and thought it unlikely that government-regulated schools would be able to fill their place entirely. He predicted a fall in literacy,4' and he was right. By 1901, Cochin's literacy rate had dropped-from 18.0 percent to 13.3, still slightly better than Travancore's. The introduction of government-regulated schools had undercut the old masters; and the "respectable poor," unable to cope with the demand for regular fees and attendance, now did not send their children to school at all.42 In 1911, the census commissioner explicitly accounted for developments in Cochin. "The immediate effect" of the introduction of the government-regulated system of education in 1890 was "a retrogression in literacy, the growth of primary schools of the modern type not having kept pace with the decay of

42 Ibid., pp. 92-93. 42 C of 1, 1901, Vol. XX, Cochin, part 1, Report, pp. 98-99.

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the old indigenous schools."43 It took twenty years for the new system to take up the slack left by the old.

Malabar and Elsewhere. In this context, it is worth comparing Kerala with other areas of India, for they, too, had village schools before the imposition of a British system of education. The crucial differences seem to be that in Kerala these village schools were more deeply embedded in society than elsewhere, and that in Travancore the government coopted them. (In Malabar, they were left largely unchallenged until the beginning of this century.)

In Bengal, William Adam's surveys of rural education in the 1830s estimated that two-thirds of villages had a school-making a total of perhaps a hundred thousand schools in the vast province." Such schools were "based largely on oral work" and had no printed books. Schools in Kerala, as we have seen, were similar. Literacy was not their goal.45 Adam advocated a strategy of incorporating these popular local institutions into a British-style, Bengali-medium, primary education system. But Macaulay and the advocates of the "filtration theory"-that higher studies in English would "filter down" to the masses-won the debates at the top levels of government, and Adam's plans were not attempted.46 Having lost their wealthiest, highest-status pupils to the qualification-granting British system, the local schools collapsed. The similarities with Cochin's experience after 1890 are notable.

In Punjab, Leitner, the first principle of Government College, Lahore, identified the same process. He contended that British-sponsored education from about 1850 had largely destroyed a flourishing village school system. When the British annexed the Punjab in 1849, he argued, about 330,000 pupils had been attending village schools. In 1882, after more than twenty years of British educational efforts, this had plummeted to 190,000 pupils.47 Officials of the Education Department had striven to lure pupils from the indigenous schools, and because "official" credentials were increasingly regarded as essential, the old village schools faded away.48

Leitner's remark emphasized the important fact that literacy increases when people come to see it as a useful, saleable skill. But in British India, the real value lay in English literacy, which was far beyond the aspirations

43 C of I, 1911, vol. XVIII, Cochin, part 1, Report, p. 53. 44 E. Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793-1837 (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1967), p. 114. 45 Kazi Shahidullah, "Patshalas into Schools: the Development of Indigenous Elementary

Education in Bengal, 1854-1905," unpublished doctoral diss. in History, University of West- ern Australia, 1983. I am grateful to Dr. Shahidullah for letting me read his thesis and to Dr. Peter Reeves for bringing it to my attention.

46 P.L. Rawat, History of Indian Education [1956] (Agra: Ram Prasad and Sons, 1981), p. 160.

4 Leitner, History, pp. i, 16. 48Ibid., p. 1.

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of the vast majority of villagers. The princely government of Travancore chose to emphasize vernacular literacy as an acceptable qualification for many of its offices. It thereby reinforced the firmly established school-going tendency that already existed in Kerala.

The example of Malabar District supports the proposition that government activity produced accelerations in literacy rates, but peculiar features of Kerala's culture determined Malayalis' eager response to particular kinds of initiatives. Malabar was a relatively neglected district on the periphery of the Madras Presidency. It had a high proportion (roughly 30 percent) of poor Mappila (Muslim) tenants and landless labourers. Yet from the first census in 1871, Malabar never ranked lower than third in literacy among districts of the Presidency, and its literacy rate was always well ahead of the Presidency and the all-Indian averages. Moreover-and here we return to the crucial aspect of Kerala's culture-in female literacy, Malabar always led the Presidency. The matrilineal customs of many Hindu castes undoubtedly explain this aspect, for Malabar had few Chris- tians, and literacy among Muslim women and the lowest-caste Hindus was low. Malabar, however, shared a common cultural base with other areas of Kerala. From that base, literacy could rise-once the conditions for promot- ing it were established. Those conditions were the same as elsewhere in Kerala: most social groups had to perceive that literacy was profitable; a literacy-oriented school system, open to most social groups, had to exist; and there had to be material to read.

