Migration and the consequent expansion of agriculture to previously untamed areas has been one of the defining features of Kerala's economic modernity. Entangled in the intertwined history of colonialism, capital and native agency, mobilizing a new discourse of development that broke radically with the existing notions of land management, it not only led to the conversion of vast areas of forests, hills and “wastelands” into arable land and the emergence of capitalist agriculture, but also provided the local Syrian Christian community with a new identity as oriented towards progress and development. As purogamana karshakar (forward-looking peasants) and productive citizens committed to national development, the community claimed a particular affinity to and wielded an authority over Kerala's modernity. In this chapter I will consider the migration of Syrian Christian peasants from the cultivated plains of rural Travancore to the pristine and sparsely inhabited mountain forests of Malabar. Starting in the early decades of the twentieth century and continuing well into the 1960s, this migration picked up in the 1940s. Over more than forty years, tens of thousands of Christian migrants colonized huge tracts of fallow land, turning hills and forests into highly profitable farms and plantations. I will argue that the Syrian Christian Church was directly involved in this modernist enterprise of turning “empty” environments into sites of human activity, production and development. It did so not only by offering a theological rationale for land reclamation and its hegemonic developmentalist ideology, but also by leading the political struggle of the laity to protect its arduously won material world in Malabar from state interventions. During the expansive colonization of a space described as “lost” and largely heathen by its leadership, the Church provided a particular orientation towards modern entrepreneurship and capital accumulation by expounding and sanctifying a new conduit for social and spatial mobility, with land and hard work at its heart. I will also suggest that in this engagement with the modern economic sphere, the Church and its narratives did not stick to any single line of reasoning. It straddled theological, nationalist, economic, ethical and humanitarian rationalities with ease and careful calibration, moving freely between the spiritual and the material with claims of morality and citizenship and building bridges with “anti-religious” communist ideology.

Introduction

Globalization, as it is unfolding, sounds to be inherently ambivalent. The new regime of porosity of borders as represented by what is referred to as globalization is considered to be inversely related to human mobility across national borders. The modern political system as represented by mutually exclusive nation-states arguably retained considerable amount of fluidity towards ‘outsiders’ at least till 1970s, as the considerable unauthorized flows of people across the globe indicates. The advent of globalization, on the other hand, opened formal spaces for new and varied forms of integration, particularly through financial flows and trade, and was run down heavily with informal ways of human flows across nations. The ‘de-bordering’ of the developed world in particular has been coincided by a vigorous process of ‘re-bordering’, or the denationalizing of economic space alongside the renationalizing of politics as Sassen puts it, against transnational migrations puncturing the notion of ‘world in motion’ associated with globalization (Aas, 2007; Giorgi, 2010; Pickering and Weber, 2006; Sassen, 1996). The assorted forms and practices encompassing globalization while posing challenges to the very nation-state system, simultaneously allow the nation-states to tighten their grip over the borders due to pressures from within, based on ahistorical myths of homogenous and autonomous societies and fear psychosis of global terrorism. From the perspective of the sending countries with demographic dividend, emigrations are no more treated as a drain of brain and labour, but as a mechanism not only of gaining resources and skills but also facilitating high human development in the country of origin in the final analysis. The advocates of true liberalism in the question of migrations consider the ability to decide where to live as a key element of human freedom in an unequal world (UNDP, 2009). The poorest regions of the world would need more globalization rather than less as a levelling strategy (Bhagwati, 2004). The barriers to migration, particularly of those people with low skills, from this perspective considerably limit human choices and chances of even distribution of resources, but on the other hand contribute to a parallel economy of migration wherein informalities abound with enormous risk and severe tribulations.