Doubtful Thomas was here
ZAC O’YEAH
B’Link, BusinessLine, Jan. 13, 2017 

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Dipankar

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Hand of faith: The Mar Thoma shrine at Azhikode village, near Kodungallur, which houses a fragment of arm bone believed to be that of Thomas the Apostle. Photo: Zac O’Yeah

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Tragic footnote: A marble plaque at Little Mount mentions the martyrdom of the apostle. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Way down: Entrance to the crypt at Little Mount. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Holy hideout: The 16th-Century Shrine of Our Lady of Health on Chinnamalai, or Little Mount, a rocky knoll in Chennai. St Thomas’s tiny private cave has been preserved underneath this chapel. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Shard of evidence: A small piece of the ‘lancehead that killed St Thomas’ on display at St Thomas Basilica. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Journey’s end: The St Thomas Basilica on Chennai’s Marina Beach marks the apostle’s final resting place. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Fresh off the boat: A marble plaque in Kodungallur. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Sculptures outside the Kottakavu church show Thomas with new converts. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Go East: View from Palghat pass (with the Nilgiri mountains in the background), which formed a part of ancient trading routes from Kerala. Thomas is thought to have hitch-hiked overland to neighbouring Tamil Nadu. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

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Here to eternity: Wall map at the Mar Thoma shrine outside Kodungallur shows the route traversed by Thomas. Photo: Zac O'Yeah

Re-imagining St Thomas the Apostle’s epic backpacker adventure in the south India of 50-70 AD

I jump off the bus in the coastal Kerala town of Kodungallur. As far as I can make out I’m the only tourist here, which is a relief considering how Kerala tends to be overrun with backpackers and rich foreigners in search of ayurvedic rejuvenation. But I am soon to learn that thousands of years ago Kodungallur was as infested with foreigners as any beach resort is today.

Walking past the typical small-town businesses — laminators and pharmacies, a biriyani joint called City Restaurant, an Internet café offering ‘100% Job Oriented Computer Courses’, the Sitara Beauty Collection that sells gift items, the Cranganore Muziris Bakery, and showrooms for Sansui and Sony home entertainment products — I sense an overall vibe of comfort. A neat little town.

It’s a little hard to believe, but this humble municipality was once a royal capital of the mighty Chera kings, who were very welcoming to people from the West. Even though the Chera dynasty lent their name to the modern State, Kerala, there are no remains of their palace except a jungly compound known as Cheraman Parambu to the east of town. A rickshaw driver offers to take me there and the place is so tucked away that he has to stop and ask for directions time and again.

I’ve read archaeological descriptions of the spacious palaces for emperors, mansions for their ministers, shrines for their gods, and halls and theatres. Now, nothing is left. I take a walk and poke around a bit when I hear children scream at me. They make strange, swaying gestures with their hands. As I listen carefully, I make out what they’re shouting:

‘King Cobra! Watch out! King Cobra!’

Scrambling off and stage-diving into the waiting rickshaw, I consider the astonishing fact (once I’ve caught my breath, that is) that there is still a ‘king’ living in the compound.

Having paid my respects to the kings of yore, I move on to explore other sights: a mosque, a temple and a church. These turn out to be pretty modern structures, but their traditions go way back. For example, the small Cheraman Juma Masjid is said to have been founded during the prophet’s lifetime, making it one of the few mosques in the world with such an ancient pedigree. It is believed to have been converted from an abandoned Buddhist monastery gifted by a Chera king to Arab traders, possibly in return for helping make his port so prosperous. Therefore, the Cheraman mosque was named to honour the king. By 629 AD, when the original mosque was inaugurated, this had been a vital harbour for hundreds of years.

While modern Kodungallur barely warrants a mention in travel guides today, it was prominently marked out on ancient European maps (such as the Peutinger Table) and featured in Roman-era guidebooks (like Periplus of the Erythrean Sea) under its old name Muziris. Remarkably, these sources suggest that somewhere around here stood a Roman temple hallowed to the Emperor Augustus, under whose reign the Kerala pepper trade grew so big that two Indian embassies visited Augustus’ court in the BC 20s. Of that temple, however, archaeologists have found no trace — unless it happens to be the same temple that became a Buddhist shrine and, later, the Cheraman mosque.

Another temple site of great interest is the town’s famous shakti shrine, Sri Bhagavathi Amman, a little to the south of the market — extremely ancient and linked to Kannaki, the heroine of the Tamil epic The Jewelled Anklet. After her husband was executed on trumped-up charges of theft, the faithful Kannaki tore off one breast and hurled it at Madurai, with the result that the entire city went up in flames. She then spent her last years by the river at Kodungallur, where locals started worshipping her, and this story was eventually noted down by Ilanko Atikal, a poet dating to sometime during 1-6th Century AD who either lived in, or at least visited Kodungallur. Interestingly, this epic also describes Yavanas (presumed to mean Ionians — that is, Aegean Greeks) who, in those days, lived in various south Indian cities while pursuing their global trade interests.

A remarkable painting of Kannaki, rattling her jewelled anklet accusingly over her head, hangs inside the shrine. The day I visit, the annual spring ritual is taking place and female oracles dressed in red, some sporting impressive dreadlocks, gather around to dance until they fall into trance, shaking scary scimitars. I am momentarily transported back to Kannaki’s time of heroic ladies.

Returning to my senses, I hop into another rickshaw that takes me a few kilometres away to Azhikode village and its church crowned by a silvery onion dome, Mar Thoma Shrine, which commands a stunning view over the slowly flowing Periyar river’s mouth. The shrine is very sacred as it contains a relic of Thomas the Apostle, who arrived on this very riverfront by ship in 52 AD.

A small quay marks the presumed landing spot and, who knows, this too could have been the site of the ancient Roman temple. After all, sacred spots tend to remain sacred, even if the religions of people change.

The relic on display behind bullet-proof glass is a bone fragment — a couple of inches of the ulna bone of an upper arm — perhaps the most famous arm in Christian history. Thomas was, as is well known, the apostle who doubted the resurrection until Jesus himself requested him to touch his crucifixion wounds. From there arises the common phrase ‘doubting Thomas’, meaning ‘a habitually disbelieving or suspicious person’. I sit by the shrine, sheltering from the midday heat, and wonder: Who was this Thomas, really?

Beyond doubt, he is perhaps the first Western traveller that we know of — at least by name — who came to south India. Other than that, it is often said that very little is known about the apostle’s travels, but at the souvenir stall outside the shrine I find a bulky Thomapedia in two volumes which compiles all the stories and facts about Thomas and his Indian legacy. Leafing through it, I realise that though he is known more as a revered saint than a hardy voyager, Thomas was indeed one of the most widely travelled men of his times.

The story begins about a decade or so after the crucifixion, when the 12 apostles divided the known world between them by drawing lots. Upon Thomas fell the duty to go to India, which was far outside the Roman empire.

According to reports, Thomas again felt doubtful, claiming ‘weakness of the flesh’ and blurting out: ‘How can I, a Hebrew man, go and preach among the Indians? Send me anywhere but not to India.’

His protests were to no avail, and to get him the cheapest possible transport (after all, the religion was new and didn’t command much funding yet) he was sold to an Indian merchant, possibly of the Jewish faith, called Abbanes or Habban.

Looking for a carpenter on behalf of a Gandhara king, Habban purchased Thomas for approximately ₹49,000 worth of silver (in current monetary value), and what follows for Thomas would count as quite a backpacker adventure.

Many episodes from this epic journey are tantalisingly described in Acts of Thomas, a text which isn’t part of the official Bible but which, according to the scholars writing in the Thomapedia, has enough authentic details of Indian customs — such as ladies being carried in palanquins and noblemen taking a bath before partaking dinner — for us to believe it to be at least partially true. Like all traveller’s tales tend to be.

His journey probably started, properly, from a Red Sea port, from which they sailed to Parthia, a region now in Iran. From there they crossed into today’s Pakistan, and via the Punjab Thomas travelled on Rajasthani caravan routes to the mouth of the Indus river. Subsequently, he hopped aboard a ship to approximately Mumbai, which didn’t exist in those days though two prominent ancient ports, Sopara and Kalyan, are part of suburban Mumbai. Sopara — nowadays known as Nalasopara towards the end of the suburban train line northwards — is mentioned as far back as in the Old Testament, where it is called Ophir, the port from which biblical kings imported foreign luxury goods; so Thomas very likely passed through there — especially since he would presumably have turned to the Old Testament for guidance.

Since road travel was impractical as there weren’t many back then, Thomas sailed southwards until he finally landed at the spot I’m standing at in Kerala in 52 AD, on November 21, and he’d have been roughly 50 years of age, which curiously enough is my own age as I write this.