By 1951, Malabar was the most literate district of the Madras Presidency. More important for my purposes, its literacy rate had shown a similar steep climb between 1931 and 1951 (14.4 to 30.9 percent),49 as Travancore's and Cochin's had in earlier decades.

The timing of this acceleration was related to government activity, and in Malabar, too, the time-lag appears to have been about twenty years. The local-government reforms introduced in the India Act of 1919 led the Madras government to spend more money on education.50 The people of Malabar seized these opportunities. They were, after all, Malayalis; they had relatives in Cochin and Travancore; and social movements and economic opportunities in the two states also affected Malabar people.51 By 1936, the Malabar District Board ran twelve hundred schools, more than any other district in the Presidency. Though Malabar accounted for less

19 C of I, 1951, vol. III, Madras and Coorg, part 1, Report, pp. 202-23. Because of the war, the census of 1941 in British India did not compile literacy statistics.

50 From Rs. 9.4 million in 1917-18 to Rs. 15.3 million in 1922-23 and Rs. 24.2 million in 1932-33. See C.J. Baker, The Politics of South India, 1920-37 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1976), p. 17; C of I, 1961, vol. IX, Madras, part X-V, District Census Handbook: Thanjavur, vol. I, p. 33.

51 See, for example, Robin Jeffrey, "Travancore: Status, Class and the growth of Radical Politics," in Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power (New Delhi: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1978), pp. 136-69.

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than eight percent of the Presidency's population, it had 10 percent of the schools. And more than 70 percent of those schools were run, not by the provincial government, but by local managements receiving grants- in-aid.52

Malabar reinforces the points I have made about the different, but complementary, roles of Kerala culture and government activity in foster- ing literacy. In pre-British times, most Malayalis-the largest exception being Mappilas-were familiar with schooling and ready to send even their girls to schools. Once the advantages of literacy, rather than simply schooling, were perceived, and once literacy-oriented schooling (which gave people saleable qualifications on the basis of that literacy) was put within reach, Malayalis of most castes and religions flocked to such institutions. However, the transition from the old village schools, which did not stress literacy or hand out "qualifications," to the government-supervised schools, which did do so, took twenty or thirty years. This, I think, goes some way towards explaining the surge in literacy rates in Travancore after 1911, in Cochin after 1921, and in Malabar after 1931.

The career of Madhava Rao after he left the dewanship of Travancore in 1872 provides further evidence for the importance of Kerala's culture in gen- erating literacy. In 1875, he went as Dewan to the large princely state of Baroda in what is today Gujarat, where he attempted to duplicate the education system he had set up in Travancore. He started a vernacular education department, quadrupled spending on education, and had a hundred and eighty vernacular schools under government control when he retired.53 Thereafter, literacy in Baroda always exceeded the all-India average. But female literacy in 1901 was only 0.8 percent, while in Kerala it ranged from 3 percent in Malabar to 4.5 percent in Cochin. By 1941, total literacy in Baroda was 23 percent, only slightly more than half that of Travancore or Couchin.54 Baroda lacked Kerala's particular cultural attributes-especially Kerala's attitude to women.

One can multiply examples that point to the importance of Kerala's culture in explaining its literacy. Tanjore (Thanjavur) District was the most literate in the Madras Presidency in 1901. Its famed concentration of Brahmins gave it a male literacy rate of 24 percent, higher than that in Travancore or Cochin. But Tamil Brahmins were reluctant to educate their girls. Female education was not encouraged until well into the twentieth century, and female literacy in 1901 was only 0.9 percent, less than a sixth of that in Cochin. By 1921, Tanjore's total literacy rate was roughly the same as Malabar's (about 13 percent). Tanjore's high male literacy was compen-

52 "Report on the Bifurcation of the Malabar District Board," by the Special Officer, 19 July 1936, Madras Local Administration, no. 3258 of 25 August 1937 (Tamilnad Archives) (hereafter, TNA); The Hindu, 24 March 1953, p. 9.

5 Philip W. Sergeant, The Ruler of Baroda (London: John Murray, 1928), pp. 56, 197-98. 54 C of I, 1941, vol. XVII, Baroda, pp. 89, 110.

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sated for by Malabar's female literacy, always the highest in the Presid- ency.55 The lesson seems to be this: literate men have literate sons; literate women have literate children. Kerala's literacy grew on a cultural base that was favourable to schooling-even for girls.

CULTURE: How WOMEN MADE KERALA LITERATE

Janamma, the mother of the diplomat K.P.S. Menon (1898-1982), told a story that vividly illustrated the distinctive place of women and schooling in Kerala's culture.

