Aatuedayanmaar and Their Kunjaadu: The Catholic Church and the Coastal Community of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala

This research looks at the Latin Catholic church and its role within the Indigenous fishing community in the South Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, specifically through the context of the protests against the Vizhinjam Port Project. Vizhinjam Port project projected as ‘India’s Gateway to International Transshipment’ has garnered widespread political support. The area’s indigenous fishing community is among Kerala’s most disadvantaged groups and is protesting against the project’s impacts of privatisation, displacement and environmental degradation. The indigenous community, mostly Mukkuvars–Christian (officially Latin Catholics), have their origin in Dalit conversions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the Portuguese. The church has a history of mediating the relationship between the community and the state. The most recent protests against the port lasted 6 months from June to December 2022, with the church taking leadership of the protest in August. The protests began to be portrayed as ‘priest protests’ in the popular imagination as the priests prominently took up the visible front lines of the movement. Sundar (2012, p. 16) in her study of the role of the Latin Catholic church in the South Indian city of Kanyakumari points out the church's resistance to secularisation with their reluctance to withdraw religion from the public sphere and reduce it to a private matter. The priests were popularly referred to as aatuedayanmaar (shepherd), invoking their role as leaders of the people through the biblical analogy of the shepherd and the sheep (kunjuaadu). This contradicted the protest's inception as secular to represent the fishing community that includes people from various religions along the coast. Through in-depth interviews, spatial mapping and observations from the villages along the Thiruvananthapuram coast, this research weaves together a narrative of the church and its role in the community both in the everyday spaces and the protest place.