Narrative Beginnings/Beginning Narratives: Co-constitution of Christianity and Caste in Kerala

Introduction

‘There is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them’, observes Edward Said . In his work Beginnings, Said reflects extensively upon the concept of origin/beginning and, according to him, a ‘beginning’ is the first step in the ‘intentional production of meaning’ . Beginning is an intentional act which determines what follows from it and relates what follows to other occurrences in an ‘eccentric order of repetition’. For Said, ‘intention’ means ‘an appetite at the beginning intellectually to do something in a characteristic way—either consciously or unconsciously, but at any rate in a language that always (or nearly always) shows sign of the beginning intention in some form and is always engaged purposefully in the production of meaning […] a beginning intention is nothing more than the created inclusiveness within which the work develops’ . That does not mean an intentional beginning anticipates only an organic whole; it is also prepared for inconsistent and conflicting parts, which eventually give an eccentric order to the whole. That is, a beginning influences both the continuities and the discontinuities from the “original” moment.¹Origin, for Said, is ‘sacred’, ‘passive’ and the ‘purely circumstantial existence of conditions’ . The quest for an essential origin, which is not located in the ‘secular’ spatiality or temporality but in divine, mythical, atemporal spatiality, forms the unifying thread of religions. By contrast, a ‘beginning’ is ‘profane’, ‘active’ and ‘intentional’. The ‘concept beginning designates a moment in time, a place, a principle, or an action […] these designations are verbal constructions employing variations of the term beginning […] thus the concept beginning is associated with an idea of precedence and/or priority. Finally, a beginning is designated in order to indicate, clarify, or define a later time, place or action. Designation of a beginning involves designation of a consequent intention’ . Then again, ‘influence’, for Said, is not a linear idea, but an open field of possibility because it includes repetition, refinement, amplification, loading, overloading, rebuttal, overturning, destruction, denial and invisible use. A “beginning” also authorises what follows from the conceived inaugural moment and how it has been repeated in order to make it present—to represent. In Said’s own words, ‘underlying the formal quest, of the mind to conceive a point in either time or space that marks the beginning of all things, is an imaginative and emotional need for unity, a need to apprehend an otherwise dispersed number of circumstances and to put them in some sort of telling order, sequential, moral or logical’ .

Tomoko Masuzawa observes that ‘religion’s unity is the kind of totality that is claimed to emanate from a common source, an original and originating principle’ . For her, myths (narratives of origin), rituals (the repetition or re-enactment of an original event or paradigmatic order), and traditions (concern for the transmission of an essential, original “truth” through time), represent—thus making it present again—the moment of the absolute beginning of religion . Consequently, creation myths or origin myths form the founding narratives of most religions, and religious rituals and traditions are formulated to repeat and recreate these mythic times of origin. Here, the mythical is not prehistorical, ahistorical or antihistorical, but very much part of the historical consciousness of the subject.

Modern historiography’s quest for a ‘miraculous origin’, as Michel Foucault explains, is an attempt to ‘capture the exact essence of things, its purest possibilities, protected identities’ that is ‘directed to that which was already there, the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature and necessitates the removal of every mask to disclose an original identity’ . Hence, in proposing genealogical analysis over historical, Foucault observes that genealogy ‘does not oppose itself to history’; rather, it ‘opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’’. Genealogy dispels the ‘chimeras of the origin’ by recognising the traces of numberless ‘beginnings’ that expose the teleological history to its limits, as it brings out contradictions rather than the exact essence of things, “adulteration” rather than purest possibilities, thereby threatening rather than protecting identities .

Drawing on the above discussions, in this essay I examine such beginnings in the genealogies of Suriyani Christians in the South Indian state of Kerala, in an attempt to critique the chimera of their ‘miraculous origin’ story.²Kerala was formed only in 1956 by uniting the princely states of Travancore, Cochin and Malabar under the States Reorganisation Act, which divided the geographical territories of independent India along linguistic lines. Although I use “Kerala” in this essay for contemporary reference, the contexts discussed pertain to the geopolitics of the princely states of Travancore and Cochin. The term “Kerala” is therefore necessarily punctuated throughout this essay. The community of Christians in Kerala is considered to have long-standing relations with the “Eastern Christian” churches since as early as the fourth century, long before the Portuguese set foot there in the sixteenth century and forcibly converted them to Roman Catholicism as part of their universalising mission.³‘Eastern Christianity’ here refers to Christianity in Eastern Europe, as well as to forms of Christianity that developed simultaneously in different parts of the world outside Europe, particularly in Asia, traditionally understood as the result of various Apostolic missions and migrations, one of the most important of which is believed to have taken place in parts of the present-day Kerala, which is the subject of this study. Many of these Christians, now scattered across different denominations, continued to follow Suriyani liturgy, from which the name Suriyani Christians debatably emerged. The majority of Suriyani Christians to date believe that they are descendants of Brahmin (self-ascribed “upper castes” of India) converts following the evangelistic activity of the Apostle Thomas in Kerala in the first century, and are therefore also known as Saint Thomas Christians.⁴According to the latest census, Christians constitute 2 per cent of India’s population, of whom 22 per cent reside in Kerala. They comprise around 18 per cent of Kerala’s population, half of whom identify today as Suriyani Christians (Census of India 2011, ‘Christian Population in India’). This “origin story”, which grants them a Brahminical and Apostolic “bloodline”, has been foundational in the making of their communitarian identity in post-colonial and post-independence India, where they are constitutionally categorised as a “minority”.⁵ Sonja Thomas problematises the presumed link between numerical subordination and political vulnerability and argues that Suriyani Christians constitute ‘a privileged religious minority community that has routinely invoked secular constitutional protections in India and has thus played an integral role in defining minority rights in the nation-state’ . This origin story has been complemented, complicated and contradicted over the years, as it remains the “originary” moment that “forges” the many different beginning narratives of Christianity in Kerala into a teleological history.

