The first week of the coming month of November will witness a huge public festival in Kerala organized by the ruling power through the government called ‘Keraleeyam‘. It begins on 1 November, celebrated every year as the ‘Kerala Piravi Dinam’ or the day of Kerala’s birth, marking the amalgamation of the three Malayalam-speaking regions into a single unit, a cherished dream of many in early twentieth century Kerala. The organizers of this celebration claim that this massive show seeks to highlight Kerala’s achievements which they hint, have an unbroken continuity from the twentieth century to the present. They claim to have furthered it, and not frittered it.

There are many in this state for who this show would look like a cruel charade. For example, the fisher folk who have taken the brunt of the ‘achievements’ of the government on the coast of Trivandrum, at Vizhinjam, in the form of the Adani Ports. Or Kudumbashree micro-entrepreneurs who desperately seek a contractor to agree to build their tiny workspaces, so that they might utilize long-awaited, recently-sanctioned government grants to good end, but simply cannot find one (because contractors do not believe anymore that the government has the money to actually pay them). Or small entrepreneurs who have been trying to pull every string that they can to get the government to clear their (not at all insubstantial) bills. Or groups of public workers who haven’t been paid pensions and salaries. Or researchers universities from which research funds have been drawn back into the treasury.

The list is much longer, but clearly, the government is confident that it has mustered the support of many constituents of what constituted the independent cultural civil society, as well as the intellectuals who were once associated with the radical left. It also is self-assured about mobilizing many of its own dependents who can, to some degree or other, speak the languages of social justice that once challenged it. In The Hindu yesterday, K Ravi Raman, once known to be associated with radical left positions, whitewashed the stomping feet on predatory capital with these soothing words: “Kerala has become a leading State in the world in terms of experimental liberalisation alternatives with the Leftist public consciousness,” and dubious claims that the Kerala government’s (thoroughly neoliberalised) welfare distribution is reducing levels of income inequality. It is easy to make such statements when data necessary for such an assessment is not publicly available. As a Member of the State Planning Board, Ravi Raman might have access to it — if so, he ought to make a rigorous assessment of the share of family expenditure that the government subsidises through multiple support systems. Like what Dr K P Kannan did, for an earlier decade, when he calculated that nearly twenty-five per cent of the family expenditure of a poor household was borne by government subsidies. But even this may not be enough to make claims about income inequalities, of course, and even about the qualitative dimensions of both inequality and poverty. There are studies that indicate the contrary. A recent study which (among other things) estimates the impact of remittances from workers abroad on income and consumption inequality by K P Kannan and K S Hari, for instance.

Clearly, Ravi Raman is fluent in academic-speak; he is able to coin such labels as ‘experimental liberalisation’ which draws a pretty veil of clever words over the dire state of many aspects of socio-economic existence here. But this is not surprising, perhaps, for Kerala too has developed a culture in which any appointment in the government, even as members of advisory boards, functions as a kind of largesse which has to be repaid by contributing to the prettification of the regime. Modi’s men may paint the roadside walls or curtain off ‘ugliness’; here academic deploy their cleverness to do the same (though the ‘ugliness’ in question is not the same at all, in both quantitative or qualitative senses).

The second type of collaborators are the CPM adherents who also speak the language of feminism (and many other liberatory isms) with some degree of fluency or the other. An exhibition is apparently being planned which, according to today’s The Hindu, “…present a deep and vibrant account of empowerment an resistance of Kerala women from early reform movements to their contemporary achievements.” The report claims that “…it will be more than a historical narrative; it will be a dynamic celebration of strength, determination, and achievements of women …” and one which seeks to highlight “…their extraordinary contributions and underline their role in building a progressive state.” (my italics). The wording is indeed interesting: for this would be a narrative for sure, but not historical enough! For it replays a narrative that modern states have often crafted — in this case, it is clearly one of women’s alleged liberation from ‘tradition’ into the vast openness of freedom and equality, and devoted to the cause of a ‘progressive state’. It is indeed a narrative that the feminist historians of Kerala have contested since the 1990s at least. And who is the curator? No prizes for guessing — a long-term dependent of the mainstream left one way or the other, who is also fairly fluent in the language of feminism. Who nods in the direction of critical thinking occasionally, but also withdraws that gaze at appropriate moments. A good girl who can hold a sufficiently defiant pose for the stipulated time and pack up on command.

