Aspects of Socioeconomic Exclusion in Kerala, India: Reflections from an Urban Slum

ABSTRACT

This article probes the intersection of spatial, caste, and gender axes of power in shaping contemporary inequalities in Kerala, through mixed-method research in an urban slum. Relying largely on qualitative data, it constructs a history of work in the slum for lower caste men and women against the backdrop of Kerala politics from the 1940s until the present. It examines the role of widening gender gaps, the persistence of secularized caste, and flagging working-class politics and discourse in shaping contemporary socioeconomic exclusion in urban areas.

Keywords:

• Kerala
• Kerala model of social development
• working class
• labor
• urban poor
• caste
• gender
• abjection

Acknowledgments

I thank my co-researchers Guro Aandhal, Berit Aasen, Vinoj Abraham, Glyn Williams, and the anonymous reviewers for discussion and insights. Hearty thanks, also, to my co-worker in the project, Santhi R. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

J. Devika has worked on the intertwined histories of gender, culture, development, and politics in Kerala. Her publications include En-Gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early 20th Century Keralam (2007), Individuals, Householders, Citizens:Malayalees and Family Planning, 1930s–1970 (2008), and jointly, with Binitha V. Thampi, NewLlamps for Old?: Women, Politics and Democratic Decentralization in Kerala (2011).

Notes

¹Kerala, established in 1956, joined the Malayalam-speaking regions of British Malabar and the princely States of Travancore and Cochin. Until the 1970s, it was regarded as one of the least-developed and politically turbulent parts of India. However, development research in the 1970s found a paradox, as Kerala combined very low levels of economic development with high levels of social development, such as extraordinarily high levels of literacy, life expectancy, low infant and maternal mortality, falling birth rates, and a strong public health system (Ramachandran 1997).

²A good example of such work is the economist K.P. Kannan's writings on labor in Kerala, particularly in cashew factories (Kannan 1978, 1981). Nevertheless, his analysis of that time remained largely blind to other structural aspects, especially gender and caste, though the majority of cashew workers were often women and lower caste. Much of his research assumes isomorphism between caste and class. While this could be empirically true, as structures of power, they do work quite distinctly. A notable exception to this is Anna Lindberg's study (2001) on cashew workers, which explores the intersections of numerous structurally given identities and, importantly, offers a historical account of their shaping. In his later work, Kannan does hint at the importance of caste and gender axes of power (Kannan 2002).

³Kannan 2005.

⁴Subramanian and Prasad 2008; Raman 2010; Tharamangalam 2010, 2012; Thresia 2014.

⁵Sivanandan 1976; Kurien 2000.

⁶Oommen 2010, 75.

⁷Oommen 2010, 78.

⁸The Urban Basic Services for the Poor (UBSP) was a version of the pre-existing Urban Basic Services program of pre-liberalization India. The latter was revised by the National Commission for Urbanization and implemented in 500 towns commencing in 1992–1993. The program involved the promotion of self-help, personal responsibility, individualism, autonomy, and self-regulation, which scholars have identified with neoliberalism worldwide (England and Ward 2007). The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was India's flagship program for urban redevelopment during the Indian National Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government inaugurated in 2005. It provided central government subsidies for the development of urban infrastructure to approximately sixty-five cities. The implementation of urban reforms was the key condition for these subsidies. At present, the JNNURM has been replaced with other focused urban redevelopment missions. As Solomon Benjamin points out, in a historical context in which the government was never really involved in the provision of urban housing, the vision of urban redevelopment that gave rise to the program was neoliberal in its “use of policy and programmes to discipline and regulate these day-to-day practices in favor of big businesses and the elite, in the name of modernity, where planned development is meant to ‘control chaos’. Neoliberalism is thus to be contextualised here not just in the frame of the nation-state but also in that of market practices” (Benjamin 2010, 95).

⁹Chattopadhyay and Sakunthala 2007, 242.

¹⁰Chattopadhyay and Sakunthala 2007, 244.

¹¹Ambat 2003; Nair and Sreedhar 2005.

¹²Suchitra 2012; Kumar 2013; Express News Service 2014.

¹³Kannan 2002.

¹⁴Kannan 2002, 8.

¹⁵Kannan 2002.

¹⁶Kannan 2002, 20.

¹⁷Kannan 1992; Waite 2001.

¹⁸Lindberg 2001; Tharamangalam 1981; Devika et al. 2011. A study of Kerala's highly successful workers' co-operative, the Dinesh Beedi, shows how even though sixty percent of its workers were women, there was not a single woman on the central society directors board, or on the pension and welfare committees (Isaac et al. 1998, 21).

