Diaspora
and Memory Susan Visvanathan, CSSS, JNU, submitted 5th October 2015 to
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla for the conference on Religion and
Social Diversity, 12th to 14th October.
Indians
tend to conflate their personal experience and relocate these in terms of the
larger issues they are interested in, in the worlds they simultaneously cohabit
. This issue of co-existence of differences, and their ability to relocate the
problem of identity in an adaptative measure has been of interest to sociologists
for many decades. Living in the world, has meant a certain pragmatism, a
certain joi de vivre, a love for the present, and equally an ardour for the
past. So, we need to understand why in Hinduism, the long memory captured by
smrithi and shruthi are still so evident, not in literate descriptive ways, but
also in photographs, forms of orality and landscapes of reterritorialisation,
and the theatre of ritual, which includes the arts and dance forms.
Indians
domiciled in India now composes 17 percent of the world population, and the
figures for NRIs are 1,3799746, People of Indian Origin 17,075280, and Overseas
Indians 28,4555026. We know that this demographic visibility is indeed the
space of cultural re-orientation. All over the world, people know that the
transmigration of ritual and ceremony is the visible way that Indians have
communicated a love for the “natal country”, from whom they may be removed in
reality, by three generations, or more, and the concrete symbols by which they show how resplendent
this love is. In America, students who enter the universities are immediately
drawn into the carnivalesque space of “India week”. Hot samosas welcome them, (
a celebratory break from the cafeteria hamburgers and fries, so ubiquitous in
American student culture).They perform
dances from their specific states, and the hall becomes rich with the yells,
and cries of jubilation and recognition, and everyone, including the audience,
loves dressing up in national costumes. Musicians and dance troops, having
professional status are also welcomed, and the quality of the amateur and
professional are sometimes equivalent. Senior citizens welcome the young, newly
entered into the portals of academia, and these become the spaces where the
love for country are then reworked into promises to serve the homeland. Money
is collected, votes are garnered, and the vicarious Hinduism felt in exile is
made more public by the customary membership into the VHP. For diaspora
Indians, this membership makes them feel they belong, this is the only Hinduism
that they can participate in, and their donations go a long way in the
establishment of right wing Hinduism as a prototype of all that is Indian. As a
result, the questions of justice, of reconciliation, with the real text of moral
disruption through riots and hate speeches finds no mention in this discourse.
Love for homeland obliterates the terror zones
of riots, internecine war, pogroms, where the search for justice and
equality continue in daily practise.
Diaspora
Hindus recreate their homeland, through the symbols of food, dance, drama and
temple ritual. In a way, this is the hyper-reality of their alienated existence
far away from home. At work, they wear suits, and eat pizzas, drive fast cars,
enter into liasons, both professional and personal, assert their identity
against subtle or violent forms of racism, meeting often at homes for meals and
literary readings, endorse Indian customs including arranged marriage, and
dialects of speech, as well as being enthusiastic hosts to visitors from their
home country. They have access to Bollywood films quicker than Indians at home
do, as the circulation of videos is one way they keep in touch with the visuals
of the homeland.
Banal
as this may seem, we have to understand, that investment in the home country is
not just through emotional chords based on nostalgia, but on the very real
questions of how tradition holds them tightly in its clutch. The real problems
for the “Confused” in the next generation is how to segmentalise their feeling
for their parents and grandparents, and to keep their friendship circles in a
foreign country intact. This has been the stuff of many popular films, and
Indians at home love to watch these films. The return home is premised on the
understanding that the village to which people return for their scheduled
holiday is the village of their dreams, it is a metaphorical space, not just a geographical one, because it shifts to
wherever the clan or lineage congregates to welcome them.
Among
the St Thomas Christians of Kerala, too, their memory as genealogy is crafted
in such a way that it extends, in printed pamphlets and handbooks, some times upto
two thousand years. They have used this as a way to keep clan privileges
intact, and though they may live abroad in United States of America, Europe,
Australia or in The Gulf, Kudumbayogam
is a very important part of their annual ceremonies. These meetings are held in
homes, parish halls or hotels, and clan members assemble, and introduce one
another to their progeny. Good food is eaten, hymns sung, news of marriage, birth
or death announced. Facebook and Skype are very important institutions in the
dissemination of information, and individuals and families return to their work
places, replete with the memory of having met with their own blood. Every morning, before going to work, families
living in Canada, Australia, Europe or America, converse, with their parents
and relatives on the computer. The time difference is adjusted so that family dinner, or early morning, when waking
up, gathering the children for school, or tennis practise is a Skype moment. Certainly,
new marriages are arranged through gossip and pointed or focussed information
culled from meeting clansmen and women, whether digitally or through intermittent
visits.
