Thinking of Kerala's Many Cosmopolitanisms

Cultural Dynamics24(2-3) 127 –142

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Migration, transnationalism, and modernity: Thinking of Kerala’s many cosmopolitanisms

J DevikaCentre for Development Studies, India

AbstractThis article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bound up with the histories of migration and transnationalisms in the region. It argues that a distinction can be made between the earlier and later phases of the migratory and transnational experience. The former allowed for the ‘cosmopolitanism of ideas’ that imagined hitherto-non-existent communities across cultural boundaries and ‘competing cosmopolitanisms’ in the region. Post-independence, however, altered political conditions that impacted migration and transnationalism and produced the ‘cosmopolitanism of duty’, which works with fairly fixed ideas about the national and community/family values and aims for flexibility in negotiating these worlds. These have had distinct effects on modernity in Kerala.

KeywordsCosmopolitanism, Kerala, migration, transnationalism

Introduction

This article is inspired by questions that emerged from the current debate on cosmopoli-tanism in the English-speaking metropolitan academy. I speak from my own location – that of the ‘post-colony’ – borrowing this term from Niranjana (1998). In her reckoning, ‘post-colony’ refers to not only a position (the ‘postcolonial’) but also a location, a difference that definitely marks our political engagement as feminist intellectuals in third-world spaces who strive to not only make feminism comprehensible but also emphasize the dependence of such translation on contingent political and cultural con-texts (Niranjana, 1998: 144). Academics in the ‘post-colony’ likewise seek to translate debates that unfold in first-world academic contexts, but their translation is shaped by local political–cultural contexts.

It is apparent that the terms of the debate are set by long-standing contests within the first-world academia – between universalists who preserve or rework Kantian cosmopolitanism

Corresponding author:J Devika, Centre for Development Studies, Prasanth Nagar, Ulloor, Thiruvananthapuram, 695 011, Kerala, India. Email: [email protected]

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(Nussbaum, 1996) and others who seek to rearticulate the idea in non-Eurocentric ways and/or in the backdrop by possibilities opened by intensified globalization (Connolly, 2000). Postcolonial scholars have taken distinctive positions within the latter group (Rovisco and Nowicka, 2011). Another strategy has been to turn cosmopolitanism into a purely descriptive category shorn completely of Eurocentric normative import (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003). Nevertheless, as Robbins (1992) and Cheah (1997) point out, these interventions often stay within the concerns and contexts of first-world academic metropolises. While it would be absurd to claim that the above struggles are irrelevant to the post-colony, it may be neces-sary to revise the question: how may the idea of cosmopolitanism be rearticulated against Eurocentrism and the depredations of global capital in the post-colony? This clearly involves more than what postcolonial scholarship has attempted.

Consider, for instance, an elaboration of cosmopolitanism that refers to ‘a more gen-erally and historically deep experience of living in a state of flux, uncertainty, and encounter with difference that is possible in rural, urban, or metropolitan settings’ (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003: 344–345). The ‘rural cosmopolitan’, an agent of local cosmopolitics, does not await transformation from elsewhere (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003: 345). However, they add that these changes may not be pro-gressive: often, ‘the transformations of social space circular migrants enact, re-inscribe and consolidate traditional arrangements, rather than undermine them’ (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003: 362). Surely, this does counter the Eurocentric geographic imagination that renders the local/vernacular into the parochial. Nevertheless, I find it unhelpful to stop here because these insights do not relate to ongoing struggles around space and recognition in South Asia as the post-colony. While highlighting the agential capacities of people who straddle worlds of difference may indeed be an oppositional move in the first-world academy, it may not suffice in the post-colony.

To pose this question is to implicitly critique mainstream social science in the specific post-colony that I write from: Kerala, India. Here, social science, since the early twenti-eth century, has been largely wedded to the state’s governmental concerns and an entrenched conception of the [sub]national,1 which is highly developmentalist. Mid-twentieth-century multidisciplinary research focused on matriliny, communism and community politics, all of interest to first-world researchers, all of which came to be viewed as unique markers of the [sub]nation (Devika, 2007b). The highpoint of this tra-jectory was the 1970s discourse around the ‘Kerala Model’2 of social development, through which developmentalism came to be projected as the unique cultural feature of modern Kerala. Interestingly, Kerala has functioned since then as a heterotopia for left-leaning developmentalist social scientists of the Anglo-American academia.

In this sense of the local that left unquestioned the hegemony of Kerala’s new elite – specifically, those caste-communities including the Syrian Christians, Nair and the Ezhavas who gained heavily from the socio-economic transformations of the twentieth century (Jeffrey, 2003) – disadvantaged groups figure as outliers to the central tendency (Kurien, 2000). However, a host of factors including the steady growth of oppositional civil social politics since the 1980s, and the strengthening of Dalit and feminist social research critical of Kerala Model discourse in the 1990s and after have contributed to destabilizing developmentalist [sub]nationalism. In short, there is an ongoing struggle over reimagining the local in which social research is deeply implicated.

