Cochin Creole and the perils of casteist cosmopolitanism: Reading Requiem for the Living

Abstract

This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala’s cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu legacies have been privileged implicitly in these and, as a result, hybrid communities can only be perceived as “miscegenated”. They are, therefore, excluded from the legacies of national culture. Johny Miranda’s recent novella Requiem for the Living (2013), tries to end this invisibility by articulating the present of one such community, the Parankis of Cochin. On the one hand, it both challenges and complicates existing identities such as the “Anglo-Indian” and the “Luso-Indian”, revealing their elite moorings and dualistic conception of hybridity. On the other hand, it departs from the long history of the implications of novel-writing in projects of caste-community identity construction in Malayali society. In doing so, it directs our attention towards the possibilities of unearthing “subaltern cosmopolitanism”, which may indeed be more appropriate for contemporary challenges in the specific postcolonial context that is contemporary Kerala.

Pluralism or Janmabhedam?

The history of modern regional identity in Kerala, in the extreme southwest of the Indian peninsula, has largely been understood in terms of its relation with the history of the Indian subcontinent. However, Kerala has historically been part of the Indian Ocean world, and these connections are better acknowledged in explorations of its pre-modern and medieval pasts. In the present day, such connections are all the more cherished as exotic; they are also highlighted, at times, to point to a history of “global connections”, much prized under conditions of globalization. ¹ In such narratives, Kerala’s connections with ancient Rome, the Arab world, and Europe are emphasized, for instance, over its connections with its close neighbour, Sri Lanka, and the South-East Asian world in general. ² This has generally opened up two possibilities for the modern Malayali, both equally self-congratulatory. ³ On the one hand, highlighting such connections bolsters Malayali exceptionalism within India. It is often claimed that unlike India, Kerala, which lies on the sea-coast at the foot of the Western Ghats has received diverse cultures peacefully, and for that reason, is more cosmopolitan — and therefore, modern. The claim is even that Kerala, in some sense, has always been modern. On the other hand, Kerala’s encounters with diverse cultures have been interpreted as pointing to a specifically non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism by critics like Ashis Nandy. In what he calls “time travel to a possible self”, he describes Kochi [Cochin] as a rare Indian city where “pre-colonial traditions of cultural pluralism refuse to die” (Nandy, 2002: 157). He claims that for its residents, the city is “the ultimate symbol of cultural diversity and religious and ethnic tolerance” (Nandy, 2002: 158). He also rejects historical enquiry into its past and professional ethnography, claiming that his essay was the result of a more “personal, cultural-psychological journey” in which the past figures only as an “immediate, felt reality” (Nandy, 2002: 162).

However, the perils of indulging in such a construction of Cochinese cosmopolitanism (by implication, Kerala’s cosmopolitanism) become evident when one reflects on the question of why some communities figure prominently in, and others vanish from, the “immediate, felt, reality” of the past that Nandy embraces. Nandy’s construction of Cochin does not allow us to explore further the question of why some cultures persisted as communities (the Syrian Christian, the Jewish, the Arab–Muslim) while others have commingled into a “cosmopolitanism of material life”, which is so familiar in everyday Malayali life that one hardly recognizes it as a form of cosmopolitanism. ⁴ Nandy’s reading makes it impossible for us to consider the consequences of the political framework of cultural pluralism and “hospitality” he so celebrates. This framework was that of the Hindu kingdoms, which were ardent defenders of the pre-modern order of caste, the order of Janmabhedam [difference by birth]. In the framework of such a society, foreigners and foreign ideas were welcomed only insofar as they were willing to be integrated within the terms of the highly iniquitous hierarchy of caste overseen by the Hindu rulers of medieval Kerala. As early as 1507, the Kolathiri, the ruler of a principality in North Kerala, wrote to the king of Portugal that

certain people who I and my Nairs [the upper caste which served the feudal elite] have as slaves and belong to the two castes, viz., the Tines [Tiyya] and the Mucoas [Mukkuva — fisherfolk] should not be made Christians […] For with the conversion of these slaves, conflict may arise between our vassals and these people. The Nairs derive their income from them and they do not want to lose it. (John, 1981: 347)

Not only does the narrative of local “hospitality” conceal upper-caste Hindu elitism in shaping such “cosmopolitanism”, it actually prompts us to look longingly at the West. In other words, it makes us blind to the historical shaping of this region as a “cusp culture” (a term coined by the sociologist Satish Deshpande), a place which was shaped by both western and eastern cultures.

Indeed, these myths and memories have romantically populated the official histories of Hindu kingdoms of Kerala and much elitist construction of Kerala’s sub-national identity in the twentieth century. The specific narrative device that enables the Hindu to occupy centre-space in the regional identity was shared across different kinds of writings. It appeared, for instance, in the writings of older and venerated historians of Kerala, such as K. M. Panikkar. In Kerala Swatantrya Samaram, he writes about pre-Portuguese Kerala, in which territorial affiliations were apparently evoked over religion as the basic condition for identification as a patriotic Malayali. However, the privileging of the Hindu surfaces in subtle — if powerful — ways; for instance, in the way Panikkar stresses that the Malabar Muslims were never interested in political power. This is at the core of his description of this ideal society of religious tolerance:

The most important feature of Malayali social life since the earliest times was the large-hearted tolerance and mutual respect shown to each other by the different communities that accepted Kerala as their motherland. The Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, and the Konkani, lived alongside the Hindus of Kerala with perfect understanding and affection. (Panikkar, 1957: 17)

This history has also shaped the popular images of the dehumanized lower-caste groups in Malayali society. They are viewed as immobile, either stuck irredeemably with the local, or simply rendered invisible.

