Arcot Lutheran Mission, Tiruvannamalai:Dalit Re-Negotiations

Notes for Dalit Renegotiations: Arcot Lutheran Church in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Religion is an epiphenomenon. Caste identity is a substratum. This listing or labeling is a process of social exclusion. Religion is about two generational or three generational choice about belongingness. Thus there may be Hindu or Christian Dalits in the same family. Rituals can be shared, or participated in across religious boundaries. Food associated with ceremonies can cross borders, as can choice of marriage partners. Ideology as Social Fact and Cultural Representation Caste has many commonalities with Race primarily in terms of how individuals are identified with domination or servility. Those who dominate others can use any excuse to do so and often use tradition or the collapsing of time across hundreds of years (‘This is how it always was’). Money, ritual hierarchy, political clout all work to underline hierarchy. Therefore, Dalits are assimilated into working class configurations because the Master class demands it. Within this, there is the further socialisation within the lower caste to accept their humiliation, and to engage with the master class with the paraphernalia of a learned passivity. Didier Fassin writing of the dangers of being black, young and living in the suburbs of Paris, argues that running from the police, even when not guilty, is the embodied memory that teenagers have of being caught, interrogated, and possibly imprisoned. They do not know why they are running, but this very act of escaping is a collective phenomenon, for they expect to be ill treated (Fassin 2013: 9,10). This embodied memory of hunger, deprivation, joblessness, lack of access to institutions and the privileges of citizenship is what Dalits carry with them. However educated they become, however respected professionally, they communicate that they come from communities which have been continually suppressed since time immemorial. Films like Patal Lok, Jai Bhim and Article 15 look at the plight of the poor in relation to the coercive power of the police or the State, representatives of whom enter into vituperative dialogues to communicate warrior hood and domination. This language is renegotiated with the appearance of the compassionate policeman, the discerning lawyer and the keen journalist. Each of them is able to document the everyday violence that the poor experience by charting a course of life and work, which uses the trope of the charismatic actor in Weberian terms. Such a person uses the charter of normative rules to carve a path different from those who believe that violence is a given in traditional society, having ritual or ecclesiastical legitimacy. In this respect allegiance to Periyar is something which goes along with a deep belief in Christological themes of deliverance. Dalit family histories are extremely evocative suggesting generations of toil before the family can achieve assimilation into blue collar or white collar status. Biography as Social and Historical Mnemonic Paul’s mother went to Malaysia by ship in the 1930s. Her husband died there. She was advised by people to return to Tamil Nadu. She had a son born in Malayasia, and was destitute, so she came to Lebanon, a Destitute Widows’ and Children Home in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Her son and his wife came to Tiruvannamalai out of poverty, they were farmers who came because the village was hierarchical, and Dalits had to live in a different quarter. Paul’s father was a teacher in Saron, a boy’s school set up by Arcot Lutheran Mission (ALC) and Paul came there with his parents at the age of four. He has deep love and admiration for the Danish Mission. “We are Christians. For other Christians, Palestine and Jerusalem are the holy places, but for us, it is Denmark.” He went to Europe for three months as a scout leader, spending one month in Sweden, and two months in Denmark in 1987. Tamil Nadu has made the mobility of Dalits possible because of education. Education is the only way by which liberation can be sought. Paul says his grandmother owned only one saree. She washed it in the pond, and waited for it to dry, before wearing it. That is what his father told him. Through education, and the state’s support through salaries and pensions (he retired three years ago at the age of 60) he is able to have a level of prosperity that he could not have imagined as a child. He never thought he could own a house, build his own house. Tamil Nadu has been supportive to farmers and displaced labour. He says that they receive 20 kilogrammes of free, (or very low priced) rice from the ration shop per month. For him, his memories of his grandmother, whom he had never seen, come to him from his father. His father said that she was very strong. Paul has a photo of hers, a small post card - stamp sized one, which a Danish mission lady sent him. He told her his grandmother’s name, and the village she was from. He said, “I have never met her, since she died in 1959”. The Danish missionary recognized his description of her, then sent him a photo of her which was in her files, which he had enlarged and framed. She looks sharp featured, about 50 years old, wearing a silk saree. As for the stigma of being Dalit, he shrugs, and says: “They will not marry us, but we farmers will not marry cobblers’ daughters or fisherpeople’s daughters or Irulas so how are we different? Every community sticks to their own.” Gabriel Dietrich writes in this general context that : “It is very difficult to understand how caste could have survived in the extent it did, in present day Indian society, or why even those people who are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy often stick to the system and insist on treating others as “inferior” while they refuse to question the “superiority” of those who are considered as “higher” ( Dietrich 1992:32, Kawashima 1998:169). Education and Inter Faith Dialogue Facilitation by Quo Vadis in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu Paul says that the upper castes treat Dalits badly, pay them low wages, but like their work. He knows that they as a family escaped the poverty of his forbears because they had education. The very rights that education provide, the liberation, the legal privileges: all of these are conspicuous, but without education there can be no upliftment. He has been part of the interfaith movement, called Quo Vadis, started by his friend Joshua Peter, who tried to bring people of different faiths together, exhorting them to be focused in their own religious practice, but to understand the faith of others (Visvanathan 2022.) Technology has made the world so much easier and cultures compatible. Paul believes that the kingdom of God is within us, and that it is here and now. His deep faith is about practice, generosity, the sharing of ideas, the very nature of post modern communication as a realization of our world as experiential. In The Church for Others and The Church or the World (1967) the World Council of Churches in two reports arising from consecutive meetings with church leaders argues that the concerns of secular society are increasingly important; war and peace, cybernetics, racialism, demography, class, struggle, fundamentalisms. Mission is about history, the Christ of history (WCC 1967: 14). In this task of comparative analyses where sociologists are on call, which is shared with people of other faiths, dialogue is a specialized task with the theologian in charge. Here, the central focus is on the sermon, biblical exegesis, training in discernment, meditative reflections on the contemporary situation (ibid 25). While this is the conventional view of church ecclesiastical functionaries, Joshua Peter and Paul Visuvasam, who are grass roots in their approach, suggest a more intense experiential dialogue process, where people share their faith, opinions and plans in conversational interaction where the leaders rise from the community in everyday praxis (interview 20th July 2022). Like race, caste segregation is ideologically motivated. It allows for dominant or dominating castes to impose their identity politics on lower castes, maintain them in a situation of servility. They may not sit with upper castes, eat with them, marry them, but they can work for them, maintaining the postures of subservience and tacit obedience. Paul says, if someone has money they can mingle, even marry, if two people fall in love, it is possible that their class situation will smoothen the match. However, his daughter says, ‘that it might happen, but usually such lovers get killed.’ (interview 6th July 2022) Schools run by the Lutheran mission are outside of the CSI and CNI. Lutheran mission schools are entirely Dalit, but are open to students of all religions. They were set up by Ziegenbalg, a German missionary, who got land from the British. Carl E.Ochs was a German missionary of the mid-19th century working in South India for the Leipzig Mission because he would not agree to its policy on caste (personal communication Kirsten Neumann Rajendran 21st July 2022), Simon Rasten suggests that the Danish missions were always in contestatory positions with the Nayaka rulers, local chiefs, rival trading posts and indigenous people subsumed within caste hierarchies (what Esther Fihl calls frictions) . He therefore suggests, following Neil Brimnes, that the imposition of colonial practices over the spice trade, essentially followed dialogic processes of culture. It was a constant process of negotiations and interplays at many levels, each actor wishing to encourage translation of views and cultural artifacts. They differentially sought to integrate one another into their exclusive world view. ( Rasten in Filh and Venkatchalapathy 2009: 44). Elisabeth Susan Alexander corroborates this contentious space of colonial ecclesiastical politics by arguing that the European trading posts were the site of Christian missionizing. She writes that Cuddalore was enroute to Madras, interlocked with important towns like Gingee, Tiruvannamalai and Salem. “It was also because it was a significant English settlement that Cuddalore, like Madras, was subject to constant attacks by political opponents as the rising English power negotiated and fought its way to political supremacy in South India by the turn of the 19th century.” (Alexander in Gross, Kumaradoss, Liebau 2006: 379). In such towns, local traders, dubashes, and artisans mingled. Ines Zupanov gives us a fascinating account of caste politics among Jesuit missionaries, where De Nobili’s contestatory Brahminic mode was in stark contrast with that of his contemporary Goncalo Fernandez, who was aware of the presence of the “classifiable” downtrodden and the diverse interests of the Paravas. Zupanov was very clear however that the huge literature produced by the Jesuits in the Madurai mission would percolate down as hymns, treatises, performative acts and literature ( ‘a legacy of the intellect’) to local communities, even when the denominational identity changed with Protestantism. (Zupanov, 1999: 116) Ecclessiastical Bureaucracy of the ALC All the office bearers of the Arcot Lutheran Church are Dalits,as testified by the Church /Parish Directory. Tranquebar Mission as it was called is the Tamil Danish Mission and Tiruvannamalai has the Arcot Lutheran Mission, which is a break away movement. Esther Fihl writes with Stine Simonsen Puri of the time of Ziegenbalg, “During this time another Christian mission - The Danish Missionary Society – also rooted in the Danish – Halle society found its way to the South Arcot district, a little north of Tranquebar. As social workers and educators, the missionaries mainly dealt with families in economic and social distress” ( Fihl and Venkatchalapathy , 2009: 10) Having provided the contestary background to the establishment of the Arcot Lutheran Church, it is interesting to look at the stable environment of the Saron School in Tiruvannamali (Visvanathan 2022}. Saron School is 150 years old, and has children who study in English medium, Tamil Medium and Urdu Medium. It had been established by Sofus Berg, who had arrived in India in 1887, and went on to start a mission station in Tiruvannamalai. The school led to a growing congregation. The emphasis was on spiritual growth as the Danish Missionary Society was against mass movements (Bugge 1994:68). The revivalist movements had meant that there was close scrutiny by the DMS regarding the faith of the believers. It had to be questioned, verified and ratified that the new converts were indeed believers. It is for this reason Joshua Peter had affirmed in personal conversation in 2006, and again in 2022, that there was no increase in numbers of the Arcot Lutheran Church, except by biological and natural reproductive processes. The Danish Missionary Society had been founded in 1821 by Bone Falch Ronne, who had wanted his new society to stand outside all control by the