This essay attempts a deconstructive reading of a ninth-century Copper Plate Deed which has repeatedly been presented as the historical “proof” of this privileged Suriyani Christian past. I argue that this document has been retrospectively recovered through an intentional intellectual exercise in colonial times as one of the community’s beginning narratives, which paradoxically both produces and is produced by the caste “origin”, in order to imagine an unbroken and “pure” privileged lineage that influences the dis/continuities of what is today understood as one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. This essay elucidates how the Tharisappally Copper Plate Grant became a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it provided legitimacy to the “caste origin”/“original caste” of Suriyani Christians; and on the other hand, it derived legitimacy from the same origin, which only it could validate. In doing so, it constituted one of the intentional beginnings that problematically legitimised and secularised the discourse of caste as an atemporal and fixed social structure of the entire region.

Retrospective recovery of Suriyani Christian: Tharisappally Cheppedu

In 2017, Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, during his diplomatic visit to Israel, gifted replicas of two Copper Plate Grants to his counterpart as a marker of the centuries-old historical relationship between the two countries. One of the Grants, called Joothapattayam (Jewish Deed), is considered to have been gifted to the Jewish community of Kerala, arguably in CE 1000, by the ruler Bhaskara Ravi.⁶The second Grant, the Tharisappally Cheppedu (Copper Plate Grant), is today believed to have been given to the Suriyani Christians, arguably in CE 849, during the reign of the regional ruler Sthanu Ravi. Cheppedu, or Copper Plate Grants, are royal orders granting land allocation and/or revenue and tax exemptions to communities, institutions or individuals. They are often issued by the royal office, but sometimes also by provincial rulers. Emmanuel Francis explains: ‘They are notably known as raja-sasanas, “royal orders”, and (tamra-)sasanas, “orders (on copper)”, two terms which denote the textual content as well as the material container […] Donative decrees and settlements doubled as deed or title to property rights and privileges and there are a number of instances in which the record refers to its own capacity to forestall or resolve future disputes over such rights […] In South India, copper plates were long designed in the landscape format and since, most of the time, the record spread on several plates, these were joined by a ring passing through a hole made in each of the plates and soldered with a seal’ . Both grants conferred special privileges, rights and properties on the respective communities . The Copper Plate Grants assume a performative function, as they gift to the grantee certain permanent rights, captured through the recurring phrase ‘as long as the sun and the moon’ in these grants. On the one hand, this re-enactment of the performative act of gifting by the Prime Minister raised critical concerns about India’s renewed affinity to Israel, as opposed to its historical commitment to Palestine, and has been retrospectively read as an event that tied Hindutva and Zionism in the present moment. On the other hand, this “gifting” can be read as a strategic “Hindu”⁷In this essay, “Hindu” is taken as a nebulous category, a work in progress since the middle of the eighteenth century. What and who constituted Hindu was a point of debate as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, when a homogenous and majoritarian Hindu identity began to be consolidated through enumerative, ethnographic and historiographic projects of both colonial and nationalist imaginations. However, this study takes the mid-eighteenth century as the beginning of the religionisation of Hindu and the Hinduisation of respective princely states of colonial India, in response to the supposed threat posed by the Christian coloniser. Hence, the correlation between the threat or fear of (colonial) Christianity and the emergence of Hindu as a religion, the simultaneous Hinduisation of the state, and the subsequent secularisation of the Hindu, along with its affective dimensions on regional religiosities, including “vernacular Christianity” in the context of Kerala, forms the conceptual framework of this essay. nationalist attempt to assimilate or accommodate Suriyani Christians as “native Christians” or “Indian Christians” in the present, as evidenced by increasing support for both Hindu nationalism and Zionism, catalysed by a rising Islamophobia among Suriyani Christians of Kerala.

