Just a quick response to point 1. Kerala's colonization cannot be compared to Cuba's. Kerala's govt was historically shaped largely by its autonomy from the colonial govt. The subregions of Travancore and Cochin were ruled by locals who were more socially responsive to their subjects. There are other particular factors: social and religious movements and the matrilineal and matrilocal society that contributed to better social indicators and women's position.
As others have pointed out, Kerala's equality is nothing to boast of but in India's terms it is much better off socially. But the driver of capitalist economic growth lies elsewhere. However, it is possible, as many belief, that better social (and income) conditions could translate to more economic growth -- compensating for the demand-constrained economy. anthony Addendum Jim C: 1) large numbers of Malayalees outmigrating (skills, cash, potential demand and savings lost) and when they return to retire or visit, usually put money into big houses in their respective villages but do not typically invest in local businesses, save at local banks or generate the structures of demand that might produce wider "spread effects" in terms of employment, income, tax and infrastructure effects; 2) University curricula often focus on more esoteric and less practical skills, knowledge and training. Some, if not many women students are in college to merely to decrease future dowry expenses along with both male and female students being trained as bureaucrats and functionaries who seek to leave the villages--and even Kerala or India--and not to return to them to work for progress and development in rural areas; 3) Foreign banks draining savings and accounts from rural areas and not reinvesting them locally but rather channeling these savings into urban areas and projects (inside and outside of Kerala) that add to the overall unbalanced, uneven and disarticulated distributions/structures of populations, wealth, incomes, investment, infrastructure development, centers of education, social amenities, employment and government spending; 4) rural poverty, asymmetric information and strong extended families limit labor mobility from areas of poverty to areas with greater opportunities for employment and higher incomes; 5) ongoing corruption eroding physical, human and social capital formation and causing popular malaise and outmigration; 6) extremely militant labor unions and political parties used by central government and outside/inside investors as a central reason/pretext for Kerala being considered a poor investment climate despite the skill/educational/literacy levels of the workforce; the concept of "altmaapeemannum" extremely strong in Kerala culture; 7) extremely uneven/unbalanced and disarticulated land tenure system in rural areas with remnants of fedualism alive and well in rural areas with large plantations grossly underutilized due to low/unequal incomes and insufficient mass demand and/or dispersed/unconsolidated small plots of land farmed by tenant farmers unable to afford or efficiently employ mechanized agriculture or efficient crop rotation schemes on small and dispersed plots of land; Jim C.
