Kerala’s Silver Tsunami & RBI’s Call for Urgent Reforms
Elderly Population Hits 19% | Ageing Society
#literarygerontology #ageing (UK) #aging (US) #socialgerontology
#newspaperinlearning #silvertsunami #biopolitics
#silverdividend #declineNarratives
This feature article in today’s The New Indian Express, Chennai Edition, is a shocker of sorts, throwing light on how the aged are viewed from a biopolitical lens.
The term “Silver Tsunami” is a metaphorical term used to describe the rapid ageing of the global population, and rising life expectancies.
It refers to the unprecedented increase in the percentage of older adults (usually 65+) in the population. In economic and policy discourse, it is often used to predict a crisis - the collapse of pension systems, the overspend in healthcare infrastructure, and a labour shortage!
Kerala has long been celebrated for its high social indicators.
However, a new report from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) highlights the economic cost of those demographic successes. With nearly a fifth of the state’s population now over the age of 60, Kerala is officially classified as an “ageing” society, necessitating urgent structural changes to avoid a fiscal crisis.
According to the RBI report titled “State Finances: A Study of Budgets of 2025-26,” Kerala is ageing faster than the rest of the country.
The RBI defines a state as “ageing” if the 60+ population share exceeds 15%. Kerala is well past this marker.
And this trend is accelerating. The elderly population is projected to rise to 20.9% by 2031 and 22.8% by 2036.
Simultaneously, the demand for social support for the elderly is skyrocketing. An older population requires significantly more spending on pensions and geriatric healthcare.
One of the most alarming statistics in the report is the burden of pensions on state coffers. In “ageing states” like Kerala, pensions consume nearly 30% of total social sector spending. Compare this to “youthful states” (where the elderly are <10%), where pensions take up only about 18%, says the report.
The RBI warns that as life expectancy rises, pension liabilities could escalate rapidly. This spending acts as an impediment to the government’s ability to invest in other crucial areas like education and infrastructure.
So what does this news item have to do with Literary Gerontology?
Well, our lives are living texts! In fact, we are curating our lives as texts every second of our lives, by the ideologies we live by, the choices we make, and the cultural practices we subscribe to!
That means all major theoretical frameworks can be applied to all facets of our lives – when they are looked upon as ‘texts’. One reason why Derrida famously said, There is no outside-text (Il n'y a pas de hors-texte).
So now, let’s try and connect this ‘dry’ fiscal report from the RBI to Literary Gerontology (the study of ageing in literature) which I’m sure would make an amazing ‘literary bridge’ of sorts.
Well, the RBI report relies heavily on metaphors of weight, strain, burden, squeeze, liability, and mounting pressure.
It asks, what does it feel like to be called a “fiscal liability”?, thus reinforcing the ‘Narrative of Decline’, a common literary trope where ageing is seen solely as a loss of value and utility.
These texts – also called Narratives of Ageing, or Decline Narratives, often explore the “social death” that precedes biological death - when people stop treating the decline-sufferer as a person and start treating them as an object!
Biopolitics, a term coined by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, refers to the modern political shift where state power centres on managing, optimising, and controlling the biological life of populations.
In his book titled, The Birth of Biopolitics, (a collection of his lecture series from 1978–1979) Foucault dives into the history of neoliberalism. Like his earlier texts on prisons and sexuality, this text examines how “the market” became the dominant site of truth for the state, and how the individual was reimagined not as a worker or citizen, but as an “entrepreneur of the self.”
Shocking, ain’t it?
And here are some of
the most insightful quotes and concepts from these lectures.
“Homo Εconomicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself... being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”
“The individual’s life must be a permanent and multiple enterprise.”
It predicts the modern “gig economy” and “hustle culture,” where we view our skills, health, and personality as assets to be managed and invested in.
Quite interestingly, and alarmingly at that, Foucault notes a shift in the 18th century where the market became a place of veridiction (truth). The government could no longer just say “this is the price”; the market told the government what the truth (price) was.
Hence Foucault writes –
“Inasmuch as prices are determined in accordance with the natural mechanisms of the market they constitute a standard of truth which enables us to discern which governmental practices are correct and which are erroneous.”