Ironically, as the same deed has been historically produced as the “proof” of a Brahminical lineage of Suriyani Christians, the inter-nationalist recognition reciprocally reinforces a Brahminical ancestry for “secular” India as well. Hence, arguably, this “benevolent” inclusion of a small number of Christians as “original” or “native” Christians gives strategic legitimacy to the Hindu India’s “secular” claims, while simultaneously excluding the majority of non-“Hindus,” including Christians, as insufficiently native. In other words, Suriyani Christian claims to “original” or “native” Christian status, at the expense of others, including fellow Christians, even if pursued for survival and flourishing as a minority, counterproduce Christianity in general and Islam in particular as “foreign” to India, against which they emerge as an exception. That is, even as some Christians who narrativise a particular past become “native Indians”, Christianity itself remains “foreign” to an imagined “Hindu” India.⁸This narrative has been co-opted by colonial, nationalist and Suriyani Christian historians alike, albeit for different purposes. For instance, in 1807 Francis Buchanan, a Scottish physician, geographer and botanist, wrote: ‘The old Portuguese historians relate, that soon after the arrival of their countrymen in India, about three hundred years ago, the Syrian archbishop of Angamalee, by name Mar Jacob, deposited in the fort of Cochin, for safe custody, certain tablets of brass; on which were engraven rights of nobility and other privileges, granted to the Christians by a prince of a fouler age; and that while these tablets were under the charge of the Portuguese, they had been unaccountably lost, and had never after been heard of’ . Similarly, in 1872 G. Curian, a native Christian priest, documented that ‘foreign Christian’ Knai Thoma, a Syriac merchant believed to have landed in 345 CE in the then Kerala with seventy-two Christian families—another origin narrative of the Suriyani Christians—was granted privileges and positions accorded only to aristocratic and elite families . This is because the Copper Plate Grant was initially dated to 345 CE, which was later interpreted as 849 CE. Similarly, Shungoonny Menon, another native historian reported that: ‘perfect toleration of Christianity had been guaranteed by the Travancore sovereigns from the earliest period of the Christian era. This is proved by the copper plate documents in the possession of the Syrian Christians at Cottayam already alluded to, especially the one given by Perumal Sthanu Revi Guptha, the second document published in the Madras Journal of Literature and science, page 126 to 130, showing that the Travancore sovereign had permitted the Perumal to give a perpetual grant of a tract of land for building a Christian church. Subsequent to this event, other grants of lands for the erection of Christian churches were made and are continued up to the present day, and the immense number of places of Christian worship now seen on the Travancore territory, between Thovalay and Paravoor, furnish evidence of the impartial countenance the Travancore sovereigns have always given to the Christian religion’ .

Further, the Tharisappally Cheppedu is also mis-re-presented as the “proof” of the antiquity of the caste system itself in India, as the Grant assigns certain Ezhava and Vannan families (categorised as “lower castes” by the self-ascribed “upper castes”) to the church and sanctions the selling/buying of “slaves”. For instance, William Logan, author of The Malabar Manual, one of the important colonial-era documentations, remarks that ‘as bearing upon this important subject of the origin of the caste system, the evidence of the early Syrian Christians’ deed, translated by Herman Gundert in Madras Journal of Literature and Science, vol xiii, part I, deserves, it would seem, a prominent place’ . That is, first the Grant is presented as proof of Suriyani Christian upper-caste status, and then the privileges of these Christians are re-presented as proof of caste as a traditional “secular” social system of the region that applied even to non-“Hindus”. This, in turn, becomes proof of Syrian Christian claims, thereby forming a viciously cyclical argument in the historiographic narratives of Kerala. Both narratives are then jointly recovered as the proof of the “secularity” of retrospectively reclaimed “Hindu” rulers and polity who gifted privileges irrespective of religions.

A critical analysis of the Tharisappally Cheppedu, also known today as the Kollam Cheppedu, the Quilon Copper Plate Grant or the Syrian Christian Deed, currently in the possession of the Orthodox and the Mar Thoma Syrian Churches of Kerala, thus reads against the grain and deconstructs it as an intentionally and intellectually produced “beginning” in the narrativisation of both caste Hinduism and caste Christianity in Kerala. However, this is not an attempt to offer a new interpretation of the Grant itself, as many scholars have already done so (see ; ; ; ; ). What renders the Grant interesting for my argument is that it was “discovered” and translated in the early nineteenth century during the British rule, when colonial historiography was in the process of recovering a “history” for Christianity in present-day Kerala. Hence, I con-textually cross-read different translations of the Grant to raise a simple question from within the text: what (dis)connects it to Suriyani Christian community, and thus to their caste origin, which may in turn problematise the origin narratives of caste itself?

