Sunday, February 9, 2025
The snake boat
When Thomas Mathew started telling me about Snake Boats, I couldn’t quite fathom what he was talking about. Then he took me to see one. Sleek, black, serenely ominous; its stern jutting high into the sky, there really is no better name for it. Each of the fifty villages around the Aranmula Temple has its own Snake Boat, built, cared for, and decorated in their own style. That means fifty boats, you know. Once a year they push these crafts into the river for some hard-core racing. They were once used as war canoes and the racers paddle as if their life still depended on it. This, I gathered from YouTube videos! The boat I saw was in dry dock; its durian wood hull being patched and prepped for a new coat of black pitch by a team of barefoot workers. No shoes allowed on holy ground.
Snake Boats are an important part of a Hindu festival held in Kerela during the monsoon season, and in his characteristic way of crossing boundaries, Thomas Mathew has managed to become the chairman of his village’s boat, and the only Christian at the festival to hold that title. This particular boat was not his, but it was nearby, and I was lucky to get such a close look at it. A single boat can hold 80 people, and festival goers are given rides when the races aren’t on. The boat house was painted with Hindu gods and Thomas Mathew explained that there are three main gods – Krishna in blue, Shiva with his four arms, and Ganesh with an elephant head – a picture book level start to learning about Hinduism.
Crossing boundaries
Speaking of crossing boundaries, I think this is a good time to tell you about Thomas Mathew’s involvement with the IARF, which in long form is the International Association for Religious Freedom. Since they have a website, you can look at, I won’t say much about it, except that IARF is the oldest international organization to promote dialogue between religions, founded in Boston in 1900.
Thomas Mathew was introduced to the IARF by an ARI friend from the Netherlands, by the name of Eimert, while attending the Appeal for Peace conference at the Hague in 1999. The reason for his presence at this conference necessitates another grand story which will come shortly, but regarding the IARF, well, its philosophies resonated so strongly with him that he got deeply involved, all the way to the point of becoming its president in 2008. The highlight of his time with the organization, and perhaps the highlight of his life, was an event that led to his meeting the Dali Lama. You can find a photo of the two chatting on his Facebook profile, right above the words “Peace Activist.”
Among big men, Thomas Mathew is not a big man. He rises no taller than the grassroots people he serves. But that does not make him a small man either. Everybody seems to know his two names, even those “important folks.” I heard that Takami sensei once said, “the grassroots level is the highest level.” When I see how Thomas Mathew interacts with all kinds of people, especially those that society presses down, how there is no distance between them and him, how they treat him as one of their own, but at the same time with deep respect, I think this is what Takami sensei was talking about. Here is a grassroots leader.
The biggest Christian gathering in Asia
The weekend of my visit to Kerala just happened to coincide with a massive event called the Maramon Convention, which is the largest Christian gathering in all of Asia, organized by the Mar Thoma Church. Musicians, preachers, speakers, and thousands upon thousands of Marthomites and other Christians from all over India gather under coconut leaf roofs on the bank of the Pampa River. Interestingly, more than 30 years ago, one of those attendees was none other than our own Takami sensei.
Thomas Mathew had arranged VIP seats for us alongside the bishops and bigwigs, but as the temperature was reaching 40 degrees Celsius, and due to my mild phobia of large crowds, we didn’t go. I felt I was missing something important, but the heat and crowds were quite a worry, so we did the next best thing. We went home and watched the whole thing livestreamed on YouTube! This year, some of the programming was accompanied by a sign language interpreter, arranged by Thomas Mathew at the request of his (Hindu) friend, who is a regular attendee of the convention.
The remarkable thing about this event for me was simply seeing those thousands of Christians gathering and worshiping, who belong to a church that, previous to my visit to Kerala, I knew almost nothing about. It was only at ARI that I first heard of the Mar Thoma church. There is so much I don’t know about in this world, and even about my own religion. This is why I want to keep the door to my mind, my thoughts, and my opinions, wide open. There are so many new discoveries to let in.
After the convention ended, we stopped in at the grounds. It was evening and much cooler and the swell of people had mostly dispersed, though it was clearly evident that something big had just taken place. That being said, let me point out that among the empty chairs and mats, and across the whole grounds, there was almost no trash. We ran into one of the Mar Thoma bishops, Bishop Joseph Mar Evanious Episopa, newly appointed to the Mumbai diocese. Photos were in order, because, well, he is a relative of Thomas Mathew!
No nukes
Well, we have come to my last story from Thomas Mathew, but it is no less astonishing than the others. In a nutshell, it is his personal campaign against nuclear weapons.
Previously, I talked about the deep impact the visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum had on his classmate from Liberia. It just so happened that that visit touched someone else deeply as well. So deeply, in fact that he spent the next ten years vigorously educating the people of India about the horrors and real dangers of nuclear war. That person is, of course, Thomas Mathew.
In 1990, a year after returning from ARI, he invited Machio Kurokawa to India to tell her story. Ms. Kurokawa is a hibakusha, which is a Japanese word used to describe atomic bomb survivors. At that time there were many hibakusha in Japan, and though it was not easy, they would talk about what happened on that fateful day, and the days following, when they found themselves under the fall of an atomic bomb. They tell their stories to museum guests, to visiting dignitaries, in schools, anywhere they are invited, because they never want such a thing to happen again to anyone, anywhere. I twice had a chance to listen to a hibakusha when accompanying ARI participants to Hiroshima. It was hard to hear, but I needed to hear it. We all need to. Today, there are few hibakusha left to tell the story. We have only their voices and images on recordings and YouTube videos. I hope that will be enough.
