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Filippo and Caroline Osella, anthropologists who spent three years in rural Kerala, south India, write about the modern search for upward social mobility: the processes involved, the ideologies that support or thwart it, and what happens to the people involved. They focus on the caste called Izhavas, a group that in the mid-19th century consisted of a small land-owning and titled elite and a large mass of landless and small tenants who were largely illiterate and considered untouchable, and who eked out a living by manual labor and petty trade. In the 20th century, Izhavas pursued mobility in many social arenas, both as a newly united caste and as families. The work considers how successful the mobility has been and looks at the effects on their society of an ethos of progress. Distributed by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
The study reveals that there is no relationship between caste and factional orientation in the politics of Congress factionalism. It discusses factionalism in Congress party, Congress factionalism in Kerala, social base of factionalism. (The book is a serious empirical study of factionalism in Kerala).
How the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications for development. Information, says Janaki Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information. The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information.
State Formation and Radical Democracy in India analyzes one of the most important cases of developmental change in the twentieth century, namely, Kerala in southern India and begs the question of whether insurgency among the marginalized poor can use formal representative democracy to create better life chances. Going back to pre-independence, colonial India, Manali Desai takes a long historical view of Kerala and compares it with the state of West Bengal, which like Kerala has been ruled by leftists but has not had the same degree of success in raising equal access to welfare, literacy, and basic subsistence. This comparison brings the role of left party formation and its mode of insertion in civil society to the fore, raising the question of what kinds of parties can effect the most substantive anti-poverty reforms within a vibrant democracy. This book offers a new, historically based explanation for Kerala’s post-independence political and economic direction.
In Kerala, Vakkom Moulavi motivated Muslims to embrace modernity, especially modern education, in order to reap maximum benefit. In this process, he initiated numerous religious reforms. However, he held fairly ambivalent attitudes towards individualism, materialism and secularization, defending Islam against the attacks of Christian missionaries.
This book is the most comprehensive analysis of the Kerala Model of Social Development to date. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it sheds new light on the paradoxes of the Indian state and critiques its model of economic development.
At a time when disillusion with neo-liberal development nostrums is mounting, alternative models of development are being revisited. Kerala's 30 million people may not have experienced rapid growth in GDP per capita, but they have for the past several decades achieved a remarkable social record in terms of adult literacy, infant mortality, life expectancy, stabilising population growth, and narrowing gender and spatial gaps.What are the implications of the disjuncture between human development and economic growth? What are the political, social and cultural factors responsible for Kerala's success? Does its human development record necessarily relate to sustainability in environmental terms? How inclusive has the Kerala model been, particularly for the fishing community and other socially marginalised groups?Can the new people's campaign for decentralised development from below make Kerala's development experience more enduring? What realistic view can be taken of its replicability elsewhere in India or further afield in the South? These are among the most important questions explored in this timely reassessment.