thirty to fifty miles wide. This is the famous pepper-coast of Malabar. Inside of the coast-line is a long expanse of water, a back-water or series of lagoons connected by channels and separated from the open sea by a narrow strip of land with occasional openings. You may travel almost the whole length of the Malabar coast by water along these lagoons. The land is fertile, but very unhealthy; cholera and smallpox carry off great numbers of people every year and leprosy abounds. The land is divided politically between the Rajahs of Cochin to the north and Travancore to the south, under British supremacy. A British Resident in their States controls their Government.[1] The majority of inhabitants are Hindus. There is a small but very ancient and interesting community of native Jews (p. 354), and about nine hundred thousand Christians. Of these, nearly four hundred thousand are Jacobites. There is no difference of race or language between the Christians and the others. All talk Malayalam.[2] Their Syriac services are like those in Latin to us. But Christians seem to have special quarters in the towns.
5. The Schisms at Malabar
The Jacobites of Malabar should have, in theory, one bishop only, the "Bishop and Gate of all India."[3] But there are many rivals and schisms among them. The people are very quarrelsome, always going to law against each other. A discontented party sends to the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, or to someone else, complaining of their bishop. In return he is generally deposed, and a rival appointed. But he will not retire; there are mutual excommunications, and a schism is formed.
- ↑ I am indebted to Mr. G. T. Mackenzie, Resident from 1899 to 1904, for much valuable information about the Malabar Christians. Mr. Mackenzie, who is a Catholic, compiled the chapter on Christianity in the Travancore State Manual (Trivandrum, 1906), ii. 135-223, and wrote an able article in the Dublin Review, vol. 139 (July-Oct. 1906): "The Syrian Christians in India" (pp. 105-122).
- ↑ Malayalam, nearly akin to Tamil, is one of the "Dravidic" (not Aryan) dialects spoken in Southern India.
- ↑ As a matter of fact, there are quite a number of bishops in Malabar, mostly in schism with one another; the Jacobite now has suffragans (p. 374).