Thomas Mathew’s “Peace Journey” for Ms. Kurokawa started in Kolkata on August 5, 1990 with a meeting with Mother Theresa at the Missionaries of Charity. She then proceeded to tour India with her message, speaking in schools and to government officers and dignitaries. In Cochin they rolled out the red carpet for her. Over the next ten years, Thomas Mathew arranged for 18 hibakusha to come to India to talk about their experiences as survivors of the atomic bomb. The Gensuikyo and Nihon Hidankyo, provided him with 500 panel packets, each packet containing 25 large photos, to exhibit in schools. The Gensuikyo is The Japan Council Against A & H Bombs and the Nihon Hidankyo is a group of Hibakusha that campaigns for the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons. The Hidankyo were awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 2024 – long overdue in my humble opinion.
Thomas Mathew also promotes the work of Mayors for Peace and their message of CAN’T. CAN’T is a powerful acronym for Cities Are Not Targets to highlight the fact that cities should not be targets in any kind of warfare, especially nuclear war. Mayors for Peace seeks the elimination of all nuclear weapons by soliciting city mayors to join their call against nuclear arms. There are now over 8,000 member cities worldwide and Thomas Mathew is responsible for many Indian signatories.
On May 10, 1998, however, India’s open arms to Thomas Mathew’s anti-nuclear movement decidedly folded shut. That was the day India did an atomic bomb test (their second, after one in 1974) in the desert outside the city of Pokhran. It was a huge shock to Thomas Mathew because he didn’t even know they were continuing development of the bomb. In protest, he went to the Martyrs Column Monument in Trivandrum City in Kerala to do a one-day hunger strike. This monument is dedicated to all the Indians who sacrificed their lives for the sake of their country’s independence. The nuclear test had been televised in India and Japan, so he called all the news outlets he could to tell them about his personal protest, and some newspapers wrote about it. “It was dangerous,” said Thomas Mathew, “but what is the truth? I have to talk.”
When Thomas Mathew was telling people about Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Indian government was kind to him. When he spoke out against Indian nuclear testing, they got angry and sent intelligence agents after him. After that day he was warned not to bring any more hibakusha to India. The atomic bomb was the pride of India against their enemies, Pakistan and China.
The international community, however, was still listening. They wanted his story, so he prepared it. In 1999 Thomas Mathew packed up a camera and a camcorder (I hope you still know what that is), and headed to Pokhran, alone, to take photos in the desert village of Khetolai, ten kilometers from the test site. Then he visited the local hospital, where he found many cancer patients. The hospital was not at all equipped to deal with cancer, so they just gave the patients painkillers.
Thomas Mathew found that two groups of people were directly affected by the nuclear test. One was the Bishnoi community, a devout religious sect of upper-class Hindus, who heard camels and cattle in the area. They have a strong reverence for nature and all life within it, so they don’t cut trees and don’t eat meat. Most of their nourishment comes from the milk and butter provided by their livestock. Since the grass these animals eat had become irradiated, so had the milk, and the people developed thyroid cancer. The same thing happened around Chernobyl.
The other group were the Dalits who wander the desert collecting scraps of metal and dead cows. When a cow stops producing milk this sacred beast is released to wander around until it dies. Many Dalits survive on what others throw out, so they scavenge the cows’ hides, bones for meal, and even the flesh if it has not rotted. Of course, these were all radioactive, but the people didn’t know that. They didn’t even know there had been a test.
Though the test was underground, apparently it was not fully underground and large areas of the surface were contaminated. The government’s response to the human suffering was, “If there is any success, there is some pain.” Later the Tata Conglomerate in Bombay, built a cancer facility in Bombay, just a thousand kilometers away, and offered free treatment to these people. According to Thomas Mathew, few availed themselves of it. They say it is their fate to die.
After three visits to the desert, Thomas Mathew, put together a documentary and sent it to the Hague in the Netherlands, to be shown at the international conference, Appeal for Peace, mentioned above. He was invited to come and present it himself, but lacked the money for a plane ticket. Eimert, from the IARF story, stepped in to help him.
Thomas Mathew’s session was sponsored by the Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, and was attended by 600 people, including three Nobel Prize laureates, Koffi Annan (UN Secretary General at the time), Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Jody Williams (activist to ban land mines). He showed his ten-minute film and then took questions for another thirty minutes. At the end, Bishop Tutu gave him a hug and told him he had thought the underground nuclear test in India had been safe. Just before the meeting started, Thomas Mathew had placed a thousand pamphlets outside the door of the conference room. To his delight, he found all of them had been taken!
Things were going well, until he stepped off the airplane in Mumbai. There he was met by RAW agents, meaning agents of the Research and Analysis Wing. Although the name sounds harmless enough, this is the Indian equivalent to the American CIA. He was taken to a room and interrogated the whole night. “Don’t talk” was their order, accompanied by threats of prison for a year without bail. His family would suffer too, they assured him. When finally released, he went home, exhausted. But after just a few hours of sleep, a knock came at the door. It was RAW agents once again, come to search his house. They took his film and videos and even the camcorder. And all those 1,000 pamphlets at the conference? Those had been confiscated by RAW agents as well. They were there in the Hague. They could not stop him speaking out, but they were there.
I was curious if a copy of the documentary remained in the Hague, but he said he had never been able to locate it. It is probably on some microfilm somewhere, deteriorating.
