Frontline
December  1999
Special Millennium Issue

Community and religious identity

The experience of the Christian ‘community’ in Kerala in the present millennium
is an interesting example of how vested interests create a ‘community’ out of a
perceived religious identity

Kesavan Veluthat

If one looked back from this cusp of the millennium and asked what the most important and far reaching change that Indian society went through during the last thousand years was, one of the unequivocal answers would be in relation to the formation of communities based on a perceived religious identity. These identities were forged only in recent times to serve the sinister purpose of different agencies. These agencies include organisations like the Church with an internal reach and strength, the colonial state, and democratic polity that replaced it.

It would be instructive to see the process through which this transformation came about so that we can guard ourselves against the forces of divisive politics making use of such identities for purposes other than what are thought to be related to the basis of those identities — religion. This note tries to see the way in which a Christian ‘community’ was contrived in Kerala from the sixteenth century onwards and how this communal identity got crystallised in the centuries that followed.

Christianity in Kerala is believed to be as old as the Christian era itself. Even if this belief is not accepted as historically supportable, there is evidence of its existence in the state from very early on. Traditions and legends embodied in folksongs and oral compositions, probably of a later date, speak of it.

Accordingly, St. Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, is believed to have brought the Gospel to the Kerala coast. He is said to have come by sea and first landed at Kodungallur on the Kerala coast in AD 52. He converted a few Brahmins there and established the churches of Palayur, Kollam and a few other places. The earliest that we hear about this, however, is not before the third century.

There are a few records, both from the East and the West, which refer to the existence of Christians in India in ancient times. These ancient Christians of Kerala are described by names such as ‘Syrian Christians’ or ‘St. Thomas Christians’. When the Portuguese came to the Indian coast "in search of spices and Christians", they had indeed heard a few versions of the traditions of St. Thomas Christians being here.

Though the historicity of the Indian mission of St. Thomas is not accepted by all accounts, many historians hold the possibility of one or even more apostles having preached the Gospel in India. It is a fact that there were ancient trade routes connecting West Asia and the East, routes frequented by

merchants from West Asia at the turn of the Christian era. The land routes reached parts of north India, while the sea routes touched the coasts of Kerala and other parts of the peninsula.

Making use of a tradition contained in the Acts of Judas Thomas, Christian stalwarts make this possibility of the apostle’s arrival a probability. The traditions have struck deep roots, with the living ethnographic testimony of a ‘community’ of St. Thomas Christians and the presence of what is thought to be a burial place, the St. Thomas Mount in the vicinity of Mylapore.

In any case, the existence of Christians and a church of Christianity in Kerala are in evidence from the sixth century. The Christians Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, the Byzantine monk, published in 535 AD states: Even in the island of Taprobane in inner India where the Indian sea is, there is a church of Christians with clergy and a congregation of believers, though I know not if there be no Christians further in that direction. And such also is the case in the land called Male, where the pepper grows.

‘Male, the pepper country’, of the author of Christian Topography is evidently Malabar, which was known widely outside India as the pepper country. We do not know what kind of church it was. In any case, a structural church is archaeologically unlikely in Kerala even in the 6th century. Some Christians must have been there, not as an identifiable religious group, but as something of a clan that alone could have been the available source of cultural identity.

Relations between the Christians of India and Persia must have existed from the very early centuries. The tradition of the St. Thomas Christians is full of stories regarding these relations. Two of them speak of how the Christians converted by St. Thomas came into contact with the Christian church of Persia, one in relation to the fourth century and the other, ninth or tenth century. The first is about the arrival of a group of East-Syrian Christians in the company of a leader, Knail Thomman (Thomas of Cana), and the second, about the arrival of another led by Mar Sapor and Mar Prot (eight to tenth centuries).

Knail Thomman appears variously as a merchant, traveller and pilgrim. He and the East–Syrian Christians, who came with him, are said to have played a key role in the organisation and building up of the church and community of Kodumgallur. He is said to have transformed Kodungallur, which was previously a wasteland, into a Christian city. It is significant that tradition puts the arrival of Persian Christians in the fourth century, while a state of anti–Christian division among the St. Thomas Christians of Kerala is attributed to the arrival of Thomas Cana and his men.

This association seems to show that the nazranis or the native Christians were, from the very beginning, acting as a cultural Diaspora of the Syrian merchants who visited Kerala from very early times for her rarities and other precious goods. It was beneficial to the Kerala Christians to a limited extent, especially since it exposed this small group to the larger Christian world. But many see this relationship as also compromising their independence and local character.

