Kalpana-di came upstairs at Abinaash and settled down with her lunch on the madur (straw mat) spread on the floor. Unlike other days when she would animatedly describe her encounters in the field, she looked dejected. She opened her tiffin box and started eating rather distractedly. This aberration did not escape us, and we wanted to know what was bothering her. Kalpana-di sadly recounted that her long-time friend, Bina-di, who had been ill for some time now, was now “very sick; I don't think she will live much longer.” Deferring to the custom of secrecy, particularly with respect to a close friend's HIV+ status in order to avoid stigma and even shame, Kalpana-di was careful to convey Bina-di's diagnosis as abstrusely as possible. An HIV+ diagnosis in Sonagachi is shrouded in euphemisms and is routinely coded as “very sick,” “very weak,” “cannot eat,” “lost so much weight,” and so on, coupled with a premonition of death. However, everybody present that afternoon knew that I had recently taken Bina-di to the ART Center at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine (Tropical), and was most likely aware of her diagnosis, so nobody asked me any questions either.

Based on the doctor's evaluation, Bina-di had advanced stage tuberculosis. Furthermore, her lack of access to nutritional food and her insalubrious living conditions would severely impede her recovery. I had known Bina-di for a few years. She was an older woman and had worked in Sonagachi for close to 20 years. However, due to advancing age and other ailments, she had retired a few years ago. Though Bina-di predated the 1990s categorization, she would then be considered B-category. Like many other B-category sex workers, neither was she able to save enough for a secure retirement nor was she able to invest in real estate to become a malkin. Often, she was cash-strapped and struggled to pay rent and procure food.

When India became independent, the main livelihoods in this region, as in the rest of the country, were based on land. But unlike most other regions of India, a significant and relatively more prominent part of the economy (half or more of the domestic product) was urban and non-agricultural. Non-agricultural did not mean industrial. True, the processing of some commercial products involved non-mechanised factories. Alappuzha (Alleppey) had emerged as a hub of coir production and Quilon (Kollam) of cashew. Some isolated large, mechanised factories employed hundreds of people in one place in chemicals, rayon, paper and a few other lines. Thus, Aluva (Alwaye) had textiles, fertilisers, aluminium, glass and rayon industries, and Ernakulam oil and soap industries. There were also tea estates in the hills. A concentration of plantation businesses in rubber and spices occurred to the east of Kottayam. But collectively, these formed a smaller group than trade and the financing of marketing, which dominated the landscape of non-agricultural employment. All major towns lived mainly on trade and informal banking. Trichur and Kottayam were mostly service-based towns, with a concentration of banks, colleges and rich churches.

Over one-third of the workforce was in industry, trade, commerce and finance. In most large states of India, the percentage was 20–35. The exceptions were the industrialised states of West Bengal and Maharashtra, where factory-based large-scale industrial firms concentrated. Again, a contrast emerged with the rest of India. Most local businesses were small-scale, semi-rural and household enterprises, whereas non-agricultural enterprises in the rest of India were mainly urban.

Further, industrialisation almost everywhere else signified a sharp inequality between the countryside and the city. The former was trapped in low-yield farmland producing grains for subsistence or local markets, and the latter experienced growth of high-wage jobs. In the state, that distance was narrower. The presence of tree crops and their industrial processing made for a narrower gap between the rural and the urban. Many of the landholders were also owners of estates growing tree crops. Agriculture was not necessarily low yield nor subsistence oriented. In this way, agriculture and non-agriculture, rural and urban came much closer here compared with India.

In the early nineteenth century, the region was ruled by three main political entities: the British Indian district of Malabar belonging to the Madras Presidency, Cochin state, and Travancore state. This was what the southwestern coast's political map looked like for 150 years before the three units were merged to form Kerala (1956). Despite this difference in political form, the three units experienced rather similar forces of change since the nineteenth century, such as the commercialisation of farming and plantations that expanded into new land frontiers, the influx and mobility of capital, labour migration, social movements targeting harsh inequalities and the decline of landholder power.

This chapter will describe the change and its legacies in the mid-twentieth century. It is helpful to start with the eighteenth century, when the political balance faced new challenges before settling down.

