About: | István Perczel |
Position: | Key Researcher |
Node: | Communication and Mobility |
The Christian manuscripts preserved in Kerala have been collected and digitised to considerable extent by the SRITE project during the last two decades. These texts are written in Malayalam, Tamil, Syriac, Neo-Aramaic and Arabic, in a number of scripts, such as Syriac, Vattezhuttu, Kolezhuttu, Garshuni Malayalam (Perczel 2014 and 2019). While the history of the native, now eight million-strong, Syriac Christian community of India had been written along communal lines, the SRITE project has produced evidence for a new wave of scholarly studies and introduced this field to mainstream Indian history (e.g. Perczel 2009, 2014, 2018; Mustaţă 2019, 2020; Thomas 2007, 2016, 2017, 2019; Payyappilly 2012, 2016). Building on the SRITE project, the study in the COE will be an investigation of entangled history over twelve centuries (9th to 21th) as an example of the global phenomenon of transmission of cultural goods along the trans-Arabian Sea trade routes, which was not triggered but only modified by Western colonial expansion. The Christian material will be then confronted to the parallel material produced by the Hindu (in Sanskrit and Malayalam), Zoroastrian (in Persian), Jewish (in Hebrew and Malayalam), and Muslim communities (in Arabic and Malayalam) of South India. This study aims to contribute to our knowledge of religious diversity and the vicissitudes of religious co-existence in India (see Sub-Node 3A) and to add to our knowledge of communication between the Middle East and India across the Indian Ocean.