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  The lady of the house took no money, accepted no offerings. Her husband was neither a priest nor a Hindu revivalist; he held a senior executive position in a Houston computer firm. When we spoke to her she exuded the simple religiosity of so many middle-class women; she was touched by what was happening in her own home, she believed implicitly in the miracle, she did not question its nature or purpose, she sought nothing from it (indeed, she put up with considerable inconvenience because of it) except vindication of her own personal faith. Every night she bathed the little statue and put it “to bed” in a little golden throne, swaddled in muslin; the next morning Ganesh was back on the low pedestal in the puja room, as thirsty as ever.

  I did not know how to react to what I had just seen. I had come out of curiosity, not to explore or affirm belief. The milk-drinking was essentially irrelevant to “my” Hinduism; my faith was neither strengthened nor exalted by the sight of a statue drinking milk, nor would it have been shaken or diluted if Ganesh had refused to imbibe. I was prepared to believe that there might be a fully rational explanation for the event, but I was equally willing to accept that a miracle might have occurred, one not readily susceptible to the demystification of scientists. I believe the world has more questions to pose than science has yet found answers for, and so have no intellectual difficulty with a notion of the supernatural. Nor, more to the point, do the millions of devotees who flocked to temples worldwide, who saw in the phenomenon a simple message from the heavens that the gods remained interested in the affairs of ordinary mortals.

  But Hindus have always believed that to be the case; the “milk miracle” merely reinforced an unstated assumption about the nature of the Godhead. Our gods crowd the streets, smile or frown on us from the skies, jostle us for space on the buses; they are part of our daily lives, as intimate and personal as the towels in which we wrap ourselves after a bath. If they push us out of our beds tomorrow, there will always be scientists pointing to a geological fault, but Hindus will accept the divine intent to arouse them, just as they accepted the miracle of the milk.

  So the intrusion of the gods into our lives through the milkdrinking episode is no great aberration. They are part of our lives anyway; we see ourselves in them, only idealized. My own affection is for Ganesh himself, a god who — overweight, long-nosed, broken-tusked, and big-eared — cheerfully reflects our own physical imperfections. After all, a country with many seemingly insurmountable problems needs a god who can overcome obstacles.

  When I was a child in Bombay, I was enraptured once a year by the city’s great Ganesh Chathurthi festival, in which India’s bustling commercial capital gives itself over to celebration of this many-talented deity. Hundreds of statues of Ganesh (and of his beautiful wives) are made, decorated, and lovingly dressed; then they are taken out across the busy city streets in a procession of more than a million followers, before being floated out to sea in a triumphant gesture of release. As a little boy I stood on the beach watching the statues settle gradually into the water while the streams of worshipers dispersed. It was sad to see the giant elephant head disappear beneath the waves, but I knew that Ganesh had not really left me. I would find him again, in my wall calendars, on my mantelpiece, at the beginning of my books — and in the prayers with which I would resume my life the morning after the festival:

  Om, I invoke the name of Ganapathi;

  Bringer of peace over all troubles,

  Om, I invoke the name of Ganesh . . . .

  * * *

  So, yes, I am a believer, with the blend of piety and practicality, faith and irreverence, that characterizes much of Hindu belief. It is an attitude toward religion that helps sustain Indian secularism.

  I came to my own secularism through my Kerala roots. My parents were both born in Kerala of Malayali parents, speakers of Malayalam — the only language in the world with a palindromic name in English — the language of that remarkable sliver of a state in southwest India. Non-Malayalis who know of Kerala associate it with its fabled coast, gilded by immaculate beaches and leafy lagoons (both speckled nowadays with the more discerning among India’s deplorably few foreign tourists). But my parents were from the interior of the state, the rice-bowl district of Palghat, nestled in the last major gap near the end of the mountain chain known as the Western Ghats, which runs down the western side of the peninsula like a subsidiary spine. Palghat — or Palakkad, as it is now spelled, to conform to the Malayalam pronunciation — unlike most of the rest of Kerala (which was ruled by maharajahs of an unusually enlightened variety), had been colonized by the British, so that my father discovered his nationalism at a place called Victoria College. The town of Palghat itself is unremarkable, even unattractive; its setting, though, is lushly beautiful, and my parents both belonged to villages an hour away from the district capital, and to families whose principal source of income was agriculture. Their roots lay deep in the Kerala soil, from which has emerged the values that I cherish in the Indian soul.

