Can a culture survive as a way of life, even as the language and writing at its core, alter with time? asks Shyam G Menon.
First week of January.
My first rail journey of 2025 to Kerala from Mumbai, had ended up a case of the train running late.
Against our scheduled arrival in Ernakulam by early evening of the second day, we would now reach by night. Traveling at irregular speed and periodically stuck on the track, the train pulled out of Kasaragod.
Lone male traveling, suddenly saw the side-seat opposite him eased into by two children.
They looked at me hesitantly as though making sure that I wasn't some cantankerous fellow.
I told myself: Oh no. Children are usually the first act in families encroaching on individual space in India's trains.
I pretended not to notice. The hijab clad girl who was the older of the two and the younger boy, poised themselves uncomfortably on the limited real estate of the single seat.
The Zamorin's naval chief
From a book she had open on her lap, the girl proceeded to ask her brother questions. It went on like a quiz -- names of state capitals, abbreviations he was expected to expand in full, names of scientists, explorers, chief ministers, twists and turns in India's freedom struggle, so on.
Unable to contain my curiosity, I asked the boy which exam or competition, he was preparing for.
"Seventh standard USS scholarship test," he said shyly. It rang a bell.
Decades ago, in the seventh standard in Kerala, I too had given that test. It was an unforgettable chapter from my eminently forgettable track record in academics.
I was notoriously weak in mathematics; in fact, scared of it because I had teachers who demanded that I solve problems on the blackboard in full view of the class.
It was a humiliating experience. Giggles would go up behind one's back as one unfailingly strayed into error.
There would be raps on the knuckles or a swing of cane to the butt and the class would be gifted an impromptu dance as I tried evading the punishment.
But for that scholarship exam, my cousin who was an excellent student, good at math, taught me the subject.
There was no public humiliation. Only patient explanation.
I got the hang of mathematics, did well in the test and secured the scholarship.
I saw myself and my cousin in the little boy and his sister.
"Here, take my seat too. Sit comfortably and study," I said, offering my corner of the coach. They smiled and said thank you.
Several minutes later, the scene transformed into a real quiz of sorts as the book went into the hands of the children's father and he posed questions to his three children -- a son and two daughters.
By now I was a fan of the family. There was something in this quiz that reminded of a Kerala I grew up in; one that encouraged its young people to be curious and aware of wider world instead of being lost in navel gazing.
Watching Siddharth Basu's Quiz Time was a popular ritual. It spawned many quiz competitions in Kerala.
Particularly because in one of the show's seasons, two colleges from Thiruvananthapuram had battled it out in the national final.
They finished first and second in the country. It was a crazy, heady feeling for with its location in the extreme south of India, Kerala's capital city was a largely forgotten place.
Not to mention, even then in a Malayalee society measuring its people by brilliance and fame, Malayalees resident in the state lived in the shadow of those making it far for education and work.
Local trailed international by a fair margin in social status. For a day or two following that national final, which was telecast nationwide, Thiruvananthapuram's students walked tall.
Suddenly, we -- students and local colleges -- were on the map.
In the train, I liked the father's nature -- he wielded the book and its questions with a quiz master's air but also made the proceedings funny for the children, as only a friendly teacher and vappa (dad) can. They were clearly enjoying the proceedings.
One slip-up by the kids was memorable. Asked who the great naval chief of the Zamorin (Samuthiri in Malayalam, erstwhile ruler of Calicut/Kozhikode) was, the children sought clues.
When told that the name had Ali in it, they said, "Ali...which Ali...mmm...Ali...Kunjali! Kunjalikutty!"
The father looked at them, disappointed and amused to the core -- all at once.
"Kunjalikutty eh? So many songs and stories of Malabar's heroism I have told you. So many you have heard. There is even Mohanlal's film. And yet, you don't remember Kunjali Marakkar?" he exclaimed.
It got all of us -- including me, sitting nearby and overhearing the quiz -- laughing.
Kunjalikutty, a senior contemporary politician from the state, imagined as the Zamorin's naval chief felt genuinely funny.
The father intrigued me for the wealth of questions at his disposal.
So, I asked him what he did. Turned out, he worked as a librarian, served as the local committee president of a leading political party in his locality in Kasaragod and had once been quite active in politics.
"Now I am not that active in politics. I used to read a lot. Books are my life. Eventually, I became a librarian," he said.
He and his family were headed to Thiruvananthapuram, where the state school youth festival was due.
His daughter was representing Kasaragod in ghazal singing and Urdu poetry recitation. For the ghazal singing, the father was set to accompany on the harmonium.
We spoke for quite some time. He introduced me to the specific dialect of Malayalam his community spoke in Kasaragod (I had found it tough to understand what his children were saying initially although it was Malayalam).
Then he highlighted the many dialects of Malayalam present in northern Kerala and how similar sounding words and usages meant vastly different from locality to locality.