Danish Church (ibid 64). Present Circumstances of ALC Schools The new problems that Dalits in Tiruvannamalai are facing are drug abuse and suicide in the ALC schools. After Covid, the schools are bursting at the seams, more children are coming and are being accommodated. In Saron Boarding School, in Tiruvannamalai, the children are from different communities. There are four schools, and four churches belonging to the Lutherans. Arcot Lutheran Church came into existence by the fact that Tamil Arcot Mission practiced caste, where different castes were given different communion cups. So the Tiruvannamalai mission came as a breakaway mission, where 95 percent of the parishioners are Dalit ( interview Kirsten Rajendran 8th July 2022). Origin of the Arcot Lutheran Church Henriette Bugge writes that “The first missionary to be hired by the DMS was a German, Carl E.Ochs, who previously had been employed by the Leipzig mission in south India. In 1854 he had a serious controversy with the Leipzing Society because he could not agree to its policy on caste. He had subsequently engaged in a bitter and long-winded dispute against the board and his former colleagues which resulted in his retirement from the Leipzig mission. Ochs then set up a mission of his own in South Arcot, but found it difficult to run. In 1863, he approached the DMS with an offer to turn his station at Melpattabakkam in South Arcot over to the DMS. His offer was accepted with enthusiasm and soon two young missionaries fresh from his mission school, were sent out to join Ochs” (Bugge 1994:64). Dalit sense of equality of purpose enriches the community, they feel that their experiential sense of here and now is perfectly in unison. Their sense of belonging in the world is just concrete, welcoming. This was corroborated by Rekha Raj in a presentation on 6th October 2022 at a Gender and Justice conference organized by Christian Institute for the Study of Religion in Manganam, Kottayam, Kerala. She said, “Dalits have a sense of identity and feel a great euphoria. For them citizenship rights are the most important, they are truly secular for they may belong to any religion or ideology, while remaining in the same family.” Yet, as the eclessiastical bureaucrats of the ALC communicate, post Covid trauma is everpresent. Bishop Kennedy feels that children are trying to cope in a post Covid world and need protection from ganja merchants. Three boys in an examination hall were too intoxicated to write the exam. Earlier it was the problem of the colleges but now it has percolated to the schools. To this end he says that they try to rehabilitate the children who have been corrupted. The Arcot Church has planned a study centre in Quo Vadis, a dialogue centre, which had been very successful for two decades of bringing people of different religions together. The unity of the world, of humankind is premised on the assumption that difference is to be celebrated (Visvanathan 2022). The Quo Vadis Centre and Library in Tiruvannamalai Rajendran is the co ordinator of the Quo Vadis, in settting up a syllabus for interfaith dialogue. He and his wife are theologians, former teachers at the Madurai Theological College. He is a student of Gabrielle Dietrich, whose name ALC members take very often with pride. This preoccupation with continuing interest in Dalit history and Christology makes Tiruvannamalai an interesting place for them to live in after retirement. Rajendran’s wife , Kirstine mentions that her father in law was also a pastor, and that every day, he cycled from church to church to carry the Lord’s word. These were essentially poverty struck villages, where landless labourers had willingly converted to Christianity. Work, food, belongingness. these were essentially very valuable. After being shunned by others, the ability to feel they belonged was the greatest gift that they received. Caste Hierachies and their Transmission The acclimatization of Ziegenbalg and Plutschau to the caste practices of Arcot was seen as something which was in keeping with respecting cultural codes. Ziegenbalg established a printing press in Tranquebar in 1713 and the first Tamil book to be printed here was a collection of sermons: then came Luther’s Catechism and a translation of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament” (Bugge 1994: 58). These were not met with pleasure by the adversaries of Ziegenbalg such as the Jesuit C.J. Beschi in Madurai. Infact Ziegenbalg was ridiculed for using a lower class Tamil instead of a higher class Tamil. This was thought to be a serious mistake which would alienate the powerful upper castes from Christianity (ibid 58). It would imply that the missionaries were lower caste people, and unclean, who would pollute the upper castes. A century after Ziegenbalg, Abbe Dubos argued for translations of the Bible as summaries, without references to Jesus keeping company with fishermen, carpenters, and no doubt free women, traditionally referred to as ‘loose’ women (ibid 58). The South Arcot District, consisting of the rural towns of Tiruvannamalai Tindivanam,Villipuram, Tirukoilur, Kallakurichi, Cuddalore, Vriddachalam, Chidambaram ( ibid 14) had its proportion of rural poor, who became a source of mobile labour for the purposes of railway, dam and other colonial construction in the British period. It is to this outcaste population that the DMS worked for, providing them with religious instruction, as well as food, medicine and education from 1860 onwards, when Ochs of the Leipzing mission station merged with the DMS. The Liberal World View of Present Day TLC Theologians Joshua Peter said that “Yes, food is important to the hungry. The symbolism of the Lord’s body as food is ultimately significant. Bread is food, and the hungry are replenished.” The Quo Vadis group essentially keeps the principle of dialogicity alive through songs, conversations and meditational practice. They feel that they can present through lyrics their theology of coexistence. Human rights, freedom from hunger and distress, social inclusion…all of these are immensely important to the community. Church services are well attended bringing in the robust population of believing Christians to Saron church every Sunday. The ardour of women is represented through the choir, and the immediate responses to the parish priest. Women fill in the liturgical services, and the bible reading fragments in loud clear voices. They are able to find the passage requested by the priest in seconds. Evelyn Christensen writes that the unifying dimension of prayer, the presence of life cycle rituals, and the collectivity found in shared worship, because friends, clan members and neighbours are needed at family reunions or crises moments. Faith is the essential binder, and with it the understanding that God answers prayers. ( Christensen 1985: 110) The results of prayer are unity, wish fulfillment, support , transcendence of distance, and cultures, and the ability to forgive (ibid 128). Within the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church, and its burearucracy, the priest has a predominant position in terms of his direct relation to the place (sacred sites) and people. Gabriel Dietrich writes that the priest is “supposed to be in some sort of perpetual institutionalised communion with God and as such functions as an intermediary between the people and god. …serves to perpetuate and to institutionalize religion by the performance of rituals, the formulation of religious theory and sometimes by the foundation of religious institutions, and therefore gives continuity and stability to religion . While the existence of priesthood is very important for safeguarding the continuity of religious traditions and often also for the transmission of knowledge and education, there are certain inbuilt mechanisms in the priestly profession which tend to make it a conservative, stabilizing force, but also often anoppressive and retarding force. The very privilege of being in communion with God gives the priest an opportunity to bestow on or withhold from people the benefits of the communion.“ (Dietrich 1991:17). Kirsten Rajendran draws attention to the fact that Arcot Lutheran theology draws deeply from the Nayanmar traditions of South India. Underlying the practices and beliefs of the local community are a sound understanding of how Saivite worship, and the understandings of the Siddhis, as poets, inform people’s religious practice. (personal communication 18th July 2022) Pastor Daniel said that the Covid years affected the poor in the community very terribly. Yet, there was a prayerful generosity which came from those who whole heartedly came out to help those in circumstances more difficult than their own. They were able to support families which were stranded in their town during Covid. Part of the problem of the breakdown between the federal aspects of democracy and the rule of the Centre can be understood in terms of the failure of bureaucracy, and the alliance between vested political interests in government and the bureaucrat. Dalits and Survival during Covid All over the subcontinent the bureaucrat/clerk has a bad reputation. Files are always pending, money changes hands, there is too close an alliance between bureaucrats and politicians, and women are usually marginalised. When criminality is rampant, then bribes are seen as being only that ‘mild an event’ as tax evasion. Nepotism and clan loyalties are seen to be normal, as is favouring of friends and loyal subordinates. Satish Saberwal argued in Wages of Segmentation that bureaucracy in India is enmeshed in village and caste and clan loyalties, that because industrialisation was imposed on us in the 19th century, the real adaptative process never took place. The partisan bureaucrat, when acting in a friendly and intimate fashion, can reorder reality by promoting the good of some people over the good of the citizens whom he purportedly serves. Since the process of going to the courts is a disruption of daily duties and obligations, the bureaucrat as robber baron, who has government employees as lawyers working for him, can create tremendous obstacles to the real issues surfacing. Since bureaucracy and its contracts are linked with personages and with codified or inscribed materials, the robber baron bureaucrat is well able to relieve honest officers of their duty or to transfer them, where they cannot be of harm to him/her/they. Yet, even with digitalisation of files, all materials are up for scrutiny, and so opaque and self gratifying acts become visible to all, unless we are functioning in an oligarchy. With this framework in mind, we can well understand why food distribution to people in camps or villages was not made possible during Covid, why 44,000 crores of rupees was made unavailable for this purpose, and millions of workers were forced to walk back home. Redistribution of Food as Ethics of Coexistence During Covid 19 in Arcot Lutheran Church There was a circus which had come to the town, with artists and animals. During lockdown 2020 -2021, they were stranded in Tiruvannamalai with 60 crew members and their animals. Pastor Daniel, parish priest of the ALC, felt really sad for them, but when they asked for help (money), he agreed to provide them three meals a day with the help of his parishioners. No one in his parish had money, but they collected food, and Rev Daniel saw to it that they were fed for two months of their incarceration. The circus manager locked all the artists into separate camps, all the young girls were put into one tent, and not allowed to go out. They were literally self incarcerated there for two months, but luckily neither they nor their animals suffered any fatalities. Poverty is something Dalits remember well, and worse, destitution, but their ethic is to surrender to fate, and to remember those who had helped them. In turn, when they are able, they immediately provide what they have to others to share. It is like Christ’s story of the old woman who shared everything she had, giving away her only coin to help others in destitution. Lebanon: Weavers, Widows and Sanctuary for the Destitute Thyagarajan is the manager of the Destitute home in the Arcot Lutheran Campus of Lebanon. His family came to Tiruvannamalai on the invitationof Dan Mission in 1959, when he was ten months old. They were farmers, from the caste of goldsmiths, invited in to farm the land, and because they were poor, they agreed, and were given a small house on the Lebanon campus. They stayed on, and joined the community, and served the church. They were Hindus, but converted to Christianity, though he says that there was no compulsion or requests. Of the dozen weavers under his care, most remain Hindus. Thyagarajan manages the home for destitute women three days a week, and returns to his home in Cuddalore, 100 kms away. He introduced me to the weavers whom he supervises. They make cotton towels, bedcovers and bags from yarn procured from Chennai or Kanchipuram. Their wages are meager, the