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back to the days of the Portuguese conversion. ‘Before Christianity arrived, the fishermen here used to worship Meenakshi or Bhagavathi Amman, and Xavier knew they were attached to their feminine goddesses,’ Kattar said. ‘That was why he emphasised the role of Mary rather than Christ—for one maternal goddess to take the place of another.’ Even more animist beliefs, such as a near-superstitious regard for deities of the ocean, were subsumed by the Virgin; today, the Paravas of Tuticorin often call her their
Kadal Maatha,
or mother of the sea.
    ‘The Paravas are very religious folks,’ Kattar said. ‘As people dealing on such a daily basis with nature, with their very life at stake, they develop great respect and confidence for the supernatural, for the power that has created the sea.’ Kattar is a Parava himself, and perhaps that emboldened him to speak bluntly of his community—so bluntly that, at times, I caught tiny whiffs of a dismissive superiority. ‘The fishing community is conditioned by its work and its situation—they’re like a tribal people,’ he once said. ‘They have changed very little in six hundred years. Till recently, many of them were illiterate, and procreation was their only recreation.’
    Then he softened. ‘I think, essentially, you have to understand them to serve them, and many bishops and fathers before me didn’t understand them,’ he said. ‘For instance, many of the fishermen talk loudly, because they are used to shouting over the sound of the wind and the waves. But that can be misunderstood as shouting.’ There were problems of alcoholism and a persistent addiction to betel nut, Kattar admitted, but there were also many poets and musicians within the community, ‘all originals.’ ‘They’re very intelligent, very methodical,’ he said, indulging in a too-sweeping anthropological generalization. ‘You should see them in the villages, resolving a dispute or an argument. They weigh the pros and cons, and they arrive at a really measured way of according culpability.’
    It was over the course of my conversations with Kattar that I learned how the Catholicism here resembled a veneer, applied upon an older base of Hindu customs and caste traditions, many of which the Church had wisely allowed to bubble up to the surface. There is syncretism in language, in how words such as ‘kovil’ and ‘aradhana,’ traditionally intended for temples and Hindu celebrations of worship, are now applied to churches and Catholic feasts. There is syncretism in practice, in the lighting of oil lamps instead of candles, in the full-stretch prostrations that men performed at Our Lady of the Snows, in conducting both the Hindu
valakappu
ceremony for pregnant women and Christian baptism for newborn babies, even in the respectful act of leaving one’s shoes outside the entrance of the church. And sometimes, there is syncretism in thought, in how a Christian fisherman still propitiates the Hindu god Murugan and refers to him
‘Machaan’
or ‘Brother-in-law,’ because Murugan’s wife Devayani came from Parava stock—at least according to a Parava legend that has somehow been comfortably ensconced within another faith for five hundred years now.

    That Sunday morning, after Kattar’s English Mass, Fernando took me to the smaller Sacred Heart Church, in a narrow road behind Our Lady of the Snows. The Sacred Heart functions more as a prayer hall than a church, and it was deserted at the time. But in a large blue-and-white shed next to it was another symbol of Parava syncretism: the Pon Ther, or the golden carriage. Since 1806, first annually and then every twelve years and now every five years, the idol of Our Lady of the Snows is installed in the Ther, which is then hauled around town with great pomp and floral celebration—exactly as South Indian temples do with their own idols. In her book, in fact, Bayly mentions that, for many years, the painted, processional banners were a set of