Following the announcement of the “discovery” of an ancient inscription of the Christians of Malabar in 1806 by the Royal Asiatic Society, Herman Gundert, the German missionary and linguist who lived in Malabar during the time, published the first English translation of this text in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science in June 1844, edited by the Committee of the Madras Literary Society and Auxiliary Royal Asiatic Society. The publication was titled ‘Translation and analysis of the ancient documents engraved on copper in possession of the Syrian Christians and Jews of Malabar’ . Gundert summarises that the Copper Plate Grant ‘is an act by which one Maruwan Sapir Iso (the Shapur or Xabro of the Syrians?) transfers a piece of ground near the sea shore, with several families of different Heathen cast[e]s, to a community and church, Tarisapalli, built by one Iso Data Virai, the grant being made with the Palace Major’s sanction (probably the Commissioner of Perumal Sthanu Ravi Gupta) and with the concurrence of the Venadu (Travancore) king, Anjuwannam and Manigramam, that is the Jewish and Christian dynasties, being appointed joint protectors of the land and the Church endowed’ . While the date of the Grant remains debatable, Elamkulam Kunjanpillai, in his interpretation of the deed, dated the cheppedu (copper plate grant) to CE 849, during the reign of Sthanu Ravi, which is a date that now commands general concurrence (; see also for a discussion on the dating of the Grant).

A fascinating detail about the Grant is that it contains signatures of witnesses in several languages, including Tamil/Malayalam, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, written in Vattezhuthu, Granthaksharam, Kufic, Pahlavi and Hebrew scripts, as well as in a still undeciphered language/script . This multiscript document indicates the transregional and vernacular-cosmopolitan sociality of precolonial Kerala.⁹See . Drawing on Varier and Veluthatt, Perczel notes that the Grant contains Muslim signatures in Kufic Arabic, Christian signatures in Middle Persian, written in Pahlavi script; Zoroastrian signatures in Middle Persian, in Pahlavi script; and the Jewish signatures in Judaeo-Persian, written in Hebrew script . As already mentioned, Gundert’s translation acquired historical significance when it was later co-opted as the unique surviving document by both “native historians”, to account for the antiquity of caste in the region, and by “church historians”, to prove the “nobility” of Suriyani Christians—which, as will be shown, concerned privileges of a trading community (mis)translated as caste. Through this singular discursive act, caste and Christianity was co-constituted. Two aspects contributed primarily to this (over)reading: first, the reading of Sapir Iso as a Suriyani bishop, and therefore the Grant as that having been gifted to the Suriyani Christian community; and second, the identification of Manigramam as a dynasty of Christians, which, according to the historians, was made possible in the region owing to its “upper caste” lineage. There were two problematic consequences to this reading. On the one hand, by presupposing that the Grant was gifted to Suriyani Christians, the majority of Christians in the region were historically configured as “lower caste converts” who lacked this “pure bloodline” and were therefore not “original” Christians. On the other hand, by presuming that Christians who were “foreigners” to the land and its faith received the Grant solely owing to the existing community’s caste privilege, caste itself was historicised as the immutable political, social and economic foundation of the region.

Subsequent translations and studies have complemented, complicated and, to some extent, contradicted Gundert’s translation, particularly his observations on Anjuwannam and Manigramam. For instance, T. A. Gopinatha Rao refuted Gundert’s claim regarding Christian and Jewish dynasties and argued that Anjuwannam refers to ‘five castes’ (Anju means five) mentioned in the Grant, namely ‘Ilavar, Tachchar, Vellalar, Vannar and one more which is not legible in the inscription’, who constituted the bulk of converts to Christianity. He further argued that Manigramam refers to Manichean followers of Sapir Iso, thereby negating any royal past to vernacular Christians .¹⁰Of course, acknowledging a royal past for Christians, or any other communities, would be detrimental to the nationalist historiographic project of recovering India as a “Hindu” nation. This, however, is a different debate which cannot be addressed here. However, on the basis of the appearance of Anjuwannam and Manigramam in other contemporary documents across regions, as well as the interpretation of witness signatures in the Grant, which were written in Pahlavi, Kufic and Hebrew, subsequent studies have argued that Anjuwannam was a West Asian merchant guild or trading corporation comprising Christians, Arabs and Jews, and that Manigramam was a vernacular merchant guild consisting of different castes and communities in different regions. The term Anjuwannam may be understood as a vernacular form of Anjuman, the Persian term for a corporation, and of Hanjama or Hanjamana, terms found in certain Telugu and Kannada records (; ).