"One day," she would say, "I was going to school with my friends. [This was in Travancore in the 1870s.] I was only 14 then. A couple of boys came from the opposite direction and pointing to me, said, 'That girl has magnificent breasts.' They thought I would not understand, but I did. I knew then just a few words of English.... My temper flared up and I used an abusive Malayalam expression, the politest translation of which is, 'Your mother's coconut!' Somehow my father came to know of this incident and he decreed, 'Janamma shall not go to school any longer.' That was the end of my education, and that's why I'm such an ignoramus. "56

In the 1870s we find a girl of good caste (a Nayar), well past puberty, not merely going to school, but going to school with her friends, unescorted on a public road. Belying her remark about being an ignoramus (indeed, she knew enough English to understand the boys), she was highly literate in Malayalam. "I would sit by her side every day until I was 14 or 15 years old," K.P.S. Menon wrote, "and hear her read the Puranas [mythic Hindu tales]."57 Moreover, it appears that Janamma was fairly typical. In 1877, Samuel Mateer, a missionary, declared: "It is remarkable that most of the Sudra [i.e., Nayar] females are taught to read and write."58

The contrast with attitudes elsewhere in India could scarcely be more striking. In Bengal, for example, William Adam reported in the 1830s that "the majority of Hindu families" believed that "a girl taught to write and read will soon after marriage become a widow,. . . the worst misfortune that can befall . .. the sex." In Gujarat, if a small girl began to play with pens and books, adults would try to distract her with toys.59

As long as censuses have been taken, women in Kerala have been more literate than women in other parts of India. The proportion of females literate in the nineteenth century was tiny-less than one percent in the 1870s (see Table 5). Yet even at this stage, women in Travancore and Cochin appear to have been more than twice as literate as those in the

55 C of I, 1931, vol. XIV, Madras, part 1, Report, p. 283. 56 K.P.S. Menon, Many Worlds [1965] (Bombay: Pearl Books, 1971), p. 4. 57 Ibid., p. 7. 58 Samuel Mateer, Native Life in Travancore (London: John Snow, 1871), p. 38. 59 Chitra Desai, Girls' School Education and Social Change (Bombay: A.R. Sheth, 1976), p.

130. The quotation from Adam is from his second report, pp. 187-8.

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neighbouring Madras Presidency. Thereafter, the proportion of literate Kerala women increased-steadily until 1911 and spectacularly between 1911 and 1941. By the latter year, roughly a third of all females in Travan- core and Cochin were literate.

In 1921, the proportion of literate women in Travancore was nearly eight times greater than that for India as a whole: 15 percent of all females were literate in Travancore; in India, 1.9 percent. By 1981, 65 out of every hundred women and girls in Kerala were literate; in India as a whole, only 25 out of every hundred. Of women over 15 years of age, 71 percent in Kerala were literate; in India, 26 percent.60

TABLE 5 PERCENTAGE OF FEMALES LITERATE, 1875-1981, FOR SELECTED AREAS

1875 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1941 1951 1961 1971 1981

Travancore 0.5 - 3.5 3.1 5.0 15.0 13.9 36.0) 37 0* - - -

Cochin 0.4 - 5.5 4.5 6.1 9.4 18.5 30.6) - - - Malabar Dt - - 3.9 3.0 3.5 4.9 7.5# - 21.0 - - -

KERALA - - - - - - - - - 38.9 54.3 64.5 Tinnevelly - 1.7 1.5 1.6 3.3 4.4 5.7# - 13.8 23.5t - -

Tanjore - 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.5 2.4 3.5# - 10.3 18.7 - -

Madras Psy 0.2 0.6 0.7 0.9 1.3 2.1 2.6 6.6# 10.0 - - -

TAMILNAD - - - - - - - - - 18.2 26.9 34.1 ALL INDIA - 0.4 0.5 0.7 1.1 1.9 2.4 6.9 9.3 12.9 18.7 24.9

Sources: Census of India for relevant years. Notes: # Excludes girls under 5.

* Travancore-Cochin state was formed in 1949. t Kanyakumari area now a separate district (female literacy: 40.7 percent in 1961). It is a Christian-majority district.

N.B.: i) Tinnevelly District often had the highest level of female literacy in the Madras Presidency; ii) Status of Women in India (New Delhi: Indian Council of Social Science Research, 1975), p. 188 gives 7.9 percent as the 1951 figure for India.