church is not permitted foreign funds, the tourists who would come from Denmark, and Germany and USA stopped arriving after Covid 19. The work went on, though the abject condition of Dalitness does not go away. The women, came in to Lebanon as widows by invitation, brought up their children on campus, the children grew up, found jobs and got married, having children of their own, and jobs in nearby cities like Bengaluru and Chennai. Nothing really changes in their lives, they do not see Christianity as opening new doors to prosperity, but atleast they feel that they are free from caste abuse, and have a room of their own with free water and electricity, with frequent hand outs of garden produce. After many decades, Lebanon is beginning to start organic farming, and they produce some vegetables, coconuts and fruits. But now, they are keen to begin rice cultivation. The well which is 150 years old, like the school and home for destitutes, can actually provide water for cultivation. But that too, is hard work, requiring a pair of bulls, or a tractor. Once they find the funding they will be able to start farming in earnest. Thyagarajan says that Dan Mission’s logos has always been “For God and India.” He understands the right to be Indian as something intrinsic to the life they have in Lebanon. There are prayers, hymns, Eucharistic services, Sunday School in the Lutheran church, but the destitute women are only witnesses to the hardwork of the missionary women Miss Else and Miss Lindenmayer who worked immensely hard till old age and death overcame them as the trustees of Lebanon campus. These widows have never thought to leave the campus. Their children grow up, find menial or low paid jobs in the city, marry, bear children. They may or may not come to collect their mother, and take her with them, but often the women remain where they are fearing the consequences of being trapped in smaller living spaces in urban ghettos, and losing what little freedom they have. Sometimes, out of their tiny stipend they save money to visit their children, and in turn, their children sometimes help them financially. Paul Gilroy writes that “race and nation, the higher and the lower become integrated in this vocabulary in the life of the camps, The dominant varieties were bound to the subordinate by their shared notions of what nationality entailed. The forms of nationalism that invoke that mode of belonging exemplify camp-thinking. They have distinctive rules and codes, and however bitterly their various practitioners may conflict with each other, a common approach to the problem of collective solidarity is betrayed by shared patterns of thought about self and other, friend and stranger; about culture and nature as binding agents and about the technological institution of political collectivities to which one can be compelled to belong.” (Gilroy 2000: 82) If Dalits have survived on subsistence farming traditionally or on foraging, today they feel that their children have needs for education and for social mobility. A glance, a kind word from the camp manager is highly valued. A sense of tactility is also missing and deeply sought. Words are comforting, as is the presence of the superintendent, who had 9 siblings all of whom grew up on the Arcot Lutheran Campus. Where church institutions are denigrated by the state, and the term ‘rice christians’ used with contempt, Arcot Lutheran missionaries remember Else Kroj with affection. She came as a young woman and took care of all of them. She was a school teacher from Denmark, who spent her life in Tiruvannamalai in charge of the Saron school, and living in a missionary house in the campus of the home for destitute women. She did not set herself above the poor whom she ministered to. If children were naughty and the teachers complained, she said “ Let them be, don’t overburden them, teach them, and in the holidays, let them go home” (interview Paul Visuwasam 9th July 2022) She was the great Mother, the presence of the great comforter, who lived in austerity and in the company of the poor. A lot of the anger against Christian missionaries is because it is felt that they are taking people away from Hinduism. However, the poor are considered to be outcaste. As a result, their suffering and affliction is not considered worthy of interest. It is believed that because of their karma in their past they have been reborn as the lowest of the low. However, they have a sense of self worth, coming from community identity, something which the collater of Ambedkar’s collected works, Vasant Moon, described in detail as the charms of living in the chawl (Moon 2001). Living in Tamil Nadu, Dalit Lutherans feel that the state is supportive. The state provides a sense of well being and succor. Rations are freely available to each family, and mission schools like Dan mission also provide state supported salaries to the teachers, with pensions when they retire. What happened to Fr Stan Swamy in Maharashtra could never happen in Tamil Nadu, according to them. There are church quarrels, and church skirmishes, but these are quickly handled in a rational fashion. Theologians trained in Lutheran theological colleges in Madurai or Chennai return with a sense of self confidence, a mastery over liturgy, hymns and scriptures. Sermons and hymn singing, prayer and meditation are thought to have tremendous power in each life. The Hymns of James Theophilus Apavoo Zoe C Sherinian writes that her fieldwork among Dalit Christians showed that their struggles were represented through the lyrics composed by Reverend James Theophilus Appavoo At Tamil Theological Seminary, Madurai. He observed that the classical Carnatak music to which hymns had been transposed, did not make sense to contemporary Dalits working emotionally with their sense of being crushed, continually excluded. Apavoo used his music lessons in the seminary to integrate students around the questions of equality and freedom. He used folk songs and the parai drum to break down the hierarchies between musical forms. He wished to integrate psychology, the environment, gender and spirituality to traditional Marxian concerns for economics, politics, social structure and ideology. Women’s rights became integral to his composition of hymns and liturgies. His classes involved true dialogue, learning from rural students about music practices traditionally known and understood by them and feeding into the liturgies that he wrote. It helped them to have pride in their dalit identity and history, evade superior Brahmanical hegemony, and to represent their desire to repudiate exploitative practices. (Zoe. C Sherinian www Galeacademic one file..Annual 2005 Women and Music, Vol 9 University of Nebraska Press accessed on 23rd July 2022) The ability of the pastor to communicate with his flock is the sense of belongingness in Christian community, where parishioners impervious to their class sit next to one another in the pews. Here, too, there is an acceptance of the state, so that both fealty and the right to protection are seen as equivalent. The Dravidian State has the power to communicate its rights to survive and provide for its people. It does not see itself as anything but carrying on a long legacy of the self respect movement. It can take on right wing fundamentalism and provide the Dalits a sense of citizenship and rights. But hierarchies do not disappear, poverty does not vanish. Race is about phenotypical characteristics genetically passed down. Racism is something else, it is about hierarchical domination which seeks to subjugate the outclassed, the declassed. Being outside the system, Dalits feel that assimilation is a primary requirement. How can this belongingness to the State be brought about? Part of the difficulties come from wanting to be mobile, to share the privileges of a global economy. More than anything, they want to share in the fruits of modernism. As long as education is sidelined, and funds and money diverted there is no hope for mobility. The Wrath of the State When Stan Swamy canvassed for the rights of 3000 undertrials who had been locked away, the police saw in him the great dangerousness that come from activists for human rights and education. The contributions he made to the survival strategies for tribal communities in Jharkhand were huge. The Investigating officer who interrogated him on the suspicion that he had engineered riots during Elgar Parishad commended him on his work with migrants returning home to tribal villages during Covid. What was this work that his work station provided access to? He says to the NIA, recorded for the reader in “I Am Not a Silent Witness” published by the Indian Social Institute, Bengaluru : About the activities of Bagaicha, we recently have started a Migrants’ Desk, and its intervention during and after the recent lockdown, due to the coronavirus pandemic was significant. It was necessitated by the sudden declaration of lockdown, throwing millions of migrant workers out-of-work, shelter, food and forcing thousands of them walk on highways and railway tracks for hundreds of kilometres. Our Migrants’ Desk (MD) is linked with governments, NGOs and human rights groups, to reach out to the migrants to offer immediate relief in the form of food and shelter and help them to reach their homes. We have helped at least about 6,000 persons, who were in precarious situations. Lakhs of them have reached home, but is there anything in their homes to sustain them and their families? (Swamy 2021:89-90) Distinction between Literacy and Education Education allows people to move forward, to assimilate, to join the professional classes. However politicians of ruling parties who create obstacles for the education of the poor, use the police to block further chances for upward mobility. It is this that is the entrenched reason for keeping the poor in chains. Here, all Indians become complicit in the ruling ideology of caste, based on Suvarna theory. There are oppositional forces in every post World War 2 society. They confront one another, and if not embedded in dictatorship, they are free to engage with one another in legal transactions. What we confront in India are two situations: belief in the Indian Constitution on one hand, and on the other hand, for their antagonists belief in the rule of Manu’s laws. These are not compatible, and lead to immense fury and bloody warfare. Whether it is RSS against Communists and vice versa, or RSS against Christians, Muslims, Dalits, Tribals, the violence and accusations of terrorism is no longer episodic. To even support the case of Dalits and Tribals is now infused by the wrath of the State. The interpenetration of uppercaste and /or upper class commercial deals, which have the blessing of the judiciary now takes away all the rights to citizenship given by the Indian Constitution to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Fr Stan Swamy showed that patronage to the mining companies was essentially protected by the machineries of the State, and that the Judiciary too became partisan in the provisioning of justice. Of the 3000 undertrials for whom he put in judicial petitions, only three had Maoist links. The very bases of the 5 lakh fine placed on Himanshu Singh on 14th July 2022, for petitioning against the attack on tribals, is a similar move to keep all enquiries of state violence against declassed tribals suspended. It obliterates their right from ever farming their traditional lands. The need for cheap labour to build smart cities, work in aluminium mines, and build roads has made an entire population of tribal/scheduled caste communities now available as cheap labour to contractors, by sheer expediency. Socialism, Gandhism and Right to Life and Human Rights in general are now as problematic to the State, as are ethnic communities and religions which do not convert to fundamentalist Hinduism,or form alliances with the BJP. Kerala and Tamil Nadu stand out in opposition to the Centre, and will pay the costs in terms of privileges granted by the federal obligations of the State, now masked as Hindu Rashtra. The political party which occupies the State is obviously not the State, for as Bezwada Wilson said, in a film made by Jyoti Nisha, on Ambedkar, there cannot be democracy and manual scavenging co existing. Caste as Calculated Hegemonic Device Abraham Ayrookuzhiel suggests that the exclusion of Dalits, their untouchability, their history of degradation is a consequence of continuous invasions, where the indigenous people were colonized and treated as slaves. He points to the idea of Suvarna and Avarna as categories of caste and race distinction, where the indigenous people bore traces of the Austro- Mongoloid, and the Dravidians, conquered in turn by the Aryans, specifically used their countervailing sense of authority over the defeated peoples to make them labour as barbers, fishers, tailors, cultivators, jugglers, musicians and stone cutters, road builders, grave diggers and scavengers. In this context, their