Trade and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

A serious European engagement with the southwestern coast of India began with Portuguese explorations in the late fifteenth century. From much before, Malabar traded with West Asia and Africa. ‘Nowhere in India,’ wrote D. M. Dhanagare, ‘have foreign trading and commercial and religious interests interacted within the indigenous socio-economic and political institutions more intimately than they have in Malabar.’

The chief exports of Malabar in early modern trade were spices and timber. Teak was abundantly available. A large shipbuilding industry developed, dependent on the custom of local ship-owning merchants. Beypur was the principal port in Malabar, where much of the commercial and shipbuilding activity was concentrated. In 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama landed in Malabar. A subsequent Portuguese attempt to impose a licensing system on coastal trade produced intermittent conflicts with the ruler of Calicut (Kozhihode), his allies inland, and a resistance force created by the Muslim merchants operating in the seaboard. The Portuguese attempt failed in the end, and the centre of Portuguese settlement shifted further north.

The cosmopolitanism of Malabar strengthened further in the second half of the eighteenth century under two forces, one maritime and another inland. In the seventeenth century, Dutch and English traders arrived to take a share of the lucrative spice trade.

The work of the previous chapters has been to consider how the findings of evolutionary biology fit with key commitments of traditional Christology. Thus far, we think the findings fit quite well. In this final chapter, we widen our scope all the way, asking not whether this finding of biology is problematic for that claim of Christianity but instead asking how biology and its total set of data fit with a Christian worldview compared to a naturalist worldview. Our main concern, then, will be to evaluate Christianity and naturalism in terms of their respective worldview explanations of the very existence of the biological world and the phenomena within it.

While advances in mass health and schooling made Kerala quite distinct from other states in India in the 1950s, this was not a pathway to economic and social mobility, let alone economic growth. The quality of education, especially higher education, was poor. The persistence of gender norms kept many women out of the labour force, and high unemployment forced most skilled people out of the state. Outside the state, Malayalis found work, but in jobs that did not provide a dramatic change in conditions compared with similar jobs back home.

The Persian Gulf migration broke the stagnation, not just by offering more gainful opportunities but in indirect, if powerful, ways. In the long run, the job market in the Gulf demanded progressively greater skills from the migrants. Two periodic reports – India Migration Reports and Kerala Migration Surveys – reveal a trend towards rising skill levels on average, consistent with the diversification of the Gulf economies from oil-based occupations towards financial and business services. Consequently, more jobs opened up in offices in clerical, accounting, sales and supervisory roles. The migration offered those who stayed back in Kerala the scope to invest in human capital. It stimulated growth by increasing construction activity and the consumption of services. It also possibly encouraged business investment, but this link remains under-researched (Chapter 4). A third factor that deserves mention is women's changing roles and economic conditions, both those who stayed back and those who moved out. In both cases, the nature of the migration and mobility link was different from men’s.

The recent globalisation, or re-integration with the world economy, is, in these ways, a story of labour – and not primarily trade, foreign capital inflow, or investments abroad. It would still be a mistake to overstress international migration or even, more narrowly, emigration to the Persian Gulf. The recent history of labour is also a history of occupational diversification, professionalisation, skill accumulation, shifting gender roles, consumption and saving, and demographic transition.

The present chapter tells that story.

The Miracle

In 1981, the south Indian state of Kerala was among the poorest regions in India. The state's average income was about a third smaller than the national average. In the late 1970s, by average income, Kerala was in the bottom third of India's thirty-odd states. In 2022, per capita income in the state was 50–60 per cent higher than the national average. Among those states large in land size, populous and with a diversified economic base, the state was the fifth richest in terms of average income in 2022. Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana were the other four. None of the others saw such a sharp change in relative ranking.

Kerala's economy did not grow steadily throughout these forty years. The acceleration, catching up and overtaking were not more than fifteen years old, twenty at the most. Income growth rates were low for much of the 1980s and the 1990s. The numbers changed sharply only in recent decades. The roots of this extraordinary growth performance, however, were much older. This book is a search for these roots.

