Travels - Johanna Stiebert: India, Summer 2005
For several years now I had been corresponding with Professor Kuruvilla, principal of the Kerala United Theological Seminary in Trivandrum, South India. We were connected through one of those serendipitous encounters, when years ago, in Glasgow, I offered to proof-read a young Indian woman student’s dissertation. I mentioned in passing that I’d very much like to visit India and teach there and she responded evenly with, “I will make it happen.” Soon letters, bearing stamps of tigers and exotic butterflies, were arriving from Trivandrum, as Professor Kuruvilla and I tried to find a way and a time for me to teach at his seminary. It took several years but finally, in the summer of 2005, I arrived in Trivandrum and stayed in southern India for six adventure-filled weeks.
Trivandrum is the capital of Kerala and located near India’s southernmost tip. According to legend, Thomas landed on India’s west coast in the first century. In the fourth century Syrian missionaries arrived and several more centuries later, Portuguese traders and settlers. For this reason, Kerala has had Christian communities dating back many hundreds of years and there are plenty of churches alongside Hindu temples and mosques. (In other parts of India Christians form part of a much tinier minority than they do in Kerala. Kerala also has a small, though well-established Jewish minority, centered in Cochin.) Though I’m told that Kerala is “sleepy” by comparison with other parts of India, I found it quite exciting enough, thank you! Every eye-full offers multifarious sights and contrasts and the traffic is an insane, fast-moving, noisy blend of over-crowded buses, rickshaws, motorbikes, pedestrians, bicycles and cows.
My intention was to become a part of the seminary community and teach as much as I could manage in the limited time available. I lived in graduate student quarters on the campus, attended assembly in chapel and student dinners in the refectory, each day and taught two undergraduate courses in the Bachelor of Divinity Program, as well as advanced English and beginners’ German to students enrolled in the Doctoral Program.
The students impressed me with their enthusiasm, commitment and team work. Although they only had one computer between eighty of them, all had acquired basic word-processing skills and thorough familiarity with the internet. Although the library’s resources were limited and photocopying expensive, they all found ways to co-operate with other students and, consequently, ALL my students did ALL the set readings EVERY time. With my three German students I was quite baffled that they would learn all the grammatical rules and vocabulary from class to class – we just whizzed through the material. As will be clear already, I loved teaching in Trivandrum. I was treated with tremendous respect and kindness and really got the strong and rewarding sense that my contribution was appreciated and valued.
While in Trivandrum I had plenty of opportunity to explore the immediate vicinity. The nearby beaches are beautiful, coconut and banana palms abound; there is a splendid temple to Vishnu and an elaborate royal palace. I also traveled to Bangalore, Madurai (which boasts an even more grand-scale temple, with a beautifully body-painted temple-elephant who blessed me!) and Kanya Kumari, on the southernmost tip (still showing signs of the tsunami’s devastation), where Gandhi’s ashes were scattered.
There is a LOT more I could say – but even the memory of my trip is rather overwhelming: India just is an exceptionally vibrant, varied and lively place. Trying to capture it in words leaves me stumped.
While some may ask why anyone would spend their holidays working in another country, I can only recommend it. I enjoyed being part of a community, enjoyed making a contribution, enjoyed learning more about how my subject is taught and understood in another setting and I gathered lots of ideas and stimuli where both teaching practice and further research are concerned.