At that time, the trading links between Kerala and Israel were old — in fact, King Solomon had even imported construction material for his temple at Jerusalem in 961 BC, more than a thousand years before Thomas’s arrival. It is thought that the first settlement of Jews in India was established in Kodungallur hundreds of years before the year 0, and so Thomas would have found accommodation in the town’s Jewish quarters. All that is left today is a stone hidden by the river’s northern bank, commemorating a batch of 400 Jewish refugees: ‘To the memory of the Knanaya Jewish-Christian ancestors who immigrated in AD 345 from Babylonia to Kodungallur. Knai Thoma their lay-leader built a town and a church dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle on the land donated by Cheraman Perumal. On the same site, about 500 metres from here now exists the ruined Portuguese fortress administered by the Kerala state department of archaeology.’

Incidentally, the leader of these Christians and Jews is said to have been a merchant prince of Edessa (in Turkey), so it appears that in the 4th Century, the congregation that Thomas had started here got a welcome boost of newcomers.

While there is no Jewish area in Kodungallur today, one does find a Jewish bazaar at Mattancherry, in Kochi, with its own grand synagogue (16th Century), which gives an idea of what Kodungallur may have been like — rows of warehouses and the air heavy with the scents of pepper, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves and turmeric.

It is interesting to note that at a time when Europeans fed Christians to the lions in Roman arenas for public entertainment, people in Kerala were tolerant and curious enough about the new faith that Thomas brought with him, enough for him to gather many converts — especially among women.

According to the Thomapedia, the apostle was invited to stay in Kerala by Prince Kepha of the royal family. Perhaps not so surprising, after all, since ancient sources mention that the harbour abounded in ships manned by Greeks, Arabs and maybe even a sprinkling of Romans. Yes, Kodungallur was the place to be, and whatever worries Thomas may have had about being a lone Hebrew among Indians were laid to rest — there were plenty of Jews living all over Kerala, in the harbours and in the main inland trading towns, engaged in selling and money-lending. Foreign coin hoards found here and there attest to this.

Here, a floating population of alien sailors waited around for the monsoon winds to turn so they could sail back, hanging out in the inns of the town, staying up late at night, talking in strange tongues, presumably having imbibed much of the wine carried onboard. And they shopped like mad. Archaeologists have found Roman coin hoards not only in Kerala but also central Tamil Nadu, and even Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, far to the north, suggesting that this commercial network was extensive.

Recently, during excavations south of Kodungallur, in Pattanam village, parts of an ancient brick wharf with teak bollards, a wooden canoe, beads, storage jars and shards from Roman wine amphorae were unearthed. The very name Pattanam means ‘port town’ (a suffix commonly used in town names such as Kaveripattanam, at the mouth of Kaveri river in Tamil Nadu, which ancient Tamil epics mention as the native place of Kannaki, as also a prosperous Yavana trading settlement). The reason there is no harbour here today is apparently because it was destroyed in the 14th Century by an earthquake followed by a flood, and the sea trade shifted 40 km south to Kochi, which — as we know — remains a major harbour to this day.

My rickshaw rattles across the mighty bridge straddling the river’s mouth, and the driver, an elderly man whom I found to be more knowledgeable than the first driver I engaged in the morning, is so pleased to have a foreign passenger that he insists we stop by his humble house, standing among coconut trees in a village after the bridge, to enjoy a cup of coffee with his family. They’re thrilled to hear about my ‘native place’ and ask if I can get them jobs in Europe. I get a feeling that Thomas may have been greeted likewise.

This neighbourhood, or what used to be Muziris, probably wasn’t much more urbanised in Thomas’s time than it is now.

In those days in Kerala there were few proper cities with paved roads, hardly any grand royal structures of the kind our minds conjure up about ancient towns — or when filmmakers make their historic epics, for that matter. A ‘city’ was more likely a cluster of villages that had agglomerated into a semi-urban trading hub.

Apart from Hindus, Buddhists and Jains, there would have been a colony of Jews — Indianised, yet fluent in Mediterranean languages, these expatriate compatriots would have connected easily with Thomas. In fact, all the seven churches that Thomas went on to found stood in places that used to have Jewish settlements — and which today have a significant Christian population.

One of the first converts in Muziris was the local Rabbi Paul, it is said.

The houses of these Jews were likely to have been built in teakwood around the market. Apart from pepper, known as ‘India’s black gold’, and other spices, the produce in their godowns that were destined for the export market included sandalwood, ivory, muslin cloth, silk and pearls. Goods offloaded and sold locally, or transported into the interiors, were Mediterranean wines, certain condiments such as fermented Spanish fish sauce, Italian pottery and crockery, glassware and lamps, exclusive colour pigments and a variety of foreign metals, possibly including shipments of tin from as far away as Britain (which the Romans had conquered for its tin mines barely ten years before).

So the prosperous bazaars displayed all the latest foreign items — yet, whenever Thomas was invited to lavish banquets, he would only have a piece of chapatti, some salt and a mug of plain water. He’d mostly be seen fasting, perhaps to avoid dicey food that caused stomach upsets. He was the ultimate traveller who carried the bare minimum: just the clothes on his back, which he wore until they fell apart.

The Acts of Thomas describe plenty of high drama that he met with around here, including speaking serpents and dragons. His most remarkable adventure involved a criminal investigation into a murder. A young man had allegedly, in a fit of anger, chopped up his mistress with a sword. It is said that she lived at an inn and committed adultery, perhaps meaning she was a prostitute in the seedier quarters of the port. Thomas interrogated the accused man, who confessed to his crime, and then solved the case by resurrecting the lady in question, who then described hellish visions from the netherworld. Thereafter she became a good woman and many of the witnesses converted. But my rickshaw driver and his family cannot recall any such incidents hereabouts.

However, the driver does know of the (perhaps) first church that Thomas founded. He excitedly drives me to the grandiose AD 52 St Thomas Kottakavu Forane Church in North Paravur village, a pink edifice which very obviously is of quite recent construction. A wedding is in progress, so I lurk about outside in the rather large compound with its colourful statues depicting scenes out of Thomas’s life. A signboard proclaims that the third church on the site was built in 1308 AD. Until the 18th Century, a wooden cross carved by Thomas himself was kept there, but it was destroyed when the church was ransacked.

It is said that Thomas came to this place, Kottakavu, which was a Namboodiri locality and the capital of a Brahmin kingdom, during a festival and was initially stoned. The saint prayed until a thunderstorm broke out, with bolts of lightning killing priests and one elephant. The idol broke into smithereens. Confusion arose. But then Thomas asked for some water, which he blessed and sprinkled over the dead, and all of them were revived and happy to convert.

The site of the festival, a Bhadrakali temple, was converted into this church.

On the church grounds, I’m excited to find an old piece of wall, known simply as ‘Old Wall’, which could have been part of one of the earliest churches. People, noticing my interest, lead me to a stone built into the foundation of the modern church and proudly claim the writing on it to be ‘Greek’. The westward connections remain strong here, because the man who shows me the inscription says he used to live in Dubai. After earning sufficient amounts of money, he returned home and set himself up as an elephant contractor. He’s got two at the moment. Would I be interested in renting them?

“Sorry, I’ve engaged a rickshaw driver for the day, so I don’t really need two elephants,” I say.

“But maybe one?” he asks, hopefully.

Having spent years visiting Indian archaeological sites, I make the semi-educated guess that the text on the stone is in a Tamil form of Brahmi script. So even if it isn’t Greek, it could be ancient — after all, Emperor Ashoka wrote his edicts using Brahmi. However, Googling on my phone, I discover that Brahmi is indeed related to Aramaic and was introduced to India by Jewish merchants in the 8th Century BC, so the stone may well be in Thomas’s own handwriting. At that thought my knees turn to jelly.

Twenty years passed happily, during which Thomas wrote back home (not a single letter has been preserved) to the other early congregations and travelled in Kerala, building churches and installing crosses in Kollam, Niranam (possibly known to ancient Roman traders as Nelcynda) and Chayal. He may have popped over to Sri Lanka, where there is another old cross attributed to him in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura.

Some believe that he also went to China, which isn’t historically proven but not entirely impossible. However, his main base was always Kerala, where the Thomas Christian tradition is strong and local sources list a number of his miracles, including the resurrection of at least 19 dead. He may have had surgical skills, because he reattached a severed arm of one politician, and cured 330 lepers, 250 blind and some 20 dumb people. Towards the end he had 17,500 followers.

As his fame grew, another Indian king called Misdaeus or Mazdai sent an invitation in 69 AD. The name is thought to be an incorrect transcription of Vasudeva or Mahadevan, possibly a Pandyan ruler who held sway at Madurai and who controlled an important fishing port at Mylapore (today part of Chennai), which was known in Ptolemy’s seminal Geography as Maliarpha, an ‘emporium’ (trading hub). Near Mylapore, a single coin of the Roman emperor Augustus, issued in AD 14, was found in 1930, which may be what remained of Thomas’s travel budget.

Theories abound as to why Thomas went there to die. According to one story, Thomas was asked to perform an exorcism on some female members of the royal family. According to another, King Mahadevan was simply interested in philosophical debates.

