THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Now a well-known specialist on Kerala, who has extensively studied the matrilineal system in the state and also authored ‘The Decline of Nair Dominance’, Professor Robin Jeffrey was not so fascinated with the Communist movement in his early days. As a school-going child, he saw Kerala as a state where the dreaded Communists came to power and was worried about the possibility of India going the Communist way.
Jeffrey, who spoke at Keraleeyam on Friday, remembered how his apprehension grows into fascination. “Kerala first appeared on my radar when I was 12. A local newspaper ‘British Columbia’ carried a news item about the Communist government being elected in a state called Kerala in India. In those days I was a young warrior brought up on the corridors of iron curtains and cold wars.
At that time Soviet force was too close to us. The news that India might go the Communist way made an impact on the 12-year-old. I felt a certain relief when the local papers reported in 1957 that the Communists were removed from power. Ten years later my views were changed in 1967. I was teaching English at a government school in Chandigarh as a Canadian volunteer. During that December I travelled to South India.
On December 27, 1967, I crossed the gaps from Coorg to the villages where red flags were tied on the polls and saw girls going to school in blue and white uniforms. At that time United Front government under E M S Namboodiripad was in power. Seeing the dangerous Communists I heard from 1957 in close corridors was frightening. I was punctuated by little girls going to school. Later mostly in 1971, I did research here on the princely state,” he said. Robin Jeffrey’s talk was recorded and shown at the seminar. He was speaking at a seminar on ‘Kerala Finance’ at the assembly hall.
Professor Patric Heller who also played a big role in placing the success story of the Kerala Model in the international academic world spoke on the occasion through recorded video. He praised the sustainability of the model. “In the 1980s and 1990s when discussion was going on about the success of the Kerala model, it was viewed that the success in social development came at the expense of growth. But today it is no longer a truth. Kerala has been capitalised in its investment ever since the 1990s through the 2000s. It has grown out with a quite impressive growth rate. It is now a well-established fact that a strong modern bureaucratic state was the key to the rise of rapidly industrialised countries like South Korea and Taiwan. Kerala is relatively in a good position now,” he said.