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As a critical researcher, I seek perspectives from first-world cosmopolitanism debates that help us to critique dominant models of researching the connections between migra-tion and modernity in Kerala and reimagine the local as historically shaped by other places. This cannot be through privileging the universal implicitly (as in Kerala Model discourse) or effectively effacing the local in favour of the cultural hybrid or the rural cosmopolitan. Instead, I hope to make better use of the different senses in which the notion of cosmopolitanism has been glossed in the ongoing debate. Different social groups in Malayalee society have related to the world beyond given cultural borders dif-ferently. These trajectories have been shaped by both the internal social dynamics of late nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century Malayalee society and the opportunities opened up to specific groups by the integration of the economy of the Malayalam-speaking regions to the capitalist world system in the mid-late nineteenth century. The present effort to investigate different cosmopolitanisms in twentieth-century Malayalee society is close to Sheldon Pollock’s suggestion about cosmopolitanism as ‘action rather than idea’, and his ‘historical analysis of cosmopolitan and vernacular ways of being and the kinds of cultural and political belonging to which they have related’ (Pollock, 2000). This may also make sense of apparently paradoxical features of contemporary Malayalee society that are explained only weakly within the dominant developmentalist paradigm: for instance, while the Malayalam public sphere is remarkably cosmopolitan, the social domain in Kerala is characterized by intense conservatism that evokes traditional values continuously. Moreover, by pursuing such a line of enquiry, I perform, to borrow Menon’s (2007) words, a ‘locally rooted cosmopolitanism that declares affiliation with other worlds and places’ (p. 393).

This article claims that the history of twentieth-century Malayalee (‘speakers of Malayalam’, the language of Kerala, and refers to the people of the State) modernity is inextricably bound with the intertwined histories of migration and transnationalism, and of shifting, diverse cosmopolitanisms. In the two sections that follow, I make a prelimi-nary foray into the complex history proposed above. In the ‘Conclusion’ section, I reflect on what it holds for scholarship and struggle.

Critical Cosmopolitanisms and Modernity: Late 19th and Early-mid 20th Centuries

If ‘cosmopolitanism’ is understood exclusively as elite mobility and ‘a conquering gaze from nowhere’ (Donna Haraway, quoted in Robbins, 1992: 171), then the only group in early twentieth-century Malayalee society who could claim to be ‘cosmopolitan’ was the members of the colonial bureaucracy. By then, many elite Malayalees, especially of the Nair and Syrian Christian communities, had joined the colonial civil service. The mem-oirs and autobiographies of such individuals reveal much about this form of power. For example, the autobiography of Menon (1983), who was a bureaucrat under the British and later became a senior diplomat of the Indian government, is mostly an account of his travels to, and observations about, many parts of the world, from Africa to the Pamirs. In the ‘Foreword’, he constructs himself as an Indian who has lived in many diverse regions of the world, always ‘at peace’ (Menon, 1983: 10) – able to deal with difference without


losing his identity. The colonial bureaucrat, he notes, was often familiar with many lan-guages and diverse cultures (1983: 205).

Strikingly, the centrality of ‘Indian culture’ to such a mobile self is also argued as characteristic of ‘Indian culture’ (Menon, 1983: 10). This view ignores the exclusions through which this image of ‘Indian tolerance’ is constructed – specifically, the fact that historically, what we have known in South Asia is not the ‘peaceful coexistence’ of dif-ferent groups but a society organized hierarchically upon caste differences. Not that this framework was utterly rigid but that change was not automatic, especially for disadvan-taged groups. This ‘high-Hindu-centric’ vision of tolerance also accompanied claims regarding the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of Malayalee society, in which Hindu kings are cele-brated for having welcomed Christianity and Islam to Kerala, and informs much main-stream history here (Panikkar, 1957), despite evidence that the welcome was limited when the newly arrived faiths appeared to be disturbing the hierarchical caste ordering of society (John, 1981: 347, 444–445). In this ‘casteist cosmopolitanism’, foreigners were welcomed and accepted only insofar as they would integrate within the hierarchical framework of caste society. It is not surprising, then, that the cosmopolitanism of the Malayalee who was part of the mobile colonial elite pegged itself on an equally elite and mobile ‘casteist cosmopolitanism’ that was deemed indigenous.

