Many Modernities: An Epistemic Shift in Kerala Studies

In 2008, at a time when ‘Kerala Modernity’ had become a kind of sacred slogan — invoked in policy reports, academic seminars, and everyday political debates — Prof. Jayasree offered a gentle but powerful disruption. She called it ‘Many Modernities.’

It wasn’t just the title of an international colloquium she organized at the University of Kerala. It was an epistemic intervention — a challenge to the self-congratulatory narratives of progress that often passed as truth.

For decades, ‘Kerala Modernity’ had been spoken of with pride, as a mirror reflecting reason, reform, literacy, and social equality. But mirrors can also blind us. Behind the gleam of this success story, other realities — those of caste, class, gender, and faith — had quietly slipped out of sight.

Prof. Jayasree’s idea cracked that mirror.
She invited us to look again — not at a modernity, not at 'multiple modernities' but at ‘many modernities’; not at one Kerala, but at many Keralas.

And that, perhaps, is where our story begins.

Kerala Modernity: The Myth of the One

‘Kerala Modernity.’
It’s a phrase that glides easily through television debates, policy papers, university seminars, and coffee-table conversations. Like a polished emblem, it signals reform, rationality, literacy, and progress. But in all the celebration, one must ask — what slips quietly through the cracks?

Words, after all, don’t just describe the world; they build it.
And ‘modernity’ is one such word — powerful, slippery, and anything but innocent.

Once, modernity arrived on our shores as a colonial promise — a universal ideal shaped by Europe’s own history of science, reason, and industrialization. It presented itself as destiny, not choice. The colonized world was invited — or rather, compelled — to walk the same path, to catch up with the West’s self-declared timeline of progress.

But thinkers from the Global South soon began to push back.
Partha Chatterjee, in "Our Modernity", asked a radical question: What if modernity was never Western to begin with? What if other societies had their own ways of being modern — rooted in different histories, epistemologies, and ethical frameworks?

This question cracked modernity open.
And what poured out were modernities — diverse, local, contested, alive.

Kerala Enters the Frame

When India’s many modernities began to be discussed, Kerala entered the conversation with confidence.
The term Kerala Modernity soon became shorthand for everything the state was proud of — mass literacy, social reform, gender awareness, secularism, and a deeply political citizenry. The Communist presence added to its allure, creating a global model admired by economists and humanists alike.

But here’s the catch: the model was too neat.

It told one story — a success story — about rational, reformist, progressive Kerala.
But whose Kerala was it speaking for?

Did it include the fisherwoman in Vizhinjam, the Adivasi farmer in Attappady, the Muslim girl in Malappuram, or the Dalit scholar in Ernakulam?
Unlikely.

Their experiences of modernity — if we even call them that — are textured, fragile, and sometimes at odds with the dominant narrative. Yet, for decades, the rhetoric of Kerala Modernity has flattened these differences into a single, glowing mirror of progress.

Many Modernities: A New Vocabulary

In 2008, a crucial intervention reframed this conversation.
Prof. G. S. Jayasree introduced the idea of 'Many Modernities' — not as an academic slogan, but as an epistemic shift. The concept emerged through an international colloquium jointly organized by the Centre for Women’s Studies (University of Kerala), Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology (La Trobe University, Australia), and Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

At its heart was a simple but transformative insight:

Modernity is not one. It is not even many versions of one — it is many worlds of thought and being.

While the idea of ‘Multiple Modernities’ (popularized by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt) assumes a shared ‘core’ of modernity with regional variations, 'Many Modernities' goes further.
It challenges that very core.

Where ‘multiple’ implies diversity within more or less a single framework, ‘many’ explodes the framework altogether.
It asks: Who defined modernity in the first place?
And can societies of the Global South — long positioned as ‘learners’ of modernity — reclaim the right to define it anew?

In this sense, 'Many Modernities' is not just about social variation; it is an epistemic act of resistance — a refusal to let the West monopolize the meaning of being modern.

Kerala’s Many Worlds

To understand 'Many Modernities' in Kerala, one must look beyond the obvious markers of development.
An Adivasi community’s relationship with time, nature, or governance is as modern — in its own way — as a technocrat’s digital existence.
A Dalit woman’s fight for dignity, a Muslim girl’s negotiation with faith and freedom, a Communist worker’s dream of equality — all these are modernities, diverse and lived.

Each is a story of survival and self-definition, a reimagining of what it means to belong in the present.

Rethinking the Story

Despite this plurality, the rhetoric of ‘Kerala Modernity’ as a singular, self-congratulatory success still echoes in our public discourse.
But language has consequences.
Every time we repeat ‘Kerala Modernity’ as if it were one thing, we risk turning our complex society into a caricature — flattening difference, muting dissent, and excluding the invisible.

Perhaps the time has come to shift our vocabulary —
from one modernity to many modernities;
from a single Kerala to many Keralas.

Because Kerala, like modernity itself, was never one thing.

It is a mosaic — fractured, diverse, dynamic.

And in that very diversity lies its modern beauty.