Many
of these institutions are stabilised by the presence of the church, since
people look to integrate their children in the same religious affiliation. The numbers
of Overseas Indians are huge, running into millions, as we saw, and so the
Church provides through its “ecclesiastical bureaucracy”, as Max Weber called
it, the means of formally inducting new members into the church, by its lessons
and its homilies, available on the net. Shalom TV is a very important ritual
medium, and though it is Syrian Catholic, the diaspora, whether in Bengaluru or
Boston, watches it irrespective of its organisational affiliation. Tithe paying
is a very significant part of time honoured conventions, since without it,
burial ground at the time of death cannot be accessible. Those who are
concerned with finding brides or grooms for their young, use church validated e-portals,
and with the blessings of the parishes, which are often far flung across many
continents, they find a suitable partner for their children. This involves
travelling abroad to finalise the match, but as with arranged marriages, the young
too are complicit, believing that their parents will make the “best choice” for
them. “You find me a bride, ma, I am too busy,” is an often announced request
by young men in the fast moving laboratories of the technological and digital
industry. The contract of marriage is based on the traditional notions of
maintenance of the house, respect and protection of the elders, and birth and
nurturing of children on the part of the wife as unspoken obligations which are
based on social patterns of acceptable and honourable behaviour. In reality,
the story may swing differently, when careers are prioritised over nurturing of
young, or protection of old. The fertility rate goes down with
industrialisation, and in Kerala, the average birth rate is 1.68 or less
progeny, as the Diaspora have experienced industrial life styles, without
necessarily migrating to them.
Dowry and gifts of gold remain stable, and the
young couple enters into marriage with parental support. Thirty years ago, in a
study conducted by me, on behalf of the World Council of Churches, (Kottayam, 1982) we found that all the women,
without exception, believed that dowry was their right or avakasham. The Mary
Roy case which won equal rights of inheritance, for children, regardless of gender
was turned into a travesty, with the Church coming out strongly against it,
since the tithes that came into parishes would be affected if stridhan became
an anamoly, as they received lucre from both parties, as record of the
transaction of marriage.(Visvanathan 1989, 1993) Property is one of the key
issues that is stabilised through discussion and gossip, when Diaspora members
return to their village. Daughters are still not expected to inherit property,
and if they do, the men work very hard to wrest it back into the male line.
(Thulaseedharan 2014) Daughters are expected to build their home, away from the
village or land, where their brothers have their home. This distance however is
mediated with close family ties of bilateral filiation, so that all festivals,
anniversaries and life cycle events corroborate with the intensity of filial
devotion to the parents, and the equalising of emotions. Daughters are expected
to be present at all these events with their family, and no contestation by them is expected, as their presence only
communicates that love transcends rights to private property. Mannam or honour
is the most privileged of sentiments. Filial obligations are now gender neutral, and both men and women are
expected to contribute to the well being of their parents, as the parents often
contribute with money to their education, and the offsprings’ subsequent
financial success is seen to be a reference point for monetary returns, helping
to pay medical bills, marriage of
unmarried daughters, house repair and loans and old age maintenance.
The
daughter’s absence during death, or funeral, is thought to be tragic, and the
video industry now plays a large part in memorialisation, so that mortuary
rituals are transmitted digitally as recordings. Who came for the funeral, the
roll call of relatives, the lament of the artisans and servants associated with
the family, the church and who officiated, the number of priests and bishops
present, tell us a great deal of the
status of the family.
Mapping
social relations through the statistics of visits, phone calls and skype
conversations is an interesting way to think of the mind body relationship.
Ghasan Hage presented the JNU -ASA Firth
lecture on 3rd April 2012, with the analyses of family gatherings
across continents, with reference to the Lebanese living in Venezuela,
Australia, USA, and Lebanon.(www.theasa)
Territory
transcends location, and digital technology brings about emotional closeness,
though people may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. The idea of the
“relative” as someone who is no longer primary kin, but is mediated by marriage
relations, so that the family of orientation is secondary to the family of procreation,
is juxtaposed with the real solidarity of kinship networks. The new mapping
practises according to Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins (2009:3) is
as follows
Mind Body
Absolute Relative
Nomothetic Ideographic
Ideological Material
Subjective Objective
Essence Immanence
Static Becoming
Structure Agency
Process Form
Production Consumption
Representation Practice
Functional Symbolic
Immutable Fluid
Text Context
Map Territory
In
a sense, what they point to is the way in which ideas hold within them, a
certain reified grammar, but the actor is placed in the historical context in
which he or she has to make decisions. So relationships would be represented
through the imaginative abilities of actors, where emotions and desires are
played out appropriately through their abilities, financial or cathartic. Dodge
et al suggest that we read the map subjectively, and as narrative, through
insights drawn from cultural practice, psychoanalyses and linguistics.
