In his 1936 Annihilation of Caste, the Dalit leader, philosopher, and lawyer Bhimrao Ambedkar turned to address the Indian Left. How, he asked, can “a socialist state in India … function for a second without having to grapple with the problems created by the prejudices which make Indian people observe the distinctions of high and low, clean and unclean?” Caste, Ambedkar argued, constituted the social order. The socialist “will be compelled to take account of caste after the revolution, if he does not take account of it before the revolution. This is only another way of saying that, turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster”. Rereading Annihilation of Caste after I had completed fieldwork in the South Indian state of Kerala, this passage stayed with me as the unresolved question for Kerala’s dramatic twentieth-century transformation.
In 1957, the South Indian state of Kerala saw the first democratically elected communist government in the world. “Whenever you think of Kerala, you think of red,” one young woman told me in 2010, “even if it is light red.” Kerala is known for having the highest literacy...
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