Nevertheless, despite the multiplicity of these plausible interpretations, none of them being final or absolute, there still seems to be an uncritical consensus that the Cheppedu offers historical proof for the resourcefulness of Suriyani Christian community from time immemorial, which then arguably becomes the “proof” for their “uppercaste” status, thereby re-presenting caste as an essential social reality and “legitimate” form of belonging in the region. Ironically, the Cheppedu in fact mentions only that the privileges¹¹A piece of land is gifted to Tharisappally (the church of Tarsa), along with four families of Ezhavar, one family of Vannar, two families of Eruviyar, one family of Thachar, four families of Vellalar and slaves. The people of Tharisappally were granted tax exemptions and the right to govern themselves politically, economically and juridically. Families from the above castes who joined Tharisappally were permitted access to public spaces, granted reduced taxes, and placed under the protection and governance of the church . are extended to Tharisappally,¹²Perczel interprets it as a generic name for ‘a Christian place of worship’, deriving from the Malayalam word palli, meaning ‘settlement’, and the Persian word Tarsa, meaning ‘Christian’, as there is no trace of any particular church by that name . built by Sapir Iso, who is also mentioned in the same document as the founder of Kollam nagaram (town). Sapir Iso could thus have been a trading chief, in line with the interpretation of Anjuwannam and Manigramam as merchant guilds that settled in Kollam. Considering the importance of Kollam port in the region’s maritime trade—so significant that CE 825, the founding year of Kollam, became the beginning of “Malayalam calendar”, also known as Kollam Era—and the fact that Sapir Iso is hailed twice in the Cheppedu as the founder of Kollam nagaram, the privileges narrated in the inscription must have been gifted to Iso by the ruler Sthanu Ravi, and by extension to Tharisappally, the church founded by Iso at Kollam. These privileges could very well be read as those granted to a flourishing settler trading commune in a particular region comprising “natives”, “migrants” and people of different religions and communities, attesting to the cosmopolitan worldview of the vernacular sovereign, rather than as privileges automatically extended to a form of “caste Christianity” ‘as long as the moon and sun and the universe exists’ . The problem with the latter reading is that it willy-nilly warrants a Brahmin origin for the “original Christians”, because caste becomes the only available explanation for the resourcefulness of a “foreignised” religion. Such a reading is also sanctioned out of a nationalist imperative to imagine a homogenous “Hindu” past for the region. By contrast, the former reading opens up the possibility of the existence of different political, economic and religious orders independent of a systematised caste order.

Scholars have already argued that Nasranis of Malankara/Kerala became a vernacular-cosmopolitan trading community that transacted with “local” and “global” merchant guilds via sea and land routes.¹³Pius Malekandathil, in mapping the St Thomas Christians as a merchant group, discusses other similar grants given to them. For example, he refers to a Tahzhekkadu inscription which records certain privileges granted to local Christian traders Chathan Vadukan and Iravi Chathan . In the case of the Tharisappally Cheppedu, by (mis)reading the gift as a “caste-privilege” rather than a “trade privilege”, and by (mis)translating the Grant as a “Suriyani Christian Grant”, the rights of a community of converts (irrespective of their native, migrant or settler status) were co-opted as privileges guaranteed by the verticality of the caste structure. Such retrospective recovery of an archive to establish Suriyani Christians as a caste community in turn enables the establishment of caste structure as the normative political, social and economic order of the land, thereby nullifying other fixed worldviews. In other words, the interpretation of the Tharisappally Cheppedu as attesting to caste privilege corroborates the Brahmin conversion origin story of Suriyani Christians and, in turn the antiquity of the Brahminical order; each validates the other.¹⁴Susan Bayly identifies the “high” status enjoyed by Christians not as caste status but as the result of what she calls ‘honours’—a ‘position of high status and acceptance within the region’s most prestigious social and religious institutions’—received in return for their economic and military services . While Brahmin origin becomes the explanation for a “foreign” community being granted royal privileges, the Grant itself becomes “evidence” of their Brahmin origin. As already discussed, the intentional intellectual exercise arising from the ‘imaginative and emotional need for unity’ apprehends an ‘otherwise dispersed number of circumstances and put[s] them in some sort of telling order, sequential, moral or logical’ . In doing so, “history” attempts to restore in Suriyani Christians ‘an unbroken continuity’ for the vernacular Christian subject by ‘imposing a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes’, operating beyond the dispersed events in order to demonstrate that this past actively exists in and continues to animate the present without ‘deviations’ .¹⁵See for a critical discussion of Syrian Christian construction of a miraculous origin through the obliteration of many “lower” beginnings. Thus, such (mis)interpretation enabled the reinterpretation of all, and only, “elite Christians” of the nineteenth century as Suriyani Christians, possessing a lineage of “pure” blood—Brahmin blood—and imagined as an immunitarian community from 52 CE, which made them eligible for royal Grants and caste deeds. By contrast, any alternative beginning narrative of the community would call for a different interpretation of the Deed: a re-reading of it as a moment of emergence, as a memory of trans-original beginnings of the vernacular Christian body politic. The Deed would then become “proof” of a community of converts from different castes, communities, countries and races, always coming and always becoming, as well as “proof” of a time and space not necessarily ordered according to a fixed caste system as understood today.