¹⁹Thresia 2006, 2007; Neethi 2014.

²⁰Lindberg 2001, 169–170; Waite 2001.

²¹See Nigam 2000.

²²I have written elsewhere on the unfolding of the “order of gender” in late-nineteenth–early twentieth-century Kerala (Devika 2007).

²³The memories of the senior residents about the canal, that it was much larger, appear to be confirmed by recent efforts by the Kerala government to reopen and widen the older water channels that once ran through the city (nicknamed “Operation Anantha”), which was provoked by severe, persistent flooding in the city's busiest areas in rainy seasons. The leaders of this effort used maps from the 1940s, and discovered this. The senior residents, however, insist that the canal was much bigger than what is indicated on the maps. In general, the accounts of my informants about the spatial features of the area, including the tank, are more accurate than what the officials and others believed till recently. See Kumar 2015.

²⁴COSTFORD, http://costfordblog.wordpress.com/category/news/ (Accessed 18 September 2014).

²⁵COSTFORD-Kudumbashree Survey 2010.

²⁶The COSTFORD-KudumbashreeSurvey of 2010 found that 157 out of 507 families were female-headed. The primary survey conducted for this research also indicated a high proportion of female-headed households. Out of the 167 households surveyed, 70 were female-headed, not to speak of many households where the male partner was present only marginally or nominally (Abraham 2014, 14).

²⁷Express News Services 2012; 2014.

²⁸Thiruvananthapuram Draft City Master Plan 2012, 327. Grade I slums conform to eight criteria: proximity to waste-dumps; problems associated with inadequate drainage of waste-and/or rainwater; predominance of informal sector laborers; predominance of semi- or non-permanent houses; a majority lack access to piped drinking water; most houses lack access to individual latrines; most houses lack private bathing space; most houses do not have a pathway at least one meter wide. The same criteria hold for classifying slums in the Rajiv AwasYojana, the successor of the JNNURM.

²⁹Out of 632 households, we surveyed 167. Systematic random sampling was used, and we stratified the survey on the basis of housing, differentiating between new welfare housing and shanties.

³⁰Existing research on slums in Kerala is very meager. I made use of a research report originally prepared for the Kerala Research Programme on Local-level Development at CDS, Thiruvananthapuram during 2006–2007, but which was not formally submitted and has been published only in parts. I refer to it as Madhusoodhanan n.d.

³¹This stigma has clearly very old, Brahman roots (Shyamlal 1992, 14–15; Pathak 2003, 1–2). Sweeping and scavenging in India are related to the history of urbanization (Shinoda 2002, 241–242). Shinoda notes that these were transferable, saleable “hereditary rights” (242–243), which actually gave this oppressive structure remarkable tenacity.

³²For a more detailed account of the setting up of the sanitation department in Travancore, see Seena 2011.

³³These accounts are corroborated by the autobiography of the first organizer of manual scavengers in Thiruvananthapuram, “Jooba” Ramakrishna (1989), and progressive realist literary accounts like Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Tottiyude Makan (Scavenger's Son) (1947 [2013]).

³⁴Madhusoodhanan n.d., 20.

³⁵For details, see Devika 2015.

³⁶The literal meaning of the word “bhangi” is “a person addicted to hemp” (Shyamlal 1992, 22–23). Many contemporary accounts point out that heavy use of alcohol is quite common among manual scavengers and sanitation workers in India even today (see, for example, Singh 2014).

³⁷The corresponding figures for all-Kerala according to NSS reports for 2009–2010 are 53.4 and 17.1 percentages.

³⁸Abraham 2014, 6. This is confirmed by other surveys; see for example, Madhusoodhanan n.d.; COSTFORD-Kudumbashree 2010.

³⁹For this history, see Pillai 1989.

⁴⁰Devika and Thampi 2007.

⁴¹Kannan 1992; Nambiar 1995.

⁴²Government of Kerala 2001.

⁴³Noronha 2006, 6.

⁴⁴The Hindu 2006.

⁴⁵Noronha 2006, 8.

⁴⁶None of these new occupations were captured by the primary survey simply because these categories of employment were not anticipated. It is interesting that none of the respondents revealed this during the primary survey, in the pilot stage and in the final data collection. Not surprisingly, perhaps, because in Kerala, the survey questionnaire is most commonly associated with “government” and “official,” and it is assumed that such details will remain concealed in a field survey. This came out in the qualitative material, which illustrates the advantage of doing mixed-method research.

