Michelle Sindha Thomas
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | KERALA 1100-1653
There exists a place maybe we should call home. At the tip of a continent, once upon a time and far, far away: Kerala, of rubber trees and coconut palms and ginger and garlic and chili pepper and professors and preachers and nuns and drunkards and aunties and uncles and nun aunties and drunk uncles. When we visit, I feel nearly whole; we drink the water our great-great-great-great grandparents and the dinosaurs drank.
By 1100, the Thekkumkur dynasty governed the Malabar coast, their royal house protected by a fort called Thaliyikotta. Their kingdom was attacked and destroyed only after centuries of dominance, and remnants of 15th century palaces and the fort remain even today in a district now called Kottayam, meaning “sheltered by the fort.” Kottayam—where you were born, where I was born, where both Papa and Mama were born, where our grandparents, and their parents were born—was indeed sheltered, set inland, off the coast, tucked away between mountains and a lake, and this is probably why our ancestors survived relatively unscathed by the European colonialism that ravaged the subcontinent for five hundred years.
Portuguese explorers led by Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498. They came hot off the Crusades, in search not only of spices, but also of the fabled Christians described by Marco Polo. They hoped to convince and enlist these brethren to join forces with them against the Muslims—in a grand scheme to take Jerusalem. Note that these early explorers represented the most hardscrabble of European society; convicts and criminals and those with nothing to lose and everything to gain by setting sail on violent seas for a possible pot of gold at the edge of the world. They landed in Kerala and found a thriving Christian community, just as Marco Polo had reported, and approached them eagerly—expecting wide-open arms.
They were met with general indifference. People from Kerala have long held a reputation for stubbornness and cynicism; the native Christians were business-minded, deeply engaged in trade, and generally integrated with a society that was more tolerant, less polarized, and more cosmopolitan than Europe of the Crusades. Arab and west Asian traders had constant presence in the markets of Kerala and east Asian traders brought huge junks to the ports, even establishing a Chinese-Indian-Malay community in Calicut. The Christians interacted so freely with non-believers that an observer stated, “There is no distinction either in their habits, or in their hair, or in anything else, betwixt the Christians of this diocese and the heathen.” The “heathen”—primarily Hindus—had a relatively liberal lifestyle that scandalized the foreigners. Women had great personal freedom, wrote Duarte Barbosa, ruefully, “the Nair princesses do not marry, nor have fixed husbands, and are very free and at liberty in doing what they please with themselves.” Women ran estates and kingdoms in their own right; they were educated and often trained in the art of warfare. One rajah maintained a palace guard of 300 female archers and commissioned songs in honor of these heroines punishing villains with their prowess. Royal women moved about freely in Kerala, unrestricted by purdah then common in other parts of India, commanding respect, acting with authority, participating in business affairs that were reserved for men in less inclusive societies. The Portuguese colonists anticipated such exotic behavior from the tales of early travelers and Marco Polo, but to find a people so utterly disinterested in them, dismissive of their efforts to negotiate diplomatic dealings, indifferent to the trinkets they peddled at market, rajahs laughing them out of court when they attempted to pave the way forward with gifts: What could Manavikrama, Maharajah of Calicut, have wanted with Vasco de Gama’s offering of “twelve pieces of cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, two of honey”? A vassal advised him that “even the poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, gave more, and if he wanted to make a present it should be in gold.”
The Portuguese traders resorted to strong-arming, piracy, and violence, rebuffed on all sides and especially offended by the Christians who refused to support both their efforts in trade and mission. The native Christians proudly claimed a tradition more ancient than the Roman Catholicism of the Portuguese and had never even heard of the Pope, the very father of the Catholic Church. When the Portuguese went so far as to assert that churches of Kerala belonged to the Pope, they scoffed, “Who is the Pope?” At first, the Portuguese were shocked—then they became enraged.
With the same violence the foreign aggressors exerted to insert themselves in trade so far from home, they punished the resistance of the native Christians with focused persecution. They declared them heretics, citing the adoption of Hindu elements in their worship, including the teaching of reincarnation and practice of astrology, their places of worship architecturally modeled on temples and adorned with carvings of elephants and dancing girls. They bristled at the idea that a bare-chested, tropical people could maintain Christian traditions predating the arrival of Christianity in Portugal. When efforts to compel them to accept Catholicism and denounce the rites of their ancestors failed, Portuguese Jesuits began to aggressively impose their dominion and force conversion on threat of death. In the 1500s, they led a campaign to destroy the documentation of the native Christians and a systematic inquisition set fire to their historical records. Until then, the Christian minority had successfully resisted political pressure from Hindu and Muslim rulers; the Portuguese attack intended to strike beyond political alliance—to crush their core spiritual and cultural identity. By 1599, the Synod of Diamper Latinized the East Syriac Rite followed by the native Christians, replacing their tradition with Latin vestments, rituals, and customs and formally bringing all Indian churches under the Roman Catholic Church.
In the 1600s, the native Christians mobilized and began to write letters appealing to foreign patriarchs for support against the Portuguese Roman Catholic administration. A representative of the Syriac Orthodox Church, Ahatallah, heard their call. He was a dynamic, charismatic figure who had spent time in Italy, Persia, Syria, and Egypt. In 1652, he landed finally in India, announcing himself as the “Patriarch of the Whole of India and China.”
The outraged Portuguese colonial authorities declared him an imposter and swiftly put him in custody of the Jesuits. He had brief opportunity to meet with native Christian leaders who accepted him as their patriarch, desperately embracing him and his connection to Syria to free themselves from Portuguese domination. The Jesuit priests alerted the authorities to Ahatallah’s activities and quietly put him on a ship headed up the coast.
Thomas, a native Christian named after the apostle, led a militia north to the port of Cochin, demanding to meet with Ahatallah, to discuss his credentials at the very least. The Portuguese authorities deemed his case irrelevant, saying no patriarch could be legally assigned to India without the approval of the Roman Catholic Pope, and that he was already gone from Kerala, en route to the Catholic stronghold of Goa. Ahatallah never reached Goa.
The disappearance of their Syrian savior was the last straw for the native Christians and in 1653, at a meeting in Mattancherry, they swore never to obey the Portuguese again, consecrating Thomas as their leader and bishop. They disowned the Roman Rite, initiating services in their mother tongue of Malayalam, reviving the suppressed tradition. This formal schism added complexity to the increasingly diverse Kerala Christian community. In addition to the Knanaya Christians who traced their roots to Syria, and Nazaranee Christians who traced their worship to the apostle Thomas, Kerala was now home to a Portuguese-Indian population and a large Catholic following. They all now had opportunity to decide whether to remain loyal to the Catholic Church of the Portuguese or to take a stand against it and align with the newly formed Malankara Church of Kerala.
Christians have always been a minority in India, but we have survived waves of persecution that rise again as we speak, in the form of nationalists who, understandably, associate Christianity with colonialism and view it as a threat to Indian culture, forgetting that pure Christianity originated in Asia, forgetting its deep and ancient roots in Kerala. Centuries of active erasure means our history takes the form of legend and oral legacy. The original Hebrew-Christian Kerala lifestyle, remnants of ancient customs, songs, and forms of worship, are preserved in the rural backwaters where early believers must have fled, in areas difficult for oppressors to reach, persisting against all odds.
Further Reading:
The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, Manu S. Pillai, 2015.