East Africa, the Arab world and Europe. It still bears the mark of that in a diluted or attenuated form. We found that there were at least 18 languages spoken in the city still. There were people of all shapes, sizes and colours. There are even a few retired English business executives and bureaucrats who once constituted a part of the colonial ruling class. There is a Jewish community which claims to have settled in Cochin nearly 2000 years ago, after the second temple was destroyed in Jerusalem. There is a Christian community which claims a history of about 2000 years. It says that it took shape after the arrival of St. Thomas in the first century. There is a large Muslim community which claims to have come from West Asia in the first century of the Islamic calendar.
These communities and groups have distinctive constructions of the past. For example, when we talked to the leaders of the Jewish community, they proudly claimed that theirs was the only Jewish community in the entire world which had no record, no history of oppression or discrimination. They said that for a brief while, in the 14th and l5th centuries, they were harassed by the Portuguese who had arrived in India by that time and destroyed one synagogue. The Jews went and complained to the local king that their synagogue had been destroyed. That king reportedly was surprised.
"How can people break places of worship, even if it is not their own?", he is said to have wondered. He offered the Jewish community land for a new synagogue just next to the palace and next to the royal temple. The synagogue they built is active even today. It is one of the oldest synagogues in Asia. And that synagogue shares a wall with the royal temple and the royal palace. The king for their security, also gave them, the Jewish community leaders tell me, the formal, permanent right -- "till the sun and the moon last" -- to have a synagogue there and establish a Jewish settlement nearby.
So in the heart of Cochin is the Jew Town and the community stays there -- looking very European, speaking the local language, Malayalam, and maintaining their tradition of Hebrew learning. They have even produced Hebrew poets and Hebrew writers, right there in Cochin. Now the community has shrunk to less than 100, but it has still not lost its self-confidence.
I could have told you similar experiences of some other communities, if I had the time. The point I am trying to make is this: there was an alternative tradition of cosmopolitanism in Cochin. It was not a cosmopolitanism that was introduced either by Vasco da Gama 500 years ago or by the British when they established their empire 200 years ago. That earlier cosmopolitanism now survives as a peripheral and marginal experience. But it survives; it is not something in the past.
The critical component of that cosmopolitanism has been the absence of a melting pot model. There has been no melting pot in which different communities and cultures could come, mix and ultimately lose their identities. Even today, in Cochin, identities are not like ornamental artifacts of life. Cochin lives with full-fledged identities; the city thrives on those contradictory, apparently irreconcilable identities. For the community lives that sustain those identities have not collapsed.
In other words, what Cochin offered me, a child of the modern world, was an insight into other possible ways of thinking about inter-communal, cross-cultural living, beyond the standard melting pot model. How to describe the culture that holds the communities of Cochin together while keeping their identities intact. The only concept I can think of -- and it isn't an appropriate word -- is that of a modular schema. Every culture is brought in to the mix like a module and remain so you could also say that instead of a melting pot. Cochin society is like a salad bowl. Exactly as in a salad, the ingredients remain identifiable and distinct but nonetheless, constitute an identifiably single item of food. I suspect from the evidence of Cochin that this other form of cosmopolitanism is probably not unknown to many Other Asian, African, and perhaps even pre-modern European cities. It has survived in some pockets in this part of the world; perhaps it survives in other places, too, I do not know.
I am merely proposing that there were and still exist alternative forms of cosmopolitanism and it has something to teach us about intercultural dialogue in Asia.
My second example is from a study of the violence which took place at the time of the birth of India and Pakistan in 1946-48. It was a massive holocaust in which more than 1 million people died and more than 16 million were uprooted.
It has now become literally an invisible holocaust. For few know or want to know about it today. We are now engaged in a large study of that violence, partly to make the invisible visible, It has been a heart-wrenching affair for me to go in to the experiences of the victims recounted after 50 years. Many of them are still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders. As a natural byproduct of the study, we once tried to compare some of the experiences of South Asian violence with that of the best studied holocaust of all time, namely, the European holocaust in the 1940s when the Jews were the victims. The most remarkable difference we found was
