Cochin

Today we landed at the southwestern Indian port of Cochin. We went to the place where St. Thomas landed in India in 52 AD in the little town of Muziris. Before it silted up, Muziris, rather than Cochin, was the major port here in southwest India. Muziris was the dockside market where the Romans would come to buy pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg and other spices. Jewish merchants established a trading post and a synagogue here in pre-Christian times. There was already a Hindu temple here whose origin is clouded in prehistory. The oral tradition here is that Thomas used that temple’s ablution pool for his first baptisms. OK, I know this is oral tradition, and you must view that with a skeptical eye. Take it with a grain of salt. Somehow I think that Doubting Thomas would be pleased for us to remain a bit skeptical. Whether this story is true or not, there is no doubt that a Christian church has been on this spot since Roman times.

There was one bit of tradition that certainly sounds to me as though it may be true. A few blocks down the street from the church stands a Jewish synagogue that predates Thomas’s arrival. We visited that synagogue today. There is a story here that on one occasion Thomas happened to be singing an old Jewish folk song that was immediately recognized by the Jews in this synagogue, who began to sing it with him. It’s unlikely that later Christians, who had a continuous feud with the synagogues, would have made up such a story. Flavius Josephus lists the sects of first-century Judaism as Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots (Sicarii), and Nazarenes (Christians). The Acts of the Apostles also mentions that it was the practice of the apostles to attempt to introduce the gospel in Jewish synagogues in the towns they evangelized. In the year 52 the separation between Christianity and Judaism was not yet complete. This folk song story seems to me as though it might be credible. There is more to this story about St. Thomas and the beginnings of the Mar Thoma Church that I will share with you after we return home.

We visited not only religious sites today, but also a traditional home, as well as a historical palace that the government preserves as a museum. The name of this province in southwest India is Kerala. By the way, the accent is on the first syllable. It’s KER-a-la. It is not pronounced like the name of our town on the Outer Banks, “Corolla.” One unusual feature of the culture in Kerala is that traditionally it was matriarchal. Property and inheritance were determined by one’s mother, who was regarded as the head of the household. In ancient times even the kings in Kerala were not succeeded by their sons. They were succeeded by the sons of the king’s eldest sister. If she had no son, the king’s mother and sisters chose a male to succeed the king. No question though, the women were in charge. The Jewish synagogue here has one feature unique in all of Judaism. The building has a gallery in which women could attend the synagogue services. As far as we know, allowing women in the synagogue was unknown elsewhere in Judaism. Remarkably, on sabbath and on holy days, the Torah was read not from the bema, but from the women’s gallery! Kerala certainly gave its own spin to Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. When the Portuguese arrived, they were a bit uncomfortable with the way the Mar Thoma Church had become, well, “Keralized.” So they just took it over, snatched it from the Bishop of Antioch and put it under control of the Bishop of Rome. It became Roman Catholic. But that’s another story.

One result of the historical superiority of women in Kerala is that even today, women have a much higher status here than in the rest of India. In Kerala there are 1,068 women for every 1,000 males, and female infanticide is unheard of. While infanticide is technically illegal in all of India, it is still practiced quietly, not only through abortion, but by “accidents,” such as kitchen fires that occasionally kill baby girls. Such accidents are neither questioned nor investigated by the police.

We finished the day by visiting a small cooperative that makes cloth on hand looms. Today they were making cloth to be used for elementary school uniforms. I will reserve my judgment regarding the working conditions. The system they have in place works for them.

Another institution which may seem strange to Westerners is Indian marriage. Our guide explained the system by which marriages are arranged for young people. He has a happy marriage of five years and, yes, it was arranged by the families of the bride and groom. However, he closed his explanation by saying, “If you can’t have whom you love; love whom you have.” In India, as a whole, the number of males vastly outnumbers that of females, and the murder of one member of a newly wed couple by a jealous suitor is not unknown. The divorce rate for arranged marriages and love marriages is about the same.

We encountered other distinctive elements of Indian culture today. Just as in Chennai, the traffic here was unbelievably frenetic and a wee bit scary. The bureaucracy here is still maddening. Immigration for Glenda and me today hit a little glitch, though it didn’t take nearly as long as it did yesterday. Clearing the ship to leave port, though, was a delayed by a big glitch.

We found a lot to love about Kerala, Cochin, and especially Muziris. We did not find the grinding poverty, nor the beggars, that were everywhere in Chennai. Our guide confessed that though it is proscribed by Hinduism (Don’t become attached to material things: they’re an illusion), Keralans like to have nice houses and yards. There is almost a 100% literacy rate here, and every child starts school with both the kid and his family fully expecting the student to end up as a physician or an engineer. Most do. Consequently, there is a brain drain from south India. The best and the brightest go to Europe or America to get jobs. In America, to get to the top of your profession you have to be very bright—one in a million. However, in India you have to be one in 1.34 billion. The parents know this, and so do the kids. The CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Adobe and a host of other companies in Silicon Valley are from south India. No accident.

India is diverse. It’s strange that the language here in Kerala is Malayalam. People here cannot understand the Hindi spoken in the nation’s capital of New Delhi, nor the Tamil spoken in Chennai. Each of these languages even uses a different script and a different alphabet. Half the people here in Kerala are Christians or Muslims. India is larger than Europe, contains 200 languages and as many different ethnic groups. If India existed anywhere else in the world, it would be its own continent with two dozen different nations. Yet somehow Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Communists, capitalists, socialists, vegetarians, carnivores, women, men, and a couple of hundred different ethnic, gender and linguistic groups have found a way to accommodate their regional and cultural differences to become one nation. The people here don’t just tolerate each other’s differences, they absorb each other’s differences.

India can be both tearfully beautiful and frighteningly ugly. She can lull you into a dreamland, then leave you lost in a dark nightmare. She is lovely and she is dangerous. As different as India is from American “normal,” despite the poverty and the bureaucracy, despite the white-knuckle traffic and murderous working conditions, the fact that India exists as a single nation—that fact alone—means that India has achieved something remarkable.Read more