Genealogies of “Origin”

It is my contention that Suriyani Christianity emerged as a communitarian consciousness in the interstices of both “colonial Christian” and “native Hindu” coercions of vernacular Christians during the colonial period. Elsewhere, I have argued that “vernacular Christians” were doubly minoritised: they were deemed “insufficiently Christian” by the British Protestant colonial government owing to their “Eastern Christian” genealogy and ironically, at the same time, “insufficiently native” by the Travancore regime owing to their shared religion with the coloniser . It was in this context that Suriyani Christianity, with its Apostolic origin (rendering them, in this formulation, more Christian than the Christian coloniser), emerged strongly as an anti-“colonial-Christian” consciousness.¹⁶See for a detailed study of Thomas origin. The colonial state enumerated this as a fixed “native Christian” category, distinct from Latin and Protestant Christians, for administrative purposes, and it was subsequently essentialised through ethnography and historiography.

Even at this juncture, however, vernacular Christians did not seem to have been vexed by the question of “who did Saint Thomas convert first”. This became a historiographic question only in the nineteenth century, when Christians began to be perceived as an “enemy” by an emerging “Hindu” state. In 1869, Edavalikel Philipos wrote The Syrian Christians of Malabar in a question-and-answer format. He asks: ‘By whom was the Church of the Syrians in Malabar founded and governed?’ and answers: ‘In 52 CE, the Apostle Mar Thomas came to Malabar in the reign of Choshen. He was so successful in his preaching that seven Christian churches were founded by him there’ . Early histories like these do not attempt to recover the community as one of “pure” blood (apart from Eucharistic blood), but rather imagine it as a community of converts from different lineages, faithful to the “minor” beginnings of Christianity itself. The Acts of Thomas, the “apocryphal” text generally considered to have been written during the first half of the third century and regarded as a key archival source on Thomas in India, narrates his mission and miracles in detail but nowhere mentions the conversion of “upper castes”; instead, it mentions Thomas baptising kings and queens along with all their subjects (; emphasis mine).¹⁷See for a detailed analysis of the text. Ramban Pattu, one of the texts that constitutes the archive of the Thomas narrative—supposedly composed by a disciple of the Apostle in the first century during his mission and orally transmitted until documented in the sixteenth century by Thomas Ramban Maliakkal—sings about converts from different caste-communities.¹⁸The narrative states: ‘He gained 17,450 human souls / among them were 6,850 Brahmins / 2,500 Kshatriyas / 3,750 Vaisyas / 4,250 Shudras’ . This, of course, is itself a retrospective narrative on the community’s beginnings.

The discourse of Suriyani Christians as descendants of Brahmins converted by Thomas in 52 CE was not historicised as the origin story until the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, when the community became increasingly alienated in its own land by the regional powers due to the growth of anti-Christian discourses shaped by negotiations with the colonisers. By the mid-nineteenth century, this resulted in a surge in the production of “church histories” by various Christian denominations, alongside the emergence of a new literary genre, known as “family histories”, authored by resourceful “men” belonging to these denominations.¹⁹See and for an analysis of the Syrian Christian family histories. Each sought to recover an Apostolic and Brahminic origin on the one hand, and an “anti-colonial Christian” or Suriyani Christian lineage on the other. For instance, Panjikaran in his The Syrian Church in Malabar, observes: ‘It is commonly believed that several Nambudhiris embraced Christianity, and if we may rely on the tradition, which, as I shall show, is supported by outstanding facts, their temple was consecrated for Christian worship’ . The method of narrativisation is itself interesting, as it relies upon other narratives which are, again, based on other narratives. In a footnote, Panjikaran states,

I am informed that in the Nagara Grantha Variola of the family of the Kalathum Nambudhiri in British Malabar the following is written: “Kali year 3153 [52 A.D.,] the foreigner Thomas Sanyasi came to our gramom [village], preached there, causing thereby pollution. We, therefore, came away from that gramom [Palayoor].” This, I am told, was reported by a member of that family. I did not see the original, neither could I procure a copy of it. I hope some one will investigate how far this is true and whether the variola is authentic. (; emphasis mine)

Another quintessential narrative of the Apostle’s mission, recurring almost identically in many Suriyani Christian family histories, reads as follows:

