Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  I did not follow the Tamil Mass too closely. The service was led by a junior priest with the trudging, uniform intonations of a university lecturer, and his sermon—on compassion, if I recall rightly—was dry and flaccid. He had positioned himself in front of a standing fan, and sporadically, his purple vestments would fly up from his white cassock, like the plumage of an exotic bird shaking itself dry. Next to me, on the floor, a little girl with liquid eyes tumbled into giggles every time this happened. From the balcony above me, a choir occasionally gave us music, accompanied by a keyboard that reeled off disco rhythms in step with the hymns.

  The next Mass, in English, was delivered by Father Jerosin Kattar, the rector and parish priest of Our Lady of the Snows and a fireball of a speaker. To a thinner but more attentive crowd, he spoke about Christ’s love for his subjects, equating it to an almost maternal love, of the sort embodied by the Virgin Mary. Kattar is a short man, in danger of being hidden by his pulpit, but he makes up for it with his resonant voice and his animated manner of speech. He posed rhetorical questions to his congregation, answered them most satisfactorily himself, plucked Biblical quotes out of the ether to support his answers, and drew conclusions that appeared watertight and irrefutable. During his predecessor’s sermon, there was always a low vibrato of surreptitious conversation in the church; during Kattar’s, his audience clung to his every word.

  Kattar is a heavy-set man in his fifties, with broad, thick hands, gray hair combed neatly back from his forehead, and a dusting of white stubble; over his cassock of dulled white, around his midriff, a red sash sat comfortably. When I met him, he was on a five-year rotation in Tuticorin, occupying an office in the compound of Our Lady of the Snows. He carried a Tamil Bible in a zippered case of soft felt, and a mobile phone that rang to the strain of ‘Hark now hear, the angels sing,’ although that may have been a purely seasonal choice. ‘I was in Rome just before this, for a two-year stint, but I didn’t like it. It was far too bureaucratic,’ he told me. ‘I was itching to get back here, where I felt more involved with the community.’

  Kattar converses as he preaches—with considered pauses, sentences modulated to a flourish, didactic patience, and a vivid sense of history. When, during one of our discussions, the subject of that Sunday morning Mass on maternal love came up, he rapidly traced its roots back to the days of the Portuguese conversion. ‘Before Christianity arrived, the fishermen here used to worship Meenakshi or Bhagavathi Amman, and Xavier knew they were attached to their feminine goddesses,’ Kattar said. ‘That was why he emphasised the role of Mary rather than Christ—for one maternal goddess to take the place of another.’ Even more animist beliefs, such as a near-superstitious regard for deities of the ocean, were subsumed by the Virgin; today, the Paravas of Tuticorin often call her their Kadal Maatha, or mother of the sea.

  ‘The Paravas are very religious folks,’ Kattar said. ‘As people dealing on such a daily basis with nature, with their very life at stake, they develop great respect and confidence for the supernatural, for the power that has created the sea.’ Kattar is a Parava himself, and perhaps that emboldened him to speak bluntly of his community—so bluntly that, at times, I caught tiny whiffs of a dismissive superiority. ‘The fishing community is conditioned by its work and its situation—they’re like a tribal people,’ he once said. ‘They have changed very little in six hundred years. Till recently, many of them were illiterate, and procreation was their only recreation.’

  Then he softened. ‘I think, essentially, you have to understand them to serve them, and many bishops and fathers before me didn’t understand them,’ he said. ‘For instance, many of the fishermen talk loudly, because they are used to shouting over the sound of the wind and the waves. But that can be misunderstood as shouting.’ There were problems of alcoholism and a persistent addiction to betel nut, Kattar admitted, but there were also many poets and musicians within the community, ‘all originals.’ ‘They’re very intelligent, very methodical,’ he said, indulging in a too-sweeping anthropological generalization. ‘You should see them in the villages, resolving a dispute or an argument. They weigh the pros and cons, and they arrive at a really measured way of according culpability.’

