Final post related to #81:
Then the article goes onto Europeans narrating the tales of the origins of the division between the two groups, as well as infighting that resulted in fatalities even:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In 1603 the Jesuit J. M. Campori, in the train of Archbishop Roz as he made his episcopal tour of villages in Malabar, wrote a letter to the Jesuit general Aquaviva giving variants of the two-wife story and a picture of Northist-Southist relations (Ferroli 1939 : 295-301):
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[...]
In the two castes we have mentioned everyone pretends to descend from the legitimate wife, and contends that those of the opposite caste are descendants of the slave. Therefore they don't intermarry and in the bazaars they have separate churches for each caste. They communicate in everything else, nevertheless there occur amongst them frequent quarrels and strifes.
This year there were so profound dissensions between two bazaars of different castes, that it was impossible to affect their reconciliation. They came to blows and on both sides some were wounded and killed.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Campori seems to stand outside the social divisions he describes by treating them equivocally. [...] The Jesuit narrators tell it from the viewpoint of European missionaries opposed to both Northists and Southists. Campori is the representative of an outside power which proposes to bring order to the irrationally divided natives. They can live in peace -he avers that they " communicate " in all things-if their meaningless differences are settled.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Then the article comes to another variation on the origins of the divisions - favouring the Knanayas as the 'superior' ones once again. And talking about racial purity again:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A major section is devoted to a remarkably extended division narrative. Instead of beginning with the advent of the Syrian expedition in Malabar Chazhikaden pushes the division all the way back to Biblical times. The original Southists, his legend proposes, were the people of the Southern Hebrew kingdom of Judea. The Assyrians invaded and dispersed the Northern Hebrew kingdom, Israel, sending its people into exile and debasing intermixture. The Southern kingdom persisted, however, thanks to the protection of Alexander the Great, and its subjects retained both their racial and cultural uniqueness. The Romans finally conquered and destroyed the Southern kingdom but they could not compromise Southist cultural solidarity. When the Southists, who had turned to Christianity but still retained their identity, fled before the Muslim invaders to Cranganore, Cheraman Perumal welcomed them but the native Christians, of Northist descent, spurned them when they refused to intermarry and dilute their blood.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->(The 'islamic' reference after the mentions of Alexander and the Romans dates their arrival in India to sometime late in or after the 7th century!)
And if you thought this infighting over the many myths - all of them ridiculous - should have ended a long time ago:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Northists, or non-Southists, continue to deliver narratives and publish pamphlets (e.g. Jose 1983) refuting and ridiculing Southist pretense, such as Chazhikaden's.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And here comes an explanation as to <b>why they keep inventing stories</b> and also <b>why the church now wants to present a united front by dismissing the division</b> as something of the past, consciously a legend.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Today there simply is a multiplicity, a pluralism, of legends. The same person may utter a fiercely partisan version then later criticize that version and offer a conciliatory alternate. There is no way to be sure that this was not always the case; that the content of individual legends says nothing definite about the identity of the teller. <b>A legend may be snatched from the air and presented to make a point in a discussion.</b> A person who has not lived in this environment cannot easily assess the role of the division legends in forming the expressing identity, which may be far less fixed than it is convenient for an outsider to assume. Only the context can be observed. <b>Recently there has been a move toward ecumenicism in divided Indian Christianity. This emphasizes history and doctrine common to all the denominations. As foreign governance is reduced it becomes necessary to formulate an indigenous history of Christianity and to frame indigenous legends.</b> This may also coincide with a growing homogenization of Kerala society as class divisions replace the former rigid caste divisions and intermarriage between Christian groups as well as with other religions grows more common. An ecumenical icon, the St. Thomas Christian Encyclopedia, published for the 1900th anniversary of the martyrdom of the Apostle to India, St. Thomas, offers a field open for the play of a variety of even contradictory histories of the same events, including the Northist-Southist division. The contemporary legends described in this article are partially in the social context of Northist-Southist antagonism, but also in the increasingly pervasive context of Indian Christian ecumenicism. The division is increasingly narrated as common history of an emergent Indian Christianity. The division is " of the past "; it is consciously a legend.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->See, christianity is always rewriting its history: "We've always been one. We've always got along. We've always been for equality"
They're always 'formulating history' and legends about themselves, and even involve other people. And their legends keep changing to adapt to the times.
Like Syrian christian stories about (1) the various dates Syrian christianity first arrived in India, (2) who murdered their non-existent <i>apostle</i> thomas, and (3) which communities thomas converted. These stories all keep changing. I wouldn't have minded their silly myths when it concerned only inter-christian bickering. But then they had to invent libel to accuse Hindus of persecuting their fictional thomas. As usual, unable to stick to one story, many different Hindu communities were accused of killing the same st thomas depending on the time period of the martyrdom-story update.
<i>From excerpted bit above:</i> "A legend may be snatched from the air and presented to make a point in a discussion."
Something christianity tends to do quite often, so one can't hold Syrian christianity in India solely responsible for that. Examples include christianity pretending it's all for equality and that Hinduism brought forth a racist social institution. While the latter has never been proven (and there's significant indication that it had nothing to do with ethnicity), the former claim is totally wrong: the earliest form of christianity in India (however late it may have arrived) has been ethnicity-conscious, racist and casteist from the start.
Christianity can keep its little 'we don't have casteism and inequality' dawaganda to itself. The supposedly oldest christian sect that spread outside christianity's 'birth-place' (India's Syrian christians long claimed - wrongly - to have got to India before Europe was christianised) was the sort that made its own two groups hate each other on grounds of the other being 'racially impure'. And from there on they progressed to discriminating against Indian converts and 'mixing' with them because (1) they were Indian; (2) 'low' caste origins and other nonsense.
