Robin Jeffrey MEDIA AND MODERNITY Communications, Women, and the State in Indi a Two puzzles of modern India—one well known, the other overlooked—form the core of this book. For fifty years, the state of Kerala has been famed, first as a home of Communists, then as a perplexing ‘model of development’. But why Communists? And why development, especially in a place where the economy usually underperformed even lowly national averages? Part of an answer lies in the unusual place of women in Kerala and their changing role in the past 200 years. Another part lies in the other, often under-analyzed focus of this book: media and communication. Printing and publishing in Indian languages—and accompanying questions of literacy and language identity—present tantalizing puzzles. Since data were first collected in the 1950s, Kerala’s people have been India’s greatest newspaper consumers. Do literacy and newspapers mobilize people for political action or does politicization make people...