Somehow, Numb at the Lodge is still on holiday. Paid subscribers can join us in a brain-melting tourist odyssey across the past and future of Indias real and imagined. The really good stuff is behind the paywall: this time, it’s about holy poverty and why the West is actually much more conformist than India. If you want to come along, all you have to do is click the button below:
Today I’m writing from a beach in Kerala. It’s beautiful out, and I’m writing this in my swimming trunks while sipping a non-alcoholic mojito that includes, for some reason, little specks of sushi ginger floating around with the sprigs of mint. In a moment I’m going to go and get another of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life, which I will eat with my hands directly off a banana leaf. I’m enjoying a kind of holiday from my holiday, and if you’ve been following this series you’ll understand why I deserve one. (Thanks to everyone who successfully campaigned for my release; no thanks at all to the thousands of people who apparently thought my being arrested and sent to Indian jail was some kind of literary bit.) It’s nice here. I hear there’s been a cold snap back in London. I’m having an extremely nice time.
It took me three days to get down here from Mumbai, chugging along pretty much the entire length of peninsular India. When I did arrive, it was like arriving in another country. Down to the language: in the north, I’d got very used to the cadences of Hindi and Bengali and Marathi, which are all very rhythmic, rising and falling on the vowels, gummed together with consonants, aapke aagey jaadu chalta hai. I might not understand the words, but it’s audibly part of the same linguistic universe I come from, some distant relative of English. Here in Kerala they speak Malayalam, which is about as different from both English and Hindi as the click languages of Africa, or the Amazonian grammars where a noun’s declension depends on whether you saw it while entering or leaving the village, or the Siberian tundra-wails in which every verb has one million possible forms. In Malayalam, there are words like vaidyuthiaagamanagamananiyanthranayanthram, which is an electric switch. The capital of Kerala is called Thiruvananthapuram. All these words are written in a very beautiful script, which looks ഇതുപോലെ. The round, flowing forms are because Malayalam was originally written by being cut into palm leaves with a stylus, and straight lines would have torn through the fibres. Before I arrived here, though, I was wondering how any of this would actually be pronounced—up to and including the word Malayalam itself, which my tongue tends to slip around on like a bad ice skater. (Malayam? Mayalayalam? It’s not just me with this problem. Other Indians default to calling the people here Mallus, which is sometimes taken as an offensive slur, but it is objectively easier.) The answer is that these words are pronounced all at once. Instead of enunciating every syllable, Thi-ru-va-nan-tha-pu-ram, you just mash your jaw up and down while emitting a fast rhythmic bubbling sound. It is utterly unlike anything else I’ve ever heard in my life.
But everything is different here. In the north, cities and towns are scrunched fibrous cysts. Narrow brick houses packed together in the dust, all reeking of diesel fumes. Here, they sprawl. A Keralite town is more like an American suburb: big low homes with pitched roofs, dotted between wide expanses of lushly watered green. Another thing it will probably share with an American suburb is a huge gaudy church: Kerala has six million Christians, nearly a fifth of the state’s population. Also the steakhouse: in the north of India cattle slaughter is illegal; in Kerala, even Hindus eat quite a lot of beef. But the resemblance ends there. In most of India, like most of the world, modernisation means Westernisation. This is why Delhi has artisan coffee shops with raw plaster on the walls, and Mumbai has some great small-plates restaurants, and every dusty town in Uttar Pradesh has a whole range of vegetarian burger bars. But Kerala is clearly guided by a different light. A white and gold aesthetic predominates. It’s hard to get a drink outside a few tourist hotels, but there are plenty of shisha bars. The fancy shops have signs in two languages: Malayalam and Arabic. Street food means dosas and uttapams but also, increasingly, shawarma. A lot of restaurants have two branches: one in Ernakulam, one in Abu Dhabi.
Kerala has always been the part of India most open to the rest of the world. Its Christian community was founded when the disciple Thomas sailed here to preach to the already long-established community of Malabar Jews. According to tradition, the first mosque in Kerala was built while Mohammed was still in exile in Medina. When Vasco de Gama arrived in India, he arrived here. So did the Dutch and the British. Today, that openness has led to a massive flow of migrant workers, remittances, health tourists, and cultural influence back and forth between Kerala and the UAE. The result is a version of India that’s visibly Christian but also Gulf Arab-flavoured. It’s also, incidentally, governed by the Communist Party, which has covered every city and every town in red hammer-and-sickle banners. At the market, the fresh fruit is sold on yesterday’s newspaper, which features a big double-page profile of Friedrich Engels, including a full explication of the Naturdialektik in Malayalam. It’s a weird place.
Kerala rarely comes up as a communist success story. I find this weird, since the seventy-odd years of intermittent communist government have clearly served the place well, without at any point involving any bread lines or nameless thousands shot and buried in shallow graves. Maybe this place has escaped the world’s attention because the communists in Kerala have had to do all their work in local government, where it’s harder to even try to abolish the value-form. Instead, they’re forced to simply administer capitalism, but it turns out that if you want someone to administer capitalism well, you could do a lot worse than a Communist Party.