Then the article goes onto Europeans narrating the tales of the origins of the division between the two groups, as well as infighting that resulted in fatalities even:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In 1603 the Jesuit J. M. Campori, in the train of Archbishop Roz as he made his episcopal tour of villages in Malabar, wrote a letter to the Jesuit general Aquaviva giving variants of the two-wife story and a picture of Northist-Southist relations (Ferroli 1939 : 295-301):
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[...]
In the two castes we have mentioned everyone pretends to descend from the legitimate wife, and contends that those of the opposite caste are descendants of the slave. Therefore they don't intermarry and in the bazaars they have separate churches for each caste. They communicate in everything else, nevertheless there occur amongst them frequent quarrels and strifes.
This year there were so profound dissensions between two bazaars of different castes, that it was impossible to affect their reconciliation. They came to blows and on both sides some were wounded and killed.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Campori seems to stand outside the social divisions he describes by treating them equivocally. [...] The Jesuit narrators tell it from the viewpoint of European missionaries opposed to both Northists and Southists. Campori is the representative of an outside power which proposes to bring order to the irrationally divided natives. They can live in peace -he avers that they " communicate " in all things-if their meaningless differences are settled.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Then the article comes to another variation on the origins of the divisions - favouring the Knanayas as the 'superior' ones once again. And talking about racial purity again:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A major section is devoted to a remarkably extended division narrative. Instead of beginning with the advent of the Syrian expedition in Malabar Chazhikaden pushes the division all the way back to Biblical times. The original Southists, his legend proposes, were the people of the Southern Hebrew kingdom of Judea. The Assyrians invaded and dispersed the Northern Hebrew kingdom, Israel, sending its people into exile and debasing intermixture. The Southern kingdom persisted, however, thanks to the protection of Alexander the Great, and its subjects retained both their racial and cultural uniqueness. The Romans finally conquered and destroyed the Southern kingdom but they could not compromise Southist cultural solidarity. When the Southists, who had turned to Christianity but still retained their identity, fled before the Muslim invaders to Cranganore, Cheraman Perumal welcomed them but the native Christians, of Northist descent, spurned them when they refused to intermarry and dilute their blood.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->(The 'islamic' reference after the mentions of Alexander and the Romans dates their arrival in India to sometime late in or after the 7th century!)
And if you thought this infighting over the many myths - all of them ridiculous - should have ended a long time ago:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Northists, or non-Southists, continue to deliver narratives and publish pamphlets (e.g. Jose 1983) refuting and ridiculing Southist pretense, such as Chazhikaden's.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And here comes an explanation as to <b>why they keep inventing stories</b> and also <b>why the church now wants to present a united front by dismissing the division</b> as something of the past, consciously a legend.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Today there simply is a multiplicity, a pluralism, of legends. The same person may utter a fiercely partisan version then later criticize that version and offer a conciliatory alternate. There is no way to be sure that this was not always the case; that the content of individual legends says nothing definite about the identity of the teller. <b>A legend may be snatched from the air and presented to make a point in a discussion.</b> A person who has not lived in this environment cannot easily assess the role of the division legends in forming the expressing identity, which may be far less fixed than it is convenient for an outsider to assume. Only the context can be observed. <b>Recently there has been a move toward ecumenicism in divided Indian Christianity. This emphasizes history and doctrine common to all the denominations. As foreign governance is reduced it becomes necessary to formulate an indigenous history of Christianity and to frame indigenous legends.</b> This may also coincide with a growing homogenization of Kerala society as class divisions replace the former rigid caste divisions and intermarriage between Christian groups as well as with other religions grows more common. An ecumenical icon, the St. Thomas Christian Encyclopedia, published for the 1900th anniversary of the martyrdom of the Apostle to India, St. Thomas, offers a field open for the play of a variety of even contradictory histories of the same events, including the Northist-Southist division. The contemporary legends described in this article are partially in the social context of Northist-Southist antagonism, but also in the increasingly pervasive context of Indian Christian ecumenicism. The division is increasingly narrated as common history of an emergent Indian Christianity. The division is " of the past "; it is consciously a legend.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->See, christianity is always rewriting its history: "We've always been one. We've always got along. We've always been for equality"
They're always 'formulating history' and legends about themselves, and even involve other people. And their legends keep changing to adapt to the times.
Like Syrian christian stories about (1) the various dates Syrian christianity first arrived in India, (2) who murdered their non-existent <i>apostle</i> thomas, and (3) which communities thomas converted. These stories all keep changing. I wouldn't have minded their silly myths when it concerned only inter-christian bickering. But then they had to invent libel to accuse Hindus of persecuting their fictional thomas. As usual, unable to stick to one story, many different Hindu communities were accused of killing the same st thomas depending on the time period of the martyrdom-story update.
<i>From excerpted bit above:</i> "A legend may be snatched from the air and presented to make a point in a discussion."
Something christianity tends to do quite often, so one can't hold Syrian christianity in India solely responsible for that. Examples include christianity pretending it's all for equality and that Hinduism brought forth a racist social institution. While the latter has never been proven (and there's significant indication that it had nothing to do with ethnicity), the former claim is totally wrong: the earliest form of christianity in India (however late it may have arrived) has been ethnicity-conscious, racist and casteist from the start.
Christianity can keep its little 'we don't have casteism and inequality' dawaganda to itself. The supposedly oldest christian sect that spread outside christianity's 'birth-place' (India's Syrian christians long claimed - wrongly - to have got to India before Europe was christianised) was the sort that made its own two groups hate each other on grounds of the other being 'racially impure'. And from there on they progressed to discriminating against Indian converts and 'mixing' with them because (1) they were Indian; (2) 'low' caste origins and other nonsense.