With all the news from abroad about trouble between Islamic extremists and the Western world you might think that as two Americans living in rural India next door to a mosque we might have some apprehension about our surrounds. Nothing could be further from the truth. On a Fulbright grant to research dance in India, my husband and I lived in the South Indian State of Kerala for ten months. Our lesson in religious tolerance came when my husband and I decided that we had been staying in a hotel long enough. It was time to find more stable housing. Our first mistake was enlisting the hotel owner in helping us find a house.
Of course, he didn't want us to move out of the hotel, so he
showed us run-down traditional style houses without windows or indoor plumbing. While these houses had a certain rustic appeal, I did not want to end up sharing my bed with a cobra that might have found its way inside through the open windows. We elected to remain at the hotel.
Our housing search continued until a friend in the Kalamandalam school administration made some inquires for us and succeeded in finding a recently built house that was vacant. The family who built the house was living and working in the Middle Eastern gulf, as do so many Keralite families. We visited the house and it was more than we had hoped for- running water, a washing machine, a stove, and even a television!
It was also next door to a Mosque.
We decided we would move in as soon as possible, and that we would try to make friends with our Muslim neighbors. And so we rented our home from a local Muslim family, in a Muslim neighborhood, next door to a Mosque, across the street from a Muslim school. Throughout our stay we had uniformly excellent relations with our Muslim neighbors. Certainly, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the calls to prayer that regularly echoed out from the mosque loudspeakers increased in length and frequency. But aside from prayer-calls waking us up in the night, we experienced no problems as Americans living among Muslims.
There is a delightful acceptance of religious diversity in Kerala; Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all live side by side as friends and companions in the Keralite culture. From our outside perspective, Kerala seemed to be a land of peaceful religious tolerance. Muslims participate in Hindu festivals, and Christians study traditional Hindu dance. At night, firework
explosions from the Hindu temples blend with evening prayers sing out from the mosques.
Religious motifs decorate the dashboards of all the buses in Kerala. Hindu buses carry small statues of Hindu Gods, Christian buses have large pictures of Jesus, and Muslim buses carry pictures of Mecca. Every time I got on a local bus, I prayed that the religious icons would impart some Divine grace (or at least good luck) to the drivers. In Kerala, the rules of the road are very wild – it is the survival of the biggest and fastest, bus drivers careen
at breakneck-speed around blind curves and past cars – barely missing oncoming traffic. Our favorite buses were the religiously pluralistic busses. These busses feature lighted displays of a Christian cross, Mecca, and the Hindu God Vishnu, side by side on the dashboard panel.
We have found friends here who are Christian, Hindu and Muslim. Naturally people assume that we are Christian. Usually, I do not bother to contradict them. As long as people can identify us as belonging to one of the three major religions found here, we can move on to the more important questions about why my husband Grady has long hair, why we don't have any children and what we eat. It inevitably comes out that Grady does a lot of the cooking and that we share most of the housework. This causes a lot of giggles from both men and women.
Last weekend we were invited to our Muslim friend Shaheem's home for lunch out in the middle of a sea of green rice paddies. We were fed a colossal amount of traditional Keralalite foods on a banana leaf. After we were properly stuffed full of food we went on a visit to their closest neighbors. The neighbors, who have an old style traditional Keralalite home, are Brahmins (the highest caste of Hindus). They are great friends with Shaheem and his Muslim family. It was so wonderful to experience the easy friendship that we felt between Shaheem and his Hindu neighbors as Hindus and Muslims have a history of strife in India. Shaheem's best friend is a Christian. There is a gentle acceptance of religious diversity here, and acceptance that is inspiring. The beautiful weather, lush vegetation, tranquil beaches, stunning mountains of Kerala all make it an attractive place to stay, but it is the people, their gentle warmth, and religious tolerance that make Kerala, as the locals are fond of saying, "God's own country."
A version of this article was published in the book "Beyond Boundaries" a USEFI/ Fulbright publication, 2007.