  It is not often that an American reference seems even mildly appropriate to an Indian case, but a recent study established some astonishing parallels between the United States and the state of Kerala. The life expectancy of a male American is seventy-two years, that of a male Keralite seventy years. The literacy rate in the United States is 95 percent; in Kerala it is 99 percent. The birth rate in the United States is sixteen per thousand; in Kerala it is eighteen per thousand, but it is falling faster. The major difference is that the annual per capita income in Kerala is around $300 to $350, whereas in the United States it is $22,500, about seventy times as much. Kerala has, in short, all the demographic indicators commonly associated with “developed” countries, at a small fraction of the cost.

  Kerala’s demographics are unique. It has the highest population density of any Indian state, its women outnumber its men (there are 1,040 women to every 1,000 men), and it has a higher rate of literacy than the United States, including two districts where every resident above the age of six is literate. Its working men and women enjoy greater rights and a higher minimum wage than exist anywhere else in India. It was the first place on earth to democratically elect a Communist government, remove it from office, reelect it, vote the Communists out, and bring them back again. When the Italian political system saw the emergence of a Communist Party willing to play by the rules of liberal democracy, the world spoke of Euro-Communism, but Kerala had already achieved Indo-Communism much earlier, subordinating the party of proletarian revolution to the ethos of political pluralism. Malayalis are highly politically aware: when other Indian states were electing film stars to Parliament or as chief ministers, a film star tried his political luck in Kerala and lost his security deposit. (Ironically, the first Indian film star to become the chief minister of a state was a Malayali, Marudur G. Ramachandran, known to all as “MGR” — but he was elected in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, where he had made a career as a Tamilian film hero.) Malayalis rank high in every field of Indian endeavor, including in their ranks many top national civil servants, eminent editors, innovative writers, and award-winning film-makers.

  More important, Kerala is a microcosm of every religion known to the country; its population is divided into almost equal fourths of Christians, Muslims, caste Hindus, and Scheduled Castes (the former Untouchables), each of whom is economically and politically powerful. The Christians of Kerala belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine, converted by Jesus’ disciple Saint Thomas (the “Doubting Thomas” of biblical legend). Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it was to do elsewhere in India, but through traders, travelers, and missionaries. And Jews fleeing Babylonian attacks and later Roman persecution found refuge, and acceptance, in Kerala. Kerala’s outcasts — one group of whom, the Pariahs, gave the English language a term for their collective condition — suffered discrimination every bit as vicious and iniquitous as in the rest of India, but overcame their plight far more successfully than their countrymen elsewhere. A combination of en
lightened rule by far-thinking maharajahs, progressive reform movements within the Hindu tradition (especially that of the remarkable Ezhava sage Sree Narayana Guru), and changes wrought by a series of left-dominated legislatures since independence have given Kerala’s Scheduled Castes a place in society that other Dalits (former Untouchables) across India are still denied.

