"Malacca in Malaysia and Cochin ..." a Kochi Travel Page by cochinjew

What do Malacca in Malaysia and Cochin in Kerala have in common?

Of course Albuquerque set off from Cochin to conquer Malacca which he did in 1511, the same year Baracoa was founded by the Spanish Conquistadores. Europeans had other intentions than glory when they set off for far away places, but this was long after the Middle Kingdom, which considered themselves far superior than the barbarians to the west, sent emissaries. The greatest of their navigators was Zheng He, a Sumar Moslem Eunuch from Yunnan in the service of the Emperor Zhu Di. He set off with the greatest fleet of vessels ever seen in these big oceans, nearly 300 of them, with technology superior to those of the Europeans who sailed a century later, with up to 30 000 men, including 130 doctors! The intentions of the Chinese were neither trade nor imposition of their religion (Zhu Di was Buddhist) on the lands they visited. They wanted the barbarians to know, by the extravagance of the gifts they bestowed upon them of finest of silks and porcelain, who was mighty and superior and the known world in the East all acknowledged their sovereignty.
Zheng He made Malacca one of his important stops (as he did Calicut and Hormuz) and from there sailed across to India and as far as Africa. So the next time some one tells you about Columbus discovering America, Bartolomeu Dias rounding the cape, Cabo de boa Esperanza or Vasco da Gama discovering the sea route to India or Captain Cook or Ferdinand Magellao gallivanting around the Pacific, they were but following the footsteps of the greatest of the Chinese navigators who had drawn accurate maps of the various countries they had visited. Zheng He visited Cochin on all his various trips and said to have left a stone monument in Cochin recording his visit. Vasco da Gama was not to come for another seventy years!
Cochin at the time of the visit of Zheng He had thriving Christian, Jewish and Moslem Communities. Along with the Hindu community. Both the Rajah of Cochin and Zamorin of Calicut were Hindus whereas their subjects were predominantly non Hindu.

Long before the Europeans had discovered the spice route, Arabs monopolized the route to India. Certainly at the time of the rule of King Solomon, there is mention of goods of Kerala Origin at his court. The Hebrew words for Sandalwood, apes, peacocks, ivory all resemble the local language of Kerala at that time. Jewish presence had been noted in the important ports of Calicut and Quilon as well as Craganore. By the 9th century we have indirect written evidence of the presence of Jews in Quilon. The copper plates written in ancient Malayalam( or nascent Malayalam) is considered to be 1000 years old which gives the right of residence to the Jews in Craganore and appointing Joseph Rabban as the owner of the land, whose descendants the latter visitors from Europe mistook to be ? king of Shingli?.

Benjamin Tudela, the Jewish traveller of 12th century had noted that at Kawlam (Quilon or the present day Kollam), there lived about ?a hundred Jews. All the inhabitants of the land are black and the Jews likewise. They are good pious Jews. They have Torah of Moses and the prophets and to a small extent Talmud and halakhah (Jewish code of law). The traveller Marco Polo had mentioned in the thirteenth century that there lived Jews in Kollam. In 1324, the celebrated Arab traveller, Ibn Batuta sailed the backwaters makes a mention of a Jewish community which is plausibly the old Jewish community of Chennamangalam. At the entrance to the synagogue which has been renovated by the Kerala Government, stands a tombstone with an inscription dating to 1269 of Common Era: dedicated to the memory of Sarah daughter of Israel, the oldest Hebrew text in India.

The synagogues had been in disuse since the migration of the community to Israel but lately the Government of Kerala has initiated a programme of renovating the decaying synagogues such as this one as well as the one in Maala which was built in 1597. (Not out of love for the history of the Jews, but seeing the hordes descending upon the Paradesi synagogue in Cochin, this curious interest on the microscopic minority among the billion Indians, turning itself into revenue)

A cataclysmic movement of the sea in the year 1341 silted up the fine harbour at Cranganore and opened up the port of Cochin with its safety of the backwaters. The Jewish community?s fortunes declined in Craganore while those of the Cochin Jewish Community flourished. Already in 1345, the Cochin market synagogue (cochangadi) had been built.
It is wise to remember that this was long before the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and arrival of so called White Jews in Cochin (paradesi or Foreigners as they are called). Currently in the wake of an increased tourism to Cochin, the remnants of this paradesi community has hijacked the history of the Jews of Kerala. They are just one part of the long history of the Jews of Kerala. Also, in abeyance with the Hindu traditions of caste and colour, they objectified the ancient Jewish community as being converted slaves of the white skinned Jews who had come here after 1492 via Turkey, Aden, Iraq, Yemen and Kurdistan.
The honour of the first synagogue of Kerala still standing goes to the one at Parur, built in 1164, fell into decay and reconstructed in 1616 in the original manner. The synagogue at Ernakulam, Kadavunbagam (or riverside in Malayalam) was not constructed until 1200 and remodelled afterwards loosing its original 12th century lay out.

I was recently in Malacca, to come back to the origin question. It is the most historical city in the Malay Peninsula including western Malay states and Singapore. I was saddened to see streets; especially the former Jonker Street has become a Junk Street full of so called Antique stores. Jew Street in Fort Cochin is now full of Antique stores, trading in items which has no geographical significance to Cochin or its history, most of the merchants being of Kashmiri origin who are there to take advantage of an increase in tourism.
Just before writing this piece I was reading Ian Buruma?s The Missionary and the Libertine. One of the chapters is dedicated to that great Indian intellectual, whom the Nobel laureate VSNaipaul had admired, Nirad C. Chaudhuri. During the course of the interview, done in 1988 when Nirad Chaudhuri was ninety years old and living in London, he had this to say about Calcutta. It was there, in the grandiose capital of the raj, that high caste Hindus imbodied European civilization during the nineteenth century, partly through mimicry of their British master, but mostly through literature. Great libraries were founded, grand houses built, stocked with books, fine European furniture, and paintings. There they still stand, for the inspection of tourists (?that abomination, the white tourist?, says Chaudhuri) who pose for pictures before the busts of Queen Victoria covered in bird droppings, and gaze at the cobwebbed chandeliers and the gilt-framed prints of the Battle of Waterloo.