It led to tighter controls by the Church of Persia over the Kerala Christians. This affected the spontaneous growth of a genuine Indian Church adversely, with its Indian Christian patterns of thought, worship, life style etc. Not only did the church leaders come from Persia, but the Kerala Christians were also forced to borrow Persian thought forms and formulae of faith, worship patterns, laws, church customs and practices.

It meant that the Kerala Christians had to live in two worlds at the same time: the geographical, political and social–cultural environment of Kerala, on the one hand, and the ecclesiastical world of Persia, on the other. This was somewhat artificial and unnatural. It is this kind of life that some writers have characterised as ‘Hindu (Indian) in culture, Christian in religion and Syro–Oriental in worship’.

The legends and oral traditions of these Christians lay claim to the conversion of members of the ‘high caste’, particularly Nambudiri Brahmins, into Christianity. This shows the worldview of a jati society. By AD 849, the date of the Syrian Christian copper plates, the Christians of Kerala had already become an inseparable part of the local population. The grant shows that the Christians had mingled with local occupational groups like carpenters, blacksmiths, washer–men, oil–mongers, toddy tappers etc.

They had even adopted local cultural idioms in religious doctrines and practices. The ‘deity’ consecrated in the Tarisappalli, the church of Tarsa at Kollam, was referred to as tevar (Skt. deva). An important offering to the tevar was the sacred oil lamp as in the case of the Brahminical temples in Kerala. The incorporation of the local idioms in Christian religious ideas and practices shows how the local mainstream culture had influenced them.

This incorporation was so comprehensive that records of the sixteenth century present the Christians of Kerala as having all features of the local people in dress, worship, social practices and other details. They were known as nazaranis, following the ‘way and worship patterns of St. Thomas’. The leader of the former was the Archdeacon who was the jatikku kartavyan (‘head of the caste’). He acted in consultation with the representatives of different churches, each of which was looked after by a yogam (‘assembly’), in the fashion of the Brahminical temples.

The priests in the churches were trained in select parishes under an elderly scholar called malpan in the typical gurukula style. In the mater of dress, they turned out "like Nairs". It is interesting that the Christians followed the rules of caste rather rigorously including the practice of untouchability. They celebrated Malayali festivals like Onam in a big way. They consulted astrologers and would not mind resorting to black magic and witchcraft in cases of necessity. They also used to worship in the Brahminical temples.

The identification with jati society was complete. The word ‘Hindu’ is not used at all; there is an occasional reference to ‘Malayalar’ to distinguish the local population from the Muslims, Christians and Jews.

It is such a Malayali Christian society that the Portuguese sought to make part of the larger Roman Catholic Church in 1599. The leadership was of the Bishop of Goa, Dom Menezes. This was obviously an attempt to gain hegemony over the native population. In any case, ruthless decisions were imposed in what was called the Synod of Diamper (Udayamperur). All that distinguished the Christians of Kerala was erased; and they were henceforth forbidden "to acknowledge the Patriarch of Babylon or any other Supreme Pastor, but the Pope of Rome, upon pain of excommunication".

This distorted the self–perception of the St. Thomas Christians; it also separated them from the rest of the local population. There was the feeling among a minority of the Christians that they were becoming victims of the missionaries who were agents of the Portuguese colonial state. There were resistance movements here and there. The Oath of Coonen Cross at Mattanchery (1653) is one of the more spectacular expressions of such resistance.

A section of the Christians went back to the ‘way and worship patterns of St. Thomas’ from the newly imposed ‘Law of St. Peter’. But the Portuguese did succeed in the creation of a separate Christian ‘community’. The arrival of the British colonial state and the missionaries with it gave this identity further strength. The political economy of indirect rule in Travancore and Cochin cemented this in a big way. The travails of the Christian community in Travancore under Dewan Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar reinforced this sense of community and solidarity further.

In the post–Independence period, when the competitive polity of democratic government demanded numbers in electoral politics, the communal identity was used in a consummate way. Religion served secular purposes in a most authentic way. In fact, the experience of the Christian ‘community’ in Kerala in the present millennium offers a case study in community formation, which is perhaps one of the major phenomena of the millennium on its way out.

(The writer is a Reader of History in Mangalore University).


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