conversion to Christianity gave them a semblance of freedom, because they no longer belonged to the subjugated outcastes of Hinduism, or were suppressed by the Dominant Castes. However, their sense of self worth came from their participation in matters of church and local community as free people, recognizing among themselves the quality of equality. Their poetry would be essentially the voice of hunger and loss. In some intuitive sense, the possibility of freedom for the Dalit Christians comes from this overarching sense of their right to live in a caste less society. And yet, three generations of Reservations for Christian Dalits will bring them to the frontlines of professional and educational mobility. Dr Rajaratnam, former Director of Gurukul Lutheran Seminary in Chennai, took 7 years to compile a hymnal in use by students of the college, and published by the Gurukul Lutheran Seminary for its use. In the Introduction he wrote that “we take pride in including a special order of Worship on Dalit concerns.” (vii) He adds ”Dalit worship is unique because it is not just a cultural expression of their joy and sorrow. They are always open and there is no secret at all. Their expression is spontaneous. They communicate all their feelings even in worship as children express themselves to their parents.” (ibid 69) That soul music represented the voice of Dalits in relationship to traditional Christian hegemonic forces in Christianity in Kerala has been made forcefully by P.Sanal Mohan. The hymns represent the continuous struggle that Dalits find themselves and laments of Dalit Christians. Education in the ALC became the focused way by which parishioners hoped for change in social and economic status. In the Appraisal Report on Arcot Lutheran Church School Project (mimeo archives of Gurukul Lutheran Seminary Chennai) the Danish Mission representatives noted that the goals were child centric learning but the text books were State provided, and thus there was a huge gap between intentions and practice. The Report writer/s say” “The concept of the ALC project is captured by the motto “Educate and Elevate” . It is the assumption of the project that improved education can lead to improved quality of life, improved education is in the project related to the consequence of relevance.. i.e what is being taught has to be relevant for the life of the learners. The methodology of the project has to seek to provide improved formal education through improved infrastructure (school buildings furniture, teaching aids) and an improved teaching learning process (teaching training programmes in child-centred learning methods}. Besides, the project has attempted to improve the link between school and community through Parent Teacher Associations and contributions from the Community to the school, and to improve the living conditions of the local communities in the project area, through adult education classes, health and income generating activities, an women’s samgams (gathering). (Mimeo,no author, no date Gurukul Seminary Archives). A representative of the teaching community of ALC in Polur district said that they had a week of consultations with teacher representatives from other districts, which involved discussions on National Education Policy, where the children are meant to be graded into different streams as fast learners, mediocre learners, and slow learners, but she said after Covid 19 and two years of absenteeism, village children have forgotten everything and suffer from short span attention. ( interview 19th July 2022) Reservations for Christians according to Ayrookuzhiel would imply being assimilated in hierarchically lower caste positions when they seek to repudiate caste. He bleakly states that Dalits are being paid to remain within the fold of Hinduism as enslaved people (Ayrookuzhiel 2006:73). A young Dalit Christian woman to whom I put the question, “Do you think non Dalits can speak on behalf of Dalits, or is it a battle only to be fought by Dalits breaking away from the subservience forced on them by the master caste, replied “ I don’t believe in caste”. As Didier Fassin writes about a constant culture of cruelty (our example here is caste), is that “ Violence must be able to find a minimum of justification in the idea the perpetuator has of the person who is subjected to it and who must be made to pay.” (Fassin 2013 :136). The leap that Paolo Freire looked for was the rise of the intellectuals among the grass roots, to speak on behalf of their communities. As M.S.S Pandian argued most powerfully, in a book published by his wife posthumously on behalf of Pandian, it is for people to decide their choice of religion, not the coercive apparatus of the state (Pandian 2019) Dr Susan Visvanathan is Retired Professor and Former Chairperson of CSSS, JNU and currently Adjunct Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal. Bibliography Alexander, Elisabeth Susan. 2006. Cuddalore in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Political and Social Overview, in Grosse, Andreas, Y.Vincent Kumaradoss, Heike Liebau (Editors). Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India; The Danish Halle and The English Halle Mission, Volume 1. Halle: Frankesche Stiftungen, and distributed by Delhi: Manohar Press Ayrookuzhiel, Abraham. 2006. Essays on Dalits, Religion and Liberation. Bengaluru: Asian Trading Corporation and Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Bugge, Henriette. 1994 Mission and Tamil Society, London: Routledge. Christenson, Evelyn. 1992. What Happens When Women Pray. UK: Victor Books. Dietrich, Gabrielle. 1992. Reflections on the Women’s Movement in India: Religon, Ecology, Development. Delhi: Horizon India Fassin, Didier, 2013: Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Cambridge: Polity Fihl, Esther and A. R Venkatachalapathy. 2009. Special Issue Indo-Danish Cultural Encounters in Tranquebar: Past and Present. Review of Development and Change, Vol X1V NO 1 AND 2 January to December 2009 Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race London: Routledge Kawashima, Koji. 1998. Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858-1936. Delhi: Oxford University Press Moon, Vasant 2001. Growing Up Untouchable. New Delhi: Vistaar Mohan P. Sanal 2015 Modernity of Slavery: Struggles Against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala. Delhi: Oxford University Press Rajagopal, Geetha, 2009. Hindu Music in the Temples of South India. Delhi: D.K Printworld. Saberwal, Satish Wages of Segmentation Pandian, M.S.S. 2019. The Strangeness of Tamil Nadu, Ranikhet and Delhi: Permanent Black. Rasten, Simon. 2009. The Tranquebar Tribute in the Reign of King Serfoji 11 in Esther Fihl and A. R Venkatachalapathy in Special Issue Indo-Danish Cultural Encounters in Tranquebar: Past and Present. Review of Development and Change, Vol X1V NO 1 AND 2 January to December Sherinian. Zoe.C. 2005. www Galeacademic one file Annual Women and Music, Vol 9 University of Nebraska Press accessed on 23rd July 2022) Oommen, T. K and Hunter P Mabryu. 2000. The Christian Clergy in India. New Delhi: Sage Zupanov, Ines G. 1999. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahminical Knowledge in Seventeenth Century India. Oxford University Press Delhi Acknowledgements: Grateful thanks to Gitika De, Tanweer Fazal, P.Sanal Mohan, Jesudas Athyal, Y.T Vinayaraj, Susan Elisabeth Alexander, Vincent Kumaradoss, Ramola Cecil Joseph and Anuradha Sen Mukherjea,Team Quo Vadis in Tiruvannamalai, Daffini, Komalamma and Paul Visuvasam.

Re-Reading Lewis Thomas: Obituary Lecture for Franson Manjali (Kochi Memorial Meeting organised by JosephDavis2024)

Post Covid Re-reading of Lewis Thomas Susan Visvanathan (Former Professor of Sociology,CSSS, JNU susanvisvanathan@gmail.com) That Covid left a trail of destruction is our great loss, as we co-existed with rampant death for two years(2020-2022). After that, those who suffered from long Covid left us, without saying goodbye. Lewis Thomas’ “The Youngest Science: Notes of A Medicine Watcher”(Penguin 1995) tells us beguilingly that right up till the mid 1930s, there was no cure for many diseases, such as influenza, syphilis, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, measles, chickenpox. Doctors and nurses provided palliative care, and hoped for cell regeneration given the circumstances of rest and nutrition provided to the patients. He writes that the purpose of the curriculum was primarily to diagnose and recognize the disease, to classify, list their signs, symptoms and make accurate diagnoses. There were some remedies such as aspirin, morphine, digitalis, bromides, barbiturates ( ibid 27). While the doctors counseled patients on their visits, it was the nurses who were the institutional catalysts who networked between the medics (professors and interns) other nursing staff, aids, cleaners, porters, lift operators and management. It was they who had the institutional pulse and knew each patient in terms of diagnoses and active treatment, which was in their hands. Because of their catalytic knowledge and networking abilities, they had the ability to be friends and confidants of those who were in danger by serious illness, and carry information to their family (ibid 67). Lewis Thomas thus shifts the trajectory of the nurse as having the job of carrying out doctors’ orders to one who, as a professional, lived in the intimate zone between life and death. Nurses make it their business to know everything that is going on. They spot errors before they can be laundered. They know everything written on the chart. Most of all, they know their patients as unique human beings, and they get know their families. Because of intimate knowledge, they are quick to sense warps in the system and act upon it. According to Lewis, the average sick person feels anxious most of the time because of anonymity, no identity other than the name tag, the sense of being left adrift with a plastic tag with number, and in danger of getting lost, being whisked into a wrong laboratory, to have a wrong procedure and so on. He writes, ‘The attending physician or the house officer on rounds and usually in a hurry, can murmur a few reassuring words on his way out the door, but it takes a confident, competent and cheerful nurse, there all day long and in and out of the room on one chore or another through the night, to bolster one’s confidence that the situation is indeed manageable and not about to get out of hand” (ibid 69). Lewis Thomas argues that the evolution of language is parallel in terms of its concepts like the evolution of the species itself. The question of’ when cannot be answered, he writes, because we have to think of the existence of prokaryotes which are organisms which have the appearance of bacteria. These left traces in rocks 2 to 3 billion years ago. Two and a half billion years ago they appeared as algal mats (ibid 52). A billion years ago these algae produced enough oxygen into the earth’s atmosphere to form nucleated cells. From there formed the mitochondria and chloroplasts of plant cells which coexist with us today. Similarly, the roots of language are produced perhaps twenty thousand years ago. For Thomas, the root word for doctor is leech, coming from the work laece in English, lake in Middle Dutch, in early Germanic it was lekjaz. In Indo European languages, its origin was in “leg” which meant “to collect”, with derivatives leading “to speak’ : hence lecture, logic, and logos are from leg. Lekjaz communicated magic words, leech stood for the double meaning of a worm as well as Doctor. Assimilation is the term used for the fusion of two different meanings in one term. The idea of ‘collecting’ present in ‘leg’ has persisted, as it combines the doctor’s penchant for collecting blood and fees ( ibid 53). He goes on to explain that the word Doctor comes from “dek” meaning something proper and useful. It became docere in Latin, to teach, also discere, to learn, hence disciple. In Greek it was understood to mean an acceptable kind of teaching, thus the roots for dogma and orthodox ( ibid 53) Here, I come to the work of Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romain Vanishing Voices (2002). They show how oral traditions become threatened with extinction, when languages are no longer used and are forgotten. One remembers here the encyclopaedic work of Ganesh Devy and his team where documentation of existing languages and dialects become the basis of their survival. Oral languages according to Nettle and Romaine survive through intergenerational transmission. Languages become extinct when people do not use this language any more. They prefer to educate children in commercially viable languages which help them with education and jobs. Peripheral languages become extinct, in favour of metropolitan languages. Official languages are not known by the majority of the population - these involve metalanguages and technical languages. Laboratory languages, with the creation of dictionaries and sometimes scripts