The differences between male and female rates of literacy have always been much narrower in Kerala than elsewhere. In India in the 1890s, for example, there was a male-female ratio of 17 to 1. In Travancore, Cochin and Malabar, on the other hand, the ratio was only about 5 to 1. Moreover, by 1951 the disparity between male and female literacy in Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar had fallen to the point where male literacy was only about 1.6 times greater than female. In India as a whole, it was nearly three times greater. In the 1980s, Kerala has roughly 115 literate males for every 100 literate females; nationally, the figures are approximately 190:100.

Janamma's story helps to explain some of these striking details. First, Janamma was a Nayar by caste, and Nayars until the 1920s and 1930s were matrilineal-descent and inheritance were traced through the mother, not

60 Women in Kerala, 1985 (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1985), p. 26.

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TABLE 6 PERCENTAGE OF MALES LITERATE, 1875-1981,FOR SELECTED AREAS

1875 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1941 1951 1961 1971 1981

Travancore 11.1 - 19.1 21.5 24.8 33.1 33.8 58.1) 54 8* - - - Cochin 8.4 - 23.8 22.4 24.3 27.4 38.3 44.6) - - - Malabar Dt 9.7 - 16.4 17.2 19.0 20.9 23.0 - 41.4 - - -

KERALA - - - - - - - - - 55.0 66.6 74.0 Tinnevelly - 22.1 22.9 - - - 30.0 - 38.3 50.Ot - - Tanjore - 22.6 24.1 20.3 21.8 24.8 29.9 - 48.7 49.0 - - Madras Psy - 10.3 11.6 11.9 13.9 15.2 16.1 - 28.6 - - -

TAMILNAD - - - - - - - - - 44.5 57.8 58.2 ALL-INDIA - 6.6 8.7 9.8 10.6 13.9#15.6# - 25.0 34.3 39.5 46.7

Sources: Census of India for relevant years. Notes: # Excludes boys under 5.

* Travancore-Cochin state was formed in 1949. t Kanyakumari area now a separate district (male literacy: 56.2 percent in 1961). N.B.: Tinnevelly and Tanjore Districts usually had the highest levels of male literacy in the Madras Presidency.

the father. Nayars, to be sure, were not the highest caste in Kerala; but they accounted for 15-20 percent of the population. Before the establishment of British rule, they had been soldiers; even under the British, many of them remained landowners and officials. Though themselves divided into "sub- castes," together they constituted the largest "respectable" group in Kerala.

Matriliny among Nayars in the nineteenth century did not mean that women ruled the household. Custom recognized the eldest male in a Nayar matrilineal joint-family as the manager. However, matriliny meant wider freedom for women, as Janamma's going to school in the 1870s shows. Marriages were made and ended with far greater ease than anywhere else in India, and women appear to have had a greater voice in such decisions. Nayar families in many parts of Kerala were matrilocal, and a husband merely visited his wife's house. Their children lived in the mother's family, which often included her mother, as well as her maternal uncles and aunts, her brothers and sisters and her sisters' children. By the end of the nineteenth century, this system had begun to disintegrate, and it was legislated out of existence, beginning in Travancore in the 1920s. But it provided the soil in which female literacy grew.6"

Until the early twentieth century, matrilineal caste-Hindus-notably Nayars-provided the reference group for Kerala society. Even low castes, given the opportunity, were eager to imitate matrilineal practices, which included school-going for girls.62

When Western styles began to supplant those of caste-Hindus as the models to emulate, Kerala's large Christian population (roughly 20 percent

61 Jeffrey, Nayar Dominance, pp. 243-56, outlines the details of matriliny and its decay. 62 Ibid., p. 146: Madra Mail, 24 September 1924, p. 4; The Hindu, 23 December 1941, p. 10.

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of the total) began to imitate European customs. As Christians, they believed they had a special affinity with the new rulers. Like the British, Christians in Kerala began to encourage female education. It needs to be emphasized, however, that until the early twentieth century, matrilineal- caste Hindu women experienced greater freedom-and a larger proportion of them were literate-than Christian women. As late as 1921 in Travan- core, for example, 34 percent of Nayar women were literate and only 31 percent of Syrian Christian women. Yet, when compared with the national average for female literacy (less than 2 percent), both figures were amaz- ingly high.63

Matriliny appears to be responsible for a related aspect of Kerala that has long distinguished it from the rest of India. As long as censuses have been taken, women have outnumbered men. In 1901, the ratio was 1004 females for every 1000 males. This rose steadily to 1034:1000 in 1981, a time when the national ratio was 935:1000.64 The Tamil Brahmin who wrote Travancore's first census report in 1875 thought it important to assert that among matrilineal castes, "a female child is prized more highly than a male one."65 We can also infer the connection with literacy: because women had greater freedom, there were fewer objections to their school-going. Indeed, it very soon became clear in the changed economic conditions of the late nineteenth century that literate women were an asset.