The decline of the Portuguese Creole cultures and communities of Cochin and the relative invisibility of the hybrid coastal communities may be better understood in the light of the above history. Over the centuries, there have been several references to mixed communities called variously Topasses, Parankis, Feringhees, Mundukaar and so on, besides the better-known Eurasians, especially in Kochi. They accompanied and served the Portuguese and the Dutch, were legally under them, worked in trades and as labourers, and set up local families. Over time, these groups blended into the category of “Anglo-Indian”. Recently, there has been much effort to revive the “Luso-Indian” identity, specifically referring to Portuguese connections. However, identity-articulation by the Paranki (literally, the Portuguese), who are arguably the most disadvantaged among all those groups which use Portuguese surnames, has been almost non-audible in the elitist Malayali public sphere. ⁵

Given that community assertion in a caste-ridden society is possible only within the framework of the caste hierarchy, and because caste society stigmatizes the Creole as a product of “miscegenation”, the Parankis have been able to claim neither their complex past nor space within the history of Malayali society. They have indeed figured in recent literary efforts to reclaim the multicultural legacy of Kochi, prominently, in the novel by the well-known Malayalam novelist N. S. Madhavan, Litanies of Dutch Battery (2010). But they figure merely as yet another element that helps to construct the exotic allure of Kochi. The “subaltern cosmopolitanism” of the Parankis, increasingly lost in the flow of time, remains as obscured as ever. However, it appears that a powerful opening has been made recently by Johny Miranda, a Paranki author from Cochin, with his novella in Malayalam, titled Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees (translated as Requiem for the Living, 2013).

In this essay I attempt to introduce the Parankis and reflect on the challenge raised by this novella to the dominant ways in which the enterprise of novel-writing has been implicated historically in the construction of caste/community identities in Kerala. In the next section, I sketch their history and, in the subsequent section, offer a reading of Requiem for the Living that seeks to make sense of its uniqueness as a novella of caste-community identity-making within the specific context of Malayali society. In the conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the kind of cosmopolitanism the novella represents and its significance for this “post-colony”.

The Parankis

The origin of the Parankis of Cochin is associated with Afonso de Albuquerque’s policy of establishing an enduring and reliable Portuguese presence there by creating a loyal population through encouraging Portuguese men to marry local women and settle down. Afonso de Albuquerque became the Portuguese Governor in India in 1509, after the Portuguese had become a presence on the Kerala coast in the preceding decade, in Cochin (Kochi), Canannore (Kannur), and Quilon (Kollam). The Malayalam name Paranki has its origins in the Arab word Farangi (which is a corruption of “Frank”), and at present refers to both this community, and everything Portuguese in general, or associated with them. The casados (married man) who married Indian women were discharged from the Portuguese army and settled down as tradesmen or merchants, often securing considerable wealth.

Nevertheless Albuquerque appears to have been particular that the casados should not marry “inferiors” — “black women”. ⁶ He recommended that his men take as wives fair-skinned, virtuous Muslim women. The “black women” he disapproved of included Malabari women (women of Malabar, Kerala’s northern region, but a name that could have meant women from the south Kerala coast or the extreme northern coastal area near the Konkan coast). However, the Raja of Cochin who welcomed them seems to have tried to adapt Albuquerque’s policy within the framework of the Janmabhedam. He is said to have arranged the marriage of a Portuguese officer with a high-caste Malayala Brahmin woman (Dias, 2009: 100). Nevertheless, it appears that working-class Portuguese were also encouraged to marry and settle down with local women — soldiers, artisans, rope-makers, workers in shipyards and arsenals, gunners, and so on (Dias, 2009: 98). By the early sixteenth century, casados had settled down in Cochin, Cranganore (Kodungalloor), and Quilon (Dias, 2009: 100–1) and there were some 300 Portuguese houses in Fort Cochin in 1514 (Dias, 2009: 111). The casados cashed in on opportunities that opened with the decline of Muslim trade and with the end of the Royal Monopoly on the spice trade in Malacca. They entered into the lucrative trade with Malacca (Dias, 2009: 119). In 1542, they were 300 and by 1547, 343; however, their numbers seem to have declined after 1611 (Dias, 2009: 112), with a good number shifting to other ports with the escalation of political tensions in Malabar.

The population that continued to increase in Cochin was that of the mestices, the progeny of mixed marriages. This group however seems to have comprised a complex mixture. Its members bore traces of multiple cultures, and presented a more layered composite than that allowed by a vision of European conquest as involving a neat and unambiguous division between an internally-homogenous Western invader and an equally singular local society. There is historical evidence that the Portuguese brought a considerable number of skilled artisans from Malacca to Cochin — as early as Afonso de Albuquerque’s return journey after the conquest of Malacca in 1511. These were well-paid slaves under the Sultan of Malacca: carpenters, boat-builders, mechanics, ⁷ blacksmiths, sawyers, caulkers, gunners, makers of weapons and powder-magazines, who travelled with their families and often converted so that they would be free (Thomaz, 2000: 1820). Besides these groups, Javanese and other South-East Asian people — Bandanese, Ambonese, Sundanese, Peguese, Sinhalese — came to Cochin as crewmen in ships throughout the 150 years of Portuguese presence. There are local traditions that speak of African slaves brought by the Portuguese to Cochin too (Dias, 2009: 138–9).

