WORDS FOLLOW ME: The reddest state

I arrived in India near the end of the monsoon, and found the world newly washed and green. I flew from Bombay to Goa, then took the overnight train down the verdant Malabar Coast to Cochin in the southern state of Kerala.

The rains were more intermittent now, swift, predictable, not the interminable downpours that threaten to sweep the country away each July and August. The air was humid but cool; we’d come during the harvest. In the morning mist, as the train clacked past, there were villagers out in the rice fields, knees deep in mud, threshing the grain by hand.

India is almost too various in its practices, too complex in its regional histories, to be believable as a single country. Its political, cultural and religious practices are either intensely localised, or so broad that their applicability applies far beyond India.

Part of what held it together was the fact of having been conquered, almost in its totality, by the Mughals, and then by the British. But what else was there was the long history of resistance, and the persistence of the local.

My host in Kerala, a retired police officer, told a story of once returning from Delhi to his family house in the village. He had, without thinking, spoken in Hindi to the housemaid, asking her to clean out a room. The language was utterly alien to her; she only knew Malayalam. Frightened, she’d run to the officer’s wife: “Master is speaking English to me!”

The story amused, but held a truth: it was possible for an Indian, particularly in the south, to be so far from Hindi that to her ear it coded more or less as English. India is not only Hindustan. But the absence of Hindi, or English, cannot be equated with backwardness.

Malayalam, the language of the Malabar coast, is an old and complex language, and it permits its own cosmopolitanism.

Kerala is one of the most successful Indian states, regularly topping the educational indices of India. More than ninety percent of the state’s inhabitants are literate.

It is also the reddest state, with the Communist Party; the first such to be elected to office anywhere in the world (in 1957), having a substantial share of the political power.

In much of India, the Congress Party, the party of Nehru and the Gandhi dynasty, is the left-wing power broker, counterbalanced on the right by the BJP, which allies itself with the Shiv Sena and other Hindu nationalist parties.

But in Kerala, the BJP doesn’t even get a look in, and power changes hand in each election cycle between the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and, to the right of them, Congress.

The intensity of Indian democracy is everywhere on display in Kerala, from the busy district of Ernakulum down to the backwaters. Red flags flutter in busy ranks along the highway, and bright red murals are marked with white hammer and sickle.

Posters promoting one candidate or the other are printed almost solely in Malayalam, the rapid polysyllabic Dravidian language whose script, all curlicues and loops, is surely one of the world’s most beautiful.

Election season never ends in India. There’s always someone jostling for office, whether on the national or state level, or for district seats. Poor people vote, because they have seen the influence their votes carry, and they must be appeased.

And this naked effort by the politicians to ingratiate themselves to the people had me wondering, looking at certain posters, whether the subject was politics or religion.

For Congress candidates, the posters I saw in Kerala often featured a photomontage of the candidate and his or her state allies, along with the images of the current prime minister Manmohan Singh and the leader of the Congress party Sonia Gandhi.

Sonia, the Italian-born wife of the late Rajiv Gandhi, had overcome her shyness to become the single most powerful figure in Indian politics. It was her face, now, that loomed largest on political posters, not that of the prime minister.

Times are difficult in India, as they are elsewhere, but the gains of the last decade were real. The dominant mood in the country when I last went there, in 2005, was one of optimism. “India Shining!” the newspapers and magazines cried in almost every issue.

Outsourcing, smart investment, and careful government stewardship of the windfall had placed India on the world economic map in a new way, though the obstinate poverty of the rural areas cast a shadow on the claims.

In the new millennium, Delhi and Bombay expanded, growing steel wings and glass fins. College graduates found that they could make a good living; and modern comfort had come at last to large numbers of Indians. Then came the global crash, and with it the fear that the dream might be over.

But India has fallen less precipitously than most. The capitalism hadn’t been unfettered, and there had been some government control over the frenzy of buying, selling and building; certainly more than there had been on Wall Street.

The control was due, in part, to the government’s effort at keeping various elements in the ruling leftist coalitions happy. Capitalism was the public language, but there had been much hedging. And in the aftermath, a vigorous stimulus package had helped soften the pain.

To everyone’s surprise, the economy has continued to grow.

It was in Cochin, in 1503, that the Portuguese established their first eastern capital. They’d come for the spice trade, as had the Dutch East India Company after them. And something of that organised chaos, of getting goods from the Asian interior out to ships and on to Europe, persists in Fort Cochin.

In the bazaars and winding back roads, merchants sitting in half-shadow sell chillies, black pepper, mustard, as well as silks and decorative objects, holding on to an older idea of the globalised world.

Not far from the spice selling precincts, is the church of St Francis. It once held the body of Vasco da Gama, until it was disinterred and taken to Portugal. Gama, the first viceroy of Portuguese India, had died in Cochin of malaria. It is true of all conquerors: they die. But the world they made possible outlives them.

Kerala has the substantial wealth that is an educated populace. It has high life expectancy and low crime. Infrastructure is good — tarred roads, regular electricity — and tourism is booming in the spectacular backwaters. Kerala has also been spared internecine violence between its Catholics, Syrian Christians, Hindus and Muslims.

My host suggested to me that many of the indigenes of the state don’t like to work, and prefer handouts. Much of the labour, he said, came from other, poorer, Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Orissa. Communism had, in his view, denatured the people.

But Kerala seems to have found its winning formula anyway, and by the accumulated accidents of history, the reddest state also appears to be one of the luckiest.