There were, however, other kinds of cosmopolitanisms that could be turned around to question colonial power; some of these predated British domination. Most striking, perhaps, is the cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church, available most frequently to the Syrian Christian clergy. Of the surviving materials that give us a sense of these connections, the most valuable document is the eighteenth-century travelogue Varthamaanapustakam, by Paremmakkal (1985 [1785]) of his travels to Rome via Bahia and Lisbon. Alangatt Kariattil Ouseph Malpan (born in 1742) and Paremmakkal (born in 1736), who journeyed to Rome together to secure a local Metropolitan for the diocese of Malankara by which they hoped to counter the domination of the Portuguese in church affairs, were both accom-plished scholars. Malpan was a student in Rome in 1755–1766 and was fluent in French, Italian and Latin. Paremmakkal had learned Sanskrit, Syrian, Latin and Portuguese. Many students travelled to Rome to study at the Propaganda Fide; two young students accompanied them there, and they also met two Malayalee students in Rome. In Varthamaanapustakam, one senses the abiding assumption of a non-exclusivist, world-wide community of Christians centred upon Rome, the breaches of which are noticed and protested. About the apathy and hostility of a Catholic priest who they approached for shelter en route to Chennai (from where they were to embark for Europe), Paremmakkal (1985 [1785]) remarked:

In defiance of the Holy Book’s command to love foreigners and not to forget the love of the foreigners, which is stated in many places such as the Epistle of the Romans and the Epistle to the Hebrews, and forgetting the Way of Christ in which our Lord Himself has declared that law and prophecy are fulfilled through love, he drove us to a wayside inn where people of many castes, women and men, virtuous folk and evil ones, come together. (p. 97)

While this Catholic cosmopolitanism was indeed being advanced by a member of a community that was fully integrated into traditional Malayalee caste hierarchy on

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advantageous terms,3 it certainly did allow for a rebuttal of European superiority. Indeed, Paremmakkal’s spirited rejoinder in the book to a hostile letter sent to Rome by Portuguese clergy stationed at Kochi furiously condemns their pretension of racial superiority. Pointing out that the Christians of Malankara are older in the faith than the Europeans, he contests the Portuguese clergy’s notion of nobility (Paremmakkal, 1985 [1785]: 352). The possibility of local elites evoking cosmopolitanism against colonialism grew as high-caste Malayalees began to seek Western education after the mid-nineteenth century. The biographer of the early nationalist intellectual Sir C. Sankaran Nair recounts an inci-dent in which Nair opposed the view of Judge Holloway of the Madras High Court, that the English were the only unconquered race in history. Nair argued that England was actually the longest colonized country in the world, since the Saxons had not ever shaken off the Norman conquest. Holloway replied that it was wrong to say so since both Saxons and Normans belonged to the same race. Nair retorted that ‘in that case, we are all the progeny of Adam. And for that reason, your argument has no relevance at all’ (Menon, 1971: 11–2).

However, by the late nineteenth century, missionary discourse also espoused a cosmo-politanism that, unlike the above, was capable of mounting a powerful critique of tradi-tional caste hierarchies on behalf of oppressed lower-caste people. Dilip Menon notes this in late nineteenth-century lower-caste Malayalam novels, which upheld the vision of a community of equality and brotherhood in Christ. Anti-slavery writings found reso-nance here through translations and adaptations; furthermore, these novels pointed to the link between travel, escape from slavery and social mobility through returning rich and endowed with values from abroad that enabled the subject to resist casteism (Menon, 2006). Such cosmopolitanism was available not just to the mobile colonial elite; it laid bare the ugly underbelly of high-Hindu cosmopolitanism and directly exposed it as casteist; it questioned not just European racist hubris but also caste oppression that struc-tured the local. Most importantly, it gestured at the possibility of possessing a wider mental map that exceeded the local and the national.4 And it appears that writing from the 1920s by non-elite labourers who went to Malaya and Ceylon indicates that the opposi-tional cosmopolitanism of the late nineteenth-century lower-caste novels fructified in such travel (Menon, 1997).5

Menon’s observations seem to be corroborated by the writings of Pottekkad (2004a, 2004b), who travelled extensively in these areas in the early 1950s and who mentions innumerable meetings with Malayalee immigrants in South East Asia and Africa under British rule. Strikingly, though most of the people whom he met – and this is immedi-ately after Indian independence – express a feeling for their Malayalam-speaking home-land, this hardly approximates to national feeling. Indeed, Pottekkad met very many people who had settled down, married local women, spoke the local language as well as any local and were well established in local socio-economic life. To mention one such instance, he writes about a certain Harry Joseph of Sumatra who had left Travancore at the age of 11, picked up some education in Indonesia, travelled all over South East Asia, married a Sumatran Muslim woman, and had four daughters, all with Hindu names:

I will never forget that Malayalee brother who had leapt across the meaningless political lines Man has drawn on land and water, the ‘lines of the map more fragile than the land’, the walls built


by religions, the narrow by-lanes of community customs, and become a citizen of the world, now living in a fertile bower by the banks of the river at Palembang. (Pottekkad, 2004b: 488)

Emigrants like Joseph – such characters abound in Pottekkad’s narratives – did express feelings for their homeland – as evident from the names of his daughters – but they do not appear to be caught between ‘national cultures’. In fact, the rise of national cultures was what threatened their rootedness in those lands. In Joseph’s case, he was struggling to establish his citizenship at the time of Pottekkad’s visit in 1953. The Indonesian government had begun to tighten the rules for permanent residence to for-eigners. Joseph had no papers though he had continuously resided in Indonesia since 1943; some enemies had informed the government of this, and he was going to the capi-tal city for the very first time to sort this out (Pottekkad, 2004b: 489).