try to rejuvenate oral tradition. This can end up as a form of museumisation. The will to learn a language and use a script makes a dying or dead language become reactivated. Languages are a storehouse of memories and knowledge. Levi Strauss, striving to generalize the unity of the human mind, spoke about the depth and variation of botanical classifications in South America by tribal communities and the complexity of kinship algebra in Australian tribal communities. Industrialisation depletes forms of traditional knowledges. The comparative method was used by Anthropology to collate vast literature across society. Malinowki’s intervention regarding matriliny and the place of the mother’s brother sought to critique Freud’s concept of the Oedipal complex. In the Trobriand case, the nephew felt antagonism toward the maternal uncle, not his biological father. The question of nature and nurture thus became central to Sociology. Lewis discusses the questions of neurological trajectories which define perception in the following way. In real life, research is dependent on the human capacity for making predictions that are erroneous, and in the ability that researchers have to bounce back. The predictions are pure guess work. Often they are wrong. Error is the mode. We all know this this in our bones, whether engaged in science or in the ordinary business of life. More often than not, our firmest predictions are chance-based, on what we imagine to be probability rather than certainty, and become used to blundering very early in life. Indeed, the universal experience, mandated in the development of every young child, of stumbling, dropping things, saying the words wrong, spilling oatmeal and sticking ones thumb in one’s eye are part of the preparation for adult living. A successful child is one who has learned so thoroughly about his own fallibility that he can never forget it, all the rest of his life ( ibid 82). For Lewis, research is born out of recognizing error, and re-searching again. Its root is err, which does not mean ”wrong”; the Indo_European root is ‘ers’, signifying “to be set in motion”, it comes into Latin as errare, meaning to “wonder’ but the same root emerges in Old Norse as “ras” or rushing about looking for something. The English word “race” comes from ras. In order to get something right, we must get something wrong, or to quote Lewis, “many things wrong”. Here, he turns to the term “stochastic” which communicates randomness. Stochastic is the term for pure chance. “But it started out, as happens so often in language, with precisely the opposite meaning. The original Greek root was stokahs, meaning a brick column used in a target, from this the root word meaning “to take aim” were derived. (ibid 83) We like to think that we take aim to hit targets by taking advantage of a human gift for meaning and precision. But there is this secret, embedded in the language itself: we become accurate only by trial and error, we tend to wander about, searching for targets. It is being in motion, at random (from a root meaning running) that permits us to get things done. Edward Lorenz in his book, Chaos suggests that even chaos has rules, we only need to decipher them. In the pendulum gone awry, or arrythamea the beat that is missing is calculable, just as the metaphor that a butterfly wing flapping can create tremors in the atmosphere, sufficient to create a storm (or not). This is how Lorenz moves from the idea of a rule bound universe to one of random chance. It also explains Levi Strauss preoccupation that change in any one element can change the entire structure. Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory (1999) orchestrates an account of the mutations of fruit flies in milk bottles in the 1950s to help us understand why obsessive interest by scientists on DNA and chromosomes helped us to understand different beats and rhythms in human neurological webs. In an interesting analogy between receptors of language, and receptors of antibodies, Lewis Thomas says that antibodies are created by using certain virus loaded genes which are then spliced onto an animal. The cross channel information is received, antigens are created when the body recognizes a foreign body. Lymphocites rush to respond, and a clump of lymphocites form to hereditarily pass on this information. He writes, “When the horse serum protein appears it is not recognizable to any but a small minority of the cell population, for all the rest it is a waste of time, motion, and effort. Also, there are risks all around, chances of making major blunders, endangering the whole organism. Flawed lymphocites can turn with an inability to distinguish between self and nonself, and replication of these can bring down the entire structure with the devastating diseases of autoimmunity. Blind spots can exist, or gaps in recognition analogous to color blindness, so that certain strain of animals are genetically unable to recognize the foreignness of certain bacteria and viruses. (Thomas 1995:85) This is the reason that in the odd case, a vaccination can maim or kill. Preeti Monga, the gifted pedagogue who became blind after vaccination has written of living a normal life, dependent on the memory of the world, before sight went completely. According to Lewis, the analogy of lymphocyte selection and recognition, is being used to understand how the brain works. It is postulated that the thinking units equivalent to lymphocytes are the tiny columns of packed neurons which make up most of the substance of the cereberal cortex. These clusters are the receptors, prepared in advance for confrontation with this or that sensory stimulus, or this or that particular idea. For all the things we will ever see in the universe, including things not yet thought of, the human brain possesses one or another prepared, aware, knowledgeable cluster of connected neurons as ready to lock on to that one idea as a frog’s brain is for the movement of a fly. The recognition is amplified by synoptic alteration within the column of cells and among the other groups with which the column is connected and memory is installed (ibid 85). Thomas then goes on to say that Artificial Intelligence may one day become superior to our own. Since this essay was written at a time when its infallibility seemed appropriate, he sets up the human brain to be unique in its ability to forget and to make mistakes. Confusion is the nature of the human mind, not just as it ages, but in the everyday contexts of forgetting, remembering erroneously, and nothing can be recalled at will, since where its stored is never very clear. For him, forgetting is the act of emptying the brain and relearning are everyday pursuits. (ibid 88). He says with utmost compassion, Come to think of it, you could not run a human brain in any other way, and the clearing out of excess information must be going on, automatically, autonomically, all the time. Perhaps there are certain pieces of thought that must be classed as nonbiodegradable, like addition and one’s family’s names, and how to read a taximeter, but a great deal of material is surely disposable. And the need for a quick and ready sanitation system is real: you cannot ever be sure, from minute to minute, when you will have to find a place to put something new. At the very least, you are required to have and use, a mechanism for edging facts to one side, pushing them out of the way into something like a plastic kitchen bag. Otherwise you would run the risk of losing all good ideas. Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea – the kind of idea that looks as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything – tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different. There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking hard about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You’d better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark (Lewis 1995:88). In an essay called “The Long Habit” in Lives of a Cell (1980) Thomas asserts that Death is a topic not discussed or raised. Large scale death viewed on the television screen hardly moves us. For ourselves during our mortal moments, we think Death will go away (Thomas 1980:55) Extending our life technologically presents the possibility of long life. In the 19th century, men died at 45 years of age, women at 40, on the average. Now the upper class think of 90 years as an average span of life extendable to 110. We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can post pone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one’s watch (ibid 57)…..We don’t know much about dying, about corporality, about extinction. Cells don’t die that fast, they can regenerate in test-tubes even hours after death. “It takes hours, even days before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces (ibid 58). According to Lewis Thomas, there is a switch off mechanism that allows detachment before death or atleast witnesses of near death experience have said so (ibid 59). Lewis seems to believe that the spirit returns to origins, I prefer to think of it as somehow separated at its filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath hack into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter (ibid 61). He sees the earth analogous to a single celled organism with its membrane of sky, piercing which creates entropy. Outside this vacuum of blue sky is the blackness of space. The color photographs of the earth are more amazing than anything outside: we live inside a blue chamber, a bubble of air blown by ourselves. The other sky beyond, absolutely black and appalling is wide open country, irresistible for exploration (ibid 50) This is the microcosm analogy of ‘life :earth :: death : outer space’. Yet we hope to encounter our loved ones again, we hope to see them in the remembrances of others, though bilateral kin linkages, through the constellation of images produced through photographs and narratives. What is a memoryscape? It is healing by its very virtue – we learn to use happy memories for recovering our past. Bad memories undergo suppression, though have recurring identity as nightmares. We learn to process these over time, crafting good memories from new landscapes, mutual recognition of pleasure principles. We use these in turn to craft new languages of desire, never forgetting the old languages of knowledge and experience. It is this relation between past and present which allows us to imagine a future. Here too is the place of language, of speech, of sharing. Human beings gather, they share ideas. Like rituals, seminars, visits to the beach or shops, language becomes the conduit of survival (ibid 73). In the midst of all this collective activity, is the autonomy of the cell – it performs, functions, dies. We must give it that autonomy (ibid 78). What makes us unique is language, human speech. It begins to look, more and more disturbingly, as if the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. Language is, like net building, or hive making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human being. We engage in it communally, compulsively and automatically. We cannot be human without it, if we were to be separated from it our minds would die as surely as bees lost from the hive ( ibid 105). Thomas continues We are born knowing how to use language. The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences is innate in the human mind. We are programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar. There are invariant and variable structures in speech that are common to all of us. As chicks are endowed with an innate capacity to read information in the shapes of overhanging shadows telling hawk from other birds, we can identify the meaning of grammar in a string of words, and we are born this way. According to Chomsky, who has examined it as a biologist looks at live tissue, language must simply be a biological property of the human mind (ibid 105). The universal attributes of language are genetically set, we do not know them, or make them up as we go along (ibid 106). Yet, he acknowledges that language has a life of its own. They become instinct, new meanings and words are created. Individual languages leave their dialect forms. Separate languages can exist side by side maintaining their integrity with out permeability or compatibility. At other times languages may come together, fuse, replicate and give rise to new tongues (106). Here, he endorses the primevality of music and art, which were probably the first languages combining symbols and sounds. Silence too, has its language, as mystics know. Reading and writing are often done in solitude. Translations liberate meaning. Raimundo Pannikkar used the concepts of shruti and smriti to show how there is a shift from secrecy to shared meaning. There is a need, equally to allow the authorship of speech, to shift to interpretation rather than the idolatory of the text (Visvanathan 2022b). What is the dialectic between faith and human