Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

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. Kochi shows us how cultures mingle and remain ever dynamic. No dynamic culture can be a calcified fossil or a stagnant mass of granite that might at best boast about its ‘unadulterated’ antique history.

History cannot remain stagnant, however. Stagnation is never the nature’s way. Therefore, it keeps giving us certain markers of significant changes.

St Francis Church in Fort Kochi, one such historical marker, where Vasco da Gama was buried in 1524, is still preserved in good condition and is visited by hundreds of tourists every day. It reminds us that Fort Kochi (Cochin was the anglicised name during the Raj) is the oldest European settlement in India. Every street in Fort Kochi has a history to narrate, not a neo-history or a fabricated one but one which really goes back to the 15^th and 16^th centuries with concrete evidence which has not been erased by revisionists yet. Even the roads carry historical names.

Vasco da Gama’s primary intention in coming to India was trade. He wanted to establish a direct maritime trade route for spices. But his goal was quickly and inextricably linked to conquest and dominance. The Mughals led by Babur would invade the northern frontiers of India only three decades after Vasco da Gama established his foothold in the Southwestern coasts.

Vasco da Gama’s core objective was to break the Arab and Venetian monopoly on spices, especially pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Previously these good reached Europe via complex, expensive, and time-consuming overland or Red Sea routes controlled by Muslim and Italian middlemen. [Please note that the Mughals were not the first Muslims to enter India. Nor were Muhammad bin Qasim's descendants.] The Arab Muslim merchants transported the spices overland through West Asia (Middle East), and then distributed throughout Europe by Venetian traders. This system involved multiple intermediaries and many taxes, making the final products extremely expensive in Europe. Vasco da Gama’s sea route put an end to all those cumbersome processes and taxes and middlemen.

In the process, Kochi became a melting pot of many cultures. Christians, Muslim, Hindus, Jews, and others lived together in Kochi.  The Jews have left the place for Israel though a few remain around the historical synagogue.

Muslims in Fort Kochi are a diverse, historically significant community, including local Malayalam speakers (Malabaris), traders like the Kutchi Memons (Sunni traders from Sindh/Gujarat) and Bohras (Shiite traders), and the ancient Naina community, linked to Tamil Muslim traders from Kayalpatnam. They've shaped the area's unique cultural blend with prominent mosques like the Memon Jamat Khana and unique institutions, maintaining traditions while integrating into Kochi's vibrant, multi-faith environment.

Close on the heels of Vasco da Gama’s arrival came the Portuguese missionaries to Kerala and reshaped Christianity which was already flourishing in the area right from the first century CE, thanks to the region’s trades with the Roman Empire. It is believed that Thomas, the disciple of Jesus, came personally to establish Christianity in Kerala. It is possible that Thomas could have undertaken the voyage on one of those Roman vessels. The Portuguese missionaries got into some serious conflict with the earlier Christians in Kerala. That’s a different history and we will look at that in another post.

One of the many tombs in St Francis Church

To be continued