By the second decade of the twentieth century, these emigrants were making an impact on the societies of their origin as well. K. C. George, an early communist leader from south Kerala, remembers the keenness with which local people followed the news of World War I in his village once many villagers entered the British army as clerks. He remembers that people began to perceive things within a wider geographical framework; emigrants often returned with new ideas and practices that fomented change (George, 1985: 124). Also the sociopolitical ferment of the times mobilized critical cosmopolitan-isms of various kinds – Buddhist, rationalist and Marxist – to challenge entrenched power structures. These efforts were often at loggerheads with Indian nationalism6 – for instance, anti-caste intellectuals like C. Krishnan and Sahodaran K. Ayyappan, who did much to establish Buddhism and rationalism in Kerala (Achyutan, 1971; Sahadevan, 2007; Sanu, 2002: 40–50, 64–67; Sheeja, 2010: 180–185). One strand of the first- generation feminists, represented by figures like Anna Chandy, drew actively on the experiences of women in the Western world, unlike the other strand that located itself firmly within Indian nationalism (Devika, 2005). Besides, by the 1930s, Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai had emerged as a formidable champion of literary and aesthetic cos-mopolitanism in the Malayalam literary public (Menon, 2007).

Communist propaganda in the 1930s significantly expanded the mental map of those who came under the sway of the movement. Medini (2011), a prominent communist cultural activist of the 1940s and after, remembers that because of the evocative propa-ganda, the poor felt that ‘... a mention of the Tsar would conjure up images of the Diwan or the local zamindar. One would feel as if Marx and Lenin were one’s neighbours, fel-low Malayalam speakers’. Yet in communist discourse, internationalism – which assumes the existence of internally homogenous national societies and naturalizes affiliations to them among people born in them – was strongly if implicitly present. The legendary Malayalee communist Gopalan (1972) mobilized a worldwide anti-capitalist cosmopoli-tanism in Ceylon against the divides inflicted by Sinhala nationalism (pp. 178–179), the strategies of which apparently involved projecting Malayalee men as cheating husbands (which struck right at the root of the sort of integration mentioned earlier) (pp. 176–177). But he also worked equally hard to unite Malayalees and Tamils, for the general good of all Indians (pp. 174–175).

By mid-twentieth century, however, conditions were ripening for the intensification of Indian nationalist sentiments among the Malayalee emigrants. The heightening of the

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nationalist struggle in India was important, but perhaps equally important is an apparent change in the nature of migration from Malayalam-speaking regions to Malaya and else-where in South East Asia. Pottekkad, writing in the early 1950s, claims that there were two stages in the migration to South East Asia, the first in the early twentieth century when Malayalees came along with others from the Indian subcontinent to work in the plantations as labourers under gruelling conditions. The second wave was by educated people from Kerala who sought white-collar jobs. However, it appears that the divide should not be exaggerated – he mentions that the divide between the rich and the poor was very palpable among the Malayalees of Malaya (Pottekkad, 2004b: 358–362).7 Not that the poor lacked all opportunity for upward mobility, as Joseph’s story testifies; upper-caste emigrants were often runaways and rebels against traditional norms (Pillai, 1982) and hence penniless, though often endowed with skills. Pillai (1982: 131–132), who went to Penang in the 1930s as a 19-year-old in search of an ‘easy job’ so that he could marry against his family’s wishes, worked for some years there and finally joined the Indian National Army (INA) that tried to make an armed assault on British India through Burma along with the Japanese during World War II. He not only remembers that people of all classes rushed to join the INA inspired by the nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose but also adds that all the recruits were literate, and at least 50% were col-lege educated (Pillai, 1982: 266). It appears that those who were attracted to nationalism belonged to the educated classes, mostly new elite Malayalees, whose mobility was largely through the colonial administrative and legal machinery or the plantation indus-try, and who earned enough to maintain reasonably well their familiar lifestyles and rela-tions (e.g. they did not intermarry with local people). This seems confirmed by several autobiographies, such as those of the nationalist leader Menon (1969) and Pillai (1982).8

Interestingly, it appears that migrants who were members of the new elite had to embrace other cultures only in extraordinary circumstances that made their return impossible. Since they moved beyond the boundaries of the British Empire, their polit-ical identities inevitably changed and this made their nationalism suspect. This is evi-dent from the autobiography of a prominent Malayalee in Japan, who went there first as a student, and realizing that it was dangerous to return to India, settled down. Working hard to aid India’s freedom struggle from Japan, he nevertheless absorbed Japanese ethos heavily: he describes himself as a ‘Ronin’ – a masterless samurai – fighting the cause of Indian independence there (Nair, 1982: 225). And perhaps not surprisingly, in the very first chapter, he ‘explains’ his hybrid self by constructing Kerala as embodying the essences of both ‘India’ and ‘Japan’. ‘Kerala’ represents both of ‘Indian culture’ as the very repository of high-Hindu ‘tolerance’ and equally, Japanese ethos, embodied in the martial culture of his community, the Nair (Nair, 1982: 44–48). Nair’s autobiography also insists on the mutually complementary coex-istence of these identities in his self. No wonder, he is bitter that Indian nationalists were suspicious of the Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose, who like him, had absorbed Japanese culture (e.g. Nair, 1982: 145, 270).

