Today’s diverse religions manifest a common thread: none of them are tied to economic governance. Taxes, salaries, wages, rents, and other forms of income and expense are absolutely removed from any religious beliefs, even in societies that are governed by religious leaders according to religious tenets.¹ Religion is relevant only in the social context, not in the economic one. This state of affairs seems fairly normal now, but there was a time in history when religious thought seeped into every aspect of human endeavor, including the economy.
Benjamin Friedman, in his book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, says that this religiously influenced economy was driven in the “top-down” direction by governments, and it changed fundamentally in European circles around 1776 with the publication and widespread social acceptance of Adam Smith’s capitalistic principles in The Wealth of Nations.² A corollary of this evolution is that by the early decades of the 1900’s, more than a century after The Wealth of Nations was published, almost all nations colonized by Europeans considered religion separately from the economy.
This separation enveloped all thought, bleeding even into such a removed endeavor as historical analysis. For instance, historians analyzed ancient temples as they did the churches of their present, removing them from the economy entirely, coloring their analysis with their own worldview. Thus, Kerala’s temples were analyzed as abodes of gods, and their economic role as land-owning institutions akin to the king was relegated as an anomaly of an overly religious society.³ In other words, the historians first separated religion from economy, seeing the temples as mere vehicles of religion in a social context, then reinserted their own worldview into the analysis, seeing religion and the state as opposing entities vying for the citizen’s purse in the economic context.
But was it really so? Land in ancient Kerala was divided into three independent portions: one for the king, one for the nobles, and one for the temples.⁴ Ownership of land was absolute; property taxes as we know them today did not exist.⁵ Thus, the temples did not pay land taxes to the royal exchequer.
Land was donated to a temple by the king and/or the nobles when it was first built.⁶ Additional land was donated for various specific purposes as and when need arose.⁷ The temple was managed by a board.⁸ Temple employees were paid salaries in return for their services.⁹ If this sounds like a modern-day corporation run by a corporate board, with capital infusions at the outset and periodically as needed, and salaried employees working for the corporation, it was. Indeed, Kerala’s temples were like today’s Netflix™ or Hulu™ with something more — they served up entertainment that had as its objects, social harmony and individual well-being.
To build and run such a temple along with the lands that it owned required many people: artisans, masons, carpenters, gardeners, cleaners, dancers, actors, priests, animal herders, farmers, jewelers; indeed, almost everyone in the community had a role to play in transacting the temple’s business. Seen in this light, the temple was the lynchpin of the agrarian community, giving gainful employment to its non-farming members, redistributing the wealth of the temple lands among all its people, and serving as the sponsor of arts and crafts in the community. Because no taxes were paid to the royal exchequer, each temple was a self-contained closed economic unit, all its wealth retained among its members, and surplus used for purchasing goods from external traders for its own benefit. It was like a modern-day nonprofit corporation, its owners being the community members themselves.
Temple work was a family affair; roles and responsibilities were given to families rather than to individuals.¹⁰ The work was also hereditary; until a family ran out of heirs, they had the right to the work and to the salary it commanded.¹¹ Such a system was applied comprehensively to any type of work, from guarding the temple to the highest priestly duties. Thus, all workers were entitled to work and to its proceeds; they could not be laid off; their work could not be outsourced to another without just cause.¹² The board could not enrich themselves with the temple proceeds — they were duty bound to redistribute the proceeds among the community members.¹³
If this type of system sounds suspiciously like Communism, it explains why Communism gained such a stronghold in Kerala. Long before Karl Marx developed his theory of common ownership, “Communist” principles were the backbone of Kerala’s ancient economy, the fabric of its social structure, implemented through its most revered religious institutions. But, Kerala was not the birthplace of this economy. The earliest evidence for this type of system dates back to 2500 BCE, on the shores of the Nile River, in pharaonic Egypt.¹⁴ Kerala’s economy was merely a replica of that ancient system, copied down to its most minute details, including the right of the people to strike for better working conditions.¹⁵
In very broad brushstrokes, one can say that the beginning of the end of Kerala’s ancient economy was Tipu Sultan’s conquest and imposition of his tax system in 1788 CE, which siphoned money out of this closed economy into his coffers.¹⁶ This bleeding continued under British colonial rule. Compounded with closing of other sources of income, such as foreign trade, Kerala’s economy fell into dire poverty by the time India became independent of colonial rule in 1947 CE. This pattern can be seen in ancient Egypt’s system too, which collapsed after colonial rule by the Romans starting around 20 BCE.¹⁷
While modern Communism tries to distance itself from modern religious and corporate structures, in ancient Kerala, as in ancient Egypt, the principles of all these institutions were tied together into one economic system. That such a system worked for more than two thousand years in Egypt, and perhaps longer in Kerala, is testament to its strength and resilience. It relied on social harmony, reinvestment in the community, and balance of the world order for its survival. When the balance broke through colonization, the system collapsed.