Anyhow, Thomas is thought to have hitch-hiked the 500 km or so overland, travelling by highways — not today’s paved roads but simply slightly raised all-weather paths. Such trading routes crossed from Kerala, through the Ghat mountains via modern Palakkad to the plains of Kongu Nadu, where the town Karur was a major hub judging from the vast quantities of Roman coins found there. In Ptolemy’s Geography — written around 100 AD and one of the most authoritative guidebooks of its time — the town is named Korur. (Incidentally, even Columbus relied on Ptolemy’s Geography when he tried to find India but erroneously bumped into America.)

While I take a train via Palakkad (where I break journey to see an old fort, but am unable to find any traces of Thomas or Roman trade) to Tamil Nadu, in those days people travelled by bullock cart. There’s also a mention of Thomas riding in chariots, including one pulled by four wild asses that he charmed into volunteering for the chore. Wild asses are very rare in south India, but then again miracles happened around Thomas. I fancy that the chariot he rode in was a bit like the private minibuses of today, as the Acts of Thomas mentions both a driver and a captain (a ticket collector, I guess).

Along the way he put up at roadside inns or stayed with friendly people (including the aforementioned collector, who was appointed the priest of Mylapore after Thomas). If he passed through Karur, which is likely, it would have been possible to sail downriver to the coast near Pondicherry, where a major Roman trading post was excavated by the British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler at Arikamedu. Wheeler found a world-class wine cellar and fine Roman tableware made in Arezzo. After a break here, Thomas would have sailed up the coast to Mylapore in a few days.

What happened next is much written about and the subject of speculation through the ages.

It is a hot Madrasi day when I reach town.

Being patronised by the King, Thomas was allowed to work on the hillock that is known as Chinnamalai, or Little Mount in English, and so that is where I head first. Incidentally, it’s just off the main thoroughfare Anna Salai (old name: Mount Road) in south central Chennai. Although there are stories of Thomas being in and out of jail, he mostly seems to have lived on this rocky knoll.

At 24 metres above sea level, it’s not much of a hill, but at the summit a rambling construction of conjoined churches — at least three — are jostling for space, dwarfed by surrounding modern buildings. The oldest chapel, whitewashed and with decorative blue trimmings, is the quaint Shrine of Our Lady of Health built in 1551 AD. Now the most astonishing thing is that Thomas’s tiny private cave has been preserved more or less intact underneath this chapel, and I climb down into it with some difficulty after squeezing my potbelly through a crevice behind the altar, down some half a dozen steps, past a Thomas-style cross carved into the wall.

How do I know this is the right cave? Well, there’s an archaic marble plaque on the wall, reading: ‘THE CAVE Where lay hid Persecuted just before being martyred By Rajah Mahadevan King of Mylapuram AD 68, THOMAS.’

So the killer’s name is on record, written in stone. Wikipedia, too, confirms this is where Thomas “led a spartan prayerful life in solitude, often praying on top of the hill and preaching to the local crowds”. Furthermore, the helpful watchman, whom I tip a hundred bucks, points out to me elbow imprints on a rock surface where the saint used to pray ardently and then a hand-print on the cave wall near a small ‘window’ shaft, through which the apostle is believed to have escaped when the King sent soldiers to arrest him.

He must have been very thin from his staple diet of bread and water but there’s no way I can squeeze through.

This is the one place, I muse, that gives an idea of the kind of accommodation a traveller may have been faced with in those days — cheap to maintain, probably no rent, four by five metres square, barely space enough to snap a selfie. However, the cave protected him from the monsoon showers, and the narrow air shaft provides reading light in the daytime.

Although the Acts of Thomas, written more than a hundred years later in distant Edessa, claims that a follower arranged a triclinium, a kind of Roman hall with dining couches, for Thomas to teach in, local tradition holds that he taught in the open, behind the present church, where there’s now an assemblage of colourful statues of him, Indian devotees of many kinds and a curiously Roman-looking soldier. Every Sunday he addressed whoever wanted to listen to him. I also find a cross Thomas personally carved into the rock, next to a miraculous perennial spring that he used to drink from. There’s a sign that proclaims: ‘Water from the fountain cures diseases.’ I take a sip and feel invigorated.

“He was hiding there and needed water, so at that time he made the well,” explains a devotee to me.

Despite the evidence on the marble plaque, it remains unclear to me who and what caused his death. Reading the Acts of Thomas, one gets the feeling that local women found the exotic stranger irresistible and so the philosophy he propagated had a powerful effect on them, which angered many gentlemen. Why? Well, one particular lady, Mygdonia (thought to be a misspelling of Mangaladevi), who was the wife of the aristocrat Charisius (or Krishna), got so affected that she not only refused her conjugal obligations but went sleepwalking, naked, to look for Thomas in the Mylapore bazaars. The following day Krishna lodged a complaint with the King against ‘a certain Hebrew, a sorcerer’ for driving his wife mad and ruining his peaceful home life. Meanwhile, Queen Tertia (or Tharika), herself had a heart-to-heart chat with Mangaladevi, and was influenced to stop travelling by palanquin, to live in celibacy and start exercise walking, which wasn’t at all what her husband, King Mahadevan, had in mind when he invited the saint to town — so he initiated action against Thomas.

Summoning him to the royal court, the King commanded of Thomas, “Tell me who thou art and by what power thou doest these things.” Thomas stayed silent and so, for starters, he received 128 blows from the royal officers, before being thrown into jail. In the night, Mangaladevi came with 10 Roman denarii to bribe the jailers, but on the way she met Thomas, who was already out, with an eerie light moving ahead of him. However, not much later, the King “delivered him unto four soldiers and an officer, and commanded them to take him to the mountain and there pierce him with spears and put an end to him.”

Around Little Mount, as I carry out my forensic investigation, I spot a fenced-in footprint left by Thomas, not far outside the ‘window’ shaft, possibly from when he was chased by the soldiers. Some 5 km away in the same direction, to the south of the Adyar river, there’s another, somewhat bigger mountain which Thomas may have tried to escape to.

I trace the route down to the fag end of Anna Salai, past a TASMAC liquor shop and on to the Tiruchi-Chennai Highway, across Guindy Flyover to a massive highway knot called Kathipara Junction. From there, Poonamalle High Road leads to the Tamil Wesley Church (and a host of other churches) and St Thomas Higher Secondary School (another clue that I am on the right track) until I, finally, after many twists and turns on increasingly narrower roads, stand at the foot of Parangimalai, a name the hill acquired because so many ‘phirangs’ or ‘parangi’ came to worship. It is only about three times the height of Little Mount, but the 135 or so steps up the hill, which in English is known as Saint Thomas Mount, take plenty of energy and electrolytes out of me. But from the top, the view over the surrounding city is stunning. Chennai stretches as far as the horizon on one side, and to the sea on another. This vast landscape, then dotted by villages, was to be the last sight Thomas ever saw. It was July 3 in 72 AD — according to my sources.

Today at the summit stands the picturesque Shrine of Our Lady of Expectation, built by the Portuguese in the early 16th Century on the site of a ruined Christian monastery, once populated by hermits.

There is a painting of the murder on one wall and near the altar is an important oil painting: it depicts Virgin Mary and is believed to be by the hand of Saint Luke, a fellow apostle. Thomas carried it with him to India, it is believed, making it possibly the oldest Christian artwork in Asia.

I also find a stone cross, unearthed when the Portuguese poked around in the monastery ruins. It bore fresh bloodstains, so it was thought to be the actual cross to which the apostle clung as he died. It went on bleeding well into the 18th Century, though I notice it is dry today. However, experts who examined it in the 1920s ascribed it to the 7th Century, so much younger than Thomas; others point out that it might be older than that, as its inscriptions in fact use the Sassanian Pahlavi alphabet belonging to ancient Persia.

After being allowed to pray before this cross, or some other cross like it, Thomas was, according to one version, struck to death, according to another pierced by no fewer than four lances, and according to a third, stabbed by a priest with a sword. In a fourth version, King Mahadevan isn’t at all involved in the murder, but is instead the one who comes to the rescue and finds Thomas here, bleeding. A small booklet I pick up at the souvenir stall reports Thomas’s last words to the King, probably spoken in a Dravidian tongue:

‘Be strong in your faith, cherish it like your finest treasure.’

Looking around for more clues, I come across a signboard that says the martyr was awarded a royal funeral on Marina Beach by King Mahadevan and his son Prince Vijayan.

As I leave the church, my feet are sore and it is 9 km to Marina Beach, but luckily I find a taxi waiting for passengers.

Joseph is the driver’s name and his helpfulness reminds me of the ticket collector Thomas befriended during his journey to Mylapore. Joseph tells me he grew up in an orphanage and has no clue where his family might live, or even if they live. He is a Std VII pass and started working as an agricultural labourer at 11, but despite that he taught himself five languages from books — apart from his native Tamil, he is fluent in Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi and English. At 14 he started working as a rickshaw driver, but thanks to his language skills he has been promoted to drive a taxi. He had a love marriage with a Muslim woman. He is very fond of Saint Thomas.

As we drive through town he tells me how Thomas met a pujari and saw him throw water in the air as an offering. Thomas asked, “How do you pray to a God to accept your water when it just falls down again?”

