Clara A. B. Joseph’s monograph seeks to dispel the notion that Christians were absent from India’s fight for independence. Before the events of the late nineteenth century through 1947, Thomas Christians, Christians of Kerala dating themselves to St. Thomas the Apostle, were engaged in a centuries-long freedom struggle involving resistance to the Portuguese and Latin yokes of the Padroado Real and the Estado da Índia. The author seeks to refute the notion that the freedom struggle only occurred between non-Christian native Indians and Christian colonizers and that emancipatory praxis falls outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. Joseph demonstrates the agency of Thomas Christians through literary analysis and critique, based on a culling of primary and secondary sources in Malayalam, Latin, Syriac, and English. The work is helpfully synthetic but also singular in that the author trains a critical eye through the lens of economics and colonial and postcolonial critical theory, challenging historians and theologians to recognize economic interest as the primary purpose behind Latinization. In short, it was about mammon all along. The text is framed by a fittingly concise Introduction and Conclusion; Chapters 2–4 constitute the heart of the text and represents the author’s chief contribution.
Critical to the author’s endeavor is a reexamination of the Synod of Diamper, the Catholic assembly of Malayali Christians, missionary Catholic clerics, and Portuguese administrators (including military) that forced submission to Rome in 1599. In Chapter 2, “Anticolonial Archives of the Sixteenth Century,” Joseph argues that the archbishop was more imperial agent than ecclesial actor at a time when crown and cross were hand in glove. After all, she reasons, Menezes’s “success” in India became a steppingstone to his eventual viceroyalty of Portugal. Under Menezes, the Synod declared their Church of the East hierarch a heretic, imposed clerical celibacy on all clergy, and forbade the clergy’s right to trade or serve in the army. Such impositions effectively severed the Thomas Christian relationship of more than a millennium to their prelate, conveniently detached Thomas Christians from the Malabar rajas they had served as administrators and warriors, re-channeled money and pepper through the Portuguese, and thereby made “the Syrians” (Malayalam: Suriānī), dependent for their livelihood and their spiritual sustenance on the Padroado and the Latin pontiff in Rome.
In chapter 3, “Freedom Fighter as Heretic,” Joseph rehearses the struggles of the Thomas Christians following Diamper, to examine the Coonen, or “Bent” Cross Oath of 1653 and its aftermath. According to Joseph, the Coonen Cross was one of many acts of ongoing non-violent resistance by Thomas Christians. One group of scholars (Brown, Frykenberg, Kurian, Paret) interpret the oath as a desire to break from all Portuguese and Roman authority; others (Thekkedath, Malancharuvil, Kollaparambil, Neil, Pallath) believe the oath-takers merely meant to sever themselves from Archbishop Mendes and the Jesuits, who were lording over their community. Contrary to these camps, Joseph argues that their real enemy was always colonization. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Thomas Christians, with their pepper wealth and martial training, were used as bargaining chips between the Portuguese and Spanish, on the one hand, and the Catholic Church, on the other. Their ongoing desire for respect and autonomy continually fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, Jesuits earned money from trade and, later, from the purchasing of indigenous lands at the expense of Thomas Christians who were increasingly depleted. All the while, the theological language of heresy and schism was used as a cudgel to control those who rejected foreign domination. Responses to such treatment is explored in chapter 4, “We Are All Indians,” where Joseph exegetes the eighteenth-century Catholic Thomas Christian travel document, The Varthamanappusthakam, through a postcolonial lens to show indigenous resistances and negotiations to such ill treatment.
In the end, one can ask if Joseph has adequately falsified the premise that colonization meant Christianization. Perhaps a modifier need only be added to this formulation – that is, “colonization meant western Christianization.” The colonized indigenous Christian, west Asian or south Asian or north African, was only relatively higher in the minds of the European Catholic colonizer than indigenous non-Christians, for all needed “education,” “civilization,” or in the case of the Thomas Christians who never quite measured up, “Latinization.” Under the gaze of western Christians, who by the seventeenth century were exhibiting a race theory underwritten by the economic development of chattel slavery, eastern Christians could never favorably compare to post-Tridentine Catholic orthodoxy. On its face this need not mean that Latinization was secondary to colonization, for if indeed church and state were hand in glove, then colonialism and Latinization are likewise united. In short, Menezes was able to accomplish a twofer – simultaneously subjugating the Thomas Christians politically while ecclesially Latinizing them. Papal claims to the one true faith and Petrine supremacy provided the theological rationale for economic and ecclesial practices favorably redounding to European coffers while growing Roman Catholicism in South Asia.
Aside from a tendency to treat “Thomas Christian” and “Syro-Malabar Catholic” as identical in the latter chapters, one also wonders about Joseph’s adoption of the nationalist (secular or Hindu) narrative to frame her interpretation. Political scientist and historian Sunil Khilnani (The Idea of India, 1997) convincingly shows how “the idea of India” as a post Westphalian nation-state took time to evolve. Such narratives, anachronistic and forced, rely on a flattening of micro-histories. Considering the historical record that the author so admirably interprets, would it not be more accurate to argue that Malayali Christians longed for self-determination in their circumscribed region? Instead, their particular emancipatory struggles are collapsed into historically later dreams of a sovereign nation state – something that Thomas Christians could never have imagined in early modernity when the subcontinent was constituted by kingdoms both petty and grand. By adopting the nationalist lens, Thomas Christians are once again forced to dance to another’s tune (“Jana Gana Mana” or “Vande Mataram”), trying to prove their legitimacy and thus being measured by exogenous standards. Will they not be found wanting yet again?
These critiques notwithstanding, the implications of Joseph’s argument are that those Thomas Christians in communion with Rome, the Syro-Malabar Catholics of Kerala, are still being colonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Long after the demise of the Padroado and the Estado, colonialism is alive and well through canons still in effect among the 4.5 million Syrian Catholic faithful. Clerical celibacy, which Joseph argues was a tool employed to rule Thomas Christians economically first and ecclesially second, is still enforced, even though with one other exception this restriction has been lifted in all the eastern churches presently in communion with Rome. That this is the case should remind us that as with all struggles for independence, the work of emancipation endures long after the colonizer has departed. This text is a treasury of primary and secondary sources for those entering the rather complex, often baffling terrain that is the historical study of St. Thomas Christianity. It serves as a timely intervention in colonial, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and will be of interest to those interested in historiography, ecclesiology, inculturation, South Asian religions, and World Christianities.