A third stream was opened through war. Later records indicate the presence of soldiers from South-East Asia in the forces of the Portuguese and the Dutch in the local wars in Cochin and Calicut. It appears that there was a circulation of multilingual soldiers between Malabar and South-East Asian areas throughout the Portuguese–Dutch period (Hagerdall, 2012: 190–1; Mostert, 2007: 22–5; Taylor, 2009: 19). K. M. Panikkar mentions in passing that the desecration of the temple of the feudal nobleman Punnathur Nambidi by the Dutch forces in their campaign against Calicut in the eighteenth century was committed not by Europeans but by Balinese soldiers under Dutch commanders (Panikkar, 1931: 125).

The identity of the Topasse, which, according to Dias, was a Dutch coinage, added further complexity to this mixed group. In the terms of surrender imposed by the Dutch on the Portuguese in 1663 quoted by Dias, Portuguese and Mestices are mentioned separately from “free Topasses” (2009: 129). They seem to have been a considerable number, judging from Dias’s account: some 4000 in all (2009: 113). In Cochin, this identity of the Topasse persisted clearly until the Dutch surrender to the English in 1795 — the Dutch deed of surrender had a separate clause for their protection (Dias, 2009: 170). Indeed, Canter Visccher gave a sense of the fluidity of this group when he mentions its multiple origins and constituents: “They are a mixed race; some sprung from Portuguese settlers and slaves whose children have intermarried with the blacks; but the greater part are the offspring of enfranchised Portuguese slaves. With these we must also reckon free slaves of all races; including Christian slaves who are chiefly of Romish persuasion” (Census of India, 1961b: 141).

It is these mixed people who came to bear the name Parankis in Kerala. But unlike powerful merchant communities in Cochin, these people had neither the economic resources nor the political clout to integrate themselves into the caste hierarchy on terms advantageous to them. And unlike the Eurasians who could claim “purer” blood, their claims for inclusion in groups that claimed to be closer to Europeans, such as the “Anglo-Indian”, were poor. And so the Census of India – Cochin (1931), for instance, noted that although they did have a distinctly traceable foreign origin, the “great majority of ‘firangis’ [more commonly called Parankis — literally ‘Portuguese’ in Malayalam] have at present next to no admixture of foreign blood. They differ very little from Indian Christians” (Census of India – Cochin, 1931: 259). K. P. Padmanabha Menon, the noted Malayali historian of the early twentieth century, remarks that the Parankis were now being perceived as distinct from — and inferior to — the Eurasians:

Topasses are evidently known in Cochin as Parangees or Feringhees of whom there are 2539 persons in the Cochin State. This of course does not include the Eurasians who were originally classified with Topasses but who by the rise of social scale have been now brought under a distinct social head. (Menon, 2001: 441)

From 1911, in India, the term “Anglo-Indian” officially designated the people who used to be called “half-caste” or “Eurasian”. The Government of India offered a legal definition (Blunt, 2002: 52), which allowed a small section of better-off, English-educated Parankis to claim this name. This whipped up opposition among the sections of the community who considered themselves racially closer to the white people. By the 1930s, it appears that the term “Luso-Indian” was declining in favour of “Anglo-Indian”, as evident from the names of the organizations and associations formed at that time (Dias, 2009: 135).

The description “Anglo-Indian” was preferred, even actively sought, by those who were generally considered to possess less European blood. But even as the upper crust of Paranki society found acceptance as Anglo-Indians, the poor majority were made abject. At the same time, the dividing line between the poorer majority of Parankis and the native Latin Catholic community was wearing thin. In the Census of India of 1961, authors of Village Surveys noted that the differences between the “Anglo-Indians” of Mulavucaud (who overwhelmingly identified themselves by Portuguese surnames) and the Latin Catholics were breaking down and intermarriage was becoming very common — and that only some special features of the latter, like women’s dress, persisted (Census of India, 1961a: 151). The Cochin creole language may face extinction (Cardoso, 2010), although Dias (2009) seems more optimistic.

Indeed, it is interesting that even Charles Dias, who in his recent work seeks to recast these people within the “Luso-Indian” historical and cultural legacies, often “sifts out” the Portuguese heritage and enthrones it above all other traces. Dias does acknowledge that South-East Asians brought to Cochin by Albuquerque formed part of the “Luso-Indian community” in its earliest days. However, interestingly enough, he claims that the group comprised only women: “Those Mongolian features among the descendants of the Portuguese have to be presumed to have been born out of such intermarriages” (Dias, 2009: 100). This differs from Reis Thomaz’ observation, and Dias’ evidence appears to be rather thin. He claims that the Kebaya-sarong costume worn widely by Paranki women in Cochin and other places in Kerala, known as the kavaya, is a vestige of this connection. However, he reads its persistence as “lack of progress”: “The continued use of the Malaccan costume of women by the Luso-Indians of Kerala shows the stagnant state of the community at the interior villages” (Dias, 2009: 9). There is also the sifting out of the Portuguese from the Malaccan in Dias’ discussion of the Malayalam spoken by the Parankis (Dias, 2009: 194). ⁸

