Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
Beautiful!!
ReplyDeletelovely!
ReplyDeleteMy instinct would have made me say 'lovely' but since someone already wrote that I'll say 'very pretty' instead ;-)
ReplyDeleteYou will make an excellent teacher of botany!
ReplyDeleteRE
Awesome and serene!
ReplyDeleteVery charming.
ReplyDeleteWoW! What a greenery! Kerala is so blessed..
ReplyDeleteWe in Kerala are blessed
ReplyDeletecolorfully green !! :) awesome photograph !!
ReplyDeleteLove this!
ReplyDeletebeautiful!
ReplyDeleteSo serene and beautiful !
ReplyDeleteI could kill to live in such a place.
ReplyDeletenice place to go for picnic...
ReplyDeletevery nice..:-)
ReplyDeleteThe many shades of mother nature ! beautiful path of greenery !
ReplyDeletenicee!
ReplyDelete