Somewhere in that conversation, the man mentioned "Kerala Model" and how much we owed the state's social indices to it.
I am not an expert in economics or the Kerala Model. But it was evident to me that in the cocoon of curiosity wrapping us all together at that moment, there was a lot of the tolerant, accommodative, rational and humanist Kerala I have known, at work.
As the socially conservative, religion-spouting, majoritarian politics dominating some other parts of the country, tries its level best to muscle into Kerala and the state's own greying demographics buys into a variety of ageing-inspired insecurities, the state's liberal traits find themselves increasingly traded for conservative, conformist views including the Hindutva mindset.
The political Right has been successful in exploiting such opportunities.
Aiding the process, I suspect, is a Kerala version of the non-resident Indian's embrace of religious and cultural roots for identity.
Same people, different people
In my interaction with Malayalees who grew up elsewhere in India, I have noticed distinct differences between their mental picture of Kerala and mine.
First, Kerala's all-pervasive politics (sometimes capable of extreme violence), makes those who studied elsewhere in India, uncomfortable.
In Mumbai for instance, I don't think any of my Malayalee friends who grew up there, studied in colleges fraught with politics as in Kerala.
They certainly enjoyed a better academic environment. I don't dispute that.
I graduated from a college in Kerala with little politics on campus and then moved to another campus, steeped in politics; one where Das Kapital was as holy as any religious book.
I found it ridiculous. I wasn't alive to follow any religious or political book as my North Star.
Yet interestingly, it was on these campuses that I began growing out of my cocooned upbringing and became cognizant of Keralite realities other than mine.
As a friend educated in Kerala, other parts of India and in the US, employed for long in north India and since living quietly in Thiruvananthapuram told me in early February -- the way we grew up in Kerala, there was a core that stayed adrift.
"Right next door, the Tamils are surer of who they are than us," he said.
I attribute the Malayalee's confused core to the willingness to question and be open minded.
In many of the Malayalees I met outside Kerala, where I went seeking work; the Keralite cocoon/core appeared intact for want of questioning because they saw it as cultural identity.
If we question identity, what is left of us? many think so. I call it the 'who' conundrum.
Second, as someone who grew up in an environment stuffed with politics, I am not generally afraid of political parties including those hailing from Left politics.
Comfort with the Left is low among Malayalees who grew up elsewhere (save from geographies where the Left exists); they respond to the Left with poor understanding of what the Left means in Kerala.
In Kerala, the Left is an relevant counter-balance for Right-Wing excesses and feudal propensities much the same way, the Right is a counter-balance for Left-Wing excesses.
Perhaps why, the Congress is invaluable as a middle path. On the other hand, I felt, non-resident Malayalees have a natural affinity for the Indian political Right (in its Indian avatar, Right Wing politics walk hand in hand with religion) given they were hewn on a religious and cultural perspective of Kerala.
Identity by religion and community -- the wish for roots -- appear important to this segment.
It is not always so for Malayalees who grew up in Kerala. Not that they desire roots less.
But that Kerala's religions and communities are sometimes the conservative backdrop they seek escape from.
In my case, given I consider culture to be constantly evolving, I found it more relevant to rediscover Kerala for roots by attempting to see it as geography and then, know it's geography (along with geography's influence on people) better.
Some of my friends find that approach limited. They believe the Malayalam language and literature are key to understanding Kerala.
In some cases, I have found Malayalee friends outside Kerala regarding folklore and myths from back home, as the gospel truth or the prism to view Kerala through.
That's being blind, I would argue. Some of these reactions to the wider world pressuring you to establish identity, amaze for the trajectory adopted.
Take, for instance, a trait I noticed frequently in the biggest wave (also now, an early wave) of migration for work during my generation's years of growing up in Kerala -- the migrants who ventured to the Middle East.
I have relatives and friends from this constituency, who attribute their emergent conservatism and loyalty to the political Right Wing, to the experiences they endured in foreign lands.
Reacting to the treatment they got abroad; they justify matching conservatism and intolerance back home overlooking the fact that their erstwhile foreign addresses were never socially and politically progressive states/examples to begin with.
After years of work overseas, shedding the accrued anger is tough, I guess. I let their conservatism and sureness of identity wash over me.
Another peculiarity is how political imperfections (like restricted freedom) in other countries, are ignored and the economic development they registered there is presented in isolation as model to follow.
It is a soulless materialism. Indeed, contemporary Kerala has a growing fan-following for materialism.
It is an outcome of both a remittance economy and India's own transformation under neo-liberal economics -- people and predicaments are viewed through the needle-hole of money.
In this reckoning by materialism, one's wealth by civilised values, one's curiosity for larger world, one's pursuit of knowledge, one's awareness of life in its many dimensions -- simply put, how interesting one is (the family in the train was interesting to me) -- none of this count as much as one's ability to amass property or money or cashable social status. It is a reckoning with a trailer.
