Kerala according to two Western women

It is an interesting coincidence that some of the most insightful studies of Kerala society in the last century were by two Western women anthropologists. Both Kathleen Gough (1925–1990) and Joan P. Mencher (1930–2026) spent much of their lives in Kerala, regarded it as a second home, and considered its people their own. They revealed many facets of Malayali society that even Malayalis knew little about. Yet, beyond academia and a section of intellectuals, both remained largely unknown to the public. No wonder the death of Mencher on August 7 at the age of 96 went almost unnoticed by Kerala’s mainstream media.

The similarities between them are striking. Both initially studied Kerala’s matrilineal system, prevalent among several communities. Through extensive ground-level fieldwork, household data, interviews and genealogies, they explored agrarian history, poverty, caste, peasant movements, ecology, gender and social change.

Both were Marxists and feminists committed to the oppressed. They admired Kerala’s Left movement but were sufficiently independent to examine the Communist movement and its record critically. Both are regarded as pioneers of Marxist anthropology.

Gough taught at several universities in the US, Canada and Europe, and was dismissed from some because of her brave activism for Communist Vietnam and Cuba. A fierce critic of British colonialism and American imperialism, she was also monitored by the FBI for participating in civil rights and anti-war movements. “Gough's work was among the first to bring Marxist perspectives to anthropology, to name imperialism and to challenge anthropology's relationship to it. Her individual counsel gave many younger scholars the courage to speak out”, wrote Prof. Richard Lee and Prof. Karen Brodkin Sachs, in a commemorative volume of Anthropologica (1993), the official journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society. According to Prof. Joseph Taramangalam, Gough initially learnt much of Marxism from the field, first in Kerala and then in Thanjavur, both Communist strongholds, and still later from activists in America.

Mencher retired as Professor of Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre and Lehman College of the City University of New York. According to Subhadra Channa, her former associate and retired professor of Anthropology at Delhi University, Mencher worked actively into her late 80s and was researching rice cultivation in South India when an attack of COVID-19 left her debilitated. “I remember walking into the home of Joan and her husband, Frank Southworth, in Manhattan to find images of South Indian gods and goddesses, and a bronze lamp, made into a small shrine. Not that she was religious—both she and her husband were Left liberals —but the little Indian space was where her soul was located. India was what she considered her true identity. For this reason, she and her husband, proficient in Marathi, Hindi, and Sanskrit, adopted two Indian children to bring up as their own. Leela and Devraj have always cherished what their parents gave them,” wrote Channa in a homage in The Frontline.

Gough’s work laid the foundation for much of Mencher’s research in Kerala, and the two developed a close personal and professional relationship. Mencher wrote that Gough was among the first British-trained social anthropologists to conduct systematic post-war research in Kerala. Arriving soon after Independence, Gough studied the profound changes brought about by legal reforms in the 1930s among Kerala’s land-owning matrilineal castes. She also examined the impact of colonialism, the invasions of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, and the eventual establishment of British rule in Malabar.

Gough and Mencher shared a close personal bond too. Mencher wrote in Anthropologica about how Gough responded when she sought her guidance when she started research in Kerala in 1958; “Kathleen responded in great detail, expressing not only interest in the work I was doing but also giving me names of people to meet and visit with, suggesting that I might want to work in one or more of the villages where she had gone, and even giving me the name of the man who had cooked for her. As it turned out, I did go ahead and work in one of her villages for the first part of my time in Kerala. It was both good and bad, because I was forever aware of her unique legacy. For example, she was a fantastic walker, never worried about falling crevices or being besieged by wild dogs, whereas I always had poor balance and eventually ended up using a walking cane. Everywhere I went people had stories to tell about her amazing energy as well as her extreme kindness, and people constantly asked me how she was doing. The young men talked about how she used to come and sit with them in the toddy shop, something I felt less comfortable doing since it was an arena where women usually did not go. They also talked about how she never seemed to get tired, staying up night after night to watch the traditional possession ceremonies during the "Theyyam" season.”

Despite their common concerns, however, the two differed significantly in emphasis. Gough was more concerned with how Kerala’s social institutions were organised and transformed; Mencher asked how those institutions affected different sections of society. Mencher retained her interest in kinship but shifted attention from institutional structures to their social consequences.