Two major points emerge from the discussion so far. The first is that there were elite and non-elite cosmopolitanisms emergent in early modern Kerala, which had different political implications and possibilities. Subaltern cosmopolitanism, which expanded with the wider geographical spread, was often suffused with a feeling for the homeland,


but one that did not readily translate into Indian nationalism. However, changing condi-tions strengthened both nationalisms among the emigrants and national borders. The second point is about the broader discussion on Malayalee modernity in the early twen-tieth-century Malayalee public sphere. The general challenge to traditional power struc-tures was made up of several critical cosmopolitanisms, all of which imagined worldwide communities of shared values. Discussion on Malayalee modernity, therefore, was com-posed of the articulation of several different cosmopolitan projects, minor and major, which combined at times and competed at others. Most crucially perhaps, critical cosmo-politanisms and much of subaltern cosmopolitanism rested upon a conception of moder-nity as a force capable of dismantling traditional hierarchies.9

Transnationalisms and Modernities: Mid-late 20th Century

In the second half of the twentieth century, a host of factors made subaltern migrations difficult. National boundaries hardened, national cultures rigidified, under hegemonic elite decolonizing nationalisms, new regulations limiting migration to newly independ-ent states, the UN-centred nation-state system, and the Cold War. The effects of this were not lost on commentators in Kerala. Writing in 1959 in the Catholic newspaper Deepika, P. T. Chacko argued that the ‘population explosion’ that the West complains about was a problem only in the present order of nation-states. He argued that hundreds of millions of people could be accommodated in continents like Australia, Africa and South America, but such migration could be possible only with the financial support from the rich coun-tries, which, unfortunately, are keener on strengthening their arsenals (Chacko, 1959: 5). These changes impacted critical cosmopolitanisms as well. The strengthening of nation-alist sentiment meant that the efforts to dismantle traditional power structures received less attention and were often considered divisive. These changes were reflected most sharply, perhaps, in the rationalists’ movement, in Kerala, which continued to attack organized religion, pseudo-knowledges and irrational beliefs and practices but from which the anti-caste content gradually dropped out of sight (Anaz, 2010). The Cold War often reduced critical cosmopolitanisms to its terms: Buddhism became associated with Dalai Lama; Christianity with the anti-communist bloc; Communism became synony-mous with the Soviet bloc. Perhaps the only place where critical cosmopolitanism con-tinued to be an oppositional place to the nation, and the Cold War system was Kerala’s literary public, where continental philosophy, particularly that of Sartre, and European literary movements continued to be adapted and advanced defiantly.

While fears of communist movements reaching beyond national boundaries were still expressed (Pottekkad, 2004b: 325) such alliances were surely harder to build. Nationalisms tended to erase the memories and traces of pre-colonial and pre-national cosmopolitanisms (Vora, 2011). However, people continued their attempts to move. Pottekkad (2004b: 362) says that there was a massive wave of Malayalees back into Malaya in 1950–1951, which prompted the government to limit migration to persons with assured jobs and a certain level of education in 1953. These restrictions were further tightened with the formation of Malaysia (Sandhu, 1969). The new opportunities for migration that opened up in the 1950s, to the West and the newly liberated African

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countries were also restricted mostly to ‘well-qualified persons seeking prestigious employment’ (Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1141; Meine Welt, 2011); this stream, especially to European countries like Germany, continued to grow through the 1960s and 1970s. Catholic cosmopolitanism often provided the ideological framing of a very large chunk of such migration mediated by church authorities (Kurien, 2000; Meine Welt, 2011). Although Catholic intellectuals like the economist P. J. Thomas and church leaders rec-ommended that Catholics should migrate to Brazil and settle down as hard-working farmers and loyal subjects of the Brazilian government (Deepika, 1960: 4; Thomas, 1958: 5), these possibilities never bore full fruit.

I argue that these later migrations paved the way for transnational cosmopolitan belonging here. In Kerala, it was undoubtedly the members of the new elite who were increasingly able to move through legal channels. Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003: 340) describe transnational cosmopolitanism well: of straddling two cultural worlds through leading a life of security away from one’s homeland but holding considerable interests back there. In general, this is ideologically framed by an ethos of dutifulness, not, however, always to one’s nation but to one’s caste or community in the homeland and to the political and labour regimes in the hostland. This has strengthened communi-ties to which migrants belong and their socio-religious institutions (George, 2005; Kurien, 2002; Osella and Osella, 2001).