  It was over the course of my conversations with Kattar that I learned how the Catholicism here resembled a veneer, applied upon an older base of Hindu customs and caste traditions, many of which the Church had wisely allowed to bubble up to the surface. There is syncretism in language, in how words such as ‘kovil’ and ‘aradhana,’ traditionally intended for temples and Hindu celebrations of worship, are now applied to churches and Catholic feasts. There is syncretism in practice, in the lighting of oil lamps instead of candles, in the full-stretch prostrations that men performed at Our Lady of the Snows, in conducting both the Hindu valakappu ceremony for pregnant women and Christian baptism for newborn babies, even in the respectful act of leaving one’s shoes outside the entrance of the church. And sometimes, there is syncretism in thought, in how a Christian fisherman still propitiates the Hindu god Murugan and refers to him ‘Machaan’ or ‘Brother-in-law,’ because Murugan’s wife Devayani came from Parava stock—at least according to a Parava legend that has somehow been comfortably ensconced within another faith for five hundred years now.

  That Sunday morning, after Kattar’s English Mass, Fernando took me to the smaller Sacred Heart Church, in a narrow road behind Our Lady of the Snows. The Sacred Heart functions more as a prayer hall than a church, and it was deserted at the time. But in a large blue-and-white shed next to it was another symbol of Parava syncretism: the Pon Ther, or the golden carriage. Since 1806, first annually and then every twelve years and now every five years, the idol of Our Lady of the Snows is installed in the Ther, which is then hauled around town with great pomp and floral celebration—exactly as South Indian temples do with their own idols. In her book, in fact, Bayly mentions that, for many years, the painted, processional banners were a set of twenty- one flags ‘adorned with a striking mixture of Saivite and Vaishnavite sacred symbols’, such as a bull representing Shiva’s companion Nandi, an eagle representing Vishnu’s steed Garuda, and a boar representing Vishnu’s Varaha avatar.

  The shed was bolted and locked, so Fernando invited me to put my eye up against the wide hinge of a small door, to peer into its soft black interior. ‘What do you see?’ he asked.

  Not a carriage, I told him, but a big golden palanquin, some of its paint peeling, its throne empty.

  Fernando said: ‘I think that must be the bigger palanquin. It is taken out during the years the Ther isn’t. Then there should be a smaller palanquin behind that. Do you see it?’ I did. ‘That is taken out on the first Saturday of every month. And the Pon Ther is in the next room.’

  I stepped back and looked once more at the shed. Something puzzled me, and it took me a couple of minutes before I figured it out: It had no Ther-sized door at all. In front of where the Ther stood, patiently waiting to stretch its legs once every half-decade, there was merely a wall of solid-looking brick.

  ‘That’s right,’ Fernando said, smiling. ‘When it is time for the Ther to be taken out, they demolish the wall. Then they also demolish the section of the compound wall that separates it from the road.’ He pointed, and now I saw that half of the compound wall was clearly of a more recent vintage than its other half. ‘And then, once the procession is over, they brick the walls up all over again.’ With such joyous exertions is the Ther loosed upon Tuticorin every five years.

  The Ther’s twenty-one processional flags are kept in the custody of the Pandiyapathi, the gentleman whose identity Fernando had promised to explain during my first day in Tuticorin. There were, he said, originally seven Parava villages in the area: Vaiparu, Vemparu, Veerapandiyapattinam, Tuticorin, Punnakayal, Manapadu and Alanthalai. Each fishing village had its own leader, a hereditary thalaivan. But the chief of chiefs, the foremost amongst the seven leaders was always the thalaivan of Tuticorin, or the jati thalaivan. ‘We believe the jati thalaivan’s fami
ly is descended from one of the Pandya princes,’ Fernando said. ‘This is why he is known as the Pandiyapathi.’

  The current jati thalaivan is J. Berchmans Motha, a militaristic, spare man in his seventies, whom I had spotted in an adjoining pew during Kattar’s Mass, sitting without movement for forty-five minutes. Fernando had actually taken me around to his house the previous afternoon, a modest brown bungalow on Kerecope Street, right behind Justin Photo Colour Lab. It was around 2 p.m., and Motha, woken by our incessant ringing of the doorbell in the middle of his siesta, came to the porch tousle-haired and grumpy, admonished Fernando for disturbing him, and asked us to come back another day. It was the only time during my stay in Tuticorin that I saw Fernando at a loss, and it must have lasted all of five minutes.

