Kerala’s high literacy rate is celebrated by Communists and left oriented media as their own colossal achievement. They vocalize the communist ideology as a reason for the state attaining such high literacy rate and even some Congressmen claim credit as they have ruled Kerala for the equal amount of time as Communists. The popular belief is that policies of Kerala government in past decades are the foundation of high literacy rate, but analyzing the statistics since independence shows us a different picture.

Source: Office of the Registrar General, India, Ministry of Home Affairs.  

Here is the data of literacy rates of Indian states from the censuses of 1951 to 2011. We can spot that Kerala reached almost 90% of literacy in 1991 census and they are the first to do so, but the question is whether the merit of such a tremendous achievement goes to Communists or does it have historical roots.

 When we analyze the above data, we can observe that Kerala’s literacy rate (47%) was highest in the 1951 census, the first census after our independence. The second and third best were from Mizoram (31%) and Andaman and Nicobar Islands (30.3%) respectively and no other state have more than 30% literacy at that time. The national average literacy rate during 1951 was 18%. Thus Kerala’s literacy rate few years after independence in 1951 was 30% more than the national average. When people in other states were not provided with proper education during British era, Travancore royal kingdom undertook educational reforms for people at that time. Thus after independence, Kerala achieving high literacy rate is not a surprise. It achieved 90% literacy in 1990s not because of communist policies, but because of its historical roots.  

Contribution of Hindu Travancore Kingdom for education:

During the year 1817, Rani Gowri Parvathi Bhai of Royal Dynasty of Travancore issued a rescript saying “The state should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order, that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them, that by diffusion of education they might become better subjects and public servants and that the reputation of the state might be advanced thereby”. The royal kingdom took the responsibility of providing funds for the education and thus many vernacular schools were set up throughout the kingdom.

This is the root of Kerala attaining 47% literacy rate at the time of independence. The subsequent rulers in the royal family like Uthrom Thirunal Marthanda Varma, Ayilyam Thirunal Rama Varma and Moolam Thirunal Rama Varma continued this contribution to the education of the state.  Uthrom Thirunal Marthanda Varma provided high salary government jobs for the students who had passed with higher grades. He also attended the examinations of the students as a token of encouragement. These rulers also encouraged education of women and they even provided lunch in royal palace for those girls, who go out of the hometown to pursue higher studies.

Salary of teachers was increased regularly, and medical inspections were held in educational institutions.  These kinds of measures were implemented by Travancore royal family continuously for a century and this created a sense of responsibility among people of Kerala even before the independence to provide education for their children. This sense of responsibility even played a major role in the post-independence era to shape the present literate Kerala society.

Thus, Kerala’s high literacy rate was because of the above mentioned initiatives of Travancore royal family in the pre-independence era. After independence, Kerala performed almost similar to many other states in educational reforms as most of the Indian states had 30% to 40% increase in literacy rate from 1951 to 1991, which is almost same as Kerala’s increase of 42%. As the Indian history is written by Marxist historians, the contribution of Travancore royal family to education is omitted, instead leftist historians along with leftist journalists and economists give the entire credit to the Communists.

This serves two purposes: i) to underplay the role of Hindu Travancore rulers in education. ii) To underplay the role of other states in education sector during post-independence era and thus falsely showcasing that Communists worked better than others in providing education. In fact Communists have tried to show this as a counter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development. They fail to realize that even with such high literacy, they were unable to provide jobs to the people of the state as Kerala’s unemployment is 12.5%, one of the highest in India while Gujarat has one of the lowest unemployment in India.

Our history needs to be reclaimed from the clutches of left. Although, they don’t enjoy power in majority of the states, they control the historical discourses throughout India to suit their political agenda. There are numerous contributions in pre independent India and post independent India in various fields of many people that have been forgotten like the educational reforms of kingdom of Travancore simply because they don’t further leftist agenda that we in India know as History.