Then Thomas threw water and it stayed in the air, Joseph explains, and so the pujari converted. (I later discover that there is a similar legend in the Kerala traditions.) This angered the other priests so much that they plotted to have him killed, says Joseph.

“How did they kill him?” I ask.

“Don’t know exactly, but they were very angry.”

After negotiating a long Mylapore bazaar street we reach a stately whitewashed edifice at Santhome, at the southern end of Chennai’s long urban beach. Joseph claims it is one of the earliest basilicas in the whole world; the very first being the one built over Saint Peter’s tomb in Rome, while this is the third.

Proudly, Joseph also informs me that the Pope himself came here to pay his respects in 1986; there’s a statue of him in the courtyard to prove it.

This is a popular place among beggars peculiarly well-versed in English. As soon as I get out of the taxi, one fellow walks up and points to a missing leg:

“I happened to have an accident on my way here. Now I need to go to hospital. Can you help me?”

I chip in.

So here is where Thomas’s journey ended, on the beach of the Bay of Bengal. At some point a chapel was built to mark the location. That would have been the same chapel Marco Polo visited in 1293, and the story he heard then was that Thomas died by accident: a hunter mistook the saint for a peacock and put an arrow in him. At that time Mylapore was a “little town having no great population, it is a place where few traders go, because there is very little merchandise to be got there, and it is a place not very accessible”. But, points out Polo, it was an important place of pilgrimage, which suggests that the location of the grave had not been forgotten. The red sand around the tomb healed fevers.

It is dusk and a strong breeze blows in from the sea. “And all the brethren wept; and they brought beautiful robes and much fair linen, and buried him in a royal sepulchre,” it says in Acts of Thomas. Archaeological excavations in the 20th Century confirmed that underneath the present basilica lay remains of brick lining vaguely similar to the bricks used at the Roman trading post in Arikamedu, so the sepulchre may have been built in the 1st Century. A capital of an ancient column, thought to be of late Greco-Indian style, perhaps from Kashmir, was also found.

Earlier the tomb, a small sandy pit by the altar, used to be viewed from above through foggy plate glass, but this view has been blocked. Now there is a proper, modern well-lit crypt one can go down into under the church (entered from the building behind it) where a symbolic tomb has been set up, including a life-sized resting Saint Thomas. Next to it is a glass receptacle labelled ‘Relic es ossia St Thomas Ap’, which contains a bone fragment.

The murder weapon — or rather, a very small piece of the ‘lancehead that killed St Thomas’, dug up by the Portuguese here in 1523 AD — is on display in the adjacent museum, and finally I know for sure how Thomas died. At the souvenir counter I pick up a credit card-sized memento that contains a few grains of sand from the tomb, sand that soaked up the saint’s blood. And so, it can be said, the apostle’s travels continue with everybody who takes some of that sand with them.

Zac O’Yeah is a part-time travel writer and part-time detective novelist based in Bengaluru

(This article was published on January 13, 2017)

The End of Catholic Marriage
DECEMBER 1, 2016 12:46 PM December 1, 2016 12:46 pm 54
Matter for Serious MEDITATION by the Faithful
 

I haven’t written in this space for some time, but now that the election is over some additional interventions seem necessary to capture what’s happening in Roman Catholicism’s remarkable period of controversy. My Sunday column talked a bit about the way in which varying interpretations of “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on the family, have produced variations in official Catholic teaching on marriage from diocese to diocese, region to region – a “submerged schism,” to borrow a phrase from the Vatican-watcher Andrea Gagliarducci, which thanks to the astringent words of certain bishops is no longer even that submerged.

One reading of Pope Francis’s intentions is that this is roughly what he wanted – a decentralized, quasi-Anglican approach to questions where the church and the post-sexual revolution culture are in conflict, in which different parts of the Catholic world could experiment with different pastoral approaches to confession and communion for the remarried-without-annulment. But at the same time, he and his allies have consistently – if not yet magisterially – expressed their strong preference for the more liberal side of the debate, suggesting that if they imagine a decentralization of pastoral practice, they also imagine it being temporary, with any differences ultimately resolved in favor of a reformed approach to divorce, remarriage and the Eucharist.

And what is that approach? From the beginning of this controversy there has been a stress, from Cardinal Walter Kasper and then from others, on the idea that the reform being proposed is modest, limited, confined to a small group of remarried Catholics, and thus in no way a public sign that the church no longer believes marriages indissoluble in general. More recently, among those Catholics proposing a hermeneutic of continuity between “Amoris” and the prior papal documents that it kinda-sorta-maybe contradicts, this stress on the rarity of what the reformers have in mind, the extremities involved, has become crucial to the case for continuity. For instance Rocco Buttiglione, an ally of John Paul II and now a prominent defender of Pope Francis, recently responded to the four conservative cardinals questioning “Amoris” with the following comments:

The first question the eminent cardinals ask, is whether it is in some cases acceptable for absolution to be granted to people who despite being tied down by a previous marriage, live more uxorio, engaging in sexual intercourse. It seems to me, that the response should be affirmative given what is written in “Amoris Laetitia” and what is stated in the general principles of moral theology. A clear distinction needs to be made between the act, which constitutes a grave sin, and the agent, who may find themselves bound by circumstances that mitigate their responsibility for the act or in some cases may even eliminate it completely. Consider, for example, the case of a woman who is completely financially and mentally dependent on someone and is forced to have sexual intercourse against her will. Sadly, such cases are not just theory but a bitter reality, witnessed more often than one would imagine. What is lacking here are the subjective conditions for sin (full knowledge and deliberate consent). The act is still evil but it does not belong (not entirely anyway) to the person. In criminal law terms, we are not in the realm of the theory of crime (whether an act is good or bad) but of the theory of liability and subjective extenuating circumstances.

This does not mean unmarried people can legitimately engage in sexual activity. Such activity is illegitimate. People can (in some cases) fall into non mortal but venial sin if full knowledge and deliberate consent are lacking. But, one could argue, is it not necessary for a person to have the intention of never sinning again in order to receive absolution? It certainly is necessary. The penitent must want to end their irregular situation and commit to acts that will allow them to actually do so in practice. However, this person may not be able to achieve this detachment and regain self- ownership immediately …

So here we have Buttiglione asking us to imagine a painful and complicated case, a second marriage (though of course it need not be a civil marriage; the same logic might apply to cohabitation or a same-sex relationship or a polygamous union or even — especially? — to a prostitute) defined by cruelty and domination, in which the psychological pressure is such that a prudent confessor might regard an imperfect contrition, a halting desire for amendment and escape, as sufficient to grant absolution and distribute the body and blood of Christ. Such cases certainly exist, and let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that they might provide a possible point of synthesis between the church’s traditional teaching on mortal sin, confession and communion and the new rhetoric of “accompaniment” for divorced and remarried Catholics – an example of how it might be licit for someone in the process of trying to escape from a toxic situation to receive communion along the way, even though their promise of amendment is inherently infirm; an instance where the current pontiff’s stress on gray areas might be consonant with the teaching of his predecessors; a case where John Paul II’s distinction between “sincere repentance” and “the judgement of the intellect concerning the future” might be plausibly applied.
Stipulate all of that, for argument’s sake. (I can hear certain true rigorists clearing their throats; later, gentlemen.) But then turn your eyes to the teaching document recently produced by San Diego’s bishop, the Francis-appointed, beloved-of-progressives Robert McElroy, following a diocesan synod convened to discuss the implementation of “Amoris.” The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some excerpts where Bishop McElroy is writing on (theoretically) the same moral issues as Buttiglione:

… many Catholics who have been divorced and remarried conclude for a variety of legitimate reasons — many of them arising out of caring concern for the effects that an annulment process might have on the feelings of adult children or former spouses — that they cannot initiate the annulment process. What is their status in the Church?
… no abstract rule can embody the many complexities of the circumstances, intentions, levels of understanding and maturity which originally surrounded the action of a man or woman in entering their first marriage, or which surround the new moral obligations to a spouse or children which have already been produced by a second marriage. Thus, Pope Francis rejects the validity of any blanket assertion that “all those in any (second marriage without benefit of annulment) are living in a state of mortal sin and deprived of sanctifying grace.”
This does not mean that there is not a deep level of contradiction in the life of Catholics who are divorced and remarried, as the Lord himself noted in the Gospel of Matthew. But Pope Francis explains that even in the face of substantial contradictions between the Gospel and the existential life of a disciple, the inexorable logic of divine grace seeks ever more progressive reintegration into the full life of the Church …
… In conversation with a priest, the believer with humility, discretion, and love for the Church and its teachings seeks to reflect upon their level of responsibility for the failure of the first marriage, their care and love for the children of that marriage, the moral obligations which have arisen in their new marriage, and possible harm which their returning to the sacraments might have by undermining the indissolubility of marriage. It is important to underscore that the role of the priest is one of accompaniment, meant to inform the conscience of the discerner on principles of Catholic faith. The priest is not to make decisions for the believer, for as Pope Francis emphasizes … the Church is “called to form consciences, not to replace them.”
… Some Catholics engaging in this process of discernment will conclude that God is calling them to return to full participation in the life of the Church and the Eucharist. Others will conclude that they should wait, or that their return would hurt others.
In pointing to the pathway of conscience for the divorced and remarried, Pope Francis is not enlisting an element of the Christian moral life which is exceptional. For the realm of conscience is precisely where the Christian disciple is called to discern every important moral decision that he or she makes.
You will notice a few things about McElroy’s teaching, as opposed to Buttiglione’s analysis. The first is that the language is completely different: Nothing gets called a “grave sin” or an “evil” or even “illegitimate” by the bishop; every tension and contradiction is resolved through gradual but inexorable processes that resemble a conversation rather than a confession. (Indeed, the word “confession” appears nowhere in the entire document; the word “sin” appears only in the quotation from Pope Francis suggesting when the term does notnecessarily apply.)

