Kappalottam: Sailing on Fasted Shoulders

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Ship Procession or “Kappalottam” at Kuravilangad Church

Every January, the ropes that tie her 40-foot-long body to the walls of the Kuravilangad Church in coastal Kerala are undone. Held up on the shoulders of fasting men, she moves with the throng around her outside the church, enacting the mythical memory of a storm. She has neither name nor owner, nor does she have traders or fishers aboard. She is, however, what ties one of the oldest religious minorities in the subcontinent to the Indian Ocean and its histories of maritime loss, dread, and faith. Without her, a tradition upheld by millions that dates back to the first century of the Common Era would be lost, even as she waits eleven months of the year to come alive for just one.The Kappalottam is a three-day ritual procession (moonu noimbu) that takes place during what is called “sawmo d-ninwoyé” or the “Fast of the Ninevites” in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, three weeks prior to the Great Lent. What marks this period of ritual fasting and abstinence is the icon of the ship or kappal carried by fasters that is believed to represent (a) the ship on which the biblical prophet Jonah defied God’s command to sail to Nineveh, after which he fell overboard in a storm and (b) the first-century promise to the Virgin Mary (Muthiyamma) by the wealthy seafarers of Kadappoor to offer a replica of their ship to her if she saved them from drowning in a storm. Today, icons of the Virgin Mary and God the Father, as well as those of the prophet Jonah and the Kadappoor traders, stand atop the ship’s deck, replete with gold-plated crosses on every side. Given her essence as an icon, only those who claim a direct genealogical link to the Kadappoor community – and thereby claim elite caste and racial (Aryan) status – are traditionally authorized to carry and sail the kappal on their shoulders.I take this indexical icon of the kappal as my object of inquiry to interrogate how ritual imaginings of the sea as a space of terror and divine rescue are, for the Eastern Orthodox in south India, mediated by the memory and materiality of a ship. While the origin stories of her iconicity rest on the image of a ship at sea in need of saving, she upends her history as an icon on land by now mimicking the waves of the sea on the shoulders of select men who raise and lower their arms in sync, standing in a contiguous circle around the ship. Her journey is no longer up to the fate of a storm; it is circumscribed within the ritual bounds of a calendar and the controlled wave-like motions of Kadappoor arms and shoulders that she “sails” on.For a brief moment in 2018, however, the kappal found new meaning outside the space of procession and ritual. During the historic floods of Kerala that drowned hundreds in a matter of days, Christian fishers took up an historically inverted image of the kappal – that is, a ship that saves ¬– and turned their boats into rescue vessels, sailing flooded streets and pulling people up into them. Here, the symbolic import of the kappal crossed its ritual hold and incentivized a grassroots rescue mission. The floods and their capacity to drown indiscriminately also forced locals to grapple with the kappal’s gender, caste, and racial exclusions. In this liminal state of emergency, her invitation to carry and save was extended to all in need of what she stood for: divine safety from watery tempest.

Counter-Mapping Shipping: Digital Joy and Digital Labor in Oceanic Social Media

 

The Oceans Lab, an interdisciplinary research and advocacy initiative, explores maritime issues across oceanic spaces. With a focus on themes of race, labor, inequality, climate change, migration, and geopolitics, the Lab seeks to unravel the complexities of our oceans, making them comprehensible through innovative approaches. One such approach is the creation of this map that aims to help bridge gaps between how scholars describe oceanic spaces and the voices of those that inhabit them.

Inspired by global maritime shipping maps like marinetraffic.com, the Oceans Lab’s map is not just about tracing the trajectories of cargo ships; it is about weaving together interdisciplinary oceanic scholarship with the voices of those who inhabit the seas. It seeks to represent the various voices and ideas that converge to define the concept(s) of the ocean(s) from what may initially appear to be blank cartographic space. In the spirit of counter-mapping, we invite creators, scholars, and seafarers to use our submit button in order to actively participate in redefining how we perceive and understand oceanic spaces.

Counter-mapping, at its core, seeks to provide alternative perspectives and representations that challenge dominant power structures and dominant narratives (Peluso 1995). This ever-evolving map thus recognizes that the ocean is not just a backdrop for the global commerce represented on standard shipping maps, but a vibrant and dynamic space shaped by human experiences.

In addition to showcasing the multifaceted nature of oceanic life, the map brings to the fore the concept of digital labor and attention economies. In the digital age, content creation and the curation of online personas have become forms of labor, often underestimated and overlooked. Those at sea who engage in social media share not only their experiences participating in the shipping economy, but also contribute to the attention economy. In addition to including these digital contributions in scholarly conversations, the map hopes to open up questions about this digital labor, underscoring the importance of recognizing it within the broader context of oceanic scholarship.




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Send us your name, a short essay, a short story, a photo, a video, or a link to a social media post related to the sea or maritime issues (TikToks at sea are welcome, as are research essays!). We aim to fill our map with “stories from the sea” of all kinds.