Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

All saints’ day in a christian cemetery. India

The christians represent 2 % of the indian population ( i.e. the third religious community after the hindus and the muslims).  They belong to different churches : catholic, protestant, evangelical and orthodox, each of them being divided in various denominations. 60 % of the christians live in the south, under a line linking Goa to Chennaï ( formerly Madras). By travelling in the south Indian countryside, it’s not rare to see a church tower, looking like an european one, announcing the approach to a village. In the southern state of Kerala, where Saint Thomas arrived in 52 AD to evangelize, the christians ( 20 % of the inhabitants of this state, most of them observing the syriac catholic rite) like to say that their community is as old as the one founded by the apostle Peter in the West. Because of the commercial links between the Middle-East…

“Within 50 years, may be we will no more exist” worry the last 67.000 “parsi” of India, almost all of them living in Mumbaï, the economic capital of the country. This tight-knit community left Persia ( now Iran) in the VIII° century, fleeing the islamization of the country by Arab invaders. In fact, “parsi” are zoroastrians, zoroastrianism being a religion based on the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster, a tradition that divides the world between the good and the evil,… Between the VIII° and the X° century, many zoroastrians arrived in western India, and most of them settled in the present states of Gujarat and Maharashtra.

Before the British colonization, most of them were farmers and shopkeepers in the villages, or traders or craftsmen in the towns. With the introduction of the western economy, they became mostly city-dwellers and in the first half of the XIX° century, they monopolized at Bombay the commerce with Europe. ( They…