The
map thus becomes known through the ability to be mobile. The idea of the
extended family remains the desired ideal, but given stringent work
obligations, men and women may be separated from each other for long periods of
time, sometimes years, but they will remain in consonance with each other,
through the medium of the aerogramme in the 80s of the last century, daily
phone calls in the 90s, and as the financial remunerations increased, mobile
phone and skype in the 21st century. Since sharing becomes visual
and auditory, rather than tactile, the interfamilial intimacy contributes to the
immediacy of reception, and the emotions associated with them run in the same
groove as if the family were indeed together. Faith and family prayer mediate the systematic
conditioning to occupational hazards, war zones, aeroplane landings and
departures, and the general conviviality of meetings in limited time frames.
Jeremy
W.Crompton in an essay in Dodge et al (2009) titled Rethinking Maps and Identity, suggests that we return to the
Platonic version, of being, becoming, and the place of becoming, the chora, or
‘ontogenesis’. It is like fire, ever changing and without fixed properties, yet
seems to have a ‘fiery character’. In this very place, truth is made, it is not
static, but constantly evolving.
When
we think of the Malayalis, who fled Quwait during the Gulf war in 1991, they
represented the waiting, the suspense, the camps, the get away, as a narrative
of survival. This is echoed in the conflicts in Libya, and in Iraq, where
Malayalis were trapped in ongoing wars in the second decade of the 21st
century, and duly reported in the press. They returned to the homeland, (Naad,)
bereft of income, and then started new ventures, such as pineapple cultivation
on hitherto fallow land, and lived off their
inherited or earned resources. When the war was over, they returned as
migrants to the Gulf, because their life there had become a known entity, their
children returned to school and life was normal again. However, they were
always anxious, knowing that as temporary workers, they could never settle or
really make it their home. In Saudi Arabia, they lived and worked under close
surveillance, made fish curry with koddam pulli (indigenous tamarind, also
called Kokum, dried and valued as a cultural legacy,) with bulbous organic red
rice which they were traditionally accustomed to. They met in closed groups to
pray in secret, formed close friendship groups, and at the end of twenty years, returned to
Kerala, with happy or unhappy memories of their working life, where often the women were present too, as spouses,
or kept hearth and home intact in Kerala. The stability of the family depended
on these contracted arrangements, where women agreed to live apart for most of
the year from their spouses. If asked
how they managed, and would say depreciatingly, “Veedu Ondullu”, meaning ‘There
is a house’, but meaning the complex relationships encompassing the Family.
Faith then becomes the cement, the intensity
of which is compounded in formulaic prayer, expressed through the litanies of
creed and bible readings. Men, who went without their families, and had to stay
eight tenants in a room, would take turns cooking the food that they were used
to in the village. The money they made was not spent, except for annual gifts
that were taken back to the village. They paid mortgages, and dowries and
education costs, so that from the average ownership of two and a half acres of
land, which was the coinage of traditional belonging that they would not wish
to sell, a new economy of servitude/service
to the family would emerge. The needs of the family, in an ever spiralling
cycle of costs had to be met.
Mortuary
rituals for relatives who died, while the members of the clan were elsewhere,
or who had actually died decades ago,
became extremely important. Services and meals held in their memory assert the
coming together of the clan. Family get together (kudumbayogam) on these
occasions, with the traditional foods associated with the clan member such as
cooked meats, tapioca, fish, payasam (rice cooked in milk and sugar and cloves)
and unni appam (batter of rice powder, jaggery and bannanas, deep fried) end with
the singing of hymns, which had been
sung during the person’s life time. This essentially brings together a collage
of memories, of youth and the effervescence of believing, the aura of a return
to the past, when the ancestors were alive.
Richard Fenn writes,
The sacred (the
institutionalised Sacred) consists of a fragile set of symbolic defences that
mimics the entire range of possibility with a substitute and counterfeit
pantheon of possibilities. It offers a form of service that claims to be
perfect freedom, and a form of renunciation that promises to give to the
faithful the consummation of every desire. Thus, the sacred is a way of finding
a safe place and time for the special graces, the charisma, of intimate, intense
and enduring but evanescent and distant relationships. (Fenn 2001:6)
Gathering
together with prayers and food, brings the dead close but in a harmonious way,
not a malefic one. Where tombstones are no longer possible, because of
population increase, the kin gather outside the vault, with the knowledge that
the cement structures have been collectivised, and the dead anonymously, in
aggregates, entropied by time and biological process.
Richard Fenn suggests that the spiritual
process of touring the past, and assimilating it, is essentially to accept that
memories create a place inhabited by the living as much as the qualities imbued
in the dead by the survivors. Remembering becomes not the harrowed space of
violent or antagonistic relations, but is characterised in terms of the strengths,
including the motifs of allegiance and affection, not to speak of authority.