The second is that the priest’s sacramental role and responsibility diminishes dramatically. There is no sense that a confessor might have an active role himself in deciding whether to absolve a sinner, or that a priest might have some obligation (as indeed the priest does under canon law, which San Diego’s priests are effectively being instructed by their bishop to ignore) to protect believers from sacrilege and the eucharist from profanement. Instead the priest becomes basically a counselor, there to help validate the individual Catholic in a decision that only he or she can make, with no supernatural power or responsibilities of his own.
The third is that unlike in Buttiglione’s unhappy example, the cases being considered by the bishop do not seem extreme or (as he says) “exceptional” in the slightest. Instead, McElroy gives every evidence that he’s talking about the most stable and happy and high-functioning of second marriages, with no hint that abuse or emotional blackmail any other extremity is involved; the only factor constraining the people he’s addressing from taking steps that Catholic teaching requires are the “moral obligations” incurred by the new marriage and the desire not to wound others by going through the annulment process.

Which is why, finally, McElroy seems to take for granted that nobody in such a second marriage would ever consider permanently leaving it, or permanentlyliving as brother and sister, or permanently refraining from receiving communion. Instead, the decision to receive the body of Christ while living conjugally with someone who is not, from the church’s perspective, your true wife or husband is treated as a question of when, not if — do it now if you feel ready, wait a little longer if it might hurt your kids or your ex-spouse or you feel like have some spiritual maturing left to do.

This is a teaching on marriage that might be summarized as follows: Divorce is unfortunate, second marriages are not always ideal, and so the path back to communion runs through a mature weighing-out of everyone’s feelings — the feelings of your former spouse and any kids you may have had together, the feelings of your new spouse and possible children, and your own subjective sense of what God thinks about it all. The objective aspects of Catholic teaching on marriage — the supernatural reality of the first marriage, the metaphysical reality of sin and absolution, the sacramental reality of the eucharist itself — do not just recede; they essentially disappear.

Which means that is not at all a vision under which a small group of remarried Catholics in psychologically difficult situations might receive communion discreetly while they seek to sort those situations out. It is, in fact, by implication almost the reverse: The only people who might feel unready for communion under Bishop McElroy’s vision of spiritual maturation are Catholics whose lives are particularly chaotic and messed-up, who don’t feel sure at all about where they stand with God, to say nothing of their kids and ex-spouses or lovers or boyfriends or whomever. Is Sonia the prostitute from Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” ready for communion in the diocese of San Diego? Maybe not; maybe she should wait a while. But the respectable divorced father of three who gets along well enough with his ex-wife and has worked through all his issues in therapy can feel comfortable receiving ahead of her. This is not communion for the weak; it is communion for the stable and solid and respectable.

Let me make a personal aside, since I don’t mean to sound overly flippant about the virtues of respectability and stability. I am the child and grandchild of divorced couples; I know well the emotional complexities involved in getting to a stable place where people can manage the holidays, deal with blended families, behave decently to one another, etc. Indeed to Bishop McElroy’s first point, I know very well the emotional costs of the annulment process for the people touched by it, the extent to which the church’s requirements can seem to add burdens to people already going through a lot, and also the extent to which an annulment process that errs on the side of mercy can itself seem like a way in which the church doesn’t take the first marriage’s possible reality as seriously as it should.

But let’s be clear: The way out of all these difficulties proposed by the bishop of San Diego is a way out of the traditional Catholic understanding of marriage, period. Drop the mention of annulments and the pro forma nod to “indissolubility,” replace “priest” with “pastor,” and there is nothing in his language that couldn’t be reproduced by a Protestant church dealing with the same issues and seeking to reintegrate its remarried members to fellowship and the Lord’s table. It is a plausible approach if you don’t believe what Catholics are supposed to believe about the sacraments; it is perhaps well-suited to Christian traditions that do not. It is reasonable-sounding response to modern realities; so is Episcopalianism. But it is not an approach that treats Christian marriage as actually indissoluble, actually real in a way that transcends the subjective experiences of the spouses, and a Catholicism that takes this approach can claim to believe in its historic teaching on marriage only in the most vaporous of ways — which is to say, not.

At prior points in the Francis-era Catholic controversies I have noted with a certain alarm that the “liberal” side and the “conservative” side don’t seem to have much of a theological language in common; we argue past each other because we almost seem to belong to different Christian communities, with different baseline assumptions all the way down to the question of who Jesus actually was. But what is striking about reading Buttiglione and McElroy back-to-back is that here we have two supporters of Pope Francis who seem to be speaking different religious languages — Buttiglione trying to interpret “Amoris” in consonance with older Catholic ideas and categories, the bishop of San Diego essentially acting as those those ideas and categories have been superseded; Buttiglione envisioning a change that affects a few; the bishop of San Diego envisioning one that’s clearly for the many; Buttiglione laboring to treat “Amoris” as a modest development of doctrine; the bishop of San Diego entirely unconcerned with potential contradiction with the Catholicism of the ancient and very recent past.

Perhaps both men’s readings of Francis’s intentions are plausible; certainly the pope’s public commentary on marriage is now extensive enough to admit of multiple interpretations, modest and sweeping and everywhere in between.
But you will note that only one of these men is a bishop, a public teacher of the faith, a Francis appointee. I am uncertain of the wisdom of the dubia offered by the four conservative cardinals, fearful (unlike certain heighten-the-contradictions traditionalists) of what might happen in the church if the pope actually clarified his teaching and intentions. But if Pope Francis does not mean his apostolic exhortation to be implemented along the sweeping, come-all-eventually-back-to-communion lines proposed by Bishop McElroy, he should say so, and soon. Because in the diocese of San Diego, there may be something called the sacrament of matrimony, but the church itself plainly does not believe in Catholic marriage anymore.

Trichy Malayalam Drama Paereduthu, 1956

In 1956 the four-hundred odd Malayalee students studying at the St. Joseph’s College, Thiruchirappalli as part of the College Day function staged a Malayalam skit entitled “Pereduthu”. The play was written for the occasion by E. J. George of the 4th B.A. 1-b Maths class, and this 1956 play was his first publicly staged play. Many now-famous personalities acted in the play, which was a great hit not only with the Malayalam speaking members of the audience but also with the Tamil students, staff, and general public. After the performance many came to congratulate the playwright and the cast. There were many actors from the Physics and Economics M. A. Hons. classes of whom many became well known teachers and high Government officials.

In this 1956 photograph are seen

Fr. C. J. Varkey, s.j.(Prefect), Chev. Prof. Abraham Arackal (former Principal, Maharajah's College, Ernakulam), Prof. Joseph Meenattur ( former HOD Economics, Christ College, Irinjalakuda), Late Dr. Joseph John Nidhiri (Maryland USA), Prof. M. D. Kurian (Christ College, Irinjalakuda) Late Er. P. T. Thomas Njarackal, Prof. C. J. Thomas (Newman College, Thodupuzha),Late Anto Palathingal (Kattur), P. V. Mathai (former AEO), K. M. Clarence (Borneo), E. K. Matthew, Chev. Prof. George Menachery (E. J. George Playwright)

Most Enlightening Region: Documentary by Dr. N. S. Xavier M. D. (USA) with inputs by Prof. George Menachery

Christianity, a threat to Hinduism? Data and historical evidence prove otherwise.

Why Christianity Failed in India?
If you have been following Indian mass media or social media in the last few months, you couldn’t have escaped the narrative being spun by the Hindutva right-wing. It goes something like this: “Christianity is posing a growing and serious demographic threat to Hinduism by converting large
numbers of Hindus through aggressive proselytising. This effort is heavily funded by Christian organisations in the West that see India as being ripe for large-scale conversions. Since proselytising and conversions are not part of Hindu tradition, or that of any religion that originated in India, the playing field is tilted against Hinduism, and this is causing serious societal friction. This sometimes leads to spontaneous and violent reactions.”
There are about four individual assertions in there, so let us take them one by one, put them to the test of data and historical evidence, and see which ones hold up, and which ones do not.

