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What is different about Kerala, India?

On a monsoon morning in July 1968, Robin Jeffrey was traveling by bus through the Indian state of Kerala. Jeffrey, who currently specializes in modern Indian history and political science, was working as a teacher in the northern Indian state of Punjab at the time.

The climate in Kerala is humid, and after a while the inside of the bus became as hot as a steam bath. So, at the first bus stop, he opened the waterproof curtains on the window for ventilation.

Photo = iStock.com/f9photos

* The picture is a picture.

Suddenly, I noticed that an old woman in white clothes was sitting comfortably on the balcony a few meters away, not even breaking a sweat. She wears thick glasses and is staring hard at something. I found him reading the morning paper propped up against one leg.

That moment was so memorable that he still remembers it well. “It’s etched in my mind,” Jeffrey said. For him, at least in Punjab, it was unusual to see people reading local language newspapers in public.

Women can go out on their own and the literacy rate is high.

Literacy rates across India were low, like many other countries in the world at the time, and female literacy rates were even lower. Very few people had reading glasses. However, this woman was calmly reading a newspaper.

“It was a scene I never imagined, and I still remember it, like a picture,” Jeffrey told me.

India’s adult literacy rate is now much higher than it was then, at nearly three-quarters of the population, but gender disparities are still evident in many states. But in Kerala, records show that female literacy rates are about the same as male rates. Currently it is over 95%.

The state of Kerala, on India’s lush southwest coast, is famous for allowing women to go out alone and walk the streets in relative safety and without worry.

This is no small thing at all. When I started my first job at an Indian current affairs magazine in the bustling, dusty capital city of New Delhi, I quickly learned that I should only go out at night with friends and relatives. There was an attitude of contempt for women and girls, and women had no choice but to take practical measures against it.

Kerala, on the other hand, was legendary as a place where gender roles were reversed, where women traditionally ruled and daughters were valued more than sons.