Free Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian

on the one hand and the Portuguese and the Church on the other. But the title has never meant as little as it does today. ‘It’s a sign of the times,’ Kattar had told me earlier. ‘The people have democratic and economic independence today, so nobody feels the need to look up to Motha, or to accord him the respect they gave their earlier leaders.’
    The few customary rights of the jati thalaivan that Motha’s father had continued to hold disappeared after 1947, when India became independent. ‘My father was a pauper, and he had many enemies,’ Motha said. Motha himself joined the merchant navy, starting as a seaman and retiring as a captain. ‘There are, perhaps, a few elderly people in Tuticorin who still respect the position of the jati thalaivan,’ he said. ‘But that is all. Otherwise, I have no friends. I am alone.’
    The narrow passageway from Motha’s door to his living room is dominated by a large painting on one wall—an oil of a gentleman with a wiggly moustache, whom a floating banner identifies as ‘Gabriel Dacrus Vas Gomus Saditaleivar, 1753–1808.’ That name would have been prefixed, in correspondence or formal speech, by the Portuguese honorific Senhor Senhor Don. In the painting, Senhor Senhor Don Gabriel Dacrus looks, slightly cross-eyed, at a pearl he holds in one hand, and an emblem of a fish further illustrates his connection to the Parava community. ‘This was the ancestor who had the Pon Ther built,’ Motha told us. On either side of the painting are mottled black-and-white photographs of Motha’s father and grandfather, in long, tapered hats, and of his grandmothers, their earlobes so weighed down by heavy earrings that they had turned into elongated gaskets.
    Behind the chair on which I was sitting (‘Two hundred yearsold, that chair,’ I was told) was a dark green, hand-carved section of wood that Motha identified as a portion of an ancestor’s palanquin. A pencilled scribble—‘1782.22.2’—dated it, he said, ‘to around the time the Dutch in these parts were chased out by the British.’ Opening the door of the palanquin, he showed us the golden emblem of a regal British lion. ‘You see? That was embossed when the jati thalaivan pledged allegiance to Great Britain,’ he said. ‘But who even knows or wants to know about this kind of thing now?’
    Like every old man, Motha bore a generic grudge against the modern world for caring too little for his generation, but his grievances against the Church were far more pointed. The priests who swarmed into Tuticorin after the mass conversion of the 1530s had worked assiduously, he said, to remove every trace of the jati thalaivan’s powers. ‘Many of them even denied that anything like the hereditary leadership system existed,’ he said. ‘They’d talk about the chieftains of the individual villages, but they would not acknowledge that there was a supreme leader. But it was only because there was one leader that the whole community could be converted at one go.’

    Captain J. Berchmans Motha
    Motha’s sentiment formed a part of a curious ambivalence towards the Church that I grew to sense in the Paravas. Their belief in the Catholic faith still runs strong, and a deepknowledge of their Church’s history is surprisingly common, as if it had been carried and spread by the region’s gigantic flies. When I sat in that staff room in Manapadu, a group of teachers of assorted middle-school subjects debated the chronology and geography of Xavier’s travels with the zeal and knowledge of university academics. When I sat in Fernando’s mobile recharge shop, he pulled open a drawer and shyly showed me a clutch of notebooks, with page after page of neatly written notes on the history of Tuticorin. I can think of no other mobile recharge shop to offer that sort of service.
    But regularly, the Paravas’ pride in their past reaches further back, past the advent of the Portuguese, and then it appears laced with regret or anger at