The ability of matrilineal women to move about independently pro- moted literacy by making its utility and profit obvious. Education and employment are intertwined. When literacy is required for work, people educate their children to suit them for jobs. This seems to be clear from the example of the employment of women in salaried jobs in Kerala, especially in Travancore and Cochin.

As early as 1869, the Travancore government was able to induce eight young Nayar women to train as midwives, a course four of them completed, having passed the requisite examination in 1871.66 Nayar women appear, in fact, to have sought out salaried employment. In 1894, six teenaged Nayar women asked Travancore's chief medical officer to train them as anti- smallpox vaccinators. "Considering the difficulty of procuring females for such work" elsewhere, he was greatly surprised.67 As early as 1898, Travan- core found it necessary to develop a scheme of maternity leave for teachers in government schools.68 In 1909 the first Malayali woman, Mary Poonen, a

63 C of I, 1921, vol. XXV, Travancore, part 1, Report, p. 82. 64 C of I, 1961, vol. VII, Kerala, part 1 A(i), General Report, p. 82; Economic and Political

Weekly, 11 April 1981, p. 644. See also C of I, 1961, Monograph No. 7, The Changing Population of Kerala (New Delhi: Registrar-General, 1968) (by K. Krishnan Namboodiri), p. 67.

65 Census of Travancore, 1875, p. 140 (V. Nagam Aiya); C of I, 1921, vol. XIX, Cochin, part I, p. 33.

66 TGG, VII, 21 (1 June 1869) and IX, 9 (14 March 1871). 67 Durbar Physician to the Dewan, 6 November 1894, TGER, 2698 (KS). 68Dewan to Inspector of Schools, Southern Range, 3 May 1898, TGER, 12975.

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Syrian Christian, went to Britain to study medicine. In 1924 she became the first woman in India to head a government department, as chief medical officer of Travancore, a post she held until 1942.69

By the mid- 1930s, women were demanding special representation in the Travancore legislature-as well as a separate section in the Government Press to train women compositors.70 The Cochin census commissioner in 1941 pointed out that "many doctors, authors, teachers and clerks" were women, that a few had begun to practise as lawyers, and that Cochin supported a "mixed club" in which men and women professionals were members in their own right.7' A woman engineer had become an irrigation and survey officer in Cochin by 1944.72 By 1957, it was estimated that one-third of the employees in the Secretariat of the newly formed Kerala state were women.73

The alacrity with which Malayali women sought literacy-based employment contrasts strikingly with conditions elsewhere in India. Even in the 1970s, one of the major obstacles confronting female-literacy campaigns lay in lack of motivation among women themselves. "Their main question," according to one researcher, was: "'What do we do with education?' "74 Not only did schooling for girls appear to bring no benefits; it was fraught with apparent risks: male teachers, for example. The problem in this instance is circular and worldwide: where women teachers are few, families are reluctant to send their girls to school.75 In contrast, 58 percent of Kerala's 185,000 teachers in 1985 were women.76

Girls in Kerala went to the local schools in pre-British times, Malayali women sought wage-earning employment as soon as-even before- governments were prepared to offer it, and a woman teacher in Kerala very quickly became a valued member of her family. Indeed, by the 1930s, officials in Travancore lamented that "the great majority of girls ... regard their education, not as something of cultural value in itself, but as a direct means of securing employment and competing with men in the open

69 Malabar Herald, 14 Aug. 1909. Madras Mall, 24 September 1924, p. 4; The Hindu, 23 December 1941, p. 10.

70 The Hindu, 17 October 1935, p. 16. 71 C of I, 1941, vol. XIX, Cochin, part 1, Report p. 58. 72 Madras States Fortnightly Report for the first half of October 1944, Crown Representa-

tive's Records, R/l/29/2707 (IOL). 73 The Hindu, 26 Feb. 1957, p. 9. 74 Sudharshan Kumari, "Problem of Motivation of Women for Literacy," in G. Sambasiva

Rao, ed., Problems of Women's Literacy (Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages, 1979), p. 71.

75 Desai, Girls' School Education, p. 108; Mary Jean Bowman and C. Arnold Anderson, "The Participation of Women in Education in the Third World," in C.P. Kelly and C.M. Elliott, eds., Women's Education in the Third World (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 20.