The incident of St. Thomas meeting the Brahmins is interesting. The Brahmins were doing the Tharpanam (a form of prayer for the dead by holding water in both palms) in the Thalikulam (pond). The Apostle asked them whether they can hold the water in the atmosphere. They said they cannot do it against the gravitational rule. Then the Apostle did the miracle, and the water remained in the sky and the trough was seen on the surface of the water. Perceiving the upperhanded power of the Apostle, the four families accepted the faith of the Apostle […] The four Brahmin families who accepted Baptism were Pakalomattam, Kalli, Kalliankel and Sankarapuri (https://pakalomattomfamily.org/history)

Through such methodical narrativisation, Suriyani Christianity in Kerala was reconceived as an endogamous community that shared a common substance (blood) with the Brahmins, thought to have never been “polluted” since its “miraculous origin”. As Anidjar observes, different bloods pave the way to a ‘difference between bloods’ , with some bloods deemed more sacred than others, thereby creating an ‘asymmetry of bloods’ .²⁰See for an insightful analysis of Christianity’s relation to blood and the co-constitution of Christianity and race in European contexts. While an Apostolic lineage rendered the community “more Christian” and legitimised the discourse of “original Christians” as a strategy of resistance to “Western Christianisation”, a Brahminical lineage rendered them “more (than) native” and legitimised the discourse of “original inhabitants” of the land, enabling them to negotiate the increasing Hinduisation of the polity. Yet this dual strategy also alienated and excluded the majority of Christians from the community and created conditions in which non-“Hindu” communities were compelled to become “more Hindu” in order to belong within the emerging secular (caste-Hindu) nation-state.

In effect, this entailed a paradigmatic reinterpretation of “vernacular Christianity”, introducing a “brand-new Old Christian” and many new “New Christians”—the Suriyani or “Brahmin Christian” as opposed to the “non-Suriyani” or “avarna Christian”—thereby inaugurating a problematic new paradigm of Christian identity in the region. Through such historiographic narrativisations, the old community of Suriyani Christians was consolidated as the bearer of approximately two millennia of imagined Christianity in the region, while new communities of “other” Christians were categorised in such a way that their histories could now only “begin” with colonialism and European missions .

More importantly, though it is not possible to elaborate this here, it is my contention that the “elite” Christians’ conscription to this new symbolic order of Brahminical hierarchy from the nineteenth century onwards, and their re-constitution as a caste community in and through the category of Suriyani Christian, at a time when different communities were actively engaged in anti-caste struggles, played a crucial role in legitimising not only themselves but also the Brahmin/“Hindu” as the “original inhabitant” and “real native” of the land. In doing so, they validated the verticality of caste structure as “historical”, thereby re-configuring the caste and community discourses for a static “modern Travancore”.²¹See for a detailed analysis. Because, since the nineteenth century, the “Hindu” was being consolidated and enumerated nationally in response to coloniser/Christian as an external enemy and Islam and Muslims as an internal enemy, and provincially in response to “local” enemies, such as Christians in the case of Travancore. At that time, the collective constitution of a non-“Hindu” community (here, the Suriyani Christians), perceived as varathar (“those who came”, as opposed to “those who were here”; non-natives or migrants), as a caste community, through their inscription into this hegemonic hierarchy, may have corroborated caste as an integral social reality of the land. It is therefore not surprising that this narrative of origin was assimilated by caste-Hindu historians and anthropologists, who “authenticated” the “originality” of the origin narrative, thereby authenticating the antiquity of caste itself as a social institution.

In 1906, when Nagam Aiya published the first Travancore State Manual in three volumes, a comprehensive document on the affairs of the state of Travancore, he observed:

There is no doubt as to the tradition that St. Thomas came to Malabar and converted a few families of Nambudiris, some of whom were ordained by him as priests such as those of Sankarapuri and Pakalomattam. For in consonance with this long-standing traditional belief in the minds of the people of the Apostle’s mission and labours among high-caste Hindus, we have it before us to-day the fact that certain Syrian Christian women particularly of a Desom called Kunnamkolam wear clothes as Nambudiri women do, move about screening themselves with huge umbrellas from the gaze of profane eyes as those women do, and will not marry, except perhaps in exceptional cases and that only recently but from among dignified families of similar aristocratic descent.

Later, in 1926, Anantakrishna Ayyar’s The Anthropology of Syrian Christians “documents” their social, cultural, ritual and customary practices and conscripted²²See and for conceptualisations of the figure of “conscript”. them as one among the ‘noble races of Malabar’ and ‘sons of kings’ .