But it is not merely a strengthening of faith and the cosmopolitanism around it that often occurred. For example, this new form involved strong commitment to family-upward mobility through status-securing consumption, even in the face of racism in the hostland. A particularly revealing account may be found in the autobiography of Thomas (2008). He hailed from a very poor coastal community in southern Kerala, worked hard to secure higher education and migrated to Nigeria in the 1950s through the Catholic Church as a schoolteacher. The principal, an Irish priest, denied an allowance granted to all (mostly white) teachers to Thomas, who kept pestering him about this. He recalls:

Fed up, he shouted at me one day, ‘Why have you come here? To make money or to serve the Catholic Church? I need an answer now. The priest calculated that I’d be floored either way, irrespective of whether I answered yes or no, and could be defeated. Not wasting a moment, I shouted back, ‘For both’. That sum was very valuable to me, who was steeped in poverty. ... My aim was to build a nice house back home. (2008: 57)

The confrontation, however, does not lead Thomas to questioning the inequalities that structure Catholic cosmopolitanism. Rather, he switches abruptly from the scene of con-frontation to home, where his real stakes seemingly lay. As Osella and Osella (2000) put it (describing another variant of this transnational cosmopolitan subject, the Gulf-returned Malayalee), ‘... hybridization is partial, context-specific, and external, existing alongside and reinforcing an essentialized and interiorized sense of locality and of belonging to a community of substance sharers’ (p. 130). Moreover, as has been noticed in many other contexts, this is often also a response to the specific conditions of minority status that many immigrant communities have to endure in their hostland or the outright lack of citizenship (Dharwadker, 2011; Vora, 2011). This involves flexibility – seamless blending into the rhythms of the labour regimes of global capitalism and norms of public behaviour (Meine Welt, 2011: 21–22), the quiet acceptance of the political regimes of the


hostland (Meine Welt, 2011: 28–31) and non-confrontational strategies to deal with rac-ism (Meine Welt, 2011: 16–17). The flip side is the anxieties about ‘polluting western culture’. Thus narratives by such transnational subjects are often shot through with deep sexual conservatism, sexual double standards, homophobia and a right-wing disdain for ‘lazy welfarism’ that apparently does not reward the hard-working [model minority] (Meine Welt, 2011; Thomas, 2008).

In short, elite transnational cosmopolitanism was conducive to strengthening social, cultural and political conservatisms in Kerala, and this process has steadily accelerated after the end of the Cold War and the opening up of the Indian economy to global capital. However, this time period also had its subaltern transnational migration, in the form of the massive flow of lower-class Malayalee to the Middle East from the mid-1960s, when the countries of the Persian Gulf began to invest their oil wealth in construction activi-ties. Researchers have noted that in the early decades – the 1960s and 1970s – the aspir-ants to the Gulf were mostly persons with relatively lower educational qualifications (Kurian, 1979; Kurien, 2002; Mathew and Nair, 1978). The first waves10 were often illegal, and researchers heard many tales of financial ruin, loss, trickery and imprison-ment (Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1143). Nevertheless, by the end of the 1970s, the Persian Gulf became the choicest destination for migration from Kerala.11

The similarities between this subaltern transnational migration and the earlier colonial migration may be obvious: both were often highly exploitative but involved voluntary decisions and risk-taking on the part of less-skilled workers. However, the differences are worth noting. First, while those who migrated in the 1960s and 1970s were the less privi-leged, they were not as disadvantaged as the earlier colonial migrants (Kurian, 1979: 38; Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1147). Also, while the worst-oppressed Dalit communities migrated during colonial migration along with other oppressed groups like Tiyyas and Muslims, in the later migration, their presence was minimal (McClelland, 2009; Zachariah et al., 2002: 26), and the Ezhavas and Tiyyas who migrated were no longer a disadvan-taged group. The Malabar Muslims who formed the largest chunk, however, were indeed so. Second, these groups, unlike those who migrated earlier, had no chance of perma-nently settling in the hostland (Weiner, 1982: 3). Third, these workers who had no rights there were sharply divided from the locals, the citizens, unlike in colonial migration in which both emigrants and locals were equally under colonial control. Fourth, unlike in the earlier wave in which individuals sought to escape oppressive family and community norms, family-status mobility was central to the second wave (as mentioned earlier, these migrants were relatively less resource-deprived that their earlier counterparts). Thus, members of the first wave often married local women and set up families making new beginnings. However, members of the second wave were deeply bound to family commit-ments back home and upward mobility. To that extent, and to the extent that conditions were such that political and social docility in the hostland were inevitable, they formed a variant of the transnational cosmopolitan subject bound by duty in both worlds. Fifth, the second-wave migrants were hugely reliant upon the networks and financial support ena-bled by their community members (Kurien, 2002: 26) – an important reason why the Dalits have been excluded from these opportunities (McClelland, 2009; Zachariah et al., 2002: 34–35) – unlike the earlier wave. The acquisition of religious symbols acquires even greater value under such conditions (Kurien, 2000: 33).