  Part of the secret of Kerala is its openness to the external influences

  Arab, Roman, Chinese, British; Islamist, Christian, Marxist — that have gone into the making of the Malayali people. More than two millennia ago Keralites had trade relations not just with other parts of India, but with the Arab world, with the Phoenicians, and with the Roman Empire. From those days on, Malayalis have had an open and welcoming attitude to the rest of humanity. When Saint Thomas brought Christianity to Kerala (well before it reached Europe), he made converts among the highborn elite. After the early Jewish refugees escaping Babylon six hundred years before Christ, Jews fleeing Roman persecution found refuge in Cranganore in a.d. 68 and flourished there until Europeans (the Portuguese) came to Kerala to persecute them 1,500 years later, at which point they found a new welcome in another Kerala town, Cochin. As for Islam, not only was it peacefully embraced, but it found encouragement in attitudes and episodes without parallel elsewhere in the non-Islamic world: in one example, the all-powerful Zamorin of Calicut asked each fisherman’s family in his domain to bring up one son as a Muslim, for service in his Muslim-run navy. It was probably a Malayali seaman, one of many who routinely plied the Arabian Sea between Kerala and East Africa, who piloted Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer and trader, to Calicut in 1498. (Typically, he was welcomed by the Zamorin, but when he tried to pass trinkets off as valuables, he was thrown in prison for a while. Malayalis are open and hospitable to a fault, but they are not easily fooled.)

  In turn, Malayalis brought their questing spirit to the world. The great Advaita philosopher, Shankaracharya, was a Malayali who traveled throughout the length and breadth of India on foot in the eighth century a.d. laying the foundations for a reformed and revived Hinduism. To this day, there is a temple in the Himalayas whose priests are Namboodiris from Kerala. In the fifth century a.d. the Malayali astronomer Aryabhatta deduced, a thousand years before his European successors, that the earth is round and that it rotates on its own axis; it was also he who calculated the value of pi (3.1614) for the first time. But a recitation of names — for one could invoke great artists, musicians, and poets, enlightened kings and learned sages, throughout history — would only belabor the point. Kerala took from others, everything from Roman ports to Chinese fishing nets, and gave to the rest of India everything from martial arts and systems of classical dance to the skills of its hardworking labor force.

  Keralites never suffered from inhibitions about travel: an old joke suggests that so many Keralite typists flocked to stenographic work in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi that “Remington” became the name of a new Malayali subcaste. In the nation’s capital, the wags said that you couldn’t throw a stone in the Central Secretariat without injuring a Keralite bureaucrat. Nor was there, in the Kerala tradition, any prohibition on venturing abroad, none of the ritual defilement associated in parts of north India with “crossing the black water.” It was no accident that Keralites were the first, and the most, to take advantage of the post-oil-shock employment boom in the Arab Gulf countries; at one point in the 1980s, the largest single ethnic group in the Gulf sheikhdom of Bahrain was reported to be not Bahrainis but Keralites. The willingness of Keralites to go anywhere to do anything remains legendary. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, my father’s friends laughed, he discovered a Malayali already there, offering him tea.

  All this speaks of a rare and precious heritage that is the patrimony of all Malayalis — a heritage of openness and diversity, of pluralism and tolerance, of high aspirations and varied but considerable accomplishment. To be a Malayali is also to lay claim to a rich tradition of literature, dance, and music, of religious diversity, of political courage and intellectual enlightenment. With all this, Keralites tend to take pride in their collective identity as Malayalis; our religion, our caste, our region, come later, if at all. There is no paradox in asserting that these are qualities that help make Malayalis good Indians in a plural society. You cannot put better ingredients into the melting pot.

  So Kerala embodies the “Malayali miracle”: a state that has practiced openness and tolerance from time immemorial; that has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its daily life rather than a source of division; that has overcome caste discrimination and class oppression through education, land reforms, and political democracy; that has honored its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling, and empowered lives. Not everyone is equally laudatory of the “Kerala model”; economists point out that it places rather too much emphasis on workers’ rights and income distribution, and rather too little on production, productivity, and output. But its results are truly remarkable; and as a Keralite and an Indian, I look forward to the day when Kerala will no longer be the exception in tales of Indian development, but merely the trailblazer.

  Having raised my Kerala roots, I am obliged to indulge in a small digression. Though I am a Malayali and a writer, I have no claims to be considered a Malayali writer; indeed, despite setting some of my fictional sequences in Kerala and scattering several Menons through my stories, I could not have written my books in Malayalam because I cannot write my own mother tongue.