The trailer before the movie
I became conscious of the trailer on my first few trips home after becoming an immigrant in other places, over three decades ago.
Traveling through Kerala's highways, I suddenly became aware of big hoardings by jewelers, wedding saree emporiums, luxury car dealerships and real estate developers advertising their products and services.
It was a reminder of what I should possess to qualify as significant.
The mark of eligibility. Some of the state's most visible celebrities stand firmly aligned with this business lobby endorsing and propagating the ambiance of a gold-tinged materialism.
With its emphasis on social indices and a support base that includes intellectuals and thinkers, the Kerala I grew up in has become a joke to the lot worshipping religiosity and material well-being.
It's a strange concoction. One would assume that religion works as antidote for material profligacy.
My friend in Thiruvananthapuram captured the situation well when he said that genuine spiritualism has receded in contemporary Kerala.
Spiritualism and ritualistic religion/blind faith are very different entities.
Herein lay a potential challenge for the long-held ground level feel of the state.
In Kerala, the remittance economy is powerful. It is what transformed the state.
Is there any reason to believe that it won't force Kerala to adopt conservative views, similar to how moneyed, Non-Resident Indians from overseas influenced politics at large in India? A few factors make this angle hard to ignore.
First, Kerala has a large number of people living outside the state (elsewhere in India and abroad).
Some of them, have their picture of Kerala founded in religious and cultural roots.
There are people who empathise with these views within the state too; some of them don't mind old feudal instincts revived as long as they are on top of the social heap.
A streak seen here is the willingness to criticize Kerala as a dysfunctional, failed state.
The most visible irony is that just as Nehru-bashing became the pastime of those who thrived despite Congress-ruled India, Kerala-bashing has taken off, standing on the shoulders of the state's improved social indices.
Even the Malayalee Union minister who recently (close to the time of writing this piece) recommended that Kerala declare itself backward to merit support from the central government, wouldn't escape being seen as an educated, well-placed individual who benefited from all that Kerala had to offer.
Citing disappointment against high expectations evoked is understandable when it comes to Kerala.
But asking a citizenry known for their awareness, progressive values and generally good human capital to declare themselves backward, smacks of sarcasm and political rivalry.
Second, we live in a world where money has proved repeatedly that it -- and not the people, as popularly imagined in democracies -- drives change.
Whoever has more money, triumphs. Kerala today, displays many symptoms of what happens when the above-mentioned brew of instincts, drives in.
Alongside the spike in materialism in Kerala there has also been the rising acceptance of insular political ideologies, conservative religion and a host of other problems ranging from substance abuse to violent crime and surrender to superstition.
The what versus who debate
At the time of writing (February first week), the topic I encountered most often in conversations with relatives and friends in Kerala, was violent crime, a few of them featuring superstition as adjunct.
The picture of Kerala emerging so, contrasts previously painted portraits.
There are those who believe nothing can be done to reverse the trend of human minds courting superstition because regressive trends have come to make good business.
This is why Siddharth Basu's Quiz Time feels quaint in 2025. Back in time, when those Thiruvananthapuram colleges -- the local engineering college and the local medical college -- battled it out in the Quiz Time finals, it was a different Kerala that one sensed.
Quiz Time happened in an era when the winds of change and liberalism blew and being rationalist and wishing to know wasn't a crime.
Those days, the broadcast media bringing Basu to our homes, was also nascent and much welcomed.
It wasn't the sponsor-rich purveyor of vested interests and rabid views, at least some of the channels became, later.
Quiz Time is an ambassador of times gone by and perhaps lost forever.
I saw in that family, a Kerala as I used to know and still occasionally sense in the state's green landscape -- a beautiful, curious thing on a slippery slope; a picture of vulnerability appealing to our civilised side and meriting what protection we can offer.
In my experience, this Kerala takes time finding and articulating for it is the harder quest of knowing what the place is as opposed to the easier pursuit of trying to know who the people are.
'What,' in its fold, holds a wealth of convergent life; it's a journey.
Can a culture survive as a way of life, even as the language and writing at its core, alter with time? Can we be rational and Malayalee or do we have to necessarily be religious and proudly cultural to be Malayalee? Still early in my voyage of rediscovering Kerala, I feel like a book of questions.
The overwhelming question in my head is -- in times of Kerala-bashing become fashionable, will Kerala earn the Malayalee's protection?
The train was now a rolling symptom of lost-in-time. Its schedule seemed thoroughly derailed. It stopped, moved for some time, stopped again.
"We shouldn't lose our capacity for independent thought," I said, remembering the numerous instances I had come across of people embracing the past, sinking into ritual and passing off myth as history.
The librarian agreed. A little before Shoranur I think, he and his wife got up and went searching for a tea vendor.
It was a long-distance train with no pantry car. The children continued their tryst with the book of questions.
A few hours later, I got off at Ernakulam. The librarian and his family continued to Thiruvananthapuram.
Shyam G Menon is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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