Skip to main content

A Church and some History

St Mary's is always spick and span


Maggie and I had to travel pretty much today for various reasons. Holidays are reserved for such travels and fulfilment of certain obligations to ourselves as well as others. Sometimes the fatiguing demands of a regular working day seem far more accommodatable than these holiday trips.

It was a long day, in short, and I needed to take a washroom break. Years of drives in Kerala have taught me that the easily available as well as clean toilets are in the Christian church compounds. So, as we approached the St Mary’s Church in Manarcad (near Kottayam), I asked Maggie, “Don’t you want to pray at this famous pilgrimage centre?” I knew what the answer would be. That is how Maggie and I found ourselves in the sacred precincts of St Mary’s Cathedral church whose history goes back to a thousand years. I don’t want to bore you with the history. If you’re interested, please go to the official website of the church here and read the history.

The church’s history claims that St Thomas, disciple of Jesus, came to Kerala in the year 52 CE. That is not impossible given the trade links between Kerala and the Roman Empire of those days. Pliny the Elder wondered why pepper, which was the most precious commodity exported from Kerala’s coasts in those days, elicited so much interest from the Romans though pepper had “nothing to recommend it in either fruit or berry” [Natural History, written in 77 CE].

The history of St Mary’s Church on whose holy ground I stood this afternoon goes on to claim that St Thomas baptised the Brahmins (called Namboothiris) and that the priests were chosen from those Brahmin families.

That’s funny. As funny as my family’s history written by my cousin which begins with the claim that our family was originally Namboothiris who were converted by St Thomas into Christianity.

Anyone can check the history of Kerala and find out that there were no Namboothiris in Kerala before the 6th century CE. It is possible that there were some people who called themselves Brahmins in Kerala before the arrival of this particular class called Namboothiris from the North of India. But those Brahmins probably had no significant role in the region’s sociopolitical life. What role could they play anyway in a place where people didn’t even have proper food to eat and clothes to cover their nakedness?

History is a dangerous stuff, I tell myself as I zip up my fly and return to Maggie with a relieved smile. I find her standing before a Chethi plant, admiring it. I had noticed that plant as I entered the church complex, particularly because I bought ten of those plants for my flower pots a month back and none of them gave me any flowers so far. 

Maggie admiring St Mary's Chethi 

My Chethi

I entered the church with Maggie. I prayed for some flowers on my Chethi plants. I hope St Mary will answer my prayers. But now I’m wondering: should I have prayed for better historical sense among my country people? My Chethis could wait.

 



Comments

  1. Hari OM
    To pray for flowers to soften the edges of life is no bad thing. History is an excellent intellectual pursuit - but the practicalities of the present are all that matter as we lay down the next layers within the timeline. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. History can take us far beyond gods and even infinity!

      Delete
  2. Flowers are the perfect thing to pray for. You can't wish to give anyone else sense. That would have been a waste of energy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, all good wishes and prayers create positive energy.

      Delete
  3. Preserving History these days has many takers!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r