Modern Kerala is the one place in India where T-shirts with Che Guevara’s face still sell and the hammer and sickle on the red flag can even now assemble a crowd to launch a revolution. This attraction to Communism is another indication of Kerala’s incredibly strong ties to its ancient cultural roots. These ties, which have extraordinarily withstood the ravages of time, manifest as a strange adherence to ancient anachronisms in the most unexpected ways. Thus in Kerala, extraordinarily, and perhaps ironically, the temple and the modern Communist ideology that derides it, may actually be twins born of the same historical mother.
Notes
[1] For example, Iranian nationals, ruled by a strict Islamic regime, are subject to income taxation in almost the same way as nationals of the United States, which separates church and state entirely.
[2] Benjamin Friedman, 2021, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 4 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Friendman writes, “In time, following the publication of Smith’s pivotal contribution, centuries of top-down direction of economic activity gave way to more individually propelled, competitive enterprise. Where it did not — the Soviet Union, for example, or Maoist China — those in power either altered course or were swept away. The few remaining holdouts, like Cuba and North Korea, stand as symbols of human tragedies that did not have to be.”
[3] See, for example, Professor M.G.S. Narayanan’s analysis of temples in Narayanan, M.G.S., 1987, “The God-Presidents of Agrarian Corporations in Ancient Kerala,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 48: 125–35. He claims that the “temple structures and temple rituals with the accompaniment of the Bhakti movement reflected in festivals, art and literature, played an important part in transferring productive land from the chiefs, merchants, and officials into the custody of the Brahmin temple trustees.”
[4] Govindan Nambiar, 1899, A Handbook of Malabar Law and Usage, v (Madras, Gopaul Naidu & Co.); Anantha Iyer, 1912, The Tribes and Castes of Cochin, repr. 1981, 2:277 (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications).
[5] Achyuta Menon, 1911, The Cochin State Manual, 303 (Ernakulam: Cochin Government Press). Even when land revenue taxes came to be instituted, the temples were exempt from paying any taxes to the state. In the kingdom of Travancore, the government created a Land Revenue Department only in 1811; presumably, no land revenue as it is known today was collected prior to that year.
[6] Narayanan, “The God-Presidents,” 128. Travancore Archeological Series, various volumes and pages. Many inscriptions on stone and copper dating to 1000 CE attest to the donations of land to the temples by various nobles.
[7] For example, one inscription notes that certain land was donated to fund a lamp in the temple; another inscription notes land donated for temple gardens; and so on. See Travancore Archeological Series, various volumes and pages.
[8] N. P. Unni, 2006, Tantra Literature of Kerala, 440 (Delhi: New Bharatiya Book Corp.); M. T. Narayanan, 2003, Agrarian Relations in Late Medieval Malabar, 40 (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre); Cudalore Ramachandra Aiyar, 1883, A Manual of Malabar Law: As Administered by the Courts, 59 (Madras: Vest & Co.)
[9] Iyer, Tribes and Castes, 2:141–42. The temple wages were paid in a stated allowance of paddy and other necessities of life from temple rations.
[10] Aiyar, Malabar Law, 59–60.
[11] See, for example, Krishnakumar v. Kochi Devaswom, Kerala High Court (Mar. 13, 2012), about which I have written in “The Karaima Litigation.” In this case, the Kerala High Court held income associated with a particular temple work was vested in the family from time immemorial and could not be arbitrarily reassigned.
[12] See Krishnakumar v. Kochi Devaswom.
[13] Various punishments were meted out to board members who enriched themselves thus. Excommunication was the strongest, as evidenced by inscriptions called kaccham കച്ചം in various temples. The board members could not exploit the workers for their own benefit either. See Travancore Archeological Series, various volumes and pages; Unni, Tantra Literature, 441; Narayanan, “The God-Presidents,” 130.
[14] See, for example, Flinders Petrie, 1923, Social Life in Ancient Egypt, 44 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.); Ben Haring, 2009. “Economy,” in UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, edited by Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: UCLA). In ancient Egypt, as in Kerala, the temples were closed economic units.
[15] The earliest known labor strike occurred in 1159 BCE in Egypt during the reign of Ramses III, when the tomb-builders went on strike complaining against the lack of compensation in food rations. See an overview of these strikes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes.
[16] Government of India Planning Commission, 2008, Kerala Development Report, 53 (New Delhi: Planning Commission) stating “During the Mysorean rule (1788–1792) … a system of land revenue was introduced for the first time in the history of the region”; see also Prakash, B.A. 1984. “Changes in Agrarian Structure and Land Tenures in Kerala: A Historical Review,” State and Society, vol. 5(1), republished by Thiruvanthapuram Economic Studies Society, 2017. Prakash writes that the British pursued a policy of maximizing land revenue and creating a feudal class as agents, leading to devolution of the traditional relations between landlord and tenant, depriving tenants of the rights and shares they had enjoyed previously.
[17] Egypt supplied most of Rome’s grains. Excess taxation and corruption, along with privatization of land, led to gradual transfer of Egypt’s wealth into Europe. See, https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Egypt/Roman-and-Byzantine-Egypt-30-bce-642-ce.