It is not a common practice among economists to treat a state in India as the subject of long-term economic history. But ‘Kerala is different’ from all other Indian states. A huge scholarship building from the 1970s and drawing in many social scientists insisted it was different. Although poor, the population of the state lived much longer than the average Indian and had a significantly higher literacy rate than in the rest of India. The scholarship trying to explain this anomaly was mindful of history. But the history had a narrow purpose. It was made to work for a specific question: how did an income-poor region make great strides in human development? The discourse that emerged to answer the question had two critical weaknesses. First, it was too state-focused and neglected to analyse enough market-led changes. Second, it took income poverty for granted. Neither the question nor the answers offered are useful to explain the recent acceleration in income. The explanations could not show how the basic premise of a low income might change someday because the research agenda did not consider that prospect very likely.

“You don't get it, do you?” Bimala-di suddenly quipped at me towards the end of her story. “The h(n)ari [cooking pot] was the only thing we had.” She was recounting her life before she came to Sonagachi about 20 years ago. Her parents could not feed the family, so every afternoon around lunch time, Bimala-di and her sister would go to the neighbors’ houses to collect the starch – usually drained and disposed off after the rice was cooked – in an aluminum pot and bring it home to share with the family. The timing was important, she emphasized. If they arrived early, it may have annoyed the neighbors, while if they arrived late, the starch would have already been discarded. Some neighbors were sympathetic and sometimes saved the starch if they remembered, but that was never assured. Moreover, Bimala-di was correct when she inferred that I had indeed overlooked the significance of the pot. As the only material possession, it symbolized her family's experience of poverty and hunger. “Yes, that is the only, the only thing we had, just a pot.” She followed up with another question: “Have you ever been hungry for days? And that you don't even know when is the next time you may secure some food?” She noticed my predictable silence and added, “Khider jala, boro jala” (The burn of hunger is especially painful). She continued:

Finally, she proudly repeated the widely recognized slogan of Durbar to sum up her argument:

Bimala-di conjures the image of a deprived life in the village, widely shared by other women in Sonagachi, which led them to migrate to the city in search of livelihood. Even in the city, she observes that sex workers are seen as ajab bastu, or strange things.

Taking shelter from an especially heavy monsoon deluge one June afternoon in 2014, I sat with a group of female sex workers in Abinaash Clinic (Abinaash), listening to their sukh-dukhher galpo (stories of everyday life). All of them were members of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots sex-worker organization in Sonagachi, and peer educators (PEs) in the HIV/AIDS prevention program launched by the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in 1992. As we passed around each other's tiffin boxes to share lunch, sitting in a circle on a madur (floor mat made of madurkathi reed), a commotion of voices floated upwards from the ground floor. Rama-di, suspecting that there was a problem, sprang to her feet and ran down the stairs. We could hear her voice, but it was not legible. As was usual in emerging situations like this, all of us ran down the stairs to join other sex workers and office staff who had already assembled. At the center of the commotion were two women, both dressed in a ‘nighty’ (a cotton house-gown) with a red and blue checked gamchha (cotton towel) laid over their chests like a dupatta (a long piece of cloth worn by women to cover their breasts). I recognized the older woman, Namita-di, as one of the malkins (brothel owners) whom I had met a year ago. She was very agitated as she spoke to Purnima-di, a retired sex worker and then the director of the Self-Regulatory Board (Board), Durbar's anti-trafficking initiative. However, it was difficult to follow the thread of the conversation since Namita-di often broke down and the other women stepped in to comfort her.

In between her weeping, she repeatedly said, “Meye tuley niye gechhey” (They took the girl away). Once she had calmed down, she gradually pieced her story together:

Although our developing discussion focuses on Christology and genetics, it inevitably connects with two larger bodies of information: all major Christian doctrines and the whole array of life sciences. Classical Christology is central in the entire web of orthodox Christian doctrine, while evolutionary genetics is now fundamental to all the sciences that study life. At relevant points, then, essential orthodox Christian doctrines and key findings of the biological sciences will come into play. Furthermore, the interaction of Christology and genetics we seek depends on how we understand the broader Christianity–science relationship. Of course, various ways of looking at the Christianity–science relationship have developed over the centuries since the birth of modern science.