Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are not states that fall under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s version of federalism as a “double-engine ki sarkar”. All three of them are culturally exceptional states within India’s federal structure. However, despite our constitutionally proclaimed federalism – judicially endorsed as its Basic Structure – India’s quasi-federal political process has enabled its Hindi-speaking majority to dominate politics, simply by the weight of their numbers.Well before the birth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee had said something remarkable about the Hindi-speaking belt, which economists once labelled as BIMARU for its poor development indices, and where Prime Minister Modi’s electoral constituency now falls. He had said: “Uttar Pradesh, that is India, that is Bharat.”The cultural terrain of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, by contrast, could not be more different. This has manifested in diverse fields, including their political and ideological differences with the states and parties in the central Indian region.Kerala, for example, was the site of the origin of Adi Shankaracharya’s long padayatra along the length and breadth of India to establish Hindu temples in Kedarnath, Badrinath and Pashupatinath, now in Nepal. This was probably a Hindu revival or assertion against the Asoka-inspired Buddhism after the Kalinga War.Geographically located on the maritime route of Arab merchants across the Arabian Sea, Kerala and its neighborhood have received migrants of diverse religions and ethnicity. Muslims, Christians and Jews have lived together with Hindus for centuries in the region, with a negligible record of social conflicts.The religious colour given to the Moplah Rebellion of the 20th century was a colonial interpretation forced upon what was in reality a peasant revolt. In fact, the diverse social groups of the region have culturally enriched each other through their interactions. The orthodox Namboodri Brahmins of the region, who produced India’s first elected communist chief minister and its distinctive matriarchal lineage system, have coexisted for centuries with other Hindu communities.Kerala also has an autonomous Syrian Christian Church affiliated to the Vatican with rights to vote during the election of the Pope. Along with neighbouring Goa and Puducherry, it was along the route of the Catholic missionary process during the colonial era. It remains among the main recruitment centres for Catholic priests and nuns, which has been another important source of cross-cultural interaction. Along with Christianity and western medicine, Kerala is a major centre of Ayurveda and Yoga.The state has the highest level of literacy in India, including female literacy, and is the main source of female medical nurses in the country and abroad. With high literacy level and low industrialisation, leading to population pressure on rubber and cashew plantations, the state also has a high level of unemployment – the trigger for migration. Its present relative prosperity is largely as a “migrant economy” through remittances from the Gulf region.Politically, Kerala was the first to elect a non-Congress communist-led government in the second General Election (1957) that was controversially dismissed in 1958. Since then, the role of governors, whether as a “constitutional link” between the two tiers of democracy, or as a central political agent to facilitate a double-engine sarkar, still remains controversial. The BJP, despite its electoral juggernaut, is unlikely to break the electoral record of the state alternating between the Left and the Congress party.Neighboring Tamil Nadu, flanked by Tamil-speaking and French colonial influenced Puducherry, is another maritime state with a similar record of asymmetrical electoral trajectory with New Delhi. Its source of cultural exceptionalism is rooted primarily in the antiquity of its tradition: classical Tamil is older than Sanskrit, the root of Hindi and most other North Indian languages. This boosts Tamilian cultural superiority over Hindi-speaking North India. Its cross-cultural interactions that reinforce Tamil pride and politics, are multiple.Firstly, the large Tamil-speaking diaspora, originally of indentured plantation labour of the colonial era, are spread across Southeast Asia, from Jaffna and northern Sri Lanka to Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar and Indonesia.Now prosperous, some of them have also flourished politically in their adopted countries. A section of them played an important role in India’s freedom struggle as part of Netaji Subhash’s Azad Hind Fauj under Captain Lakshmi Sahgal.Also read: Netaji Stood for Unity Among All Indians, Something That the BJP Tries to HideThe other sources of cross-cultural interactions are the numerous specialised techno-local and industrial centres across Tamil Nadu and neighbouring cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Coimbatore etc. Global city Auroville, established by the Mother of the Aurobindo Ashram, with its highly motivated citizens spreading Sri Aurobindo’s message of the “ideal of human unity”, is no exception. It, too, reinforces the cultural exceptionalism of Tamil Nadu.Their cumulative impact on state politics has been historically significant. Firstly, the numerical minority of Hindu Brahmins, hopelessly divided between the Shaivites and the Vaishnavites, remain electorally marginalised. They are treated as an extension of ‘Aryan’ culture in Dravidian society, preoccupied with temple rituals and classical music (or Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi). Some non-Brahmins also are critical of the Hindu epics, like the Ramayana for deifying Lord Rama at the cost of Ravana of Sri Lanka.In this social milieu, the non-Brahmins, constituting the majority, are divided between the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the late Annadurai-led Anna-DMK, portraying their ubiquitous Dravidian identity to rule the roost.Hindi remains the dividing line between the parties from the north Indian plains and both state parties in Tamil Nadu, which are otherwise divided on local issues. No party from Delhi has managed to breach this line, except once, in the late sixties, when Indira Gandhi’s Congress, allied with the intermediate-caste Nadar community led by K. Kamaraj, briefly managed some leeway.This time, given the Hindutva component dominating the BJP’s ideology, along with its Hindi overtones, even the imaginative coalition forged with a film icon is unlikely to reverse the Dravidian political base.Another border state, West Bengal, is culturally distinctive, but with a different track record of political compatibility with the federal