But besides these predictable hangers-on, the festival has offered a number of promising artists and writers handouts and opportunities that are sure to keep them by the side of the regime (in anticipation of future largesse, too). Kerala’s independent cultural civil society built on the sweat of such stalwarts as M Govindan has already been conquered to a large extent by the market; the rest of them are on their knees before the present regime. In other words, it is no longer independent. Independent thinking is a dangerous enterprise in present day Kerala as it is anywhere in the world.

But let us assume for the moment that such a celebration is necessary, especially because the Hindutva right-wing Union government is trying every trick up its sleeve to stamp Kerala down. It is not the first time we have seen such a public celebration of ‘Kerala essence’ — every year we do witness it during Onam. And indeed, ‘public Onam’ has been, I believe, a good antidote to the relentless effort by the Kerala BJP, incurably savarna to its core, to replace the mythical asura emperor Maveli with Vishnu disguised as Vamana.

The present celebration however draws very strongly on a sub-nationalist discourse on Kerala that had served the mainstream left very well in the twentieth century. Linguistic nationalism was never strong in this region (though linguistic sentiment was), for example, compared to the Tamil region. Kerala also never had a history of empire-building, unlike the Tamil region. The mid-twentieth-century sub-nationalism that took shape here was quite subservient to the high-Hindu-dominated imagination of India initially, but the cultural interventions of the dominant Left rebuilt it on fresh foundations: while the ‘superstructure’ was to be of culture and language with mostly sanskrit roots (with all tensions purged, and so Sree Narayana Guru’s critique of caste was read as relevant to a time on the verge of passing), the ‘base’ was to be of Development. I have written elsewhere how Malayali were brought together as a ‘People united in Development‘ (like People united in Christ, perhaps). Development — social development, that is — serves as the base on which Kerala’s secularism (a shorthand for the implicit socio-political contract between the elites of Kerala’s three major religious communities, which also cornered a great deal of resources between themselves in the famous ‘community-competition’ chapter of mid-twentieth Kerala history) rested. And of course, this served as the basis of Kerala’s purported openness to the world, the claims of being cosmopolitan.

It is this discourse that the present regime is trying to leverage.

Now, is this useful anymore? I am not sure at all. Let us look at Kerala’s development, secularism, and cosmopolitanism in turn.

There can be little doubt that social welfare in Kerala, the lynchpin of social development here, has been steadily neoliberalizing since the late twentieth century. As mentioned earlier, there is little sturdy basis to claim that Kerala has been spared of the phenomenon of soaring inequalities, unlike elsewhere in the world — through social protection or some other means. In other words, Ravi Raman’s claims of ‘experimental liberalisation’ might apply to the 1990s when the Left experimented with local government, but no longer. Predatory capital that aims to corner natural resources cheap has by now penetrated every nook and corner of Kerala, and government policy to limit its criminal loot as well as to ameliorate the damage it leaves behind has been either weak or poorly implemented. Direct incentivization of natural resource predators is now normalised, after the state repression of fisher folk seeking to save their land and livelihood from Adani Ports with the Left softening its stand considerably. But elsewhere it is still not easy or is costly, and so keep the disincentives for natural resource predators weak is the name of the game.

