Poonam Sharma
Suppose the tale you grew up with for decades was half-baked? Suppose the peaceful backwaters of Kerala, which have been eulogized for literacy and liberal politics, concealed beneath their tranquil facade a rising ideological tempest? On June 30, at the Indian International Centre in New Delhi, a book was released that took courage to provide some answers — The Untold Kerala Story.
Spurred by the provocative but highly debated movie The Kerala Story, this new book probes further, not merely into the personal stories of radicalization, but into the cultural decay, ideological manipulation, and strategic silence that made such stories possible in the first place. The event was not merely a book launch — it was a cultural awakening.
The Stage is Set: Voices That Broke the Silence
The room buzzed with energy. The who’s who of the cultural-political landscape were present — Senior Advocate Monika Arora, film director Sudipto Sen, BJP MP and fiery orator Sudhanshu Trivedi, Delhi’s civic leader Rekha Gupta, producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah, and authors Ambika JK and G Sreedathan.
But it was Trivedi who lit the fire. He didn’t mince words. “What we’re witnessing in Kerala,” he declared, “is the result of a calibrated cultural assault—waged by market forces, Marxist ideology, and Macaulay’s ghost still haunting our education system.”
These forces, he warned, haven’t just influenced thought — they’ve reprogrammed identity.
Kerala: Paradise Lost or Reclaimed?
In order to realize where Kerala is at present, the book contends, you need to realize where it began. Trivedi transported the audience back to the myth of Parashurama — the warrior-sage who reclaimed Kerala from the sea. Whether myth or metaphor, it symbolizes a land born with holy purpose, abundant in tradition, discipline, and resilience.
Flash forward to the early 20th century, and Kerala was ahead of India in literacy. Travancore was already at a 47% literacy level before independence — a statistic that compared favorably with the rest of India. But everything changed in 1957 — the world’s first democratically elected Communist government came to power in Kerala.
What came afterward, the book says, was a gradual, near-invisible ideological shift. Marxist ideology combined with a Macaulayist contempt for tradition, and the result was a world in which indigenous heritage was ridiculed, and Western values were taken as gospel. What happened? Generations raised to view their own culture with distrust — and radical ideologies found their niche.
From Movie to Manuscript: The Real Story Begins
As The Kerala Story film garnered headlines, protests, and box office figures, The Untold Kerala Story aims to offer what the film could not — context, history, and intellectual support. The film, which showed young Hindu women tricked into conversion and recruitment by ISIS, was written off by some as fantasy, but the book contends that the seeds of such radicalization were no work of fiction — they are the bitter results of years of indoctrination.
It does not merely speak of missing women. It speaks of missing culture. Missing identity. A missing resistance.
This book is not about a single story. It is about the system that made possible many such stories to quietly flourish.
The Triple Attack: Market, Marx, and Macaulay
Three forces, in the authors’ view, have eviscerated Kerala’s cultural core:
Market-Driven Individualism: The commodification of all aspects of life, from school to love, reduced tradition to drudgery. Culture was a commodity. Roots were sacrificed for relevance.
Marxist Subversion: Disguised as social justice, the book asserts, Kerala’s Left parties propagated atheism, disintegration of identity, and a intolerance of anything ‘Hindu’. Political killings, ideological policing, and campus extremism went mainstream.
Macaulayist Education: Instituted under British rule and untouched after independence, this education system informed generations that Indian customs were backward, and Western frameworks alone were ‘modern’ or ‘rational’.
All of these together created a storm in a teacup. A storm that the book asserts was ready to be exploited by Islamist radical networks — targeting disaffected youth, broken families, and an ideologically bewildered society.
Cultural Crisis or Political Plot?
Is The Untold Kerala Story a wake-up call or a political pamphlet? Depends who you ask.
Supporters would describe the book as a must-read — the initial honest effort to address what they feel Kerala’s ruling class and media have attempted to cover up for decades. It reveals how politics, education, and entertainment came together to erase civilizational memory and substitute it with ideological confusion.
But critics disagree. They characterize it as a community polemic with academic clothing, aimed at a state with its secular reputation. The statistics used in the film’s notorious “32,000 converted girls” figure were never verified. Most people think this book just doubles down on fear-mongering with better vocabulary.
Still, there’s one thing that is certain: the book has ignited a national debate.
Why Now? The Timing Is Telling
The timing of the book’s release is important. As elections approach and arguments about national identity become heated, Kerala has become an emblamatic field — between modernity and tradition, between radicalism and faith, between memory and oblivion.
In a sense, The Untold Kerala Story is not necessarily about Kerala. It’s about India’s soul — who owns it, who defines it, and who guards it.
Whether you find its findings agreeable or not, the questions that it poses are significant:
Can pride in culture go hand in hand with contemporary government?
Has ideological conditioning become a substitute for critical thinking?
And above all — who decides to narrate our own stories?
A Mirror or a Weapon?
Is The Untold Kerala Story a mirror held in front of hard realities? Or is it a political polarizing sword hammered out from hard realities?
It’s maybe both. But in a nation where silence might be preferable to dissent, where cultural pride is either celebrated or reviled — this book has the courage to share a story that many suspected would never be shared.
And that alone is worth reading.
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