  And yet I am not inclined to be defensive about my Kerala heritage, despite the obvious incongruities of an expatriate praising Kerala from abroad and lauding the Malayali heritage in the English language. I have felt vindicated in my Malayaliness ever since I received an unusual endorsement of it, unusual in that it was unintended. It came to me when I was living and working in Singapore. A leading member of the expatriate Malayali community there, a prominent doctor, met me casually one evening and mentioned that he had just read a short story of mine in the Illustrated Weekly of India. Since I was young and very proud of the story, which was called “The Death of a Schoolmaster,” I did something no author should ever do — I asked him how he had liked it. He was not exactly effusive in his reaction. “Oh, it was all right,” he said grudgingly, “but you just seem to have recorded the story of your own upbringing in Kerala — there was not much fiction in it.”

  At that point we were interrupted. But I could see he was startled by the look of sheer delight that crossed my face on hearing these less than complimentary words. Since I was called away soon afterward, I never had a chance to explain to him why his mild criticism had pleased me as if it were the most generous praise. The reason was simple: I had never had an upbringing in Kerala. I was born in London, brought up in Bombay, went to high school in Calcutta, attended college in Delhi, and received my doctorate in the United States. My short story was entirely fiction. But the Malayali doctor’s reaction suggested that I had succeeded in evoking village Kerala — a Kerala he knew far better than I did — convincingly enough for him to consider it authentic.

  As a child of the city, my only experience of village Kerala had been as an initially reluctant vacationer during my parents’ annual trips home. For many non-Keralite Malayali children traveling like this, there was often little joy in the compulsory rediscovery of their roots, and many saw it more as an obligation than a pleasure. For many, Kerala was a world of private inconveniences and mosquito bites; when I was ten I told my father that this annual migration to the south was strictly for the birds. But as I grew older, I came to appreciate the magic of Kerala: the extraordinary natural beauty of the land, its lagoons, its forests,its beaches, and above all the startling, many-hued green of the paddy fields, with palm trees swaying in the gentle breeze that whispers everywhere in Kerala. As a Malayali, this beauty is bred into my soul; but there is much more to the Kerala experience. In my own lifetime I have seen remarkable transformations in Kerala society, with land reform, free and
universal education, and dramatic changes in caste relations. But I had seen all this as an outsider.

  In meeting expatriate Indians in Singapore, London, Geneva, and the United States, I have seen much of the predicament of the Malayali who is, geographically, no longer a Keralite. Indian Malayalis outside Kerala have the same problem of living in a society that is not fully their own. Modern communications and jet travel have made our situation both easier and more difficult than in the past. It is easier, because we are always able to renew our contact with the home, the family, the village. It is also more difficult, because it is precisely this tantalizing access that complicates the agonizing conflict between adjustment to the world around us (wherever we happen to live) and loyalty to our cultural legacy — a loyalty that fades with each succeeding generation born in exile.

  We are, for the most part, conscious — some would say inordinately proud — of our Malayali cultural heritage. But as we are cut off from its primary source, the source of daily cultural self-regeneration — Kerala itself — we have to evolve our own identities by preserving what we can of our heritage and merging it with those of the others around us, whether Americans in Queens or a pan-Indian potpourri in Delhi. As we grow up outside Kerala, we know that we are not the Malayalis we might have been if our parents had never left Kerala. In due course, Onam becomes only as much a part of our culture as any other holiday, and we are as likely to give a younger relative a Christmas present as a Vishukkaineettam (New Year’s gift). It gets worse with each succeeding generation. Your father, as an Indian Malayali outside Kerala may consider himself a Malayali, but as long as he does not live in his home state he remains on the outside, looking in. We, his descendants — Malayalis without our Mathrubhumi or Manorama newspapers, who do not understand the Ottamthullal folk dance and have never heard of the great poet Kumaran Asan — are, when we come to visit Kerala, foreigners in our own land.