(ibid 19)
The
videography of the corpse, in Kerala, is one of the most macabre aspects of
visual mummification, as the dead then enters into a space of continuous
presence. The funeral becomes a transglobal phenomenon, as the living, where
ever they are, may now participate in the prayers for the soul. The presence of
the dead is given a corporeal and ever present immanence, and the bright lights
of the video camera then record the emotions of the mourners in the indefinable
space of an eternity which immortalises the deceased and mourners. As memory
codes, the peacefulness of the visage, or the utter and total disfigurement is
a testimony to the struggle against death.
When
Ramana Maharishi died, his corpse was photographed by the eminent French
photographer Cartier Bresson. This collection is with the Indira Gandhi
National Centre for the Arts. People came from all over the world and India, to
have darshan of the Sage, and the return to view Maharishi was in a way the
recreation of his life, which was observed visually as a meteor that crossed
the sky at 8.47 pm on 14th April 1950, the time of death. People saw
this meteor in other parts of India, and the next day, the news of his death
was confirmed. Fenn writes,“Religious
language possesses the capacity to embody possibilities excluded from social
discourse and from the conventional imagination. Not merely to point to that
possibility, but to embody it, that is the core of religious speech.”(ibid 27)
In
contrast to the pilgrims, coming from many parts of India and the world, who
sacralise by their continuous involvement, the life of the sage, are the
children of the old, who visit them in Old Age homes. There is a great deal of
mutual embarrassment, as love
predominates over negligence, and yet, co-terminously there is a utilitarian
sense of time and obligation to the work world, which both recognise. Old Age
Homes are Kerala’s gift to the rational soul who knows that his or her
obligations are to the next generation who have to be educated and fed. The
loneliness of the old is circumvented in collective activities, where prayer,
music, sociability, autonomy are all seen to be values in themselves. Often
crèches are run in the premises of the Old Age Home, as this provides for the
mutual pleasure of interaction, which Radcliffe Browne, as every undergraduate
Sociology student knows, called “the merging of alternate generations”. Phone
calls from children and grandchildren become the high point of interaction
because there is information that is exchanged on both sides. When senility
falls like a shadow, the institution knows how to handle it with the help of
specialised staff, and the offspring are protected from the humiliation of
being absent, and seemingly non-caring.
The
pilgrim, the tourist, the countryman who is privileged to return home are co-incident. They bring with
them the exhaustion and the joys of their working lives. They communicate on
their return that this is a holiday which is won. They work very hard to please
the family, to make long journeys to spend an hour or two with distant kin, to attend
betrothals, marriages, baptisms and death rituals. Their success, financially
and experientially is a sign of their honour. They left the homeland because
there was no avenue of employment, but having made good, the trip home annually
or less frequently, is an embellishment of love of family and country. Martin
Buber suggests that beyond the cult of the individual, the monolith of The
State or of Collectivities, is “relationship” as the total social good. How is
this made possible, how is dialogue the virtue of those who wish to remain
connected? He describes it as anguish and expectation, as the context in which
all religions maintain not a uniformity, but a specificity. Dialogue is not traffic, it is relationship.
(Buber 1992: 47)
Accordingly, even if
speech and communication may be dispensed with, the life of dialogue seems,
from what we may perceive, to have inextricably joined to it, as it’s minimum
constitution, one thing, the mutuality of inner action. Two humans bond
together in dialogue must obviously be turned to one another, they must,
therefore – no matter with what measure of activity or indeed of consciousness
of activity – have turned to one another. (ibid 47)
It
is this tuning into one another that allows for the intimacy of the return, the
ability to forgive and forget, the realisation that the homecoming is always
painful and yet liberating. Love transcends class differences, and the return
to poverty, or at least frugality is made evanescent in the exchange of
confidences, the sharing of mutual sorrows and joys, and the exchange of
consumer items such as foreign soap and shampoos or perfumes and colognes, for
jasmine flowers, yams and home reared goat meat, chicken or duck eggs, fresh water
fish from the nearest river, and jackfruit chips, or mangos and bananas from
the yard, all seen to be novelties that the home country still provides,
including eating on banana leaves.
It
is the meal as a cultural signature of community life that has it’s greatest
significance. In Kerala, as there is no
ban, beef is served, (fried with coconut
slices,) but is called Poth (ox) or kalla, (bullock) as India becomes more self conscious about cow
totemism. The diaspora are used to eating hamburgers and steaks unselfconsciously, in cafes or at
home, and the political connotations of this with regard to specialised forms
of bovine totemism in several parts of
the home country quite escapes them. Where there are bans, the diaspora eat
from cold storage what is available and permitted. Certainly that export of beef
occurs is a well known fact, and sometimes the beef exporters live in a village
where people remember them for their initial poverty, and then the palatial
house they were able to build with their new wealth. Ban on beef in India means
increased export to the West. There is no social taboo to eating beef, since in
Kerala, it is not the cow belt politics that pervade north India, and for
Malayalis there is no taboo, unless self imposed, through systematic
Sanskritisation by the RSS, or because of
traditional Hindu upper caste
affiliation. In North Malabar, Christians eat pork to differentiate themselves
from Muslims. The idea that what one eats is one’s own business is a very dominant
position taken in Kerala vis a vis ritual taboos, probably because of a century
of the anti Brahman, Self Respect Movements, and Marxism.