76 Women in Kerala, 1985, p. 55.

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markets." 77Could there have been any other region in India where such a remark would have been even plausible in 1933?78

LESSONS ABOUT LITERACY?

Another woman enters this story from the direction of the Connemara Market in Trivandrum: a fisherwoman-Hindu or Christian, I couldn't tell-barefoot, thin as bamboo, a smelly, empty basket on her head. Sunset, and she was returning to her village on the coast after a day's selling. As she bustled down Mahatma Gandhi Road, past the Victoria Jubilee Town Hall, she spotted on the road a handbill advertising a political meeting. Altering direction slightly but scarcely breaking stride, she clutched the handbill between her toes. Without setting down her basket, she bent her knee and passed the notice into her hand. Then, reading intently, she hurried on down the hill.

"Literacy," asserted Daniel Lerner thirty years ago, "is the basic per- sonal skill that underlies the whole modernizing sequence. "7 Few scholars today would put so much faith in the capacity of literacy to produce "modernization" or "economic development." Indeed, most would stress "growing skepticism" about the idea that "education is the key to economic growth.'"80 Yet few doubt that literacy changes people.8' John Kenneth Galbraith spelled out this feeling when he reflected on the need to over- come the "culture of poverty" before real economic development can begin: "You can assess the progressive parts of India by those where the literacy is highest and where people break with the culture of poverty . . . [I]t's literacy that comes first. We had our sequential priorities wrong. We thought we could start with capital investment; we should have started with investment in education.'"82

In the last few years, the so-called "Kerala model" has attracted the attention of students of Third World "development.' '83 The model suggests

77Travancore Education Reforms Committee. Report (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1933), pp. 65-66.

78 We must not overemphasize the opportunities for women in Kerala. Today, like other Indian women, they do not enjoy anything like equality with men. Indeed, in some ways, some groups may be more constrained than their forebears were a hundred years ago.

79 Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 64. 80 E.G. West, Education and the Industrial Revolution (London: B.T. Batsford, 1975), p.

249. 81 F.W. Mote, "China's Past in the Study of China Today-Some Comments on the Recent

Work of Richard Solomon," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. XXII, no. 1 (November 1972), p. 110.

82 Interview in India Today, 31 March 1982, pp. 96-97. 83 T.N. Krishnan, interviewed in Development Forum (June 1980), p. 7. See also Poverty,

Unemployment and Development Policy. A Case Study of Selected Issues with Reference to Kerala [1975] (Bombay: Orient Longman for Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 1977), p. 5; Erik Eckholm, Down to Earth: Environment and Human Needs (London: Pluto Press, 1982), pp. 41-45. Indeed, BBC-TV's "Global Report" in 1983 devoted a program to the falling birth rate in Kerala.

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that a highly politicized population can force a measure of land reform and improvements in public health, which will in turn reduce infant mortality and lead to a falling birth rate, thus relieving "the grip of extreme depriva- tion."84 In the Kerala example, all this happens without either an industrial or a political revolution. Literacy seems to be crucial to the process. Throughout the world, for example, high female literacy is usually corre- lated with lower fertility and a declining birth rate.85 If you take the handbill between your toes and read it on the way back to your village, you are a different person from someone who asks, "What do we do with education?"

Rhys Isaac, the historian of eighteenth-century America, contends that regular reading produced "modes of silent thought" and "thus was engen- dered 'individualism.' "86 The remark is particularly suggestive in relation to Kerala. Malayalis are notorious in India for their individualism. The difficulty of dealing with them is a national commonplace. As the labour leader V.V. Giri told an audience in Trivandrum in 1960, "there was a feeling" in the rest of India that "industries in Kerala" faced "a day-in and day-out series of strikes.'"87

To make a tight connection between literacy, the militant assertion of individual rights, and a strong Communist movement is impossible. Yet, the suggestions are everywhere. After a detailed statistical analysis, for example, Donald Zagoria concluded that "the combination of landlessness and literacy is the major predictor of communist voting strength" in India.88 In the 1940s, the newly arrived English missionary, Leslie Brown, was amazed to see, "all over the deck" of a Travancore ferry boat, "working class folk . . . studying the Communist Manifesto."89 Kerala offers little evidence for Levi-Strauss's assertion that "the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.'"90 Today, a far higher proportion of Malayalis believe they have rights-and attempt to assert them-than in the largely illiterate Kerala of the past.

This leads me to the second general point that I wished this essay to raise: the relative influence of government activity and cultural predilec- tion in determining social or political behaviour. The Kerala example gives us the opportunity to compare the actions of three different governments operating in a single cultural region over more than a hundred years.