rights? Pursuing our rights as believers/non believers we carry on with our daily chores (ibid 147). Ascription implies closure (ibid 148). Technological change and digital resources make our understanding of the world more complex. The dispossessed, the meek inherit the earth remaining behind when all else is lost. Talking to plants- the bases of organic farming is the iconic symbol of this . We must believe that they believe, whether it is in divinity or the secret life of plants (ibid 148). Sociologists never attend to the truth value of utterances as they do to representation, or forms of disclosure ( ibid 149). Ideologies are totalitatarian. Translation, comparative religion, learning from history, from the other, opens up the texts (ibid 149). This leads to new ways of orienting ourselves to the known world. Feminists demand accountability. Love and responsibility are not enough. The concept of dhyana or concentration as Simone Weil called it is essential to the task of learning (ibid 150). As Humanities shift from the Universities to the technical colleges they are seen as the Handmaids of the Sciences. A space carefully created for the establishment brains to embellish themselves, to become cosmopolitan rather than unidirectional. And yet, we remember Bachelard who could integrate Laboratory and Poetry to unravel the world in a technical way, and with narrative virtuosity in the metalanguage of verse. How do texts correlate between canonical and the domestic? Subramanium and Velacherry Rao say that in the 16th, 17th and 18th century it (neeti shastra) was frequently read out across communities. In 1708 Ziegenbalg wrote that the St Thomas Christians knew it by heart and quoted it often (ibid 154).. This absorption in the grand traditions of Hinduism are common. We look at Clifford Geertz’s classic work Negara to understand how the Hindu Buddhist consciousness permeated the elite strata in Java. The inscriber whatever the epoch, becomes the utmost authority. Political ideologies, dramatic interpretations, details of mundane description, suppression of the problem, enhancement of the politically expedient, engineering of silences, in the passing of the text maybe noticed (ibid).In the case of religious poetry, the erotic often becomes translated into the inviolable mother’s body. Here too, there is an act of mapmaking (157). Much of the spiritual texts point to androgyny, as the devotee has to cross borders transforming his/her/their psyche in constant devotion. Those crossing borders live in osmosis. Heteroglossia is present. Sometimes untranslated mystic states are communicated through body language – tranquility, detachment, solitude, silence, revelation, dream, prayer, seeking. The physical leads to longing. Transcendence to newer states leads to what C.S Lewis called spontaneity, originality and action. In my ethnography of ashram life in Tiruvannamalai titled The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramanamaharshi , I noticed that Nature/Space and Time lie beyond the individual. There is a denial of free will. A search for symmetry follows. The paradox of hierarchy exists between the holy and the individual. Manifestations in a literary device follow, be it poetry or philosophy. The seeker who transcends is permitted to renounce. Yet there are duties, routines. These are times of meditation, community prayer, chanting, meals (both serving and eating) social interaction and silence. All are governed by clock time, and often the ringing of bells. The penultimate rules are silence, meditation and work. Ramana Mahrashi never believed idleness led to meditation (Visvanathan 2010: 231). To understand Nature in terms of the mystery whether in religion or science is the quest for solitude (ibid 232). The inalienable nature of solitude once recognized is the quest for solitude. Thomas Merton said “ We put ourselves between ourselves and things” (ibid 253). Silence has the power of love, it moves beyond classification. Silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it. Renunication has a specific attribute. Solitariness and the Here, work and community all go together. The metaphors used are of family and brethren. Normal life, such as householders live is about comfort, reassurance and diversion. Here, we are able to gather, reassure one another, we enjoy the consolation of companionship (ibid 233). To live in intimate communication with that mystery is the mystic’s sole choice, where the only goal is to be one with the godhead. Erich Fromm in Beyond the Chains of Illusion writes of the awareness of the unconscious which appears as Jung’s collective unconscious. Here, too, are found the archetypes of repression, domination and resistance, terms beloved of feminists. Challenges to revealing the unconscious remain, namely fear, hopelessness and lack of proper orientation. Fromm writes that resistance is an attempt to protect oneself from fright. People said that after the second world war, that they did not know that Jews were killed. People say today that they do not observe death, threats, or admit to selective inattention. The question of Palestine remains closed, hurtling towards extinction, a self fulfilling prophecy about a map without people. It is for this reason that war rages on the planet collectively, an enemy is sighted and the cannons and bombs go off endlessly. We know that arms, food, medicines are run by investment by known and connected oligarchies. Health and agricultural capitalist enterprises find in war machineries substantial profit-making motives. Workers receive wages and support managers. Earlier, there was a distinction between ‘doing a job’ and ‘having a vocation’. There is patriotism and love for the country, which is deeply imbued in terms of partisanship. Fromm deals with the understanding of ambivalence as a necessary part of existence. There is love, hate, contradiction, dialectic and paradoxical thought (Fromm 130). Assimilation brings profit, and no questions are asked. Learning languages become an essential part of survival strategies. Language is for communication, interaction, commercial values, increasing awareness, globalization, abbreviation (sms) and mobility. Learning languages arise from fear of isolation, ostracism, and fear of exclusion. It is a continuous interplay of new vocabularies, changing radius of power and domination, and the essential play of creativity and adaptation. In the rapidly changing world, there are acceptance of norms which are against human nature. ( ibid 138) We know that the polarization of the world today is similar to the early medieval period in Europe. The return to a world which capitalizes on autodestructive tendencies is based on the atrophy of language, where speech is monosylabillic, and renders the passivity of the governed subject as a given. Reference Fromm, Erik 1962 . Beyond The Chains of Illusion Lorenz, Edward: 1995. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Thomas, Lewis: 1980. The Lives of a Cell. New York: Bantam Books 1995. The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher. New York Penguin Visvanathan, Susan:2010. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. New Delhi: Roli .

Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans

Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans, Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region and a Church. P.K.M Tharakan, Bloomsbury, India 2014 This is an interesting book for practitioners of Anthropology, since it delves into family history and uses of biography in social science, with a framework which is deeply entrenched in kinship history. Lay St Thomas Christians, and Keralites in general will find a very important slice of history, which is osmotic with statecraft, the rules of kings and local community leaders. We do know that in the 18th century the St Thomas Christians were still recovering from the ecclesiastical fissioning of 1664, so it’s not surprising that a hundred years later they were still dealing with the problem of pazhecoor and puthencoor, since the old liturgies and the new liturgies were still operational. The Romo Syrians who had accepted the allegiance to the Pope, to use the Roman liturgy in the language they were used to, which was Chaldean. However, the Jacobites received the liturgy from the West Syrian church in 1664, and were in a distinctly different location from the Romo Syrians. Tharakan’s books shows us that the Romo Syrians longed to return to a composite fold, which in the present day Ecumenical movement is still a strong predisposition. Since the Tharakans were the keepers of the original Varthamannam Pustukam for two hundred years, until it was lodged in the Kakanad Ernakulam museum, the history of the Tharakans is not of personal interest to the family alone. It is presented here as a case of how family histories are in Kerala, occasionally cosmopolitan in nature, and involves an old history of trading, ecclesiastical manoeuvres and neighbourhood relations and emblems of community concerns. The Tharakans were powerful traders, and as a result, close to the Kings of Thrivathamcoor and Kochi Rajas. However, their personal relations express the way in which inter lineage rivalries would be subsumed within the larger interests of the family, as mentors to priests and high placed ecclesiasts, providing the financial resources for the church quarrels that would intermittently surface among sections of the Romo Syrians, with reference to the claims to loyalty or disloyalty to the mother Church, the Papacy. The two lineages of powerful family heads clashed over property and allegiances, and were engrossed in court cases for decades. However, family lore about mutual courtesies were legion. Max Gluckman has written about the ‘peace in the feud’. In the Tharakan case, it would be the community feasting and hospitality at marriages and wonderful meals in their grand mansions fraternal tensions where sometimes, joking or great generosity would underlie the subterranean animosity of fraternal relations. The women were active players, as they supported the men in their landlordship and dealings with both local chieftains, and later, the colonial government. Their lives were often tragic, and the travails of disease and childbirth, and early deaths too frequent to be ignored. Not surprisingly, the institution of a hospital and school, as well as a newspaper (Nazrani Deepika) during the 19th century is well documented by the author as the contributions of individual Tharakans, looking after their estates. Policy matters dealing with canal construction and the measures provided to alleviate famine are also described. The section on the Varthamanam Pustukam is interesting, because it describes the journey of Thomas Paremakkal, whose sister might have married a Parayil ancestor Variath Avira, but more importantly, describes the journey to Rome by Indian priests who were looking to revolt against Portuguese ecclessiastical control. They began the journey on October 14th 1778, via Africa and Brazil to Europe. This alarming route was the result of sailors falling ill, and Portuguese sailors could next be commissioned only in Bahia, called Salvador today. The contribution of the Parayils to local community and church was so immense, that the Pope sent three members of the family Titles, with injunctions on how the paraphernalia should be worn in a ceremonial manner! The matter of their financial propriety was given the seal of authority, and both Ezhupunna Puthenveetil Parayl Avira Varkey Tharakan and his brother Ezhupunna Mangalamuttathu Parayil Hormis Tharakan received Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Sylvester and Grand Cross Knight of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, while Ayanattu Parayil Kunjuvira Tharakan received Knight of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great. Parayil Avira Varkey Tharakan, the hero of this book was referred to as the Marquis. Working along with Nidhirickel Mani Kathanar of Kuruvillangad, substantial contributions were made by the Parayils to the establishment of a Seminary at Mangalapuzha and to the Bishop’s Residence in Ernakulam. The formation of the Catholica Mahajana Sabha (1904) in Mangadapally in Alapuzha also had their powerful backing. We must also remember that they dealt with the British with equanimity, and were able to appropriate all the privileges of a trading family, when Alapuzha became the baseline entreport for pepper contracts and trade in timber. The Parayils had a sense of worth, which was foremostly “Indian”, as the Varthamanam Pustukam proffered as its argument for staying with the ancient Chaldean liturgies. This book gives us a sense of cosmopolitanism and the wonderful energy of a family, who depended on local Rajas to support their vision. Their personal tragedies and family rivalries were bypassed to offer local communities, of which they were undisguised lords, their sense of a larger wisdom, which was fearless and erudite.