That
Diaspora, when abroad, eat the best
produce, exported from India, from the fisheries or mango orchards. When they return, they find
that with their remuneration, they are able to afford expensive sea fish, or
fruit, but their neighbours cannot.
Often religion becomes a divisive force, when lower income groups, on
their return from the Gulf, can afford expensive food, and upper castes who
have remained in salaried jobs in the home state cannot afford the same.
Alcohol consumption rose so substantially that in 2015, the Kerala government
banned liquor in the toddy shops and the government retail stores, but
permitted hoteliers and tourists to stock alcohol. This led to a public outcry,
and the Malayalis who had become addicted to liquor found vendors setting up stalls at the Coimbatore
border. Fried beef and arrack were the common man’s staple, and the shutting
down of the indigenous pubs created a hue and cry. Dilip Menon had argued that
the Tiyyas were politically powerful in the 19th century because of
their ability to provide alcohol to the Nairs for their temple rituals, where
libations of toddy was an oblation. However, the use of toddy was in fact a
time honoured beverage, included in cooking even in Syrian Christian domestic
use for pancakes, and could still be procured from the Ezhava community, on
request, since every family had a toddy tapper bring down their coconuts
according to domestic need or for sale. The real abuse came from the sale of
hard liquor, and since the Kerala government was receiving crores in excise
duty, the recent ban did not come into
place till the rates of suicide, rape and murder were too high to ignore.
The
cleavage between Hindus, Christians and Muslims became increasingly evident in
the 21st century. Since the sensibilities were further aroused by
the ideological provocations of political parties, and religious communalism,
the loud speaker became a site of continuous contestation, and small towns were
riddled with noise pollution from the churches, temples and mosques, all
expressing their right to profess their religious beliefs equally at the same
time.
Maurice
Blanchot writes
The Book always
indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are
affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the
promise of communication that would one day be immediate and transparent. Now
it may be that writing requires the abandonment of all those principles, that
is to say, the end and also the coming to completion of everything that guarantees
one culture – not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn back, but rather so
we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to break the circle, the
circle of circles; the totality of the concepts that found history, that
develops in history, and whose development history is. Included in
all this are events, lapses, and interruptions: death itself. ( Blanchot 1993:xii)
Once
the Book closes on itself, each religious community then defines its
boundaries, excluding those who will not accept its totalising dictates. The
Syrian Catholics in Kerala began to have prayer camps which were magnetising in their
power to ‘charismatically’ draw in large numbers. The Mar Thoma Church had its
Maramon Convention, which innovated with music, and drew in international
gospel evangelists. The Pentecostal Church drew in larger and larger numbers
from all affiliations, since it offered miraculous cures, and catharsis as the
total experience uniting all members. The Muslims began to go on Hajj, thus
creating a hierarchy among themselves of those who could attain this life
changing ascent to Mount Arafat, and the circumambulation of the tomb of
Mohammad the Prophet, and those who could not pay the travel agent for such a trip. The Hindus,
namely the Nairs, returned to their traditional Martial rituals and arts,
representing the cult of self defence not just as aesthetics, but also as war
fare. The Ezhavas dominated Marxist politics, and the Dalits began to organise
themselves to counter Brahmin hegemony. The Brahmins felt increasingly
marginalised, and either departed to foreign lands, including metropolitan
cities in India, or became professionally displaced.
The pilgrim to Sabarimala created new osmotic
boundaries between caste, class, gender, region and physical ability to enter a
sacralised space, crowded beyond measure. The new dispensation was to the
forming of new rules of conduct which became binding on those who belonged to
any specific association. People just
became used to the atrophy of dialogue as neighbourhood and family practise. These
became codes of conduct, which were articulated publicly, and found their
permanence in inscription. Any move towards flexibility and syncretism was frowned
upon.
For
the Diaspora, Work was panacea, but the high turnover at the work place because
of recession meant that families quite often lived in different continents, and
women were often overqualified at the workplace as cashiers and school teachers
when they had been educated as engineers or doctors or academics in the home
country. Siblings too settled in other countries, and so people travelled in
various directions, because they could afford it, to meet their kin.
