Michael Zank

You might well ask, what is Zank doing in India? Actually, few people call me “Zank” these days. Really only one person does, namely, our friend Guy, but it struck me as funny because that’s what they used to call me in school. Everyone was known by their last name, and not just during roll call. Also when a teacher called you to the board, in my case usually with the intention of amusing themselves at my expense. After a year of near despair, when I had my first “ungenügend” on a math test and my father comforted me (“it’s not like a broken leg”), I developed a thicker skin when it came to math teachers. I was still a musterschüler in other subjects for a while. I always met Fräulein Gamroth (German, geography, and sports) at the bottom of the stairs to carry her satchel. That relationship ended in seventh grade when I talked back at her for a perceived injustice. It was downhill from there. But that’s not why I am in India.

When Miriam and I thought about what to do during my sabbatical and her half-year of leave from the Hosmer School in Watertown, our original plan was to study Arabic. We had talked about this for a long time. The last time we discussed this was just before the Arab Spring, but then the civil war broke out in Syria (Aleppo seemed the best place to study the spoken dialect we are most interested in) and that was that. When we began making plans for this sabbatical, almost a year ago, we thought that perhaps Morocco would be the place for us. It was highly recommended as a wonderful place to live and travel (thanks, Diana Wylie!). It would have been close to Europe so we could have toured the parts of Spain that I hadn’t seen yet and also  visit our friends in France and Germany. But the spoken languages of Morocco wouldn’t have helped us achieve the purpose of learning to communicate better with our Arab friends in Israel. That’s when we thought this may be the time to do something completely different. Go somewhere we’ve never been. Do something we’ve always wanted to do. That’s when we decided on India.

Encouraged and equipped with lots of good advice from many kind people who had been to India and loved it we spent the next few months researching artists’ residencies for Miriam, contacted various places, and slowly but persistently worked out a plan. It took many “India meetings” to hammer out the details and make all the arrangements, settle our affairs at home, and get ready (visas, vaccinations, etc.).

Neither of us had a clear idea of what to expect. But we’re at an age and in a situation in life where we’re both healthy, greying but still in fine shape, our lives and affairs in good order, really an ideal condition to set out and explore a part of the world one is vaguely aware of and that has been weaving in and out of one’s consciousness without great urgency but with a certain allure of the exotic. Miriam did south Indian dances as a child (she still has the costume her mother sowed for her). In my adolescent years, a time of musical exploration, I listened to endless reel to reel tapes of ragas and adored George Harrison’s recordings of Indian music. Then I found Jesus and put away the songs to Krishna and Govind as pagan idolatry. But the love for Indian music never went away. After high school, during my first year as a student of Protestant theology in Göttingen I took Religionswissenschaft classes on Buddhism and Hinduism. Then I lost sight of it for a while. These last twenty-three years of teaching as a member of a religion department made me aware of the fact that it is a deficiency not to know more about other parts of the world. I learned a lot about the complexities of religion and identity in the wake of the British raj from the work of my colleague Teena Purohit, though I can’t say I was in any way prepared for what we are actually finding here.

It’s been a stroke of luck to begin our time in India in the south, in the state of Kerala rather than in one of the busy urban centers like Mumbay or New Delhi. Kerala, and particularly Cochin (Kochi) where we first landed, flying in through Dubai, is predominantly Muslim and Hindu but has a strong Christian minority (divided into Syriac Jacobites, Roman Catholics, and now a growing number of Pentecostalists) that traces its origins to St. Thomas, the “doubting” Apostle. (See this recent article on the question of authenticity of the tradition that the saint himself established the first Christian mission in India. With thanks to my friend Tomás Kalmar for the link.) Cochin also boasted a sizable Jewish community. There’s still an active synagogue (the oldest one in the lands of the British Commonwealth), but the local community mostly up and left for Israel shortly after the founding of the state. The Jews of Kerala are the stuff of great rumors of a Jewish kingdom in the east that spread to early modern Europe and stirred messianic hopes during the time of the Protestant Reformation. Archaeologists have evidence of regular Roman trade missions to the coast of Malabar going back to the first century CE.

We left the old port city of Cochin after a few days and moved up here to an artists’ residency twelve kilometers from Vagamon, in the Western Ghats, a mountain range between Kerala and Tamil Nadu that is deemed a world heritage site for its natural resources and bio-diversity. Our place, run by Cyril Jacob, a retired banker,  gentleman farmer, and founder-director of “Palette People,” is nestled between tea plantations and grassland. In the shaded valleys you find coffee, bananas, guava, cocoa, cashew, various types of legumes and spices, grown by the many small farmers who moved into this area since the partition of the sub-continent, when Indians were starving and the government provided opportunity to acquire leases of public land through provided there was evidence of farming and agriculture. Not far from here are forest preserves with settlements of tribes people who are protected by law from all land alienation. Here and there among the tea plantations and small land-holders are resorts, mostly for Indian tourists who enjoy weekends away, where alcohol–a scourge now widely controlled–flows freely.

Most enjoyable for us are our daily walks where we discover something different every day and make friends with the local population, despite the fact that we don’t speak Malayalam or Tamil and they speak very little English. I post pictures on my Facebook page every day that have proved a source of relief to my friends who have been hit by the full force of the political developments back in the US. Now it’s time to put aside the computer and take out the clarinet. This too has proved useful. The instrument is a wonderful conversation starter for people with whom you have no other common language. Miriam and I are spending altogether three weeks here at “Green Meadows.” We’re going back to Cochin on Feb 11, stay and explore the area until the 19th, then on to Salawas village near Jodhpur, for our residence at “Carpe Diem.”