⁴⁷Abraham 2014, 6.

⁴⁸According to our survey data, the present labor force participation rate of women in Kulamnagar is higher than Kerala as a whole, but lower than the other site of extreme disadvantage that we surveyed, a fishing hamlet. It was 30.7 percent in the former and 52.2 percent in the latter. See Abraham 2014, 6.

⁴⁹Kudumbashree (literally, the auspiciousness and prosperity of the household) is the name given to the Kerala government's poverty alleviation mission, which has set up a vast network of women's self-help groups all over Kerala, covering nearly half the number of all households. It offers microcredit and opportunities for microenterprise to its members, who are largely from below-poverty-line families, and is closely linked with Kerala's local self-government institutions in implementing welfare measures and distributing welfare. See www.kudumbashree.org (accessed 6 November 2014).

⁵⁰Pillai 1989, 8. According to the primary survey for this research, nearly twelve percent of the women who reported to be engaged in gainful work were tailors.

⁵¹Pillai 1989, 7.

⁵²A domestic worker who is a member of the collective organized by SEWA Kerala who cooked and cleaned thirty days a month could receive 12,000 rupees and meals. See http://www.sewakerala.org/smss.html(accessed 6 November 2014).

⁵³In the debate over the Family Mode of Production, Michael Lipton's notion of “extended fungibility” has been noted as useful in understanding the longevity of informal sector enterprise. Leinbach and Del Casino Jr. 1998, 191–192.

⁵⁴Kudumbashree leaders reported that Kudumbashree livelihood loans had been distributed to individual members of almost all groups (fourteen were mentioned by name), but no group enterprises were functioning there. The largest single activity supported was petty vegetable-vending followed by petty production of food items and cooked food, and a few loans were also given to flower-garland and footwear makers.

⁵⁵This is a loan from a central government scheme that has provided livelihood loans since 1993 to the educated unemployed; the money is channelled through Kudumbashree.

⁵⁶The Area Development Society is the ward-level tier of the Kudumbashree. ADS members are elected by the respective self-help groups to represent them.

⁵⁷Suchitra 2012b.

⁵⁸The News Minute 2015.

⁵⁹Karunakaran 2015.

⁶⁰Creed 1993, 65.

⁶¹Kristeva 1982, 9.

⁶²“The concept of territorial stigmatization weds Goffman's model of the management of “spoiled identity” with Bourdieu's theory of “symbolic power” to capture how the blemish of place impacts the residents of disparaged districts, the surrounding denizens and commercial operators, street-level public bureaucracies, specialists in cultural production (such as journalists, scholars, and politicians), and state officials and policies (Wacquant et al. 2014, 1).

⁶³The notion of abjection is also widely used in urban studies to make sense of the nexus between “modernity, spatiality, and alterity” especially in contexts of apartheid and racism (Popke 2001, 737) and of racism and migration (for example, De Genova 2008).

⁶⁴The earliest settlers, the sanitation workers, were Tamil Dalits – but the dalits at Kulamnagar now are fully integrated into Malayalee society and do not retain connections with their places of origin. Their command over the Tamil tongue is also minimal.

⁶⁵In a more indirect but perhaps more powerful way, this was also evident in the keenness shown by interviewees to establish that they preferred “properly gendered” lives which the arrack trade by women had been made impossible. Interestingly, though it appeared to us that neither the ex-arrack brewers or their opponents abided by Brahman norms of femininity in their daily lives, both sides were conspicuously keen to deploy arguments that stressed women's sexual purity and the invariable association of women with the home, marriage, and family honor.

⁶⁶The sale of liquor, which women engaged in during the early twentieth century, was deemed “unwomanly”quite early on (see Malayala Manorama, ‘Kochi Niyamasabha Sammelanam’ ,4 August 1928, 3; ‘Kochi Niyamaabha’, 9 August 1928). There is a long history of opposition to women's involvement in the sale and production of liquor in Kerala's history of social reform.

⁶⁷Mager 2010, 81–89.

⁶⁸John and Deshpande 2008, 45–46.

⁶⁹John and Deshpande 2008, 46.

⁷⁰See, for example, Sreekumar and Parayil 2010.

Additional information

Funding

This essay draws from fieldwork conducted as part of a joint research project titled “Self-Help or Self-Transformation: The Role of Women in Local Governance in Kerala, India, and South Africa,” in which CDS, NIBR, Oslo, and the University of Witwatersrand are partners. NIBR, Oslo is the lead partner. This research is supported by a research grant from NORGLOBAL [Project No. 217185/H30].No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.