84 Eckholm, Down, p. 16. 85 Susan H. Cochrane, "Education and Fertility: an Expanded Examination of the Evi-

dence," in Kelly and Elliott, eds., Women's Education, p. 329. 86 Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-90 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina:

University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 122. 87 The Hindu, 18 July 1960, p. 9. 88 Donald S. Zagoria, "A Note on Landlessness, Literacy and Agrarian Communism in

India," Archives europeennes de sociologie, vol. XIII (1972), p. 328. 89 Leslie Brown, Three Wlorlds: One Word (London: Rex Collings, 1981), p. 42. 90 Claude Levi-Strauss, Triste Tropique, trans. Doreen Weightman (London: Penguin,

1976), p. 393.

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This comparative exercise, I hope, demonstrates two things. First, it shows the potential that the pre-1947 patchwork of princely and British India offers to those who would try to explain cause-and-effect in complex societies. Scholars of eastern Europe have long recognized that the way political boundaries criss-cross cultures provides more than j ust a problem. It also provides an opportunity for comparisons that may "illuminate a significant theoretical issue.""9 As many scholars in the 1980s incline increasingly towards "cultural" explanations of human activity-both orthodox Marxism and head-counting behaviourism often having failed to answer the questions they have confronted-India's old units of administration (and the vast quantities of records they accumulated) offer a fruitful field. Perhaps this attempt to explain literacy in Kerala illustrates the potential of studies comparing princely states and contiguous British districts.92

The example of literacy in Kerala also suggests the need to modify the emphasis sometimes placed on governments and institutions in explaining social and political events in modern India.93 The notion that governments initiate and people respond-often, to be sure, in unpredictable ways-is too tidy and simple. The acceleration of literacy in Kerala resulted first from the exploitation of existing cultural strengths: the relative freedom of women and the popular, old-style schools. Malayalis were culturally attuned to schooling of a particular, local kind in which girls participated. When the Travancore government provided literacy-oriented but recogniz- able schools, persons in those groups in Travancore who were accustomed to schooling their children continued to do so. In Cochin, however, where an unfamiliar system of English education was attempted in the 1870s, people avoided it. Moreover, in the 1890s, abrupt innovations in Cochin's schools led to a temporary fall in the numbers of school-goers and in literacy. Governments, to be sure, influenced their subjects, but rarely, I suspect, directed them down paths they were not already inclined to go.

An educational survey in Gujarat in the 1970s supports the idea that familiarity with schooling among influential social groups explains acceleration in literacy, once governments begin to spend more money on education. The author concludes that the "tradition of going in for education" was "the single most powerful influence on literacy rates" for all the

91 Archie Brown, "Introduction," Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, 2nd edition (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), p. 13. See also Gray's "Conclusion," especially p. 253.

92 See John R. Wood, "British versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat." Journal of Asian Studies, vol. XLIV, no. 1 (November 1984), pp.65-100. Edward S. Haynes, "Comparative Industrial Development in 19th and 20th-Century India: Alwar State and Gurgaon District," South Asia (New Series), vol. III, no. 2 (December 1980), pp. 25-42.

93 For example, see B.R. Tomlinson, review of D.A. Low, ed., Congress and the Raj (London: Heinemann, 1977), in Modern Asian Studies, vol. XVI, no. 2 (April 1982), p. 340.

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villages in the study.94 For planners, the establishment of a primary school system that carries prestige-that attracts the looked-up-to groups in a society-seems a basic requirement of a successful literacy program.

In Kerala, lower castes had always regarded school-going as a mark of status. Their tiny, but growing, elites began to demand opportunities in the new education system from the 1880s in Travancore, whose government slowly began to concede such demands in the twenty years before the First World War. Meanwhile, Christian mission schools had been providing another avenue for low-caste education. The Cochin government eventu- ally followed the Travancore example, but more suddenly and disrup- tively. Cochin's literacy figures, which had reached a plateau in the 1890s based on high-caste and Christian school-going, increased sharply from the 1910s as governments opened the schools to most social groups and spent increasing sums on education. Similarly, after the constitutional reforms of 1919, more funds were available in Malabar District as well. In response to the demands of Malabar's people, its District Board and local educational entrepreneurs built the largest system of district schools in the Madras Presidency.