Christianity poses a serious threat to Hinduism
To put it bluntly, this assertion would be laughable if its consequences were not so destructive of social cohesion. The fact is, the story of Christianity in India is a story of dismal failure, demographically speaking. No believing Christian would like to admit this in this manner, but both they and their detractors should open their eyes to the simple fact that stares them in the face: that India has mostly passed up Christianity, and that there is no other country in the world that has proven so resistant and so impervious to it as India.
And not for lack of effort on the part of the Christians, or for lack of listening on the part of the Hindus. Very few regions in the world have provided Christianity as much freedom to tell its story and propagate itself as India, and in no other country has Christianity tried to spread its message so hard and for so long—for nearly 2,000 years to be specific—which is about half as long as Indian civilisation itself.

Return ticket A ghar wapasi at Kharmadanga village, Birbhum
And so, what does Indian Christianity have to show for its humongous effort in terms of men, money and material, over two millennia? Almost zilch—or somewhere between two and three per cent of the population. And that number is on the way down, not up—from 2.6 per cent in 1971 to 2.3 per cent in 2001. The census figures for 2011 have not been officially released yet, but leaked figures suggest that there may have been another small decline.

Christianity’s demographic defeat in India is because for the first time it encountered a culture that didn’t need to persecute other faiths, or find the messiah exceptional.
To put that in numerical perspective, think of this. The first Hindu probably landed in London only about 200 years ago, not 2,000 years ago. So what would you expect the Hindu population of the city to be today? Half a per cent? One per cent? Two per cent? The actual figure is over five per cent, more than twice as big as the presence of Christians in India. London is just a city, one might say, so let’s look at the figure for the whole of the UK. Then you come up with 1.3 per cent. If you add those who identify themselves as Sikhs (thus bowing to the wishes of the Hindutva right-wing to treat all Indian-origin religions as essentially one group), then the number goes up to 1.9 per cent, quite comparable to the percentage of Christians in India. And mind you, the Hindu figures for the UK are on the way up, not down. And the UK is no exception. Here are some other figures—New Zealand: 2 per cent, Canada: 1.6 per cent, Australia: 1.28 per cent, Malaysia: 6.3 per cent and Indonesia: 1.69 per cent. This is without even considering our immediate neighbours such as Sri Lanka or Bhutan, or countries such as Fiji or Mauritius, where the figures are, of course, much higher.

So the accurate and insightful question to ask is not why Christianity is expanding in India, but why it is NOT expanding. A full answer is beyond the scope of this article, but if one were to pick out one reason, it would be this: Christianity, probably for the first time, came up against a philosophy and culture that did not feel the need to persecute other faiths, did not find the Christian messiah and his teachings either objectionable or exceptional, and therefore, didn’t see why anyone should convert either. This embrace-cum-rejection was such a novel experience for it that Christianity probably didn’t know quite how to respond. After all, the Church is so used to growing amidst persecution that theologian Tertullian’s statement in second century AD that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” has not yet been forgotten.

There is no better way to bring this situation to life than to quote the knighted Sanskrit scholar Monier Williams, an avid supporter of Christian evangelisation in India, who wrote this in 1878: “The chief impediment to Christianity among Indians is not only the pride they feel in their own religion, but the very nature of that religion. For pantheism is a most subtle, plausible and all-embracing system, which may profess to include Christianity itself as one of the phenomena of the universe. An eminent Hindu is reported to have said: ‘We Hindus have no need of conversion; we are more than Christians already.’”

The last sentence, in this writer’s opinion, captures the essence of the situation, and you see that in action again and again, when even those Hindu intellectuals who had taken a particular liking for the teachings of Jesus found no reason to accept baptism. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is an example. He had no difficulty whatsoever in citing Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as one of the great influences on his life, but neither had he any difficulty in plainly telling Christian missionaries, who would never cease their attempts to convert him, this: “I am not interested in weaning you from Christianity, and I do not relish your designs upon me, if you had any, to convert me to Christianity. I would also dispute your claim that Christianity is the ONLY true religion.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the limited successes that Christianity has had in spreading its message in India has come from communities that were regarded as outside the hold of mainstream Hinduism, such as people in the Northeast or tribals in central India.

The first-ever proselytising, world-conquering religion owes its origin to India, and it is called Buddhism. No other cultural export from India has been more influential.
To fully appreciate the exceptional nature of the demographic defeat that Christianity experienced in India, one has to look at its track record in the rest of Asia, which itself has been a difficult terrain for Christianity in comparison to other regions such as, say, the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa where the Christians today form over 60 per cent of the population. So here is a partial list from Asia—Indonesia: 9.8 per cent, South Korea: 29.3 per cent, the Philippines: 85.5 per cent, Sri Lanka: 7.5 per cent, Myanmar: 7.9 per cent. Even giant China, where Christianity arrived centuries later than in India, has been a far more fertile ground, despite the Communist dictatorship severely restricting religious freedom. The most reliable estimates are that Christians today form 4-5 per cent of China’s population, more than double the figure for India.

What if we pulled back a little now, and took a global view? Would Hinduism be under threat then? Nope. Hindus today form 15 per cent of the global population, compared to 7.1 per cent for Buddhists, 23.2 per cent for Muslims and 31.5 per cent for Christians. And the number for Hindus is inching up, not sliding down—a century ago, Hindus formed less than 14 per cent of the world population. In other words, if any religion has to worry about its future, from a national or global perspective, it is not Hinduism, but Christianity.

Stroke of history A painting of Nagasena debating King Milinda
More and more Christians are turning to atheism, agnosticism and alternative spirituality (think Deepak Chopra, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Dayananda) in Europe and the US. Already in the UK, for example, people who identify themselves as Christians have come down to 59.3 per cent. In fact, churches in Europe are now being repurposed as shopping malls and office spaces as the number of worshippers fall, and priests are being imported from countries such as Korea, Vietnam and India, as priestly vocations decline. The fast declining Christian population in the US today stands at 77 per cent, compared to the Hindu population in India of 78.3 per cent, which means both the UK and the US are less Christian nations today than India is Hindu, and they will be even less so in the future.

So the next time you see a Hindutva right-winger painting a scary picture of Christianity posing a growing, serious threat to Hinduism, you have to assume one of only two possibilities. One, he or she has not taken the slightest effort to know the facts, or two, he or she knows the facts, but doesn’t want them to get in the way of a good, well-running hate campaign.
Religions of Indian origin do not proselytise or convert. These ideas have come from outside.

Really? Want to think again? The first-ever proselytising, world-conquering religion that history has seen owes its origin to India, and it is called Buddhism. When Emperor Ashoka became a Buddhist a couple of hundred years before Christ was born, and put his considerable resources, influence and support behind the idea of propagating his newly adopted religion beyond the limits of his empire, the first world religion and its learned monks got off their mark in a manner that inspires awe even today. Ashoka’s son and monk Mahinda, who took the religion to Sri Lanka; Sage Nagasena, who debated with and converted King Milinda of Bactria; Santaraksita, the abbot of Nalanda who helped establish Buddhism in Tibet—the list of Buddhist heroes of proselytisation is very long and even more impressive.

There is no cultural/intellectual/philosophical export from India that comes anywhere near Buddhism in the way it has influenced, and continues to influence, human activity in the world. There are about 350 million people who identify themselves as Buddhists now, the vast majority of them outside of India, and they are standing testimony to the fact that proselytisation, first and foremost, was an Indian invention, along with its accoutrements such as an order of celibate monks/missionaries; prayer and preaching routines; codes of behaviour for the monks and the laity; seminaries and retreat centres. If there had been a patent on proselytisation, we would perhaps be the richest country in the world!
The country’s largest single temple trust had a revenue of Rs 2,262 cr last year, twice the donations 10 biggest Christian or Christian-affilated outfits got in 2011-12.

And it’s not just Buddhism. Hinduism spread itself out too, though not over as vast a region as Buddhism and not mainly through monks and missionaries. The men who carried Hinduism beyond the borders of Bharatvarsha were empire-builders and traders who conquered many regions of Southeast Asia. They took their religion with them and then popularised it among the local people. The hundreds of ancient Hindu temples in Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet¬nam and elsewhere and the continuing traditions among their populations bespeak the fact that Hinduism too obtai¬ned new adherents in areas far from its region of birth. The earliest historical record of Hinduism in Southeast Asia is in the island of Borneo (now divided between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei), where Sanskrit inscriptions of the late 4th century talk about the performance of Vedic sacrifices by Brahmans.

According to a Tamil commemorative inscription, Chola king Rajendra Chola I launched naval raids on Srivijaya in present-day Indonesia in 1025 AD, and conquered territories. In fact, successive Chola kings occupied coasts as far as Myanmar and Vietnam, and became dominant players in Sri Lanka through multiple invasions and occupation. (Aside: the common tale that Hindutva right-wingers often tell, of Hinduism and Hindu kingdoms going into decline around the 8th century with the beginning of Arab invasions, betrays an exclusively northern Indian Hindutva perspective; South Indian Hindu kingdoms were still reaching for the heights of culture, influence and riches in the eighth century, and were hundreds of years away from reaching their peak yet!)