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First, it is now well established that the remittances that flowed from the Persian Gulf have been a vital factor sustaining Kerala’s economy since the 1970s (Zachariah et al., 2002). However, its cultural effects have been ambiguous. As the Osellas have also argued that through their investment in temple rituals, Ezhavas ‘twist’, in creative, ways, temple rituals once completely inaccessible to them. However, there is no guarantee that the outcomes of such contests are always progressive (Osella and Osella, 1999). Following the unfolding of its effects on the ground is indeed a vital concern for critical social science in the post-colony. These, however, are almost inevitably underwritten by conservative social norms that justify sexual double standards in public and private lives, promote ‘ethnicized disciplining’ and are deeply homophobic. Moreover, the claims that international migration has tended to strengthen matrilineal tendencies in Kerala (Gulati, 1993; Kurien, 2000) may indeed be exaggerated.12

Second, there is also some indication that the forms of individual public self-assertion that this transnational migration has made possible may possibly have corrosive effects on the community itself. The Osellas’ (2000) perceptive study of the local deployment of consumption-centred cosmopolitanism by Gulf-returned men to assert themselves as ‘mature men’ gives us some pointers about this. From their account, it is clear that the prevailing norms of success for these men are equally grounded in narrow kin and com-munity circles, as they are for elite transnational cosmopolitan subjects even if they do not evoke community or religious affiliations explicitly. They remark that the Gulf-returnee often seeks to perform his newfound status by appropriating the elite traditional model of the wealthy upper-caste landlord who did not work (Osella and Osella, 2000: 124) and combining it with the image of the carefree cosmopolitan. However, the moral obligation to give away wealth indefinitely, which is associated with the landlord figure, is absent. Also, full altruism and sacrifice is not desirable, as it is said to be too ‘feminine’ a quality. Instead, controlled gift-giving that allows one to preserve one’s resources, yet gain control over others is preferred. It is obvious that this two-pronged strategy is aimed against traditional moral obligations on the elite to share resources with kin and immedi-ate community. Thus, it not only reappropriates traditional elite masculine power but also destroys other aspects of tradition that involves sharing and reciprocal obligations that bind the community. This is why the argument that a ‘decastification of status’ (Kurien, 2002: 38) has been achieved by rich lower-caste Ezhava Gulf returnees is inad-equate: the ‘decastified’ status may have been recast in terms that ultimately undermine communal reciprocities. While the community’s public assertion may be strengthened, the erosion of reciprocal obligations that structure its internal life may render life in the community all the more oppressive for resource-poor members.

From this sketch, a shift from the early twentieth-century sense of ‘the modern’, as the possibility and ability to escape debilitating traditional structures of caste oppres-sion, and self-reflexivity, even regarding what presents itself as ‘modern’, seems evi-dent. In the present, at least two broad understandings of the ‘modern’ (each with several strands, not always linked harmoniously) are in circulation. The first is advanced on behalf of marginalized groups in Kerala, such as women, Muslims, the sexual minorities and Dalits, and relies upon critical cosmopolitanisms that, unlike early twentieth-century critical cosmopolitanisms, allow for a debate around the rele-vance of Kantian universalism and include positions that make reference to ‘regulative


universals’ (Connolly, 2000). More often than not, this sense of ‘modernity’ is to be found in oppositional civil society, which is a strong presence in Kerala’s public sphere. However, the later sense of the ‘modern’, which foregrounds consumption and remains limited to family-status mobility and community, now infuses civil society more and more, even as entrenched community structures gain greater control over key institutions of culture and socialization. But not without unintended consequences,13 complexities14 and interesting hybrids,15 which indicates not a watertight division but an ongoing struggle.

Meanwhile, critical cosmopolitanisms have been largely confined to Kerala’s expan-sive public sphere, where feminism and environmentalism struck root and grew since the 1980s, along with thriving literary cosmopolitanism (Nambidi, 2011). However, their ability to pressurize for change independently is limited, given the almost unquestiona-ble sway of conservative ideologies in the social sphere. No wonder, then, that Kerala appears to be the land of striking cultural contrasts – thriving literary cosmopolitanism combined with alarmingly conservative social attitudes.

Conclusion

The history of the [sub]nation traced in the preceding sections differs significantly from dominant accounts that underlie Kerala Model discourse that highlights Kerala’s exceptionalism within the Indian subcontinent, driven by unique internal forces (Tharakan, 2006). In it, migration itself has roots in social development; and perhaps this explains its glaring lack of attention to colonial migration (for example, Zachariah et al., 2002). The present account takes a different route to demonstrate how the vicissitudes of Malayalee modernity have been shaped equally powerfully by external connections too numerous to be ignored. It shows how different senses of the ‘modern’ have emerged over different time periods and under specific con-texts, global and local, and how they have changed over time, to produce specific effects that structure contemporary everyday life in Malayalee society. Unlike the dominant account that points to the decline of progressive forces as the reason for the rise of right-wing social ideologies in Kerala, the present account raises the possibil-ity of more nuanced explanations that take into account multiple discourses and specificities over time, which may explain the antinomies that shape our everyday existence in the present.