  When we did return, Fernando was careful to call ahead, and we were consequently met by a Motha with neater hair and a lukewarm smile. The smile, gleaned as it has to be through the foliage of his moustache, is not the expression he is most comfortable with. By default, Motha looks deeply disappointed with the human race, much as a father would be with a wastrel son; his eyes, behind spectacles, engage minimally with others, and his conversation is grudgingly given, some mental pair of scales weighing each sentence to judge whether it should be squandered on this undeserving world. But he was never unpleasant, and he was more generous with his time than I could have hoped.

  Twenty-two generations ago, Motha’s direct ancestor, Joao da Cruz, was the incumbent jati thalaivan who led his people in the conversion to Catholicism. The position has passed from father to son since then, every jati thalaivan serving as a vital liaison between the Paravas on the one hand and the Portuguese and the Church on the other. But the title has never meant as little as it does today. ‘It’s a sign of the times,’ Kattar had told me earlier. ‘The people have democratic and economic independence today, so nobody feels the need to look up to Motha, or to accord him the respect they gave their earlier leaders.’

  The few customary rights of the jati thalaivan that Motha’s father had continued to hold disappeared after 1947, when India became independent. ‘My father was a pauper, and he had many enemies,’ Motha said. Motha himself joined the merchant navy, starting as a seaman and retiring as a captain. ‘There are, perhaps, a few elderly people in Tuticorin who still respect the position of the jati thalaivan,’ he said. ‘But that is all. Otherwise, I have no friends. I am alone.’

  The narrow passageway from Motha’s door to his living room is dominated by a large painting on one wall—an oil of a gentleman with a wiggly moustache, whom a floating banner identifies as ‘Gabriel Dacrus Vas Gomus Saditaleivar, 1753–1808.’ That name would have been prefixed, in correspondence or formal speech, by the Portuguese honorific Senhor Senhor Don. In the painting, Senhor Senhor Don Gabriel Dacrus looks, slightly cross-eyed, at a pearl he holds in one hand, and an emblem of a fish further illustrates his connection to the Parava community. ‘This was the ancestor who had the Pon Ther built,’ Motha told us. On either side of the painting are mottled black-and-white photographs of Motha’s father and grandfather, in long, tapered hats, and of his grandmothers, their earlobes so weighed down by heavy earrings that they had turned into elongated gaskets.

  Behind the chair on which I was sitting (‘Two hundred years old, that chair,’ I was told) was a dark green, hand-carved section of wood that Motha identified as a portion of an ancestor’s palanquin. A pencilled scribble—‘1782.22.2’—dated it, he said, ‘to around the time the Dutch in these parts were chased out by the British.’ Opening the door of the palanquin, he showed us the golden emblem of a regal British lion. ‘You see? That was embossed when the jati thalaivan pledged allegiance to Great Britain,’ he said. ‘But who even knows or wants to know about this kind of thing now?’

  Like every old man, Motha bore a generic grudge against the modern world for caring too little for his generation, but his grievances against the Church were far more pointed. The priests who swarmed into Tuticorin after the mass conversion of the 1530s had worked assiduously, he said, to remove every trace of the jati thalaivan’s powers. ‘Many of them even denied that anything like the hereditary leadership system existed,’ he said. ‘They’d talk about the chieftains of the individual villages, but they would not acknowledge that there was a supreme leader. But it was only because there was one leader that the whole community could be converted at one go.’

  Captain J. Berchmans Motha

  Motha’s sentiment formed a part of a curious ambivalence towards the Church that I grew to sense in the Paravas. Their belief in the Catholic faith still runs strong, and a deep knowledge of their Church’s history is surprisingly common, as if it had been carried and spread by the region’s gigantic flies. When I sat in that staff room in Manapadu, a group of teachers of assorted middle-school subjects debated the chronology and geography of Xavier’s travels with the zeal and knowledge of university academics. When I sat in Fernando’s mobile recharge shop, he pulled open a drawer and shyly showed me a clutch of notebooks, with page after page of neatly written notes on the history of Tuticorin. I can think of no other mobile recharge shop to offer that sort of service.

