About Cochin, or Kochi

In South India hardly anyone speaks Hindi. The languages here are not even related to it. The ancestors of South Indians are Dravidians, who evidently migrated here from the Iran-Pakistan border regions some five or six thousand years ago. At least, that is what is thought, since the only other language that resembles the languages here is found there. In less that two weeks, we have lived among three languages we had never heard of before, that are related historically but have different scripts: Kanada in Bangalore, Tamil in the state of Tamil Nadu, which includes both Tiruvannamalai and Trichy, and now Malayalam in the state of Kerala, which lies along the western coast of southern India. Children learn much more English than Hindu in school.



Cochin (or in the post-colonial spelling—think Mumbai instead of Bombay—Kochi) is a peninsula, mainland, bay, inland waters, and some islands, with a very different character than the inland. More laid back, more touristy (in a pleasant way) and endowed with history connected with our own story. Remember what the European explorers who ended up accidently in America were after? Spices! This is the place the were trying to bypass the Arab middlemen to reach. Vasco da Gama lived and died here in Kochi. The Dutch East India Trading Company was here, and then the British. There is a Jew Town here, though the Jews themselves mostly migrated to Israel in the 1940s. Because of Kochi’s trade history, Malayalam’s vocabulary includes loan words from Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.

But the history of east and west goes even further back. St. Thomas is supposed to have come here, and in fact Christianity here dates to at least the fourth century with the Syrian Church. (I saw an auto repair shop whose posted address was: Anna Auto Spares, Near Syrian Church, Palluruthy, Kochi.) India’s oldest standing church is here, the early sixteenth-century St. Francis Church, which began as Portuguese Catholic, and became Protestant with the Dutch, Anglican with the English, and is now a parish church for Protestants, the ecumenically united Church of South India.

Another interesting feature of Kerala is that in 1957 it became the first state in the world to have democratically elected a communist government. Land reforms have created more equitable distribution of property here than in other parts of India, and literacy is high. Beggers are relatively few, and there are some very prosperous places here. But I am getting ahead of myself.

We came to God’s Own Country, as Kerala is called, on Friday morning, and we did believe the nickname when we saw our new accommodations at the pastoral center here, especially after living with the dust and critters at Shantivanum. Generous and clean rooms with attached bathrooms in which the cold shower, sink, and western toilet all work, are not taken for granted any more in this group, nor after a week of ashram feeding, are tables and chairs and a dining room where talking is permitted. We fell into the rooms and the showers with great delight.

During breakfast, my daughter Claire arrived from Nepal to join us for the last couple of days and to take another week with me in India. She had just a little time to tell her name and story over and over again before we left for the first day’s activities.