government. In the first two general elections, it was in sync (a double-engine sarkar) with the Jawaharlal Nehru government. Thereafter, they drifted apart, first under coalition of CPM-led Left parties and, since 2014, under the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC).In the phase of partition and communal violence, Bengal gave birth to the Jana Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha, but the combined vote share of the Hindu communal parties in Bengal was still negligible compared to the Muslim League. In the north Indian plains (including the Akali Dal in Punjab). Bengali Hindus, with no reason to be less religiously inclined than others personally, having paid the price of communal politics, may have opted out of it.After 2014, the Modi-led BJP in New Delhi and the Mamata-led TMC in West Bengal were elected to the two tiers of Indian democracy and continue to reinforce their own electoral power bases, while their constituencies drift further apart. Their electoral strategies were comparable, though their long-term consequences were dissimilar. Just as Modi’s currency demonetisation would later undermine all political parties except his own, Mamata’s Singur agitation against the Tatas undermined the ruling CPM, which had invited the Tatas to Singur, thus creating a political vacuum in Bengal to its own advantage.But while the Indian economy recovered after a brief setback to reinforce BJP, Bengal’s de-industrialisation has continued unabated, adding to the problems of law and order, unemployment and worker migration, along with cross-border infiltration within the turbulent neighborhood. All this and more has happened within a political vacuum and weakened Mamata. This diversion between the response to demonetisation and to the TMC needs some explanation, as it is a result of the different cross-cultural influences shaping Bengal’s cultural modernisation (influencing its politics) compared with the central Indian region.Cultural and historical icons still live and breathe in West Bengal politics and society. (A protest in December 2025 in which Congress members dressed as Ram Mohun Roy.) Photo: PTI.One factor is the importance of Protestant Christianity as a component of the colonial capitalism of the East India Company that had its headquarters in Bengal. This is different from the dominance of the orthodox Roman Catholic missionaries in the southern states. After the Battle of Plassey (1757), which established colonial rule through Bengal to India, Durga Puja became a community festival, emerging from the domestic precincts of Hindu landlords. It has now become a cultural icon of Bengal, recognised by UNESCO. Yet it is distinct from the worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, in the rest of India, during Diwali.The other Bengali goddess of considerable importance is Saraswati, the goddess of learning, possibly reflecting the nature of social aspirations in Bengal, different from other Indian states.No less important for Bengal has been the colonial Permanent Settlement Act (1793) and its complementary “sunset laws”. Together, they incubated, first, a new generation of Bengali Hindu Zamindars (the Bhadralok), who were yet insecure enough to accept colonial protection. As the new beneficiaries belong to the Hindu elite castes, it weakened the caste prejudices among them.Besides, the Brahmo Samaj, critical of Brahmanical oppression and orthodoxy, also attracted the same elite castes, making caste prejudice in Bengali society and politics almost inconspicuous – unlike most other parts of India. The role of figures like Ram Mohan Roy, I.C. Vidyasagar and the Tagore family are all too well known in this regard.Also read: 19th Century’s Hindu Nationalism Was Flawed But Had Purpose. Now, We Have Only HateLess-well-known is the role of English missionary William Carey. Since he supported the Brahmo Samaj-led demand against sati and child marriage, the Hindu orthodoxy, accused him of “foreign interference” against local custom. The colonial administrators legally banned these practices and encouraged Carey to shift to neighboring Serampore, a Dutch enclave beyond British jurisdiction.The importance of Serampore and Carey remain understated in the cross-cultural evolution of Bengal. Carey travelled regularly to teach colonial civil servants at Fort William College. He also established the English medium Serampore College about 40 years before Calcutta University, at the same time as Presidency College (now a university). He also helped establish among the earliest printing presses in Bengal and the prominent newspaper, the Friend of India, later named the Statesman, emerging after a merger.The press published copies of the Holy Bible in Southeast Asian and Indian languages. The college degree in Theology was the basis of recruitment for church appointments across Asia, yet another source of Bengal’s cross-cultural influences, along with the Royal Asiatic Society and the Imperial Library (later the National Library), all located in Calcutta.Institutions such as the Ramakrishna Mission founded by Swami Vivekananda, Tagore’s Visva-Bharati and the intellectual traditions associated with Sri Aurobindo represent a strand of Indian nationalism rooted in catholicity and cosmopolitanism. These institutions emphasise cross-cultural exchange and spiritual universalism, central to Bengal’s cultural identity and to its political evolution. This reality does not only contrast with the BJP’s exclusivist Hindutva nationalism in isolation, but finds expression beyond Bengal, in places such as Puducherry’s Auroville, which, too, embodies spiritual universalism and human unity.The cross-cultural influences on Bengal are continuing. Film festivals, book and music fairs are recurrent affairs, and few other cities than Calcutta – now Kolkata – have as many places and metro or railway stations named after cultural icons, who also hold influence over politics. Many Bengalis consider it the cultural capital of India, unfortunately no longer along with being an important economic centre.Bengal’s politics is secular and nearly casteless, unlike most other states. Apart from law and order concerns and economic chaos, the state is in a political vacuum: Mamata Banerjee is no longer popular, nor does her party hold any popular base. But no substitute has yet been found. The BJP has no one Bengali enough to be accepted by Bhadralok electors, and nobody Hindutvavadi enough to be accepted by BJP ideologues!Infiltration, Vande Mataram, Vivekananda, Bankim and Subhash Bose remain the political and electoral issues for both BJP and TMC. If only either could claim for itself the issue of bringing Bose’s ashes from Japan to the Red Fort in Delhi…Aswini K. Ray was a professor at JNU, New Delhi.