The Parankis’ recent history, thus, has been one of gradual decline. Perceived to be lacking in “pure blood”, they seem to have blended more and more into the Latin Catholics, who are considered to be Christians of lower-caste ranking, compared with the Syrian Christians who claim upper-caste status. The history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Malayali society is prominently that of the modernization and self-assertion of the economically powerful caste-communities. In this period, often referred to as the period of “social renaissance” or “social reform”, the elite sections of many prominent caste-communities in Malayali societies, who received a colonial education and liberal values filtered through colonialism, began to call for far-reaching reform of community institutions and practices, challenging the traditional Brahminical jamnabhedam order (Jeffrey, 2003). The powerful Nair and the Syrian Christians successfully refurbished and homogenized pre-existing privileged identities. The Ezhava community, which achieved similar transformation, was originally lower-caste and untouchable, but the members of this community made the best of economic opportunities which became available to them during the integration of the Malabar economy into the capitalist world system in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, they converted this into social and political mobility, successfully challenging their marginalization in the caste order (Chandramohan, 1981). While a fully indigenous origin was one of the keystones on which modernized caste-community assertions were successfully made, this was not always necessary. The origin myths adopted by many Ezhava caste-community reformers claimed Sinhalese and Buddhist origins for the community (Kalarikkal, 2012). However, in their struggle against the caste order, the Ezhava community largely identified themselves within the framework of reformed Indian high-Hinduism of these times, claiming the Ezhava ascetic and Hindu social reformer Sree Narayana as their preceptor (Chandramohan, 1981). They also were able to amass tremendous economic power in this period. This is in sharp contrast to the poor majority of the Parankis who were alienated from the emergent category of the “Anglo-Indian”, even as general society continued to perceive them as within it (like the authors of the Census village studies, mentioned above). As the non-Hindu, mixed, descendants of “foreigners” and subaltern castes, and members of the lower middle or poorer classes, the Parankis seem to have been many times jinxed. No surprise, then, that as the discussion above indicates, even the articulation of the “Luso-Indian” in contemporary Kerala seems to exclude them.

Crisis and hope

Novel-writing in Malayalam was an important practice in and through which homogenous caste-community identities were imagined and asserted in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Malayali society. Writing about late nineteenth-century Malayalam novels, Dilip Menon challenges Andersonian claims about the novel and imagining the nation, pointing instead to these novels’ centrality in the shaping of caste-community identities within the framework of colonial modernity. He distinguishes between the “upper-caste” and “subaltern” novels of this period and specifies their difference: while the former fashions a self embedded in a new reformed caste-collectivity within the imagined Indian nationalist Hindu order, the latter addressed the hierarchies and inequalities of existing society (Menon, 2006).

In most of these “upper-caste” novels, the consolidation of community identity is achieved through narrating the life-journey of a female protagonist, whose trials and tribulations stand in place of the community struggling for self-definition and social space. Nevertheless, in many of these works, hidden behind the female figure is the hand of the male reformer who shapes her subjectivity and directs her conduct in desirable ways. For instance, in O. Chandu Menon’s Indulekha (1889), the eponymous heroine is a modern educated Nair woman, whose self-building is initiated and guided by her enlightened uncle. She possesses an empowered sense of self and asserts herself— not just to defend her dignity as an individual but also to uphold the self-respect of the (imagined) Nair community — against the power of the aristocratic Brahmin man. At the end of the tale, she establishes herself as a sexually chaste woman who also challenges traditional norms that successfully allowed Brahmin men easier sexual access to Nair women. The upper-caste novel’s imagination of the woman’s centrality to the new community (quite typical of high-Hindu reformism and nationalism elsewhere in India; Sarkar, 2001), embodying its self-respect, continues to be articulated in the present. It appears to be now acceptable even to subaltern authors, who seem to combine the above themes typical of the “upper-caste novel” with those of injustice and inequality, themes typical of the “subaltern novel” as understood by Dilip Menon (2006). I refer to Narayan’s novel Kocharethy (1998), which was recently translated by Catherine Thankamma as “The Araya Woman”. The novel asserts tribal identity in its recounting of the hitherto-obscured history of the marginalization of tribal people in Kerala, through the life of its eponymous heroine. While Narayan’s novel tries to assert tribal identity through the use of tribal language and the retelling of a history of great dispossession and exploitation, it does so through narrating the life-story of a chaste, dutiful, and beautiful woman who stands for the tribal community; her experiences mirror its tribulations. This female figure is not too distant from that of the chaste Hindu woman of the dominant Malayali social reformisms. ⁹