It’s not just outside Bharatvarsha that Hindu religion got new adherents. Hindu proselytisation within India has also been very much part of our tradition, and this took forms ranging from Adi Shankara’s epic mission throughout India to defeat Buddhism ideologically, to what sociologist M.N. Srinivas called Sanskritisation and others call the Hinduisation of tribal societies. The ghar wapasi movement now in vogue is nothing new either; it has a history going back at least 100 years to Swami Dayananda Saraswati and his Shuddhi movement.
The story would not be complete without taking into account the cutting edge of Hindu evangelisation today: the new-age gurus who have very large global followings and the commensurate funds to sustain their missions. Just one of them, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, claims 20 million followers wor¬ldwide for his Art of Living Foundation. Nobody explains the phenomenon better than probably the most influential right-wing columnist today, Swapan Dasgupta. This is what he wrote in 2004: “There is a thriving tradition of what can be called evangelical Hinduism. It comprises the likes of Asaram Bapu, Murari Bapu, Swami Ramdev, Amma, Satya Sai Baba, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and many others who feature on the various religious channels on TV. They are the Pat Robert¬sons and Billy Gra¬hams (controver¬sial evangelical Christian movement leaders in the US) of modern Hinduism.”
So historically, or even in a contemporary sense, it is highly inaccurate and facile to say that proselytisation and gaining new adherents is an idea foreign either to Indian-origin religions in general, or to Hinduism in particular.

The playing field is tilted against Hinduism, because Christianity is heavily funded by foreign donations that Hinduism cannot match.
The problem with this argument is this: if the playing field is tilted in favour of Christianity, how is it that Christianity has been such a resounding demographic failure for over 2,000 years? Logically, there are only four possibilities: the playing field is not tilted as charged; the tilt is too minor to be of consequence; the tilt has no role to play in determining outcomes; one side is too weak in other, more important ways to take advantage of the tilt of the field.

Christian evangelists have been preparing for the great harvest of souls for centuries and they are no nearer now than they were in 52 AD, 190 AD or 1757 AD!
But let’s leave that aside and still try to figure out how much money flows to Christian missionary organisations in India in a year. One would think this is an easy question to answer. After all, donations to anyone in India are controlled by the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), and organisations receiving it have to provide information to the government under the Act. So one would think the government would find it easy to give the answer, especially since BJP or BJP-supported governments have been in power at the Centre for about 10 years over the last four decades, or about a quarter of the period in question. Since foreign donations to missionary organisations is such a sensitive issue for the BJP, one would think this is something over which the party would have kept a hawk’s eye, at least when it is in power. One has to wonder why it has not.

In the absence of official data on this, one is forced to do guesswork. The total amount of money that comes in under FCRA for non-governmental organisations in the country annually is about Rs 11,000 crore (the figure has more or less stayed stable since (2006-2007). It is received by about 13,193 organisations. This includes Christian organisations such as Believers Church India (Rs 190 crore), Hindu organisations such as Mata Amritanandamayi Math (Rs 98 crore), Islamic organisations such as Aga Khan Foundation (Rs 110 crore), and secular organisations with a variety of objectives like the Public Health Foundation of India (Rs 130 crore) or Greenpeace or the Shiv Nadar Foundation.

Ritual cleansing A baptism in Nagpur. (Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook 13 April 2015)
How much of this money goes to Christian organisations? According to one study which looked at all ngos receiving more than Rs 1 crore in 2010-11, about 30 per cent of foreign contributions could be going to Christian evangelical organisations such as Gospel for Asia, and another 10 per cent to other organisations focused on charity rather than proselytisation, but have a strong Christian identity such as World Vision. Let’s go with the higher figure for argument’s sake. Forty per cent of Rs 11,000 crore is Rs 4,400 crore. No one has yet attempted to figure out how much of the remaining funds go to Hindu religious or religiously-inclined organisations, and until we have that figure, it is difficult to decide to what extent the playing field is unlevel.

But there is another proxy indicator that one can use, to check how big a factor Rs 4,400 crore is in terms of the overall religious donations and spending in India. The country’s largest single temple trust had a revenue of Rs 2,262 crore last year, which is nearly twice the foreign donations received by the 10 biggest Christian and Christian-affiliated organisations in 2011-12.
Christian organisations in the West see India as being ripe for large-scale conversions and are gearing up for a great harvest of souls.
This assertion is both right and wrong at the same time. It is correct that there are Christian organisations in the West, mostly independent evangelical churches, that believe India is ripe for a great ‘harvest’ of souls for Christ. But what is wrong about the assertion is that it suggests this is something new. Christian missionaries have been preparing, planning and acting for the great harvest in India for at least half a millennium—ever since Vasco da Gama set foot on Kappad beach in Kozhikode in 1498 (and discovered there was already an independent, flourishing and prominent community of Christians in the region, who had known Christ for far longer than the Portuguese themselves and were determined to keep their own independence, but that’s a different story!)

The narrative that the intending harvesters build is always the same, whether they are writing/speaking in the 15th century, 17th century, 19th century, or 21st century, and it goes like this: “Christianity has been an utter failure in India until recently for a variety of reasons, but all that has changed! Now the time has come for the great harvest, because a new window of opportunity has opened! So please open your hearts and wallets!” This is so partly because the missionaries do not readily want to admit defeat, and partly (and perhaps more importantly) because they are in fact trying to raise money and resources, and you can’t do that without giving hope!

Here is one such passage from a book written by James Vaughan, a missionary who spent 19 years in Calcutta, writing about the coming total victory of Christianity in India. This was written in 1876, and makes a prediction about what would happen 150 years hence, or in other words, by 2026! This prediction about a great turnabout in the fortunes of Christianity in India comes after long explanations of why Christianity had made no headway in the country for the previous 18 centuries!

Constitutional amputation for remedying what is essentially irritation to public order and good sense would probably be an over-reaction.
“If we compare the statistics of 1852 and 1872, in a period of twenty years, the native Christians have multiplied at a rate of 150 per cent. Suppose this rate of increase were to continue, and, say, in less than 150 years, the Christian community will be equal to the present population of India, say 250,000,000. But it will still be observed that the ratio of increase in the last of the two decades is much greater than the former; thus it is quite supposable and, indeed, probable, that each succeeding decade will show a proportionate advance in the ratio. If, therefore, any of our readers prefer figures to faith, and numerical probabilities to a quiet reliance on prophetic assurance, they may readily satisfy themselves that the prospect of India’s evangelisation is neither so visionary or so remote as many persons imagine!”

Examples like this abound over the entire period of colonialism. If any Indian of any faith had the interest of Christian donors abroad in mind, this is what he would tell them: “Brothers, don’t be fools! Don’t get taken in by these false hopes and propaganda! Stop throwing good money after bad! There must be other parts of the world where you can get better returns on your investment!”

SOS Christian children protest fire in Delhi church
Vivekananda, in fact, said something similar. “As to the way of converting, it is absolutely absurd. The money the missionaries bring is accepted. The colleges founded by missionaries are all right, so far as education is concerned. But with religion it is different. The Hindu is acute: he takes the bait but avoids the hook! It is wonderful how tolerant the people are. A missionary once said: ‘That is the worst of the whole business. People who are self-complacent can never be converted.’”

There is no better place to see the absurdity of the whole Christian conversion effort and debate than the state where Vivekananda was born, Bengal. Bengal was the first large province to fall under the complete control of Europeans (after the Battle of Plassey in 1757), and it later became the seat of British power in the subcontinent. No other region in India has seen such forceful, concerted conversion efforts by well-funded foreign missionaries, learned scholars, builders of institutions and veritable heroes in the annals of proselytisation. Some of the country’s earliest English schools, colleges, printing presses, all came up in Bengal. The state also saw many leading intellectuals, such as Keshub Chandra Sen and Kali Charan Banerjee, falling under the spell of Christianity.

In the post-Independence period, this powerful missionary tradition was carried forward by Missionaries of Charity founded by the Alban¬ian nun Teresa, who acquired a larger-than-life image in India and the world for her charity work focused on the poor and the homeless in Calcutta. With all that background, and keeping in mind the statement made by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat that Teresa’s services were motivated by the desire to gain Christian converts, you cannot blame anyone for thinking that Bengal would be a veritable citadel of Indian Christianity.

So what do the numbers say? Hold on to your chair please—00.64 per cent of the West Bengal population is Christian, according to the latest census figures available! And that leaves one wondering, where have all the converts that the great missionaries of their age and, most of all, Teresa of Calcutta, were supposed to have won, disappeared?! I think neither Monier Williams nor Vivekananda would have been surprised.

So to come back to the fourth assertion, that Western evangelists are all preparing for a great Indian conversion: of course they are! They have been in preparation for centuries, and the harvest is no nearer now than it was in 52 AD, 190 AD, or 1757 AD! If the Christian evangelical efforts in India pose a threat to anyone, it is to the pockets of Christian donors in the West.

But this does not mean there is no problem. There are evangelical activities that pose serious irritation to Indians of all religions (or no religion). For example, there are cringe-inducing videos up on Youtube and other social media of Christian pastors moving around poverty-stricken areas, talking into the camera for the benefit of potential donors in the West, patting their own backs about the great job they are doing of converting Hindus to Christianity, and explaining why they need support in terms of ‘prayers’ and perhaps, some greenbacks as well. A new breed of independent, evangelical churches that has sprung up in recent decades, unaffiliated to the long-established mainstream churches such as the Catholics or the Anglicans or the Protestants, are particularly to blame. In their single-minded focus on money-raising, they seem no different from some of the godmen who have gained notoriety for their devotion to mammon.