One
of the interesting aspects of globalisation has been the need that the Diaspora
has for magnificence in the site of home and place of worship back home. When
they return to the village of their forefathers, they immediately constructed
huge houses, larger than the neighbours. Inside they maintain much the same
level of comfort or discomfort, as they knew previously. The electricity
routinely goes off in the monsoon, which because of climate change extends much
beyond the Harvest festival of Onnam. These mammoth houses are constructed
ostentatiously, as the nouveau riche see the need to exhibit carpets and
chandeliers brought back from the Emirates, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, or Oman. They
like to communicate that they are different from the Malayali, who has not had the Gulf experience, and so vivid colours
are used in painting the exteriors. However, when it comes to agricultural
work, the NRI or Overseas Indian is perfectly capable of setting up a haystack
with childhood friends, or sharing in ritual offices in the local parish. Since many return when they are in their
early fifties, they take up honorary occupations as principals of trust
colleges and schools, or work in any capacity available to them. They enjoy
meeting their former colleagues in get togethers which are titled Gulf
Employees, or they write their memoirs and read newspapers. In places like Kuruvillangad,
or Ranni, the elite have transformed their hitherto obscure villages by duplicating South
of France villas. The demand for a privately constructed airport has been
vociferous in the Chenganoor area, as the
numbers of Gulf returnees are huge. In one village ten kms from the town, all
three hundred and fifty families, had members who worked in a Gulf country. In
Cochin, the large number of flats which have surfaced are establishments,
mostly unoccupied, as the rentier class of Syrian Christians living in the Gulf
or Australia or Europe or America, built them, but they do not live in them,
nor is ready to rent them out. Absentee landlordism takes a new avatar.
Near Chenganoor, the Gulf returned are so many,
that they have demolished an ancient Church and produced a huge and stunning
edifice. Parumalla Tirumeni was the humblest and purest of souls, a Saint recognised by all, and his living quarters are
still preserved, his actual room the
size of a large dining table! Yet, the miracle church associated with him has
been turned into a massive cathedral, such as the medieval churches of Europe,
built from the loot of war. This church however, built with Gulf remittances
has modern abstract art glass windows,
and three eucharist celebrations occurring on simultaneous altars, at which three
different priests preside. The influx of the faithful is so large, that the
size of the church is a matter of pride for the residents of the hamlet.
However archaeologists and sensitive laity are aghast. As one of them, Fr
Iganatious Payappilly, a well known archivist at the Indian Institute of
Science, Bengaluru said to me, in October 2013, “I wrote to the Parish priests of several places, saying that Tippu
Sultan did less damage than people like you. He only took off the thatched
roofs of ancient churches but you have totally demolished them.”
In
an email to me, dated 22nd
June 2015, Dr M.P Joseph (IAS) responded to my concern over the confabulation
of images and expansion of churches,
The Cardinal Alencherry, Head of the Syro Malabar Church has
now advised all parishes that they must avoid ostentation in the building of
churches. He has also made it mandatory for the Cardinal’s Office to approve
designs of new churches to be built. And more pertinently, there is a growing
appreciation among the laity for the need to preserve these old churches and
their beautiful architecture, however innocently they may have put motifs of
the Swastika or the Eye or whatever.
A letter to a cardinal in Kerala about the
ostentations of the church went viral on
Facebook, and is reproduced here. It may be remembered that the concern about
new art is often open to interpretation. A Times of India journalist Annu
Thomas wrote to me on June 11 2015, to ask
if the eye depicted in the wall art in the church, or the swastika was a sign of the
devil, to which query Ignatius Payappilly and Hormis Tharakan (IPS) replied to me, that it would be creating
misunderstanding between religious communities if such a view was taken. The
idea that shared symbolism might in fact lead to communalism and
misinterpretation was a very real fear. The contemporary data on exaggerated
renovation as representing the vested interest of the Diaspora in affirming
it’s piety in the home country is interesting primarily because of the
traditional syncretistic motifs of Hindu Christian art, as ancient crosses,
temple walls, peacock motifs which have been presented in the first chapter of
my book, The Christians of Kerala
(1993) as that aspect, where in the contexts
of architecture and symbols, the osmosis between religions is notable, its
legitimacy authorised through assimilation into dominant Hindu motifs,when
Christianity in Kerala had royal patronage.
In Palakkad, the temple dedicated to
Siva called Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy has a long history of renovations, since
this takes place routinely according to the prescribed temple calendar.