Johny Miranda’s Requiem for the Living (2013) differs from Narayan’s novel in its undeniable distance from the themes of both these late nineteenth-century genres. Its subalternity is certainly defined by the present, in which writing Malayalam literature serves (once again, after the late nineteenth century) as a “practice of the self” for underprivileged people here (Devika, 2013). But it is clearly not fired by the explicit desire for social reform, as were the early nineteenth-century subaltern novels. Nor is the anticipated reader a member of the Paranki community, quite unlike the late nineteenth-century subaltern novel which directly addressed itself to members of the oppressed caste-communities. Rather, the anticipated reader is one who possesses the cultural literacy associated with mainstream Malayali identity, to whom the community was not visible until now. The novella does not belong to the genre of the nineteenth-century “upper-caste” novel either. Although the narrator of Requiem for the Living is male, it is dominated by unreformed female figures, or powerful maternal characters beyond the power of the (absent) male reformer. Unlike the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century upper-caste and subaltern novels, which often harnessed literature explicitly to the end of social reform, Requiem for the Living has no such explicit ends. In his note that prefaces the English translation, Miranda insists that his work is not merely “the documentation of a society, or a description of its ways of life and its customs and rituals” (Miranda, 2013: xii–xiii). ¹⁰ Rather, it is a literary work meant to “create a fresh flavor in fiction, a completely original artistic experience” (xiii).

Indeed, Miranda’s female characters, especially the formidable grandmother in Requiem for the Living have a remarkable resemblance to female Creole characters portrayed in the novels of Creole authors, especially the Macanese novelist Henrique de Senna Fernandes and the Singaporean Rex Shelley, at least in their portrayal of women as perpetuators of a distinct lineage and keepers of eminently mixed tradition (Morais, 2011). While more comparative research is clearly necessary to establish this, it seems that this inadvertent sharing may justify the characterization of this novella as the first “Cochin creole ” novel, though it is written in Malayalam. ¹¹

However, Miranda cannot perhaps ignore either the history of the novel and community-assertion in Kerala, or the question of delineating the Paranki community before launching into a novella which, he tells us, is about the Parankis. In his very recognition that his novella is primarily “literary” and not just a documentation of a community, Miranda makes oblique reference to the long connection between the novel-form and assertion of community identities in Malayali society. Yet he tries to redraw (rather than completely erase) the line between political and aesthetic significances of literature. So, despite its clear departure from available modes in which the novel-form has been deployed in community identity-building and assertion, there can be little doubt that the novella was conceived by its author, at least in part as rendering the Paranki community visible and, to that extent, contributing to its self-assertion in the present. Here, he lays a claim to the “Anglo-Indian” identity himself, identifying his work as capturing the “life of the Anglo-Indian Latin Catholics of central Kerala who have lived through great historical, political and social upheavals” (xi). However, almost immediately, he has to question prior homogenized formulations of the “Anglo-Indian”. First, he mentions that this novella does not reaffirm common, derogatory stereotypes in the Malayali public about the “Anglo-Indians” — instead, it challenges them. Second, he asserts the specificity of the Paranki by anticipating and clearing the confusion regarding the boundaries that separate the Paranki and the more Westernized “Anglo-Indian”: “Though we were Parankis, the men in our family weren’t the kind who wore trousers. Instead, they wore the mundu and the half-sleeved shirt called kammeesa” (2).

Third, he inverts the power equation between “Paranki” and “Anglo-Indian” by projecting Paranki as the more expansive category — this “Anglo-Indian” may well be the English-speaking, upper-class Paranki. Miranda’s narrator declares:

So what if we call ourselves Parankis and have these surnames, none of us know English, nor have trousers, or coats or shoes […] When the coastal people — the lowest of the low […] were converted, all that they were really given were some four hundred surnames […] this venom was injected into us by none other than some suited-booted English-speaking Parankis. (12–13)

Through these three moves, he renders the elitist construction of “Anglo-Indian” vs. “Paranki” unstable.

However, the novella is not about the conflict between elite Anglo-Indians and subaltern Parankis; nor does it romanticize the predicament of the Parankis. There is no malevolent other being singled out for blame: Anglo-Indians have little significance in the novella, except in the introduction (here Miranda sketches an outline of the Parankis and their world which, according to him, lends itself naturally to magical realism). Miranda introduces the novella and the predicament of the Parankis together, in the very first line of the author’s note and the title of the book as well. It is, he asserts, “the story of a people who are eligible for an oppees [a prayer for the dead] in every way, while yet alive” (xi). Focusing on the specific sort of marginalization the community faced — that of being “hybrids” in a society dominated by the caste order — he conjures up an image of bestiality:

They [the Parankis] may lack a firm grasp of their own history and ancestry, but they continue to live with the sense of isolation and conflicted identity that comes along with being a hybrid race; a condition which affects the very rhythm of their lives. They may call themselves Anglo-Indians and carry outlandish surnames that stick out like tails, but the fact is that most of them remain backward and poor. (xii)

The Parankis, then, are caught between oppositions; their life is “naturally strange” — a world into which the author has access primarily because he was born and raised there. Miranda speaks of his novel portraying “the essential strangeness of life here, with its innate magical realism” (xii).

