Working Papers

This study focuses on the efforts of the most prominent development movement in the South Indian state of Keralaa??the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP)a??and its efforts to take forward the achievements of Keralaa??s unique development trajectory hinged on social justice and equity. The major objective of the paper is to dwell into the concepts of civil society to examine what it is and what is outside it and to see the scope and constraints of KSSP as a civil society organisation. One major question that we raise is whether the state and political society4 are overgrown in Kerala and hence crowd-out the civil society initiatives to the extent that it is difficult to function without the patronage of both. To examine this we take the case of a large and visible organisation like KSSP, which has a track record of more than 40 years. The inquiry in this paper is on the movementa??s relationship with the State and party-political realm, over-grown and important in the Kerala context. It closely examines the strategic shift of the organisation from the role of a social critic to collaborator in an attempt to scale-up its impact by mainstreaming certain micro models evolved over a period. Lately, the organisation was criticised as having co-opted within the mainstream left politics in Kerala. Our focus is on the case rather than in the amorphous debates on civil society. We take concepts from some pertinent earlier work as a background to the question raised and reflect on the conceptual understanding at the end. The idea is to bring in some clarity to this contested debate that will help the organisation to position itself better to face the emerging challenges in Kerala society.