38 SOCIAL SCIENTIST may hold divergent views on the precise role of economic growth in human development, they would all, I think, subscribe to the rejection of this view. In other words, there is likely to be general agreement that growth which accompanies such a trajectory of human development is all to the good (though to what extent such growth is essential may be a matter of disagreement) while a rolling back of these achievements for the sake of 'obtaining higher growth* is absurd. A good deal of discussion has taken place on the question of the causes of the specificity of the Kerala experience. How did it come about that Kerala pursued a trajectory of economic advance so different from that of the rest of the country? And the answer has been sought in a number of specific features of Kerala's history, ranging from the relatively more 'enlightened* character of the Travancore ruling family to the long history of struggles unleashed by the powerful Communist movement in the region. While I do not wish to go into the relative weights of these explanations, and agree on the whole that the basic explanation for Kerala's economic trajectory has to be sought in the historical specificity of its internal development, I have a different point to make, namely that in all this discussion the enabling role of the 'external' conjuncture (relating both to the international and national levels) has scarcely figured. This to my mind is a methodological lacuna having serious implications of the following kind. One can easily slip into the belief that the state of the world at large or of India within it had nothing to do with the specific economic trajectory followed by Kerala. In such a case one would equally easily believe that the current policies of 'liberalisation' and 'structural adjustment' being pursued in the country, or more generally the rise to dominance of finance capital all over the world, manifested inter alia by IMF-dictatorship over much of the third world (and even the erstwhile second world), would have no adverse consequences for the Kerala model or the replication of the Kerala model elsewhere. This is no idle fear. A significant number of economists who write approvingly of the Kerala model are either entirely silent on the debate on liberalisation-cum-structural adjustment raging in the country today, or even view this debate somewhat distastefully as being altogether irrelevant to the main issues, a 'red herring' that distracts attention from the real questions. The purpose of my paper is to argue against this position. I submit that to view the Kerala model in isolation from its international context is myopic and misleading.