Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian Page B

their very nomenclature. Tamil Sangam literature, from the years between 300 BCE and 200 CE , refers to them as ‘neithalimakkal,’ or ‘people of the coastal tracts,’ but this seems too poetically generic. For long, the fishermen were known by their caste—Parava—but many today prefer to be called Bharathas or Bharathakulas, which instantly confers a martial lineage dating back to Bharatha, king of Ayodhya and brother of Rama. Another, rather more extreme theory believes the Paravas to be one of the lost tribes of Israel. But Hindu or Jewish roots notwithstanding, they are now almost overwhelmingly Catholic—and that happened because of one man’s ear lobe.
    Early in the sixteenth century, a seaman of the Kayalar caste—which had been recently converted to Islam by Arab traders—insulted a Parava woman with an epithet that is unfortunately lost to history. Her husband, when he tried to intervene, got his ear lobe cut off for his troubles, losing his pearl earring in the bargain. With the Ear Lobe Incident, the long-simmering tensions between the Paravas and the Kayalar Muslims appear to have boiled over. The Paravas approached the newly arrived Portuguese for protection, and they were promised this in return for their faith and a monopoly on pearl fishing rights. So, in a mass baptism in the mid-1530s, roughly twenty thousand people from thirty villages converted to Christianity—possibly the biggest such single conversion in history. This was a conversion merely in the most elementary sense of the word: In her book titled
Saints, Goddesses and Kings,
in a chapter on the Paravas, Susan Bayly contends that it only involved ‘being taught to make the sign of the cross and to recite garbled Tamil renderings of the creed andthe Ave Maria.’ For all its simplicity, nearly half a millennium later, the conversion seems to have held fast, at least on its surface.
    The heart of Parava Catholicism is the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, on South Beach Road in Tuticorin. Locally called the Periya Kovil, or the Big Church, it is located down the road from the old harbour, where in the bygone days barrels of drinking water would be imported from Sri Lanka, and from where cargo still leaves for the Maldives. Across the road from the church is a slim cross, so evidently a converted mast that it is still festooned with nautical-looking bunting. (The cross-mast is, I would observe, a common, vivid symbol of the twinning of the Church and the fishing community in this area, as is an altar centrepiece at another of Tuticorin’s churches: a large, open oyster bearing a creamy exaggeration of a pearl.) A few doors from the Church of Our Lady of the Snows was a blue, half-timbered structure, bearing a painted sign saying ‘Justin Photo Colour Lab’ and depicting a wild-eyed child presumably in the throes of being photographed. The sign looked as worn as the building it was labeling. ‘That used to be the Pandiyapathi’s house,’ my friend Amalraaj Fernando said as we passed it on his motorcycle. ‘I’ll explain later.’
    The Church of Our Lady of the Snows is, like so many local churches inspired by the Portuguese, painted in white and bright blue. It was consecrated, a signboard reads, in August 1582, but to my eyes, the church looked barely two hundred years old. (In 1707, the signboard mentions incidentally, the church ‘saved miraculously’ the town and surrounding villages from a heavy thunderbolt—from, in other words, a very loud sound.) To the tail of the older, more compact, central hall of the church, a new, rectangular room has been tacked on. In its sterile whiteness, this space could pass for a hospital waiting room if the altar weren’t visible through the doors at one end. ‘It was freshly painted for Christmas—that’s why it looks the way it does,’ Fernando told me.
    A small, neat man, Fernando nominally runs a mobile recharge shop in Tuticorin but, to the dismay of his wife, spends more time