Before the first communist government, a good chunk of the rural population were essentially slaves; meanwhile free peasants had to give over up to 75% of their crop to their landlords. The class struggle that followed was not bloodless. Across the state, there are monuments to peasant leaders murdered by landlords during the land reform campaign. A lot of people were hacked to death in their fields; in the end the Indian government decided that the communist programme was too radical, dismissed the elected state government, and declared direct rule from Delhi. But in the end the peasants won, and today Kerala has the lowest rural poverty rate in India, under 1%. The communists empowered trade unions, and today wages here are higher than anywhere else in the country. The average Indian farmworker makes just over 300 rupees a day; in Kerala it’s more like 800.
This has led to some problems. India as a whole is growing fast, but economic growth in Kerala is sclerotic, barely above first world-level, and the state has a hard time attracting capital. (This makes sense: as a good capitalist, would you prefer to build a factory in Bihar, where desperate peasants will beg you for a job, or in Kerala, where labour costs three times as much, your workers will immediately start scheming for your surplus, and the local government won’t even bash their heads in for you but might even back them up?) But there’s one other thing that communism has historically done extremely well, which is to provide an ideological structure that efficiently mobilises urban elites to go out into the countryside and provide healthcare and education to the rural poor. (Under noncommunist ideologies they usually go for a more well-remunerated but less socially useful version, like setting up an NGO to deliver corporate trainings on social equity.) The result is a huge surplus of well-educated Keralites, and like any other surplus in a well-run capitalist economy it ends up being exported abroad.
The UAE runs on Malayali engineers. In Britain, our NHS essentially parasites itself off the communist school system of Kerala. The revolutionary workers and peasants toil for universal education, and that education is realised in an oil despot’s thirtieth mansion or a few pills for a Scouse granny’s gammy knee. In return, of course, a chunk of the much higher foreign wages ends up coming back here, so people can live well in their green God-fearing suburb with Arab aesthetics and Communist slogans on all the walls. It’s not perfect, but it works.
I think this is not the India a lot of people are thinking about when they think about India.
This country has an image problem. In 2023, I was also in Asia, also in a place governed by a Communist Party that mostly just administers ordinary capitalism. But as I mentioned last time, readers do seem less interested in the India series than in China. A friend of mine admitted that despite being a progressive educated type, he has the sense that India is somehow dirty. China is cool, it’s Blade Runner, it’s a terrifyingly organised five-thousand-year-old cyborg dystopia. India is not cool. India is Blade Runner 2049. I ran a highly unscientific experiment on the kind of images of India and China people are receiving in the West, by noting down the reels Instagram’s algorithm has chosen to show me, which these days are almost entirely drawn from these two countries. The results look like this:
Beautiful, fashionable Chinese woman walks around at night asking other beautiful, fashionable Chinese women to dump their boyfriends via text on camera; they all shrug and do it.
Weird, skinny Indian men hug a large stone idol while an almost naked, grotesquely fat priest pours various unsanitary-looking gloops over their heads.
Chinese guy sits in street food restaurant with his friends, eating noodles, drinking baiju, and smoking cigarettes; is unexpectedly poetic about smoking. ‘It’s the turbid air that sighs unwillingly.’
Indian cooks in street food restaurants cut meat between their toes, hold bread dough in their armpits, ineffectually swat at large clouds of flies, totally ignore enormous rats, and use their naked hands to dole out unsanitary-looking gloops.
A Chinese man has a little door in his wall that leads into a tiny, cosy living room he built for his pet cat, with a little sofa and a little coffee table and a little TV; in the wall there’s a tiny door that leads into a tiny, cosy living room he built for his pet hamster, with even smaller furniture; in the wall an extremely tiny door loads into a minuscule, cosy living room he built for his pet cricket.
A skinny, stunted Indian man grins while squatting on the mud floor of his hovel; the camera zooms in to reveal that his hair is visibly crawling with tens of thousands of lice.
Majestic bridges in rural China, extraordinary feats of engineering that span entire valleys.
Children in rural India pushing each other into an unsanitary-looking gloop-pool of what looks like liquid cow shit.
It continues like this, six seconds at a time, twenty-four hours a day. Maybe this is, in part, a problem of perception; Kerala never seems to make it into these videos. But there’s not nothing there. This country really does have a lot of dirt. In 1950, China and India were two of the poorest places on the planet. Filthy, squalid, backwards, ignorant, addled. In the 1960s and 70s, India followed the path of sensible socialist-developmentalist economics, and incidentally became a major destination for millions of rich young Westerners seeking spiritual enlightenment. Meanwhile, China was pointlessly wiping out millions of its own people in enormous famines, political mass exterminations, and an undeclared civil war. In some parts of the country, political enemies were barbecued and eaten. Today, China is not just safe, clean, and prosperous; by any objective measure, it’s the coolest country in the world. India is the land of unsanitary gloops. What went wrong?