Michelle Sindha Thomas
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | MALABAR COAST 1-1100 AD
Even in India, we are a minority people.
The state of Kerala takes a tiny space on the Indian map, and the bouncy, bubbling, idiosyncratic language, incongruous tendency towards both Communism and Christianity, and coconut-heavy cuisine are exotic to the rest of the country, let alone the world. Christians make up less than two percent of the Indian population, yet account for 18 percent of the population of Kerala. Of that 18 percent, Jehovah’s Witnesses, our progenitors with their unique principles and belief system within (and often at odds with) Kerala culture, account for a minuscule portion. This is our heritage and our demographic, Cherie baby, my fellow can’t-speak-the-language-stop-asking-me-questions baby: We have never, at any point in our known history, been part of a mainstream. The righteous indignation of the underrepresented is lodged deep in our DNA. Add to that quick temper a taste for sticky sweet and killer heat (and nothing in between), propensity for heart disease and emotional distress, a skeptical nature, big hips, and a head for business—and you have the baseline genetic code for a child of Kerala.
Kerala takes its name from the first-century Chera dynasties who governed the west coast of India, nature-worshiping people who held poets and musicians in high regard. They organized themselves according to clans based on geography and profession—hill people, forest people, farmers, guards, warriors, traders, seafarers. The Cheras engaged in foreign trade, and evidence of long-standing collaboration with west Asian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman merchants is regularly unearthed near the site of an ancient harbor at Muziris. A Tamil poetic text, the Purananuru, describes the Chera trade hub of Muziris as a buzzing metropolis:
With its streets, its houses, its covered fishing boats, where they sell fish, where they pile up rice—with the shifting and mingling crowd of a boisterous river-bank where the sacks of pepper are heaped up—with its gold deliveries, carried by the ocean-going ships and brought to the river bank by local boats, the city of the gold-collared Kuttuvan (Chera governor), the city that bestows wealth to its visitors indiscriminately, and the merchants of the mountains, and the merchants of the sea, the city where liquor abounds, yes, this Muziris, where the rumbling ocean roars, is given to me like a marvel, a treasure.
Muziris since declined, until it was completely destroyed by floods, but during the reign of the Cheras it was a thriving urban center: goods from inland were brought down the Periyar River for distribution and the harbor drew traders from distant parts of the ancient world, including Jewish merchants who first arrived during the reign of the prosperous Hebrew King Solomon, acquiring for him silver, gold, gems, teak, ivory, spices, monkeys, peacocks. They established settlements at Muziris and key points along the Periyar River, engaging in trade over the following centuries while maintaining their unique identity and faith.
In 30 AD, Jesus was impaled in Israel under the Roman empire, and his followers increased efforts to spread his teachings. News of his acts reached India with the traders and persistent legend maintains that the apostle Thomas landed in Muziris in 52 AD in the company of a Jewish merchant. In the first century, contact between Rome and India was regular, even extensive; the Romans had realized the strategy of sailing with the monsoon, reducing travel to only 40 days. By the time of this journey, about 200 Roman trading vessels were visiting India each year—analysis of Roman coin hoards at Muziris shows that the Roman spice trade peaked in the first century AD, building up under Augustus and climaxing under Nero. During this period, Thomas would have had greater ease of access to India than at any other time up until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498. Thomas focused on visiting the Jewish settlements, preaching in Jewish colonies along the Periyar River and tributaries along the coast until his death in 72 AD. The faithful maintain that their ancestors were taught by Thomas and hold fast to oral histories and customs that reflect the particular Hebrew Christianity he would have shared, obeying Jewish food laws, performing circumcision, observing Passover. In remote areas that were insulated from later generations of European missionaries, services to this day are partly sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Thomas and Jesus.
Early Christian travelers from west Asia and Europe were enthusiastic about the promise of India: a fertile land with generous people relatively tolerant of their faith and ripe for conversion. By the third century, there was a substantial Christian population in India, but an organized presence dates to the arrival of settlers and missionaries from Persia around 200-300 AD. Further growth is attributed to the arrival of Christians from Syria led by Knai Thoma: a formerly Jewish, Christian merchant who brought 72 families to India with him. The colonists received land to settle south of the Periyar River, near the trading hub of Muziris, and strictly maintained their exclusive culture, socializing and marrying within their own group. They had little interest in proselytizing and focused on the reason they came to India: commerce. The native Christians, however, viewed the Syrians as patrons: placing themselves under the bishop who arrived with them, adopting their religious practices and the Syriac language for worship. These two groups of early Christians in Kerala became known as Syrian Christians for their historical and religious connection to the Church of the East. Christians in Kerala are to this day identified by lineage as Knanaya Christians (tracing back to Knai Thoma) or Nazaranee Christians (tracing back to the apostle Thomas and Jesus of Nazareth); those taught by later waves of Catholic and Protestant missionaries are identified as Latin Christians (who observe the Roman Rite) or Puthu (New) Christians.
By 900 AD, the Syrian Christians integrated with Persian Christian migrant merchants to become a powerful trading community, granted privileges to promote revenue generation by the Hindu rulers of the Venad dynasty. In allying with the Christian traders, the Venads aimed to undermine the Buddhist and Jain traders who rivaled them for religious and political power. The Venad kingdom was based in Quilon, described by Marco Polo during his visit in the 1200s:
The people are idolators though there are some Christians and Jews among them…merchants come here from Manzi (south China) and Arabia and the Levant (west Asia) and ply a thriving trade, for they bring various products from their own countries by sea and export others in return.
He moves up the Malabar coast toward Muzris and continues:
In this kingdom there is a great abundance of pepper and also of ginger, besides cinnamon in plenty and other spices, turbit and coconuts. Buckrams are made here of the loveliest and most delicate texture in the world. Many other articles of merchandise are exported. In return when merchants come here from overseas, they load their ships with brass, which they use as ballast, cloth of gold and silk, sendal, gold, silver, spikenard, and other such spices…you must know that ships come here from very many parts, notably from the great province of Manzi, and goods are exported to many parts.
Marco Polo wrote these tales decades after his travels, while imprisoned in Europe with a Romantic writer named Rustichello da Pisa. With such nostalgic distance, and Rustichello’s artful flourish, he most certainly exaggerated his adventures, but he did describe certain elements of life in India with keen observation and accuracy. Take, for example, his description of the coconut:
The Christians who guard the church have many palm-trees that yield wine and also such as bear coconuts. One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink. Their outer husk is matted with fibres, which are employed in various ways and serve many useful purposes. Under this husk is a food that provides a square meal for a man. It is very tasty, as sweet as sugar and as white as milk, and is in the form of a cup like the surrounding husk. Inside this food is enough juice to fill a phial. The juice is clear and cool and admirably flavored. When a man has eaten the kernel, he drinks the juice. And so from one nut a man can have his fill of meat and drink.
Marco Polo’s delicious tales piqued European hunger and soon explorers were looking for a way to reach the waterfalls dripping with diamonds, the dancing temple girls (“their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect”), the exotica flora and fauna (“What more need I say? Everything there is different from what it is with us and excels both in size and beauty.”). Missionaries joined these voyages, hoping to commune with the native Christians and Jews, and of course to save the souls of Muslims (“Saracens”), Hindus, Muslims, Jains, and Buddhists (“idolators”).
Further Reading:
The Customs of the Kingdoms of India, Marco Polo, translated by Ronald Latham, 1958.
The Indo-Roman Pepper Trade and the Muziris Papyrus, Frederico De Romanis, 2020.
Where the Rain is Born: Writings About Kerala, edited by Anita Nair, 2002.
In Search of Doubting Thomas, William Dalrymple, 2000.