The role of governments in producing Kerala's high levels of literacy is unquestionable. But equally clear, it seems to me, is the fact that government activity alone was not enough. More important was the cultural base on which that activity arose. As the Indian census commissioner observed in 1901, "The spread of education does not depend primarily on the multi- plication of schools, and. .. there are large sections of the population who remain ignorant, however many schools there may be."95

By the 1910s and 1920s in Kerala, the question was: who was leading whom? Was government policy tempting more and more Malayalis to send children to school? Or was government unable to keep up with a deep and constant demand to multiply the number of schools? In 1937, Cochin's Dewan had little doubt. He told his finance department that the education budget must stop growing (it exceeded 18 percent of total expenditure). He particularly criticized the practice of citizens setting up schools without government approval and later applying for grants, which, if not conceded, produced dissatisfaction.96 Though the contrasts between Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar illustrate variations in timing, by the 1920s virtually every section of Kerala society had come to regard education as "the door to a new earth and a new heaven. "9

91 Maya Shah, Ecoiomic- Factors Explaininig Valiations in Literacy Rates inl Rural Aieas: A Case .Study of Guijarat (Baroda: Departmiien t of Economics, Maharajah Sayajirao University, 1981), p. 51.

95 C of I, 1901, vol. I, India, part 1, Repoit, p. 165. 16 R.K. ShanmllUkham Chetty to T.S. Narayana Iyer, Secretary, 14 April 1937, Dewan's

Letters, Cochin (Kerala State Archives, Ernakulam). 9 Report of the Unhemiiployient Eniqiry Com7mittee, Trazmancore, 1928 (Trivandrum:

Government Press, 1928), p. 28.

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The three women who have been so much in my thoughts since I first began to wrestle with the question of what made Kerala literate probably came from three different social groups. The woman with the newspaper on that rainy morning north of Ernakulam was probably a Syrian Chris- tian. Janamma, of course, was a Nayar. And the fisherwoman with the handbill was either a lower-caste Hindu or lower-status Christian. Yet all read, all no doubt had been to school and all undoubtedly expected their children and grandchildren to go to school and learn to read. Any government that failed to provide the opportunities would do so at its peril. Kerala's culture gave women a remarkable independence, and women have made Kerala remarkably literate.

NOTE: THE DEFINITION OF LITERACY IN THE CENSUSES

Indian census data are notorious. Definitions changed from one census to another; categories were added or eliminated. Comparisons over time thus become difficult and dangerous.

In 1931 and 1941, for example, the census commissioners in Travancore debated the merits of the literacy statistics compiled in 1921. The 1931 commissioner thought they were wrong-far too high. The 1941 commissioner thought they were about right. He argued that his 1931 predecessor, who instructed enumerators to record people as literate only if they had four years of schooling, had introduced inaccuracy by applying too rigid a definition. The 1941 and 1951 censuses confirmed Travancore's and Cochin's literacy rates as the highest in India, and the 1951 commissioner concluded that "a very stiff interpretation has been given to literacy in 1931." The debate illustrates the problems with the figures.98

Except for the 1931 Travancore census, the criterion for being recorded as "literate" from 191 1 onwards was the ability to "write a simple letter and read the answer to it. "99 Before 1911, literacy in the census depended on the claims people made to the enumerator and his willingness to believe them.'00 This may account for the low percentages in Travancore and Cochin in 1875: the unwillingness of high-caste enumerators to ask low- caste people if they were literate-or believe them if they said they were.

Most of the figures in this paper are expressed as percentages of the total population, including children, though sometimes literacy tables elimi- nate children under ten or five years of age. When this is done, the percen-

98 C of I, 1931, vol. XXVIII, Travancore, part 1, Report, p. 281; C of I, 1941, vol. XXV. Travancore, part 1, Report, p. 154; C of I, 1951, vol. XIII, Travancore-Cochin, part 1, Report, p. 78.

99 S.C. Srivastava, Indian Census in Perspective, 3rd edition (New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General, 1983), p. 272, where the various criteria are compared; C of I, 1911, vol. XVIII, Cochin, part 1, Report, p. 51.

100 K. Narayanan, Kerala. A Portrait of Population (New Delhi: Census of India, 1973), pp. 93-4.

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tage of literates naturally appears higher.'0' Such variations represent a further difficulty for anyone using census data.'02

For my purposes, the important points concern not so much the preci- sion of each individual decade's percentages but broad trends over time and comparisons between different administrative areas. Treated with caution, the literacy statistics can be made to tell significant and reliable stories.

La Trobe University, Australia, May 1987

101 Children under ten in Travancore and Cochin represented between 25 and 30 percent of the total population throughout the twentieth century. See C of I, 1951, vol. XIII, Travancore- Cochin, part 1-A, Report, p. 15.

102 Narayanan, Kerala. A Portrait, pp. 93-4.

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