Estates: Colonial and Modern

Plantations In Colonial and Contemporary Manifestations The Opium War with China precipitated the need for establishing plantations in India. The British depended on opium sales to pay for their Chinese tea, and in providing opium, for sale in exchange for valuable and expensive Chinese tea, they had to first grow it(Lovell 2011).Plantation economies depended on indentured labour, as Amitav Ghosh (2008) has shown in his The Sea of Poppies and the traffic was an international one, till slavery was abolished. In Assam, an indigenous variety of wild tea was found which was subsequently propagated as has been described in Alastair and Iris Macfarlane’s “Green Gold: The Empire of Tea.” The use of Chinese convicts to plant tea in South India and in Assam was too obscure and difficult, so the labour from Chotta Nagpur became a safety valve for providing for the immense labour requirements in planting tea in nurseries, transplanting and nurturing them, and keeping them free from pests and fungus. The colonial system depended on the early founding of railways to the ports. (Ghosh, Amalendu 2016: 28) A matrix of lines were established to take away first the felled timber in the clearing of forests, and then the dried tea from the factories. The preoccupation from 1836 onwards was to be able to provide England with its brew, and cease the sulphurous dependence on China. The politics of labour was defined in terms of availability from given sources of workers (Amalendu Ghosh (2016), Rana Behal 2014, Prabhu Mahapatra (1992), Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane (2003) Jayeeta Sharma (2012), Virginius Xaxa, Sharat K Bhowmick and M. A Kalam (1996), Abraham Verghese (2023), Arupjyothi Saikia (2011) Shyni Danial (2014)) So political circumstances were varied. In South India IPKF presence in Sri Lanka drove many tamil labourers during the 30 years war to estates in Coonoor and its hinterlands as they were able to provide refuge to their families. In Assam, Chota Nagpur labourers were replaced by the terrible wars of self proclaimed autonomy and tea planter families had to prove their stability by holding their links with the Army, Police and Forest officers together. While there was a symbiotic relationship between these bureaucratic echelons and the multinational communities of shareholders in tea plantation estates, the choice between life and death was never clearly explained to either labourers or the managerial incumbents of the plantations. “Tea is a way of life” the young elite personnel going into the plantations was informed. They already came from families with a military or executive background, where class, status and hierarchy was a form of incipient socialization. On arrival the newly employed initiates were welcomed by the manager and his wife, who right upto the 1970s were often British with a long history of administrative duties for their company in the colonies. The novitiates were taught their duties through conversation and social intermingling. House and garden were the responsibility of the chotta membsahib, as the assistant’s wife was known. As a partner, she was an essential member of the community, and at all times had to accept the formal hierarchical system of the estate. She was in charge of the domestic staff, and learned to cook the bada khana or big feasts that was so much part of their life. Food, interaction and business dealing all went together. In this sense much work went into learning or preparing the food, as supervising cooks and asserting authority was a necessary part of ruling the kitchen and being responsible for household keys and the home economy of management of resources. In the same way, the gardens were an essential prerequisite for representing the bungalow and gardens as essentially paired. Quite often the garden would be in disrepair and the house would be liveable or it would be the other way around as gardens could turn decrepit in the absence of a managerial class tenant. So given that transfers between estates was part of the promotional attributes of climbing the occupational ladder, the wife of the manager would have to be in charge of the transfer of material goods and the the relocation to a new place. Getting to know the cook and gardeners and the household help required self confidence and emotional dexterity, gaining which was a very laborious process. The master of the house was out of the house at 5 a.m with his dogs, to supervise the plucking. He returned for a brief while to have breakfast with his wife, and then returned to office affairs and management of financial aspects. He returned home for lunch and a short nap before returning to the gardens to supervise the weighing of the leaves, and at midnight he returned to over see the drying and curing process in the factory. Returning in the early hours of morning, the assistant manager would sleep on the ground floor, instead of the master bedroom as he had to be up early to supervise the pluckers once more. Chotta memsahibs and wives of the managers had a hierarchy among themselves and were not permitted to mix with the workers in the lines. These strict rules allowed the managers to carry out their work in a way which made supervisory capacities efficient. However, the wives of the managers had a very important role in managing the estate hospital and consulting with the doctors over the condition of the patients. They also had a free run over the corporate social responsibilities enjoined in the conjugal responsibilities of the couple to the estate. Women showed rare abilities in organizing , teaching and weaving, jam making, baking, dyeing and tailoring, art and boutique extensions of the Estate. They were truly committed to these parallel structures, as it was a necessary survival strategy to their basic responsibility to managing home and garden. On having to learn these new skills, as they may have arrived with none of them, they saw it as a necessary way of providing their husbands with the wherewithal of presenting themselves as an efficient managerial couple. As Claude Levi Strauss argued for the Amazonians in South America, a bachelor was an embarrassment, and it was only through coupledom that legitimacy of work and survival could be strategized. So too, the couple here represented the powerful aspect of conjugal complementarity. The woman had to communicate that she was strong and healthy as the master of the house, and run alongside. It was this physical and mental ability to understand the significance of her husband’s work and contribute to the stability of its presentation through the symbols of a perfectly managed home and garden which was her lot. The cry that usually accompanied this call to occupational perfectionism was, “We had to send our children away. We were not permitted to have them with us. They had to go to boarding school at the age of five, and were allowed to come home for the holidays”, is a very important aspect of understanding the emotional costs of bourgeoisie lives. The normalcy of this did not lead necessarily to the alienation of children from their parents, as life on the estate was extremely hard, and given the isolation, surrounding forests, and the prevalence of raging rivers and nocturnal animals it was a fact of nature that childhood and adolescence and young adult hood was better managed in an institutional framework. The fact that tea estates were often adjacent to Reserves brings forward the juxtaposition of certain aspects of tourism which includes hunting, tourism and animal protectionism. Every estate would have dogs, cats, poultry, donkeys, horses, goats and cattle. The presence of these animals were the responsibility of the chotta memsahib who had to protect her domestic staff from snakes, wolfs, elephants and wild boars. Clearly the household staff were alert to these dangers, as the master was often away from the house. Animals like the pet dogs, were trained to provide an antenna of warning protecting the life of all those who lived in the bungalow. As the sports and athletic aspect of their conjoined life was a given, the chotta memsahib had to turn up very well dressed to the club. She was expected to play tennis or badminton, dance, provide or contribute to excellent dinners, and be hostess in whatever capacity that the Senior Managers’ wives expected. To be asked to cook 25 chickens at short notice meant that no questions were asked, chicken curry that the guests would eat would just have to be perfect. Baking was an additional skill. The head cook would usually be elderly and well versed in the art. Often the Manager’s wife would leave behind some paper trail of recipes and accurate oven heating parametres to the novice Chotta Memsahib. Bird watching, embroidery, crochet, painting, reading novels, decorating and re-decorating the house were some of the attainments expected of her. Setting the table perfectly could not be left to the domestic staff, flower arrangements for the table, and setting out the cutlery in the exact grammar of use were her responsibilities. Official guests were those who were buyers, tea tasters, or executives of the multinational company who had numerous estates in India and abroad, where parity had to be maintained. As the standardization principle was paramount, neither climate change not unseasonal rain or defective factory machine could ever be an excuse. The work was hard, and international trade being what it was limits of pesticide use had to be monitored. As one tea estate manager said “ We pay the labourers little so that tea is affordable. If we raised the labour costs we cannot keep tea prices low, and consumers get angry if they have to pay more. As for organic tea, it does not exist, since tea pestilence and fungus are common.” Labourers in tea plantations contribute to the tourism industry as much as to their allocated tasks in plucking and gathering leaves together and weighing their morning productivity according to a time schedule. Quite often, spice gardens which grow pepper, cinnamon, star anise, cloves and cardamom are in contiguity. The agent visits from the nearby town and collects the produce against a given and mutually acceptable rate. Where tea plantations are individually owned against a small acreage, new innovations in Munnar estates include an airconditioned, or fan operated van which brings the tea in a cool atmosphere, thus avoiding damage. The collation of small estates together and the rights of workers have been an interesting aspect of the Tata estate which is owned co-operatively and by the workers. It means that they have union rights, can voice their discontent, and hope for better circumstances of work. The foreman is their leader, and he gets to boss over them over the speed of plucking leaves and the quantity which is accumulated over the morning. Ofcourse, there are bonuses for increased productivity, but clearly this comes at a cost. Muscles can become stiff, neck and hands can be affected from concentrated and aggressive plucking. The mechanical scissors used to trim the three leaves required for drying, roasting and curling are a great boon, but they still require hours of labour in the early morning sun right up to mid day. Each worker is under the gaze of the foreman, who also promises commissions to the super successful and eggs them on. Other workers look at this with caution as it is understood that super efficiency can affect the body. As one worker whose responsibility is taking tourists around the plantation said, “Who will look after us in our old age?”