For instance, matrilineal descent did not, for Mencher, automatically establish women’s superior status. One had to ask whether women controlled productive resources, benefited from land reform, received income and exercised meaningful authority in household and community decisions. Gough too wrote about caste, village politics, Communist organisation, literacy and peasant resistance, but Mencher made the caste-class-land nexus particularly explicit. She examined how caste hierarchy operated through control over land, employment, agricultural labour and access to public benefits.

This perspective led her to challenge celebratory accounts of Kerala’s progress. Her famous 1974 essay, The Caste System Upside Down or the Not So Mysterious East, questioned whether agricultural labourers and other disadvantaged groups had benefited from Kerala’s transformation to the same extent as others.

Their approaches to women also differed. Gough’s analysis was largely embedded in kinship and marriage. Mencher’s later work was closer to feminist political economy. She studied women’s work in rice cultivation and processing, in collaboration with the late Malayali sociologist K. Saradamani, as well as its invisibility and undervaluation, occupational health and women’s own perceptions of social change.

Mencher’s most provocative intervention concerned what later came to be celebrated as the Kerala Model. A 1975 United Nations-commissioned study conducted by the Centre for Development Studies under Dr K.N. Raj drew global attention to Kerala’s unusual achievement of attaining high levels of social development despite relatively low economic growth. Public investment in health and education was central to this achievement.

Yet in a landmark article in the November 1980 special issue of Economic and Political Weekly, Mencher challenged the celebration of the “Kerala Model”. While acknowledging its historic achievements, she argued that it had failed to end landlessness among the poorest or substantially improve their living conditions. Even literacy and declining fertility, she suggested provocatively, could partly reflect poverty and unemployment. She would arguably be the first prominent critic from the Left to highlight the limits and contradictions of the Kerala Model.

Comparing Kerala with Tamil Nadu, she argued that children in rural Tamil Nadu often worked or cared for younger siblings while parents worked on farms. In contrast, in Kerala, unemployment meant parents were more likely to stay home and send children to school. Similarly, she suggested that poorer families adopted family planning partly because they could not afford more children. Her stark conclusion was that, for agricultural labourers, “the ‘miracle of Kerala’ has not been a miracle at all. It has passed them by.”

Her pessimism provoked strong reactions in Kerala, including among academics. Her claim that Kerala had failed to reduce poverty substantially has clearly not stood the test of time; the state subsequently emerged as the country’s leader in poverty reduction. Nor can all her explanations for Kerala’s achievements be accepted today.

Yet Mencher deserves credit for sounding one of the earliest warnings against complacency about the Kerala Model. Many of the inequalities and structural weaknesses she identified have since become widely recognised. She also warned that the growing influence of the middle class within the CPI(M) and its increasing engagement with parliamentary politics could weaken its commitment to radical transformation.

Mencher wrote that Gough had shared her concern for Kerala too. “We shared a common view of the situation in Kerala and were equally distressed by the way in which Kerala was being touted as a "development model" while so many people were without work. Without the funds received each month from expatriates living and working in the Middle East, the Kerala situation would be far worse. We shared our fear about what will happen when this goldmine dries up”.

Mencher’s critique therefore remains valuable not because all her predictions were correct, but because she insisted on asking who actually benefited from Kerala’s celebrated progress. She forced attention away from aggregate indicators toward the intersection of land, class, caste, gender, and power.

“She might have been a bit too pessimistic,” says economist Dr K.P. Kannan, who knew Mencher during her association with CDS. “Kerala’s success in vastly reducing poverty was made possible by the totally unexpected gains from Gulf migration and the resulting remittances. Those who predicted the collapse of the Kerala Model could not be faulted, since this development was unforeseen.”

That perhaps captures Mencher’s enduring relevance. Kerala’s achievements were real, but so were its contradictions. Gough helped us understand the structures through which Kerala society was organised and transformed. Mencher persistently asked who gained, who remained excluded and what lay beneath the celebrated statistics. Together, they gave the world—and Kerala—a far more complex understanding of a society that continues to fascinate social scientists across the globe.