Biopolitics hence becomes a very resourceful theoretical framework for analysing Literary Gerontology.
In a nutshell, then, if Literary Gerontology is the study of stories about ageing, Biopolitics is the study of how power manages biological life. Hence, a biopolitical study within the broad field of literary gerontology would help reveal how literature critiques the way society controls, categorises, and “processes” the ageing body.
In this connect, Foucault discusses extensively on the concept of the ‘Medical Gaze’ and the ‘Ageing Body’. He argues that modern power doesn’t just punish; it observes and regulates.
Literary Gerontology has extensively appropriated and applied Foucault’s concept to the ageing body. Thus, the ageing character often moves from being a “subject” (a person with a story) to an “object” of the medical gaze (a patient with a chart).
For example, Philip Roth’s Everyman is a seminal text that analyses the biological realities of ageing. The protagonist’s life is narrated not through his achievements, but through his medical history (surgeries, stents, cardiac arrests). The body is portrayed as a traitor, and the narrative of self becomes identical to the narrative of the dying body.
Current narratives in mainstream literature, often foreground the concept of “Successful Ageing” - the notion that if you exercise, stay social, and remain “productive,” you can beat the decline.
However, Roth explicitly rejects this. While many novels treat ageing as a backdrop for wisdom or legacy, Roth strips away these consolations, focusing instead on the biological and existential erosion of the self.
Secondly, the RBI report warns of a resource war! - money spent on pensions cannot be spent on education for the young. This is the classic conflict – the conflict between the young and the old – we find in literature. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, the transfer of power and resources from the old to the young leads to chaos and abandonment.
Literary Gerontology argues that ageing is also a cultural and biographical event, not just a biological failure.
Hence, while the RBI is correct fiscally, a society that only views ageing through a medical/fiscal lens tends to risk erasing the wisdom and cultural memory that the elderly hold - a theme often explored in post-colonial literature where the elders are the keepers of history.
In the same vein, then, even the expression ‘Silver Tsunami’ is viewed upon as a highly controversial and loaded term in Age Studies, and it is often critiqued for being inherently ageist (like the term ‘sexist’) and hence considered dehumanising. Literary gerontology seeks to critique this explicit dehumanisation of the elderly.
The word “Silver” being a metonym for grey hair, reducing a diverse population to a single physical trait associated with decline, framing them not as citizens or human beings, but rather as a Tsunami-like destructive, unstoppable flood or natural disaster that threatens to wipe out the “shore” of civilised (younger) society.
Due to the biased and apocalyptic nature of the language, scholars in the field of Age Studies like Margaret Morganroth Gullette have come up with alternative metaphors like ‘The Silver Dividend’, whereby the ageing population is viewed as a resource of experience!
To conclude, then,
while the RBI’s report deals in liabilities and deficits, Literary Gerontology reminds us that human lives cannot be fully calculated on a balance sheet.
The challenge, therefore, is not just fiscal, but narrative. We must reject the story of the elderly as a “crisis” to be managed and instead embrace the “Silver Dividend” - viewing this demographic shift not as a flood to be dammed, but as a reservoir of cultural memory and lived experience, to be carefully stored, preserved, and utilised.
If our lives are indeed texts, as Derrida suggests, then society must learn to read the final chapters not as a decline, but as a culmination. The state may see a pension as a burden; but as literary beings, literature demands that we see a person, not a burden!
Thus, by connecting RBI’s fiscal report to Literary Gerontology it can be reasonably argued that, there is an urgent need for a new lexicon – a syncretic lexicon of sorts - one that moves beyond the binary of “asset” versus “liability.”
In this regard, it is also imperative on our part to resist the “Narrative of Decline.”
The elderly are not a tsunami crashing against our shores; they are the anchors of our history, and how we treat them will ultimately write the ‘text’ of our own future.
PS: You may also want to read our previous post based on a report in The New Indian Express dated 25 October 2023, on the subject, “Kerala faces the threat of turning into a huge old-age home”, on our past blogpost HERE.
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