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home / papers / 2024 / New Evidence on the Sixteenth-Century East Syriac Missions in the Malabar Coast: The Muttuchira Inscription (1581 CE) in Context

New Evidence on the Sixteenth-Century East Syriac Missions in the Malabar Coast: The Muttuchira Inscription (1581 CE) in Context

Summary

The study re-edits a 1581 granite stele from Muttuchira (Kottayam District, Kerala). The stele is written in Malayalam using a late form of the vaṭṭeḻuttu script. It records a sequence of open-air crosses raised in front of the local church between 1528 and 1581, and the installation of a Persian "Bleeding Cross." Every reading since the first publications in 1930 depended on a poor estampage, and that weak source produced competing and mistaken interpretations. The authors made a new, legible estampage and from it offer a Unicode vaṭṭeḻuttu transcription, a Modern Malayalam transliteration and translation, and an annotated English translation. They then interpret the text against Syriac, Portuguese and Malayalam documents. The new reading shows that Mar Denḥā was still alive in 1528 and led the resistance to the Portuguese and to Latinisation, from his see at Muttuchira. It also suggests that the open-air cross custom does not come from Portuguese practice. The work contributes to a post-colonial rewriting of St Thomas Christian history, which until now has been seen mostly through European sources.

Key points

  • The stele was set up in 1581 by the Persian bishop Mar Šem'on and his archdeacon Jacob Nadakkal. It was first studied in 1926 and first published in 1930, and it now sits in a room of the parish building.
  • Saranya Chandran and Mishel Maria Johnson produced the new estampage on 28 August 2021. A shorter Malayalam version of the study appeared in 2023.
  • The first cross, made of wood, was raised in 1528 by Mar Denḥā and Givargis Pakālōmaṯṯam. This contradicts the earlier belief (Schurhammer) that Denḥā died soon after arriving in 1503.
  • Several Portuguese traits in the text reflect the late-16th-century situation and not 1528:
    • the AD era,
    • Malayalam months matched to European ones,
    • a 18 December feast of the Bleeding Cross.
  • The authors infer that Kerala's granite church crosses probably date no earlier than the late 16th century and replaced wooden ones. The granite cross now standing at Muttuchira is dated 1624.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Generations of scholars disagreed because all of them worked from one flawed estampage; the fix was a better primary copy, not a cleverer interpretation. — For Mova (learn): when silver data is "agreed by several witnesses," check whether the witnesses share one noisy input, since shared input errors produce confident agreement on the wrong answer.
  • I2. The edition is built as visible layers: original-script transcription, then modern transliteration, then modern translation, then English with notes, so each step can be checked separately. — For Mova (back): keep every intermediate representation in the text → graph → text pipeline inspectable, so a bad output can be traced to the exact layer that introduced it.
  • I3. Features found in a later document (Portuguese dating conventions in 1581) are not projected back onto events it reports from decades earlier (1528). — For Mova (world): attach to each fact both the time of the event and the time of the source asserting it, so properties of the narrator's period do not leak into earlier states of the world.
  • I4. One dated sequence (a wooden cross later replaced by a granite one) is used as a template to date a whole class of similar objects across a region. — For Mova (world): event-order knowledge learned from one well-documented case could become a default script in the knowledge graph, which explicit counter-evidence can override.
  • I5. The authors widen the label "missionaries" to include West Asian bishops, because the local Christians saw them in the same outside role. — For Mova (frames): role labels can depend on whose perspective a frame takes, so the frame should record the point of view as well as who did what.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.46586/er.11.2024.11764

@article{perczel2024new,
  title = {{New Evidence on the Sixteenth-Century East Syriac Missions in the Malabar Coast: The Muttuchira Inscription (1581 CE) in Context}},
  author = {Perczel, István and Chandran, Saranya},
  journal = {Entangled Religions - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer 11},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.46586/er.11.2024.11764},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2024.11764}
}

References

51 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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