There are also other practices that some proselytisers resort to that are either dubious or deeply annoying: holding ‘faith-healing’ meetings that are indistinguishable from plain old quackery, for example. It is perhaps time for the mainstream churches that are not into these practices, but are probably feeling tempted to use them as they lose some of their own flock to these new-fangled churches, to wield their influence and powers of moral suasion to create a code of ethics for all Christian organisations or, if that is not feasible, at least create a public distance between themselves and those who violate that code, in order to put more social pressure on them.

To sum up, the Hindutva right-wing narrative of a growing, serious threat from Christianity to Hinduism does not stand the test of data and evidence. In fact, India is that exceptional country that listened to all that Christianity had to say without feeling threatened, and we know from history that this confidence was justified and it continues to be so. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that aggressive proselytisation efforts of a limited number of new evangelical chu¬rches is causing annoyance, but that is probably not reason enough to start a concerted hate campaign with violent overtones against a mini-minority of the population. Cons¬titutional amputation for remedying what is essentially irritation to public order and good sense would probably be an over-reaction; but fanning hatred against fellow citizens of a different faith is indeed an abomination not worthy of us.
________________________________________
(Tony Joseph is former editor of BusinessWorld. The author, who bears a Christian name, ceased to be a believer of any religion in his early 20s, and considers himself an atheist with a liking for the original teachings of the Buddha.)
 

OUTLOOK

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

New Chapter for Classic Paris Bookstore: Books Printed on Demand

By CIARA NUGENTJUNE 12, 2016

“We’re completely revising the chain of book production because we’re a bookseller, a publisher, a printer and also a distributor,” said Alexandre Gaudefroy, Les Puf’s director. CreditDmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

PARIS — Gauthier Charrier, a graphic design student, stepped inside one of Paris’s newest bookstores and wondered, “Where are all the books?”

“I saw this empty, open space — just a couple of stools — and I wondered, ‘Did someone mess up?’” Mr. Charrier, 20, said.

No one messed up.

The pronounced stock shortage inside the Librairie des Puf, run by the publisher University Press of France, or Les Puf for short, is not the result of an ordering mistake, but the heart of the shop’s business model.

There are books, but they are not delivered in advance from wholesalers. They are printed on request, before the customer’s very eyes, on an Espresso Book Machine. On Demand Books, the American company that manufactures the machine, chose the name as a nod to an activity you can complete in the five minutes it takes to print a book: Have a quick coffee.

Labeled, not so modestly, the “Gutenberg press of the 21st century” by its creators, the machine sits in a back corner of the shop, humming as it turns PDFs into paperbacks. Customers use tablets to select the titles for print — adding, if they want to, their own handwritten inscriptions — while sipping coffee in the light and airy storefront in the Latin Quarter of Paris. “The customers are all surprised,” said the shop’s director, Alexandre Gaudefroy. “At first, they’re a little uncomfortable with the tablets. After all, you come to a bookshop to look at books. But thanks to the machine and the tablets, the customer holds a digital library in their hands.”

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From a business standpoint, Mr. Gaudefroy said, “I don’t have to worry about space for the stock. We’re in a space which measures less than 80 meters squared, and I can offer readers as many titles as I want.” And that is a lot of titles. All 5,000 books published by Les Puf are available, as well as an additional three million books compiled by On Demand Books, including titles from 10 large American publishers and the public domain.

Les Puf’s prestige in the industry has helped it secure even more titles — a group of French publishers are expected to hand over PDFs of their titles in a few weeks. “What’s really exciting is that, thanks to the on-demand model, we can revive old titles, which we previously hadn’t bothered with because they’d only sell five or 10 copies in a year,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. “On-demand, it’s a new economy for us.”

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About 2,000 out-of-print Puf titles will be made available to customers in the coming months, Mr. Gaudefroy said. “We’re completely revising the chain of book production because we’re a bookseller, a publisher, a printer and also a distributor,” he said.

It is a radical reinvention of a store that first opened its doors in 1921. The original Librairie des Puf occupied a far larger, multilevel space in the corner of Place de la Sorbonne, and had packed window displays and a bustling intellectual crowd from nearby universities. It was long a cultural and academic symbol, until it was forced to close because of falling profits and soaring rents. Then, about 10 years ago, the site was sold to a men’s-clothing chain, much to the chagrin of locals.

But its closing was no exception. From 2000 to 2014, 28 percent of Paris bookstores closed, according to a 2015 report from the Paris Urban Planning Agency, a body assembled by the City Council in 1967 to chart social and economic evolution in the French capital. Crippling rent increases in Paris’s densely populated center were mostly to blame, as well as growing competition from e-commerce sites that are able to offer far more titles than a cramped city bookstore. The decline in sales of newspapers and magazines also contributed, since these are often sold alongside books in French bookstores.

The Espresso Book Machine is made by On Demand Books, which chose the name as a nod to an activity that can be completed in the five minutes it takes to print a book: Have a quick coffee.CreditDmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

The Latin Quarter, which has the highest concentration of bookshops in the city, was among the worst-hit areas. In an effort to protect the neighborhood’s unique character — and prevent so-called blandification — the Paris City Council in 2008 made it the center of its Vital’Quartier program. The program buys retail spaces across Paris, renovates them and rents them to small culturally significant enterprises at far below market rates. Les Puf was leased one of these spaces on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, allowing it to reopen in March just a few blocks from where it closed.

“We’re already thinking about opening in other big cities in France — in university towns like Lille, Bordeaux and Lyon,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. “After a few weeks of business, there’s a real commercial motivation for doing so because, well, we’re selling a lot of books. A lot more than predicted. We thought we’d sell 10, 15 books in a day, but it’s been more like 30 or 40.”

“It’s an investment, but if it’s well managed, it can be very profitable,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. Along with the low rent for its retail space and the elimination of the cost of overproducing books that may not sell, Les Puf benefits from an affordable two-year lease on the Espresso Book Machine from the French printing association Ireneo. And France’s fixed-book pricing law, which prohibits anyone from selling books at a discount, means Les Puf can charge the price set by the publisher for each book. “A lot of publishers I know are interested in the idea, especially when we tell them how little it costs us,” Mr. Gaudefroy said.

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So far, the store has relied on foot traffic and the pull of the machine’s novelty to draw customers, but a social media and leafleting campaign aimed at students — Les Puf’s original demographic — is planned.

Les Puf’s success is not an anomaly. Times are still tough for brick-and-mortar shops, but signs of a recovery are widespread. In the United States, sales in physical bookstores rose by 2.5 percent last year, the first increase since 2007. In Britain, the largest chain bookseller, Waterstones, announced a return to profitability at the end of last year after the arrival of the indie book-selling success story James Daunt as managing director.

Mr. Daunt decentralized control of the chain’s 275 stores, encouraging individual managers to modify their stores’ layouts for the local book-buying audience, thus scrapping an ingrained industry practice that had effectively allowed publishers to dictate which books appeared in best-seller sections.

Independent bookstores, too, are beginning to carve a path out of their business’s decade of decline. “It’s an industry which is very much starting to rebound,” said Nick Brackenbury, one of the founders of NearSt, a mobile application created in London that is helping to wean customers off buying books on Amazon.com, encouraging them to return instead to their local stores.

“Bookshops are starting to do lots of little innovative things and getting people to come back into them,” Mr. Brackenbury said. For many bookstores that have the space, like Gogol & Company in Milan, La Fugitiva in Madrid and Java Bookshop in Amsterdam, remaking themselves as hybrid bookstore-coffee shops has become a reliable way to attract customers. Other shops are emphasizing something unavailable online — the experience of visiting a bookstore.

The Society Club in London’s Soho district is as much a cocktail club and members’ lounge as a bookstore. Books for Cooks — a store in Notting Hill entirely devoted to cookbooks — offers a sensory experience by cooking up one of its books’ many recipes in an open kitchen at the back of the store every morning.

Mr. Brackenbury and his team are allowing bookstores to innovate on a more fundamental level: convenience. “The main feedback we get from our users is: ‘I buy from Amazon reluctantly because it’s so easy,’” he said. “Everyone will say, ‘I want to support my local shops.’ But few people actually do today because it’s so much hard work.”

NearSt aims to help local shops adapt to the needs of the modern customers by making local shop inventories “shoppable” from a smartphone, allowing customers to search for titles, find local stores that sell them and see routes there. “We just want local stores to be able to offer customers something which is just better than Amazon,” Mr. Brackenbury said.

Garfield, NJ, USA: Prof. George Menachery recieves award for his contributions to the fields of history and archaeology from Msgr. Madathipparambil at a function presided over by Msgr. Kandankudiyil in the presence of Fr. Joy Alapatt, later Aux. Bishop of Chicago.