As for secularism, the socio-political contract that endured between the neo-savarna Hindus –which included the savarna and the modernised Ezhava elite — the elite Christians and the elite Muslims — has been steadily breaking down in the 1990s and after. There is strong exertion, on the part of the neo-savarna Hindu and Christian elite to push away the Muslims, elites included, to securitize their existence into an abject state. All constituents of formal politics in Kerala today are islamophobic to some extent or the other. The BJP rides on it and tries to whip it up at the slightest excuse; the Congress seems to hang on to the outdated socio-political contract which is sadly anachronistic; the Left, irrespective of whether it is actually islamophobic, has no qualms about using it against sections of Muslims who they deem to be a threat. The Left has been long seeking to revive the dead horse of Navoddhanam (the social awakening of the early twentieth century in the Malayalam speaking regions often wrongly called ‘Renaissance’) through its word-spinners like Sunil P Elayidom — yet another display of cleverness that pulls the shrewdly-woven brocade coverlet of words over a decaying social and cultural body.

Finally, about Malayali cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, as many have already pointed out, is not an unambiguous virtue. It can be, and has been, as a cover for claims of colonial cultural superiority, and recent anthropological work on elite migrants from south east Asia to the West has shown well that it is not the opposite of narrow localism. Indeed, it can be ‘the cosmopolitanism of consumption’, where high-capitalist values and consumer habits are readily adopted within shockingly-narrow horizons of morality, culture, and kinship. It is true that Malayali migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century created an expansive space here of competing visions of social justice, but in the latter half of the twentieth century, migration to the Gulf and elsewhere increasingly narrowed Malayali cosmopolitanism into that focused on consumption. It is true that a more resistant cosmopolitanism of ideas persisted in the Malayalam literary public, but definitely, it had no determinant effects on Malayali social life.

The Kerala government has condemned Israel’s atrocities and openly expressed support for the Palestinian people, though it still seems to be ready to condemn Hamas as ‘terrorist’. In other words, the Left may have by its side a whole array of clever opportunists or dependents who can spin a word or a coinage, and speak the languages of oppositional politics, it is scarcely able to find someone who can analyse the situation for what it is,point out the difference between condemning an unacceptable act (of taking the lives of the innocent, even of the enemy), and of condemning a whole movement (which is the product of a whole history, complicated in some parts and complex in others). This is despite the fact that the Left does it all the time. I have myself heard so many Left supporters argue thus — whether about Marichjhapi or Chengara — that the Left violence (which was to different degrees of course) was utterly condemnable, but that did not mean that the whole movement can be therefore condemned, because there is a complex history. In the present case, there can no doubt about the brutal colonial occupation of Palestine that has lasted very long indeed.

Well, if Malayalis were truly cosmopolitan, one would think, that this drama over Kerala-ness would have been substituted with a sustained series of public campaigns for Gaza! Palestine is a region to which Kerala is long indebted culturally, and stability in the Middle East is vital for us economically in the present as well. We would have devoted the truly scarce resources that the government has mobilized for Keraleeyam for a sustained cultural campaign for the beleaguered people of Palestine. We would have spent the resources which we spent on inviting the Western and non-Western devotees of twentieth-century Kerala (devotees, because they seem to think that it is deathless, eternal, untouched by history, and therefore implicitly, divine) on inviting here voices that would speak out aloud against the vicious colonial repression in Palestine! That would have made the ties that bind us economically to the rest of the world shine, it would have redefined the very meaning of cosmopolitanism itself.

Was there a better way of celebrating ‘Keraleeyam’ then? Yes, by devoting resources to highlighting our historical ties with Palestine and the Middle East, by encouraging discussions that would have educated us on the terrible legacies of war and genocide and colonialism, on bringing to the fore such global issues as climate change and its impacts imbuing them with the spirit of cosmopolitanism, we would have refurbished the three pillars of development, secularism, and cosmopolitanism.

That would also be to recall the spirit of Jimutavahana, the hero of the most moving of stories about the origin of Kerala, from the Nagananda. Of the prince who was willing to intervene in Garuda’s unrelenting persecution of the snakes, throwing in between his own body, and whose act persuaded the eagle to accept ahimsa. In return, it is said, the snakes welcomed humans to their land between the Malayaparvatha and the sea. I can already hear cynical snickering, but cynical sneering has never brought anything good to the world; only those who have, against all odds, dreamed of a better world have contributed to its betterment.