However, when Indira Nooyi became President of the Pepsi cola company, her mother who was originally from the Kalpathy village,
dedicated a meditation chamber in thanksgiving, as her own father, Justice
Narayanswamy was from Kalpathy. As renovation had proceeded on a grandscale, according to the desires of the local
community, based on their donations, the wooden pillars in the temple were
substituted by stainless steel pillars, and the archaeologically significant pillar
thought to be an emblem of the 14th century king, Raja Ittycheryan,
was polished, and the inscription removed. The Tamil Brahmins of Kalpathy are
an upwardly mobile community and for them the modern is the epitome of the
present. The past is legend, it is necessary as a bulwark to their present
circumstance, but the present is sacred. People return from all parts of India to
initiate their new-borns, to conduct mortuary rituals, to be present at the
annual Rath festival, and ofcourse to hear the musicians from all over South
India, who perform on the invitation of the trustees of the Kalpathy
Viswanathswamy temple. There is really nothing old according to this view, in
that sense, because the new must presents itself in keeping with the needs of the believers.
Archaeologists, of course, feel differently. Heritage thus becomes a loaded term, with
people contesting the State and the requirements of the Tourist industry, which
was clamouring for the old and the traditional. However, there are critics, and
they are often influential, as the following letter shows, for St Thomas
Christians, who often feel their voice has been taken away from them
arbitrarily in the market place of the church. The call to frugality comes at a
time, when Kerala is rapidly changing its traditional rural urban continuum,
and tourism and Diaspora are looking for
highways to turn the State into a site of continuous hedonistic visuality, be
it IPL games, a la Shashi Tharoor, or monstrous shopping arcades and
magnificent sites of worship. Places where the Techno Parks have come up, have
promoted the Laboratory as being less polluting than the Factory, but, in
truth, the needs of the cereberal workers are such that owning several cars, and shopping brings with it a
huge cost on the delicate ecology of the State. Building large churches on
paddy fields has brought about the distinctly dangerous phenomenon of sinking
floors, and parishioners have to carefully skirt the ragged construction and
repair works as they come to pray and sing. The response has been to ban
construction on paddy fields, and to call on parishioners to be more
circumspect in their architectural renovations.
Such
a letter clearly comes from a powerful member of the laity, whose family has a
strong history of honours and obligations to the church, whose very past is
retold through print, general opinion, and rumour to record its special place. The
Tharakan family history has been recently published as Profiles
of the Parayil Tharakans, Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region, and
A Church, written and collated by P.K.M Tharakan, who lives in Belgium, and the
work is replete with genealogies and photographs of family mansions, housing
not just eminent kinsmen, church honours, brave actions, but also the material
culture that accompanied them. As
Medievel pepper merchants, they became immensely famous for their cosmopolitan
ability to deal with the Portuguese and the British colonists, during the
period of the commercial revolution. They were the keepers of the Varthamanampustukam,
the first travelogue, which communicated that the Malayalis, even when
Christians, referred to themselves as Intugal, or Indians and wanted more than
anything ecclesiastical jurisdiction to be placed with Indian priests and
prelates. (Visvanathan 1995 (Interview with
Ambassador A.K. Damodaran, IFS,) Maleykandathil 2013).
Interestingly,
with tourism, family mansions become the site of bed and breakfast
arrangements, as the beauty of these 18th century houses is
memorable, and well maintained. The Diaspora return to boat rides on backwaters
in Kuttunad, eating the traditional fare of the Malayalis, and at the same
time, savouring the sense of being an elite that has the best of both worlds.
The lives of artisans and the working class, such as shop employees, or
professionals such as nurses, working in the Gulf, as has been pointed out by
Prema Kurien, in Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity
is marked by a certain conspicuous consumption. This has much to do with the
way in which we think of subsistence economies, where the remuneration is such
that it cannot always be defined as stable or permanent. Here and now is
sufficient, because of tomorrow nothing is known.
In
the case of Kalpathy, Palakkad, we have
a genealogical tradition which goes back to the 14th century, where
a King, patronised a widow, Lakshmi Ammal, and built a temple for her. She had
been to Benaras with her husband’s ashes to be interred in the Ganga, and
returned from there with a lingam. This
was installed on the banks of the Kalpathy river, a tributary of the Neelam.
Steps were built, in emulation of the ghats of Benaras, and this temple, the
Viswanathswamy temple, became the site of mortuary rituals, for those who could
not afford to go to Benaras.
The
Smartha Brahmins (Iyers) had been invited by the Palakkad king, migrants from
drought prone areas, around Tanjore and Chidambaram, and settled in 18 villages
in Palakkad. The Raja was wrathful to the Namboodris who refused to serve him,
since he had a liason with a tribal woman, whom he wished to marry, and so the drought affected Tamil Brahmans took
their place on invitation. The Kalpathy Iyers, descendants of the migrants from
Mayiladathurai, became very well known in the early 20th century,
for the remittances they made to their families from the Presidency towns of
colonial India, as service providers, clerks and administrators, to the British
government. The rich traditions of the Brahmans had been preserved through
their culture of food, architecture, temple rituals, mathematics and music. Milton
Singer, has very well described the segmentalisation of home and workplace in
his classic work, When a Great Tradition
Modernizes, (1972) and so have C.J. Fuller and Harpriya Narasimha, in their
recent study, Tamil Brahmans (2015).