This “strangeness” has to do with at least three things: one, the peculiar neither-here-nor-there predicament of the community; two, the truly unique features of the community that set it apart from the rest of Malayali society; and three, the effect of the unfamiliarity of the mainstream Malayali reader with this world, which makes it potentially exotic, a possibility that Miranda is careful to close off explicitly. The possibility of rendering the community exotic and thus consumable to the mainstream reader is eliminated through the zigzag movement of the novel’s narration in and out of the community’s world. Depicting the community from within, Miranda’s narrative differs remarkably from other depictions of Luso- or Anglo-Indians, both literary and non-literary (say, from the Malayalam novel/film Chattakkari (1974) which depicts the “Anglo-Indian”, or Charles Dias’ research, mentioned above). This is because the South-East Asian traces remain in it, strewn throughout the text unselfconsciously. Examples include terms of address utterly unique to the Parankis, like Nona (in Indonesian-Dutch, this refers to a locally-born Creole woman, believed to come from the Portuguese “Senhora” for “lady” or “madam”) and Choochi, apparently a version of “Zusje” (Indonesian-Dutch for “sister”). Descriptions of Paranki dress codes also definitely reveal their sharings with Creole communities in South-East Asia. But running through the novel is the narrator’s awareness that the reader is most likely to have no knowledge of the Parankis. The narrative is broken more than once in the effort to provide an “anthropological introduction” of sorts to the community.

However, as the author suggests through his reference to the “innate magical realism” of the community, articulating its strange contemporary predicament requires more than just straightforward realism. In the author’s note, Miranda indicates that the Paranki male and female characters he creates do have counterparts in the real world. That said, the plot which unfolds around the singular experiences of the Paranki narrator, the young Josy/Osha Pereira (Osha being the Creolized pronunciation of the Portuguese name, Jose), allegorizes the crisis of the community. The young successful male modernizer-reformer and the young female he successfully reforms are at the heart of caste/community-assertion in the earlier Malayalam caste-community novels — almost exact inversions of these occupy the central space of Requiem for the Living. Osha’s character is marked precisely by isolation, lack of voice, and powerlessness; he is undoubtedly the “failed” male, he who could not be a reformer despite his ability to gain distance from and insight into the community’s plight. His sister Ida is the “young female” who he would have redeemed had he become the reformer; she is the ruined female.

Yet, Requiem for the Living is not just an inversion of the earlier models. Osha Pereira, the young sacristan who leads a bleak existence in a coastal village near Kochi, is plagued by poverty and lacks direction and hopes for the future. The background is his family’s more secure and prosperous past, before his birth, in the bosom of the community guided and regulated by a powerful maternal figure, Juana Mammanjhi (possibly the Cochin Creole version of Mamae). This grandmother is the centre around which not only her family but also the whole community revolves. It is she who secures the economic stability of her family, keeps traditions and rituals of the local faith which appear to be a hybrid of Catholic practices and local Hindu oracle-worship, and is in general the repository of the community’s knowledge.

The difference between senior paternal and maternal figures is striking. The mothers are the keepers of the community, carrying and handing down its hybrid customs, practices, and knowledges. Not surprisingly, the Malaccan traces are found in her, not in the males — as if acknowledging Dias’ claim about women-only migration from Malacca; only here, the mother embodies both Malaccan and Portuguese legacies. The father, however, embodies the community’s crisis, its dualistic imagination of origin, of being caught between oppositions. He thus wages a silent, self-destructive, ultimately fruitless battle against the Catholic Church and faith, in effect reducing its core to the Christian faith (and ignoring its hybridity), attacking it relentlessly. He steals from the church and whispers against Christ constantly, calling him Jooda kazhuvery. Jooda refers to Jesus’ Jewish birth. This removes him twice from the faith, as the abuse seems to direct (possibly Christian) anti-Semitism against Jesus. It also evokes the hatred of Jesus voiced by the Jewish leaders at Jerusalem of Christ’s time, evident in the derogatory word kazhuvery, which literally means, “a criminal condemned to die at the stake”. In contrast, the mothers are well-embedded in the community’s hybrid traditions, both religious and otherwise, and do not share Osha’s father’s discontent.

The narration proceeds through two distinct but interrelated strands. The first strand begins with a major event early on in the narrative — at the age of 12, Osha stumbles upon a small key in the soil thrown up when a grave was dug to bury the dead body of a pregnant woman in the cemetery. This discovery sets him on a search for its lock — and this becomes his obsession, the very quest of his life. This masterful (possibly phallic) metaphor indicates in no uncertain terms that the novella is about an identity — for identities, especially community identities, are like keys for which locks have to be found. It overshadows his life entirely — and therefore he can only watch the terrible tragedies which befall his mother and his sister. His mother, who rebelled against his formidable grandmother, turns to evil ways. Her husband is weak and violent, and she herself leads her daughter Ida into a disastrous relationship, which eventually pushes the latter into madness and death. Osha, however, remains fixed on finding the lock that his key may open, and is driven by its irresistible power, even as this tragedy unfolds:

Chitta was roaming the city streets day and night. What could I have done […] I too had been wandering aimlessly with my chaavi […] Like the fat, shiny, white maggot that comes out when a grave is dug, [the lock] keeps crawling through my brain and mind. (20)

He even tries his key on the lock of his grandmother’s wooden box where she stores her ritual items, writing, and special clothes, but it does not fit. Osha is also unsuccessfully searching for a special prayer which the male elders in his family alone recited. In between, he marries Jacintha who is not a Paranki and moves in with her (as is the practice in a number of coastal Latin Catholic communities). But this does not soothe him; his agonized quest continues even on his wedding night and he is reluctant to consummate his marriage. Eventually, Jacintha takes the initiative and they consummate their union, but he is plagued by nightmares. In this recurrent dream, Osha’s sexual anxieties commingle with his anxieties about moving away from the community: he sees in this dream a pig-man buried for slaughter whose entrails explode as it suffocates to death underground. Jacintha is not unfamiliar with the mad quests of menfolk. Her own father is away at the pilgrimage centre of Mother Mary at Velamkkanni, seeking solace there after having received divine punishment for greed. Right from the early days of their marriage, Jacintha dislikes the key and wants him to give it up, and finally she persuades him to give her his key. But when he gets to know of her pregnancy, he keeps away from Jacintha’s house.

