Governments and Culture: How Women Made Kerala Literate

Abstract

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