Finally, it may be necessary to point out that to get past both the reinstatement of Kantian universalism and arguments about cultural hybridity, we have to perhaps probe the cosmopolitanism of objects – of material life including cuisine, fabrics, architecture and other elements – the give and take of which has shaped and continues to shape what we perceive to be essential to [sub]national culture. Only pursuing such connections that make up the givens of our everyday life and lived traditions will help loosen essential-ized constructions of the [sub]nation. It may indeed give us a sense of insertion that also reminds us simultaneously of our constantly changing, multiple connections to the worlds outside.

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Acknowledgements

The pleasure of discussion with Fernando Rosa, T. T. Sreekumar, Anvar Ali, and V. J. Varghese is gratefully remembered. I also thank Darsana Sreedhar, C. A. Anaz, and Anvar Ali for sharing valu-able sources.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘[sub]national’ to indicate that the Malayalee national identity has most often than not stayed within the overarching framework of Indian nationalism.

2. In the 1970s, Kerala’s specific trajectory of modernization, in which poor economic growth coexisted with remarkable achievements in social development comparable with those of developed countries, attracted international attention and was referred to in a worldwide dis-cussion on its replicability as the ‘Kerala Model’ (see Oommen, 1996: xvi).

3. Which surfaces in Paremmakkal’s concern that the upper-caste people do not join the Church anymore, mentioned as a sign of its decline.

4. Though not recognized in mainstream migration research in Kerala, the labour movement from Malabar and south Kerala to other British colonies during the nineteenth century was not inconsiderable (Panchanan Saha, quoted in Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1153).

5. It is important to mention here the cosmopolitanism of Muslims from the Malabar Coast, which dated to before colonialism. Malabar Muslim communities were found in almost all major Indian Ocean port-towns. There is little serious work available on these, but indications from the new histories of Indian Ocean trade are that these were not all subaltern groups; communities of prosperous traders were prominent among them.

6. Hani Sayed’s description of early twentieth-century Egyptian Muslim intellectuals, who had

... an ambivalent relationship to something they call home. They did not quite belong to it; yet they were not quite deracinated ... They were not into reclaiming an identity that is out there, or that existed at some point in history. They were constructing their own identity as their intellectual projects were unfolding (Sayed, 1999: 364), fits them well.

7. About presumably the earlier wave, Mathew and Nair (1978) mention that it was the untouch-able Cherumas and Tiyyas and (often poor) Muslims who migrated, with a small group of Nairs. It was the lower-caste people who migrated from southern Kerala as well – Latin Christians, Ezhavas and Tiyya (Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1141).

8. But even building nationalist sentiment and action was difficult, as Kesava Menon (1969: 278–279) discovered. For an account of tensions between north and south Indians in the Indian National Army (INA), see Pillai (1982: 396).

9. This is not to deny that dominant strands of ‘Malayalee modernity’ sought to mobilize the idea of the ‘modern’ against the above processes that were directed against traditional, but not all, hierarchy. So their drawing upon other cultures was necessarily selective.

10. Mathew and Nair (1978) mention that the earliest emigrants they traced were soldiers in the


British army in World War II who found themselves in Pakistan during Partition in 1947. They had reached the Persian Gulf by land routes and became traders of sweets (Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1142). Distress migration in the 1940s is also noted by Jeffrey (2003: 87).

11. In Mathew and Nair’s (1978) sample, 96% of the emigrants were in the Persian Gulf; only 4% of them were in Malaysia or Singapore (Mathew and Nair, 1978: 1146). According to recent research (of 2007), the majority of Gulf migrants remain less-skilled workers, contrary to the idea that only the skilled workers migrate to the Gulf post the 1990s (Zachariah and Rajan, 2010: 96).

12. Such claims tend to pick out one aspect of matriliny – women’s managerial role within the household – and project it as its marker. The empowering effects of matriliny for women arose from a combination of features: matriliocal residence and managerial roles had to be necessarily combined with the absence of domestic-conjugal ideologies and dowry payments, widow remarriage, relative ease of divorce and so on. Clearly, transnational migration began at a time when the latter features had significantly declined (Devika, 2007a).

13. For instance, heightening fashion consumption among young Dalit men in Kerala has had the effect of challenging upper-caste domination (Lukose, 2010; Sreekumar, 2011).

14. Contemporary Muslim cosmopolitanism in Kerala, for example, draw upon a wide range of sources of reflection about a specifically Muslim modernity, all of which, for example, do not espouse gender conservatism in the same degree.

15. An interesting ‘hybrid’ is the Madhyamam Weekly founded in 1987 by Jamaat-e-Islami – one of the first forums that offered space for oppositional civil society including feminists even as it sometimes assumed openly anti-feminist positions, reaffirmed naturalized gender differ-ence and mounted belligerent attacks on sex workers trying to organize.

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Author biography

J Devika researches and teaches at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. She has received a doctoral degree in history and is interested in the intertwined histories of gender, politics, development and culture in her region, Kerala. She also translates back and forth in English and Malayalam, the language of Kerala, and provides political commentary on contemporary Kerala on www.kafila.org

Thinking of Kerala's Many Cosmopolitanisms

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