"I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed..."

Moving to Kochi from Orissa 13 years ago made me Bollywood crazy. Having spoken Hindi all my life till then I felt the lack of “Hindiness” when I moved to the southern city where hardly anyone spoke the language let alone watch Hindi movies. Moving to Bombay after 5 years of living in Kochi de-Bollywoodised me. I guess it had to do with being once again in a Hindi-speaking environment and well, Bombay gave me an overdose of Bollywood which made me value it less. After having come to Europe I find that I am once again leaning towards it although my interest in it had virtually died. I find myself helpless when faced with the beginning of autumn and the turning of leaves into yellow, red or brown. It already looks beautiful. How can a once-Bollywood-crazy person like me not feel like picturing herself as Rani Mukherjee singing Tumhi Dekho Na from Kal Ho Na Ho with Shahrukh-I-hate-him-Khan?

Coming back to the point, I started thinking of all the times Bollywood entered and left my life depending on where I was and how I was situated. It occurred to me that Bollywood was only one of the things in my life the importance of which evolved over time and many moves to different locations and situations. Another one of those that comes into mind is religion. I was born Christian and still am a Lamb of God J. But this feeling of being Christian was not something I grew up with. The way I was brought up, going for Sunday Mass was, to put it crudely, the only Christian thing we ever did. In fact in a place where I was the only Christian person other than my siblings I used to feel strange about being a Christian. On one hand I was proud of being different from the rest and on the other I secretly felt ashamed of being different from the rest. Why you may ask. Let me give you a simple example. This is a conversation I very vividly remember from when I was probably eight.

Friend: What did you do on Sunday?

Me: I went to Church

Friend: How often do you go to Church? And where is it?

Me: It is very far from here but we Christians have to go every Sunday.

Friend: So your God is Jesus, na? Why do you pray to a naked God? (Yes, the phrase used was ‘nange bhagwan’)

Me: He is naked because he was stripped off his clothes by bad people.

Friend: But if he is God why did he let it happen?

Me: I don’t know.

Friend: Our gods are very strong. They destroy bad people.

My friends had cool gods, you see, beautiful, exquisitely clad and invincible. And they had plenty of them. I had only one. And he died on a cross. True, he came back to life but why did he have to die in the first place? Yes, these are remarks taken from what could probably have been among the first ‘religious debates’ of my childhood with friends.

At one of the last masses I attended in Orissa before moving to Kochi, my friend- a Christian, another rare creature in my realm of non-Christian friends, brought to my notice that we belonged to a group called Catholics. The word rang a bell. I had heard it somewhere; it sounded cool. But then, I thought, if there were Catholics there had to be non-Catholics too. Who are they? And what makes them different from Catholics? At this point I was almost 13 and I cannot imagine a Christian of that age brought up in Kerala, Mangalore or Bombay not knowing who Catholics are. So there, that was my childhood. I grew up knowing way more about Jagannath, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Vikramaditya and Krishna bhagabaan than I knew about Jesus, Mary or Joseph (at that point God and the Holy Spirit being strange entities mentioned only during mass).

Then came the move to Kochi, a city with a 75% population of Christians. Seeing that I was the only un-Christian being in my circles I took it upon myself to dive deep into Christian knowledge. In 3 years I knew my Bible and I almost became a Bible-verses-spitting self –appointed preacher. The militancy gradually wore off in the next 10 years but I never ceased being a ‘believer’.

Before I came to Europe I thought I knew what Christianity was. Since I had for the longest time wanted to study Indian Christianity I thought it wouldn’t be so difficult for me since I was a Christian myself. I could not have been more wrong. This I started realizing only when my PhD guide and I started discussing what things like faith, doctrines and belief meant to Indian Christians. He prodded and pried my eyes open into seeing what European/ Western Christianity is. It was strange. And indigestible. I don’t know if I can empathize with it still. I explained to him how I understood things and most Christians I knew shared the same understanding giving him specific examples of why and how we practice certain things to which he responded in peals of laughter. He was amazed and fascinated by this odd belief we called Christianity and said that to the western eye it would seem absurd if not blasphemous.

So if a practicing Christian like me, who everyone around believes to have a lot of bhakti, can harbour the kind of beliefs that she does and still be seen un-Christian, what can be said of the few million Christians in India not all of whom have had the opportunity or even disposition to engage in any religious thinking whatsoever? It now begins to make sense why those missionaries said that even the Christians in India are ‘heathens’. We still are and probably will remain so. You see, it takes a lot more than the promise of eternal life to drive the Indian out of you. And now as I sit and wonder what is it that I need to explore academically in order to learn to do good research I realize that I am my own subject and maybe the scores of books written by our very own Mallu priests on the Indian Church may not be able to give me half the answers that my very own experience can. I now understand why they said research is not just academics.