The latter authors assiduously describe how third and fourth generation mobile
Brahmans from Tamil Nadu were able to assimilate into the West, as soft ware
engineers, and in the cosmopolitan cultures of the big cities of Modern India,
such as Chennai. However, as a community, they always communicated total
loyalty to their traditions, and were
able to express solidarity through their loyalty to their village, small town
or city, through participation in temples,
and domestic rituals, including their renovation and management. A new and non Brahman resident in Kalpathy, a
collector of antiques, reported to me that downward mobility is frequent, and
that the Brahmans are going through a decline, which happens to many
communities during historical periods. They have lost traditional occupations
and skills, and have become auto drivers, shop keepers and labourers.
(interview 28th June 2009)
Preservation
of culture is not limited to buildings, it is about vedic culture, about music,
mathematics and knowledge, specifically Sanskrit,
according to another informant. The Tamil Brahmins in Kalpathy remain “migrants”
in Kerala, though they have been here for centuries. In September 2013, in
Palakkad, they have asked for minority status and privileges, including
reservation.
Joan
Punzo Waghorn in the Diaspora of the Gods
(2004) defined the specific ways in
which the mapping of the temple, mosque and church in the Mylapore Luz area was a representation of the syncretic
nature of religious persuasion in a historical framework. The Tamil Brahmins
came in to do their shopping, alongside
with visiting the Gods, including the purchase of necessary silk sarees for
festivals and rites of passage, and so the juxtaposition of market place and
religious sites were indeed very visible. The Diaspora is conversant with the
best places to shop for the traditional items needed for pujas, and they take
back to America the appalams, the sambar powders etc, which they may equally find in the
Indian stores in their work places. Diaspora
of the Gods describes the duplication of ritual sites in cities abroad, so
that people will feel comfortable far away from home. Equally, in temple and
mutt pathshalas, young Brahman boys are trained to carry out their
responsibilities as temple priests in far off countries.
The
ability to represent the cults of Hinduism as sites of ritual transfer is well
known. Americans have invested in the Hare Rama Krishna movement for decades,
and the skill of the orators of other cult representatives of Hinduism is the
new machinery of conversion. At street corners in Boston, one meets white devotees of some Hindu cult or another
selling copies of the Ramayana or Mahabharata. In Santa Cruz, California, a
quiet sanctuary exists for those who are drawn into the meditational practises
of Sri Ramanasramam, but the temple aspect, the iconography and the
representation of the Gods in a traditional place of worship is well accentuated.
The integration across race, caste and religious lines is clearly established.
Whereas, previously, Hinduism represented itself as an exclusive religion of
ascription, one had to be born a Hindu, the
globalised world has communicated its need to be absorbed in Indic practise,
whether Hindu or Buddhist. In Santa Fe, the Sikhs have established a cultic
rendezvous, well entrenched in the post modern practises of finding a comfort
zone, where ever one may. It is no longer necessary to be Indian, to fit into
the kaleidoscopic religious ferment. This is in stark contrast to the idea of
endogamy and religious community discussed previously. It may be noted that in
the urban metropolis the move to homogenisation is strongly resisted by the
youth, who see the senseless killings in the name of religion as abuse of
faith. Right through the 90s, the middle class urban youth expressed great
interest in religion, communicating that all the Gods were interesting to them,
visiting pilgrimage sites as devotees. Sacred Heart Cathedral in Delhi,
juxtaposed with the neighbouring Sikh Gurudwara, the Hanuman temple on Baba
Khadak Singh Marg, and Nizamuddin Chisti’s dargah just 8 kms distant from the
city centre, all had the sense of thronging crowds and the vibrancy of accompanying
markets, where amulets, sacred pictures, holy water and food are available
along with prayers for blessing, cures and favours. In contrast, the lumpen
proletariat and the avaricious, so-called ‘faceless mob’ is always marshalled
by politicians to murder and desecrate across religious lines. Is there a
justification for mass murder? Those who engage with it ascribe to themselves
martial status, and deny citizenship rights to others.
The
choice of faith and acceptance with respect for all religions is the most
interesting aspect of Indian secularism. Clearly, these young people were very
different from the fanatics of each religion who had closed the gates of their
faiths to the other. Terrorism, which Indians had been familiar with for
decades, and struck fear in every heart was the ugly face of fanaticism, and
communalism was equally rampant. Festival, fair, carnival and trade that
integrates communities, went against riots and pogroms and the easy dealing of
death by those who carried the cards of violence. (Visvanathan 2012)
The
Diaspora often returned even during days of riots and violence, because of
their commitment to families and neighbourhoods. What we need to understand is
that while war, espionage and terrorism are every day events, the normal world
revolves around the ability to carry out mundane tasks.
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