  But regularly, the Paravas’ pride in their past reaches further back, past the advent of the Portuguese, and then it appears laced with regret or anger at the loss of so much heritage. This was true not only of Motha, who had lost something tangible, but of a man like Joe D’Cruz, a Chennai-based author and a successful businessman, and such a human dynamo that it is impossible to sit still next to him. D’Cruz was my gateway into Tuticorin’s Parava community; he is so well known there that Fernando lubricated many of my interviews by simply saying: ‘Joe sent him.’ In our very first conversation, D’Cruz had foreshadowed my meeting with Motha. ‘The Church has destroyed the lineage of leadership in Tuticorin. It just used the fishermen to spread Christianity,’ he said, as we swung one evening between his house and his office in his car, his BlackBerry emitting occasional, soft chirrups of light. ‘My blood is Hindu—it has been for years. Only my name is Christian. Why should I take on an alien culture or religion when my own is so glorious?’

  Motha claimed that some of the Church’s stated history was sheer fabrication. ‘You must have seen the signboard saying that Our Lady of the Snows was consecrated in 1582?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Well, it wasn’t. The original church was right here, on Kerecope Street, in front of this house,’ he said. ‘On that site was a lodge for foreign missionaries and travellers. The present church was built only in 1712, but in their history, they have just fused the two buildings.’ Motha also insisted that the Church denied the authenticity of one of its relics—a strand of the Virgin Mary’s hair—and, in search of proof, stalked away into another room to rummage among some documents. Fernando and I sat very still and looked at each other. Somewhere in the house, a MIDI version of Silent Night was playing.

  After a few minutes, Motha returned with an armload of files, each sated with thick sheaves of documents. These were letters in English or Tamil or Portuguese, between his ancestors and Portuguese regents or officials of the Church, the papers all jaundiced with age, their edges cracked and curled like untended toenails. Some of these letters Motha had, in the manner of an earnest schoolboy, copied painstakingly onto fresh sheets of ledger paper. ‘See here now. This is the certificate of authenticity for that strand of hair, from 1789,’ he said, pointing to a letter from a Portuguese Church official. It was nearly falling apart. ‘There are even older papers in that room, but they would crumble into a powder with a single touch.’

  Even more nefarious motives, according to Motha, were afoot. In the church, he said, his voice dropping a little, there was a box full of the jewels with which the idol of Our Lady of the Snows was decked out for the Pon Ther procession. ‘Traditionally, there have been two keys for that box, one kept with the jati thalaivan and one kept with the parish priest,’ Motha said. ‘But now they’re even trying to take that key away from me.’ His face clouded with a
nger. ‘The jati thalaivan could hold his own against the Church even until the nineteenth century. But after that, it all just slipped away.’

  Motha, a widower, has two daughters, one living in Chennai and one right down the street from him. His only son is a geologist in Australia, and Motha said he was unlikely to return to Tuticorin. If that proves to be the case, Motha will be the last of a grand, centuries-long line of local leaders, rubbed out partly by design but partly also by the inexorable forward march of history. When I understood that, I could understand better his sadness of seeing a noble family tradition wither away on his watch, and his frustration of being able to do nothing about it.

  Puzzlingly, throughout the Portuguese presence on this stretch of Tamil Nadu, its cuisine remained as untouched as its religion stood transformed. I came across no Portuguese influences in my meals in Tuticorin and its neighbouring villages, but, thinking I’d missed something or simply eaten in all the wrong places, I later sought the wisdom of Jacob Aruni, a food consultant and researcher in Chennai. ‘It’s true, and it’s a mystery,’ Aruni said. ‘In Goa, for instance, the use of cinnamon and garlic and wine in food caught on from the Portuguese. But in the coastal area around Tuticorin, they still use salt, tamarind and coconut more dominantly—the ingredients they were using even before the Portuguese arrived.’