. Since he had mobility, drove a jeep around the plantation and could speak English, Tamil and Malayalam he felt privileged to share the real conditions of work and life on the Estate. He wanted to bring his son home from boarding school, but the supervisor was not giving him any guarantee that he would be relieved from his duties to bring back the boy. “I’ll let you know what the situation is, I cannot just give you leave without looking at the roster”. The aggrieved father said that he faced the same problem when he had to get married, and till the last moment did not know whether he would be allowed to go and stand next to his wife in the village where the marriage was to be held. For three generations, as Tamil workers in Munnar, Kerala, they had consistently worked in the Estate, but for his sons he wanted a different life, and was intent on educating them. His wife was a tea plucker on the Estate, his mother was a cook in the residence that was kept as a relic of colonial days. He was guard and driver to tourists at the bungalow which was rented out to different people on a daily bases, and always booked. Friendly by nature, he takes visitors to the Lines, and shows them the variety of temples, churches, mosques which dot the landscape, as the different cults have their places of worship. He also drives them to the Boutiques and the associated workshops for dyeing and tailoring, and the bakery with its allied gardens where strawberries are grown for jam. All the workers here are children of tea pluckers, who wanted to learn different skills. The bakery in fact is well known all over the town with its residents and constant stream of visitors as the personnel were trained in Mumbai by the Taj Hotel. The children of the pluckers who were sent for training were spastics or had Down Syndrome, and after training they came back very able as astute bakers making cakes, pastries and breads of various kinds. Outside each line tenement are small manageable kitchen gardens where workers can grow their yams and papayas. While wages are low, the workers are represented through the advertising and media efforts as ever friendly and smiling, as tourists visit in a parallel economic venture to keep the tea gardens afloat. Shobhita Jain’s essay Plantation Labour in South and South East Asia (2001) is an alarming essay on the hardships of workers’ lives, and the exact description of what they own is a description of poverty and hardship. On the other hand, managers try to keep workers happy by being involved in their personal lives, and giving them a sense of belonging. One of the indexes of these is how workers may indeed save the master’s life. In one particular instance in Assam when Bodo agitation was at its highest and plantation managers were being killed by terrorists, one of the women weavers in the Corporate Social Responsibility project run by the Memsahib whispered to her to tell her husband not to take certain routes, as there was rumour that he would be murdered by hidden assailants. Not just climate change, but the daily terror of being stalked and killed was ever present. Yet, as the Manager of an estate in Assam said, not one work day was lost. So dangerous was life in those years, there was one occasion when he had to herd all the women and children in a room and guard them with the Assistant Manager’s help as the assailants had turned up on the estate and were threatening the families of the Managers. Abraham Verghese’s novel The Covenant of Water looks at the juxtaposition of a family run estate (500 acres of gravelly, near-barren land) which has to be brought to life with the help of traditionally enslaved artisanal labour. The author’s mother left a hundred page account of their family history. Verghese then fictionalizes it, but in doing so he gives us archetypical figures who over a hundred years replay the great catastrophes which beset Kerala, or rather Travancore from 1930s. Tragedy upon tragedy beset the protagonists as they deal with flood, famine and the prevalent diseases of that time. The central figure is a 12 year old girl who is given in marriage to a 40 year old man, who is left widowed with a young son, at the start of the story. He is aghast on sighting her at the church, and tries to run away, but his sister who has arranged the match brings him back and persuades him that it is for the family’s good. To the credit of this widower, he consummates the marriage only when the child is 17 years old. Accompanying them in this period of slow familiarizing with the house and environment is the presence of the ghost of the 1st wife who occupies the cellar and is also a poltergeist dropping and breaking things. The estate owner is a rugged man, silent and preoccupied, who is intent on domesticating his property, and eating his food silently when served by his child bride. The son from the first marriage who is an infant, when his step mother is 12 years old, adores his new mother, and sleeps close to her and is her constant companion. Alas the family has a history of accidental drowning, and the young bride discovers this through a short hand insignia of names with a symbol of a cross which opens up at the top like a palm leaf frond. These deaths are so frequent that her husband refuses to travel by boat walking miles to a destination rather than cross by bridge or boat. What is the cause of these frequent accidental drownings? She discovers that those who are afflicted with the curse cannot bear water falling on them, even baths frighten them. In her darkest fears she never imagines that her step son will die of drowning in a puddle, but that happens and her husband can not recover from this second loss, so his silence becomes even more deafening, and the ghost in the cellar becomes even more demanding. So given her belief in Christ (they are all biographically as a family close to a Christian Saint in Mannar) she edges past year after year, and calamity after calamity. Given the monsoon, floods, and the proximity of rivers these drownings are endemic, but the physican Abraham Verghese locates a genetic connection, a family blip in the nerves which leads to both deafness and lack of co ordination in water, as the ears are affected and motor neuron functions are blurred regarding concepts of space and boundaries. In contrast to this simple family with its 500 acres which are also parceled out to relatives to help work the land, are the fictionalized tea estate owners who come into proximity. The Estate owners are enormously wealthy and own large cars, bungalows and they too are marked by death and tragedy. As Verghese is handling questions of three generations, and the stolidity of tradition, in the face of what are endemic, the question of how children who are ‘special’ or ‘challenged’ are treated, becomes central to the analyses. The child born to the protagonists is a girl who is spastic but loved and cheerful, able to speak and laugh and dance, but never grows beyond 4 years of age mentally. Her brother is intelligent but he must die of the family illness. His wife is the survivor of a great family tragedy, which is the death of her mother at an early age. She is a gifted artist, but alas, contracts leprosy, unknown to her family. Her husband dies after impregnating her and life does go on parallel tracks but not as any of us can imagine it. These stories of such great and intense sorrow, presented as fictionalized family history is a testament to the way in which the St Thomas Christians in Kerala present themselves in terms of an ethos of survival, philanthrophy, and subject to the tropics, and all the illness associated with it which affect the body including drownings, snake bite, diphtheria, tuberculosis, cereberal stroke, cancer… the list is endless. Philanthrophy leads to the ultimate infection of leprosy, and Abraham Verghese must give the occupational details of doctors’ lives from descriptions of diphtheria, hydrocele, leprosy and stroke. People care, they deal with disease and death, they don’t push it away, they accept their fate. The Estates are remote places, and the people who live in them must eke out their life emotionally. Death is a frequent and haunting presence, the loss of children the hardest to experience and describe vicariously. How to reach the Doctor remains the perennial trouble. As a planter from Attapadi who was looking after the family legacy said to me, “My father would say that he was Doctor, Tea Planter, Police Man, Lawyer, Forest Officer, Post Man all in one, and yet, he would drive down to Kottayam to meet us at our boarding school every week end.” Babies who were sick were driven down at night through forests with elephants and leopards and monkeys and snakes. Life was always dangerous, and there was also the problem of alcoholism. When the son of the protagonists, who was slated to be a Medial Doctor, meets his wife to be, a gifted artist, he explains that he wants to be a reader of classical literature and there is a death mask which appears in their family because of frequent drownings, she says casually, words to the affect that in plantation families, it is alcoholism, her father drinks, and now her brother drinks too. Abraham Verghese takes individual lives, with individual attributes, separate contexts and life chances then weaves them in a historical skein which gives us a history of plantations which is simultaneously stereotypical and exaggerated, filling even Oprah with dread, as the tv interview with her communicates. The solution to the possibility of famine, flood and contiguity to raging rivers is migration to foreign lands. Diaspora Malayalis are haunted by the fact that they could not keep their ancestral lands, and their tiled bungalows, with their artisanal slaves. The latter, with a practiced etiquette communicate the significance of childhood friendships with the Master and their consent to bondage. This intimacy and its corresponding social distance is the stuff of everyday relations of hierarchy which continue even today. For those who could not get away from their flooded homes, or from the impact of all that Verghese describes, the tropics remains their home as statistics of death from chicanguniya, dengue, batfever, and affliction from filarisis and cereberal malaria show. The floods leave a trail of death and loss, as has been shown in the disaster footage for Kerala in 2018, 2019 and 2024. Tea stations are particularly vulnerable as their altitude and proximity to water sources makes them prey to flash floods and crumbling mountains. Seasonal variation, where there is no fixed months when monsoon appears makes growing tea. Baldeep Singh, President of the Tea Association in India, and also later in Uganda, where he managed Khaitan tea plantations, said that the problem is so acute, that he had asked for researchers’ help in the Geography department to find new areas for establishing plantations where geology and climate could coincide for growing tea. The thing about climate change is that there are no rules, the el nina and el nona effect influences climate in terms of extreme heat and drought, or extreme rain fall. In the 1960s, Loren Eiseley communicated that all events were, in Nature, arbitrary. There had to be a promise of stability, but the entrance of human beings changed everything( Eiseley 1999:123). He argues on behalf of James Hutton in the 18th century who believed that whatever erosion or change happened through geological events gathered itself elsewhere. The memory of these events are inscribed in rock (ibid 26). In his observation that land was being created while land was being worn away, that there was continental elevation as well as erosion, Hutton shows a great grasp of the earth’s interior powers. Eiseley writes, “Time and accompanying geological change are two of the necessary properties without which evolution would be unable to operate. And those two properties bring death as a third factor in their wake.” (ibid 35). Climate change as a result of human activity results in the rising of the seas from the melting of glaciers, but the earth independently has a body of its own, where changes occur, revitalize while destroying. Acknowledgements: Alka and Baldeep Singh, Susan and Anish Mathai, Zubin and Rachel Varghese, Jiju and Jeanette James, Susan and George K John, Ben and Rana P Behal, Anita Varghese, Sunetra Amarasuriya, Radhika Singha and Sucheta Mahajan and extended families and friends for conversations. References Eiseley. Loren: 1957 The Immense Journey, New York, Random House. 1999 The Firmament of Time Nebraska: Bison Books Rana P Behal and Prabhu P. Mohapatra: 2007 Tea and Money vs Human Life: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840-1908 in E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass (eds) Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, London: Frank Cass pp. 142-143 Behal, Rana P: 2014 One Hundred Years of Servitude, New Delhi: Tulika Books Berger, John: 1992 Pig Earth. New York: Vintage Bhowmik, Sharit, Virginius Xaxa and M. A Kalam: 1996 Tea Plantation Labour in India. New Delhi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung , Ghosh, Amitav: Sea of Poppies New Delhi Penguin. . Guha, Amalendu: 2016 Planter Raj to Swaraj, Guwahati: Anwesha Publications Jain, Shobhita: 2001 Plantation Labour in South and South East Asia, in Susan Visvanathan ed. Structure and Transformation. Delhi: Oxford University Press Lovell, Julia: 2011 The Opium War, London: Picador Saberwal, Vasant and Mahesh Rangarajan Ed: 2003 Battles Over Nature, Ranikhet: Permanent Black Saikia, Arupjyoti: 2011 Forests and Ecological History of Assam, New Delhi: Oxford University Press Sharma, Jayeeta: 2012 Empire’s Garden, Ranikhet: Permanent Black Verghese, Abraham: 2023 The Covenant of Water, London: Grove Press Unpublished Phd Thesis submitted (2012) to JNU, New Delhi, Shyni Danial Chapter 3 Rehabilitation as Nation Building in State and Statelessnes: The Politics of Repatriation in India and Sri Lanka 1920s to 1970s.