At the risk of sounding polemical, it may then be suggested that it was not the “upper caste” that was converted to become Suriyani Christian, but rather the Suriyani Christian who was converted into “upper caste”, thereby producing ever more people as “lower caste”, irrespective of religion. Such attempts by Suriyani Christians, alongside caste Hindus and Christian colonisers, to displace the discourse of caste from a primarily religious paradigm to a civic and social one can be seen repeatedly in the modern period. For the British “colonial Christian” power, often accused of Christian favouritism, explaining the privileged position of resourceful Christians in the region as directly proportional to their caste status rather than their religious affiliation served to reconstitute the colonial government, and, by extension, ‘Western Christianity’, as paradigmatically secular. Similarly, endorsing the “upper caste” status of Suriyani Christians also served the interests of the Nair-Namboodiri elites, as it legitimised their efforts to rewrite the social-political and economic history of the state in terms of caste.

Conclusion

This essay has sought to engage with the beginning narratives and/or narrative beginnings of a particular community in South India in order to deconstruct critically the speculative reimaginings of the past from the standpoint of the present for a strategic future. This is not, however, to negate the potential of such speculative narrativisation to imagine radically ethical ‘“communit[ies] for those who have nothing in common’, as Alphonso Lingis titled one of his works. The crucial question concerns who is narrating, for what purpose, and how such narration affects the “others” who are included, excluded or ‘differentially included’ in the new imagination.²³Etienne Balibar explains ‘differential inclusion’ as exclusion effected through the very act of inclusion . Suriyani Christians were not alone in historicising a community with a “golden past” from the nineteenth century onwards. The significant difference, however, is that while many communities sought to deconstruct an essentialised Brahminical past through history writing,²⁴Padmanabhan Palpu recovered Ezhavas as descendants of Buddhists whose rule was displaced by Brahmins (see ). Chattambi Swamikal argued against the Brahminical origin narratives of Kerala by claiming Nairs as the original inhabitants of the region . Poykayil Appachan critiqued “mainstream” caste historiography through his history of “slave castes” in Travancore, positing a prior period of equality that was free from caste distinctions. He postulated the “Adi Dravida” as the original inhabitants and former rulers of the land who were later enslaved (see ). Pampady John Joseph argued that Pulayas were descendants of Cheramar, the original inhabitants and rulers of Kerala, who were subsequently overthrown and enslaved; he even held the view that Pulayas should rename themselves Cheramar to reclaim this lost glory . In Madras, Iyothee Thass constructed a Buddhist past for Tamil Dalits through speculative history writing (see ). Suriyani Christian histories reconstructed it by forging a Brahmin origin for themselves. Departing from this framework, narratives such as the Tharisappally Cheppedu or Kollam Cheppedu, if anything, ought to be read as one among many beginnings in the genealogies of vernacular Christianity, which always already comprised migrants from different parts of the world and converts from diverse regional castes and communities who became Christians, rather than as “proof” for an “upper-caste origin” dating back to antiquity.²⁵The Tharisappally Copper Plate Grant shows that different castes and communities were affiliated with the church. Colonial and missionary records further show that the Portuguese converted “different castes” to Christianity. Considering that Christianity in the region was in a constant flux, with multiple entries and exits, it is therefore problematic to continue to retrieve an “original” Suriyani Christian in disregard of its own genealogies of multiple beginnings.

The issue is not whether there is “evidence” for a particular origin; rather, it is that “evidence” itself could be a privileged narrative and a narrative privileging of what is (made to be) present over what is (made to be) absent. Such exercises are important because they puncture the immunitarian history of the community from within, opening a genealogical possibility of rewriting two thousand years of Christianity in the region not as the history of Suriyani Christians alone but as the history of all Christians. They also enable us to explore ways of actively un-inheriting any pregiven and fixed absolutist caste history of Kerala/India, by exposing the co-existence of different political, economic, religious and social orders across times, rather than a monolithic “Hindu” order imagined as timeless. More importantly, this approach allows a break from conscription to the settler/native binary that the nation-state thrusts upon “minorities” , and instead invites a reimagining of the nation and the native as always already transnational and migratory. By contrast, the continued recovery of a Brahminical past dating back to the first century within Suriyani Christian historiography problematically recuperates a legitimate past for Brahminism itself. This is even more important insofar as the Brahminisation of certain “elite” Christians, and their consolidation as Suriyani Christian, at least in the contexts of nineteenth-century Kerala, appears to have played a crucial role in modernising and secularising the paradigm of caste, by which I mean the verticality of caste structure as the organising principle of the polity, to the disadvantage of others as well as themselves.

A Brahminical origin narrative, and its supposed uninterrupted continuity, reduces the lived realities of a community which, in its multiple beginnings, has always already been a community of converts from different religions, castes and races. ‘If beginning is a creature with its own special life, a life neither fully explained by analyses of its historical-political circumstances nor confinable to a given date in time called “the beginning”’ , then it is only ethically and politically imperative to narrate the story anew from different beginnings, in order to imagine new communities yet to come.