The second thread narrates the terrible fate of the women in Osha’s family. It too starts with the digging of the grave to bury the pregnant woman who died, which he witnesses at the age of 12. Pregnant women, Osha says, represent unfulfilled wishes; they may wander as the lost and malevolent spirits of women who died violent deaths, Yakshis. Perhaps they represent unrealized promises as well. The key emerges precisely from the depths in which such failed hopes must be buried. That Osha’s grandmother, the pillar of their community, died about the same time he found the key, is not coincidental. It marks the beginning of a period of total breakdown for the women in his family, who are seduced and betrayed. His mother, who had walked out of the joint family household in defiance of his grandmother, now begins to go astray. His sister, Ida, is betrayed in love and returns home, quite possibly like a lost female soul rising up from the grave, as a Yakshi. Indeed, seeing her back home, Osha feels that she “now looked like a shattered tomb”. Caught up as he is in his obsessive search, he watches out of the corner of his eye as she descends into madness and depravity, and is finally hacked to death by their father. Indeed, Ida’s fate is to wander in madness and despair like a lost female soul, to die pregnant, and be reburied with her Achilles’ tendon cut so that she will not rise up again. Perhaps Ida was to have been the object of reform, but she is not saved. Osha, who alone could be the reformer of the community (since it is he alone in the text who has achieved the necessary distance from the community), remains utterly passive.

Up to this point, it may appear that Requiem for the Living is merely the inversion of the earlier forms of the Malayali novel of caste-community assertion, actually, a novel of caste-community dissolution, However, the tale does not end at Ida’s death — or her murder at the hands of the patriarch. This event changes her mother who returns and undergoes a total transformation, slipping into the matriarch’s role with extraordinary smoothness. She inherits Mammanjhi’s legacy and takes up her role in the community as the oracle, soothsayer, and custodian of its knowledges and practices. Interestingly enough, Osha’s and Ida’s mother seems to possess the uncanny ability to re-enter the community and pick up its reins, leaving behind her earlier self completely. And this is in sharp contrast with Osha’s experience of both leaving the community through marriage (which, ironically, he could never really enter despite being born in it) and re-entering it.

The two strands come together in a climax when Mamma takes over Mammanjhi’s duties and powers. Osha’s anguish about intercourse with Jacintha — his unconscious fears about moving away from the community — becomes unbearable. He seeks the key again, only to find out that Jacintha and her mother had sold it for money. For Jacintha and her mother who are not Parankis, the key can have only material significance; they do not share the meanings that Osha unconsciously attaches to it. This casts him into a deep sense of loss, but even as he broods over it, he is overtaken by a series of momentous events — the death of his father and the discovery of Mammanjhi’s sainthood during his burial. This anguish reaches a crescendo when the novella ends, the protagonist’s search ends in futility, and the community seems to be submerging within the Catholic Church. Struck immobile and dumb, Osha is now under his wife’s tender care. Here too, gender emerges as an axis of power and the crisis of masculinity is unmistakable. Jacintha’s father, who was away atoning his greed at the shrine of Velamkanni now returns home, but Osha, though filled with the feeling that the older man had things to share with him exclusively, cannot overcome his paralysis to reach out.

This is not a total disaster, for it also appears that the merging of the community in the larger Church may not be the end. Mammanjhi the Oracle, the Soothsayer, is to become a Catholic saint, canonized by the Vatican. And this is achieved not through social reform and the enlightened male reformer, not through the discovery of its “truth” — or of the lock which the key may fit — but through its powerful women and the community’s epistemology, rituals, and practices that they preserve. In other words, the community is redeemed not through the male modernizer-reformer as in the more familiar Malayali novels, but through women who preserve its hybrid non-modern knowledges.

It is also important that the novella does not seek to excavate the South-East Asian legacies of the community. Indeed, it seeks to portray the futility of the quest for pure roots, and the obsession with pure identity — keys and locks that fit each other exclusively. In this sense, Requiem for the Living is a novella of community, but with hybridity, not purity, at the heart of its identity. Perhaps this is why it was poorly noticed in the Malayalam literary public. ¹² It was not reviewed seriously; nor was its publisher, Mathrubhumi Books, even interested in another edition. Subsequently, however, with a number of favourable reviews of the English translation appearing in the local English press, a leading Malayalam publisher, DC Books, is producing a second edition.

