Out of Kerala, in Goa

Kerala was fairly interesting, but I am now out of there - yesterday I arrived by train in Goa.

My final days in Fort Cochin included a visit to the local synagogue, granted by the local maharaja in 1568 to the  previously strong Jewish community there. Today, things are different, especially for the tiny group of some ten Pardesi Jews who fled Europe and The Inquisition some five hundred years ago. Following Indian independence, most of them have emigrated to Israel and now their last remaining female member of child-bearing age was collecting my entrance ticket with a stern expression on her face. Like me, she is 38 and childless, which probably means the end of history for her community.

There are however other groups of Jews there. Some of them arrived after fleeing the Romans in 70 CE. Other date their history to the Babylonian captivity.

In this sense Kerala has a very interesting history. As a centre for trade, it played a role already during the days of King Solomon. Christianity got a firm following already during the first century of our era, thanks to the arrival of the apostle Thomas ("Doubting Thomas").

Many expressions of this region's rich history have been preserved. The local martial art, kalarippayatu, that I learnt some of during my first week there, is one example. It is thought to be the first systematic martial art, from which all others developed. I don't know whether this is true, but there is a certain crudeness to some of its moves which perhaps speaks for that. It is also linked with Hinduism, and during training sessions I was required to perform Hindu rituals - some of which I had no way of grasping the meaning of.

Another preserved art is the traditional dance theatre called kathakali, of which I saw a demonstration in Fort Cochin. Also highly elaborate, with mythological figures dressed up in very colorful costumes and with their faces painted in ways that signals the traits of their character, the movements of their bodies, hands and eyes follow established and detailed rules of expression. Plays can go on for six hours or more, but luckily we were treated to a short version.

Strangely enough for a communist-run state perhaps the people of Kerala are still a bit trapped in such things, in what one may call dead history. At least that was an impression I got from the bigoted and stratefied society described in Arundhati Roy's novel "The God of Small Things". I finally got to the end of her book before I left, and was glad to put it behind me. Unless you feel a need to learn about Kerala, don't read it.

Well, feeling I was done with Kerala for now, I took a night train north and yesterday I arrived in Goa. It's nice here, I'll probably write a bit about it later but now it's time to meet someone for dinner.