Sadhu Free Zone. Moving On

From the heart of Fort Kochi in Kerala whence I arrived just a month ago, I am now ensconced in a small apartment in a largely Muslim residential part of town, which, being surrounded by mosques, offers ample exposure to Islam’s sacred quotidian rhythms starting with the call to prayer at 4.45 every dawn.  Striking after so many months, years even, immersed in the strident Hinduism of the north, where Islam and Christianity even, kept a very low profile.

In such a religiously conservative part of town with its spiritual affiliations uncontestable, I was stunned by the sudden appearance of Jehovah’s Witnesses one morning, preaching God, Jesus and the Bible together with very loud music broadcast in what seemed to be a clear challenge to the mosque at the end of the road. Aside from the language, which I presumed to be Malayalam, the local vernacular here, their presence, energy and manner of delievery clearly proclaimed them for who they were, no different in any other way to the bunch on the bridge over the River Wear in Durham shouting their wares, also to loud music, to deaf passersby back in February. My early impressions were soon confirmed by a support worker offering me a leaflet proclaiming eternal life as I walked by later. I was suddenly transported back years and many miles to the other side of the world and a different life stage, and my Salasakan interview assistant in Ecuador snorting contemptuously at the site of Evangelists in the distance, “Evangelists looking for victims!” They have a strong presence in the Andes and specialise in destroying Indigenous sacred sites.

But I digress. Here finally in Kochi, I have been able to review the last three month period in India as it falls away, much like the scenery in a journey falls away from you as you advance along the road. The Pilgrimage cycles are indeed over. Their song is over. And with them, sadhus too it would seem, as, present on every part of my earlier journey, they have now completely disappeared. The sight of an orange clad figure in the distance will simply be a lady wearing an orange salwar or saree, never a renunciate on the road to salvation.

 

 

Now it seems I am about casting my nets wide again back into the ocean of life possibilities to see what comes up and herein does the Malabar coast and the Chinese fishing nets of Kerala offer fertile symbolism in the extraordinary richness and diversity of the daily catches for sale at the many small fishing stalls by the harbour.

 

 

And in the spices that were the lures and drivers of emergent globalisation dynamics for so many centuries here.

 

The exchanges have not always been admirable or easy, as with the arrival of exiled Sephardic Jews in the 16th century, from their erstwhile Spanish homeland. As with the brutality of the Catholic Inquisition in its determination to enforce orthodoxy. Now the easy eclecticism of Kerala reflects more its wealth of resources from the sea and the fruits and spices of the land. A real celebration of terre y mar.

How religion and the diversity of beliefs reflected in these lands will look in the coming years with the complex interplay of national and global processes, remains, however, to be seen.