Conclusion

Historically, the “Anglo-Indians” of Kerala are composed of different groups which have merged into this category at different times. It appears evident from the prominent Anglo-Indian author and activist Charles Dias’ own work that class distinctions are vital in determining the proximity specific individuals and families could claim to the paternal legacy. Thus, not all “Anglo-Indians” experience economic marginality. Sections of the Anglo-Indians did enjoy privileges, particularly service jobs, under the British. Among those of the Anglo-Indians with Portuguese names and Latin Catholic faith, known often as Luso-Indians, many who were not educated possessed highly marketable skills. Charles Dias’ work (2009) meticulously charts their success in converting these skills into viable economic opportunities. A good many Anglo-Indians were able to migrate. Alison Blunt notes that by the 1970s, about one-third of the Anglo-Indians in India had migrated to the UK, Canada, or Australia (Blunt, 2002). While their cultural legacies remain misunderstood and marginalized — and understood through very many derogatory stereotypes ¹³ — this group has successfully combated received opinion; for example, by getting the government of Kerala to ban the Merchant–Ivory movie Cotton Mary as demeaning to Anglo-Indians. More recent efforts to recast people with Portuguese surnames in this group as “Luso-Indians” and reclaim cultural legacies, such as those of Charles Dias, have focused less on critiquing the general devaluation within modern Malayali identity and much more on claiming a distinct identity that is arguably linked to Portuguese culture.

Even though it is not about the Anglo-Indian–Paranki conflict, Johny Miranda’s novella, Requiem for the Living, questions this effort, bringing to the fore the identity of the Paranki over those of the Luso- and Anglo-Indian. It hints that there are other, more subaltern, voices that may be further marginalized in and through the move to recast the community as “Luso-Indian”. This is well-reflected in the novella’s distance from Dias’ recovery project. In its lack of interest in discovering origins or essences, it privileges hybridity over purity. This goes against the grain of the ongoing effort to restore the paternal legacies as the essence of the community, which, it appears, also relegates traces of South-East Asian cultural inheritances to the maternal and assigns them lesser value.

In this essay, I have also tried to pay attention to the specificity of this novella within the larger history of the connection between the genre of the novel and the politics of caste-community identity assertion in Kerala. I argue that it falls into neither the “upper-caste” nor the “subaltern” genre of the caste-community novel. On the one hand, Requiem for the Living belongs to the contemporary moment of lower-caste assertion in Kerala; on the other hand, there are elements which render it closer to Creole novels from South-East Asia, which calls for a separate inquiry.

Lastly, there is the question of the kind of cosmopolitanism that the Paranki culture may represent. It has been argued that Anglo-Indians have indeed been represented as embodying a certain kind of desirable cosmopolitan modern, exemplified, for instance, in the Malayalam film Chattakkari (D’Cruz, 2007). But Requiem for the Living does not seem to hold such a possibility; the cosmopolitanism of the Parankis is no longer a conscious position they hold, rather it inheres in their culture. It has to be excavated through readings such as the present one.

Is such an enterprise worthwhile? It appears to me that the terms of the debate are set by long-standing contests within First-World academia — between universalists who preserve or rework Kantian cosmopolitanism (Nussbaum, 1996) and others who seek to rearticulate the idea in non-Eurocentric ways (see, e.g., Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003) and/or in the backdrop of possibilities opened by intensified globalization (for instance, Connolly, 2000). Nevertheless, these latter interventions often stay within the concerns and contexts of First-World academic metropolises. From the vantage-point of the “post-colony” which I occupy, it appears that the debate on cosmopolitanism, if it is to sound appealing, needs to move away from both Kantian universalism and the articulation of the significance of cultural hybridity or the “rural cosmopolitan” (as, for example, Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003 does). The latter interventions are made well within Euro-American academic circles and essentially address the questions raised there. As Pheng Cheah (1997) reminds us, discursive moves made against entrenched powers in First-World academia may not have similar effects elsewhere; they may also render people in the post-colony invisible. While highlighting the agential capacities of people who straddle worlds of difference may indeed be an oppositional move in First-World academe, it may not suffice in the post-colony. I have argued this at length elsewhere (Devika, 2012).

As an inhabitant of the “post-colony” (India), I think that it is vital to imagine a cosmopolitanism that does not perpetuate the implicit racism of Kantian universalism or restrict itself to combating it in terms set by the First-World academic contexts. For in the contemporary “post-colonies”, the cultural challenges are from both entrenched universalisms and virulently exclusivist and essentialized local identities and affiliations. Here it may be vital for us to probe the forgotten or ignored cosmopolitanism of everyday life of the past and present — of objects, material life, cuisine, fabrics, architecture — the give-and-take of which has shaped and continues to shape what we perceive to be essential to narrower identities and cultures. Requiem for the Living offers a rare view of an “actually existing” historically-shaped cosmopolitanism of everyday life. It depicts, albeit unselfconsciously, the intermingling of European, Malayali, and South-East Asian elements in the totality of Paranki life, which implicitly privileges the hybridity that makes it impossible to isolate these elements from each other and from the whole. Given that increasingly narrow nationalisms and sub-nationalisms encourage the purging of elements deemed “foreign” and/or “low”, Miranda’s account is politically valuable as well. But most importantly, it alerts us to the possibility of finding traces of both the “foreign” and the “low” in all communities in Kerala.

Only pursuing such connections that make up the givens of our everyday life and lived traditions will help loosen essentialized constructions. It may indeed give us a sense of insertion that also reminds us simultaneously of our constantly changing, multiple connections to the worlds outside. The interest in cosmopolitanism has been criticized frequently as essentially elitist; but accounts such as Miranda’s allow us to imagine a subaltern cosmopolitanism that will surely be worth unearthing.