Introduction

The Tamil Paravas are another of south India's maritime groups, but unlike the Syrians, they did not originate as a high-ranking service and trading community with a tradition of west Asian descent and migration. Instead the Paravas were once part of the low-ranking fishing and boathandling population of the south Indian coastline, and they adopted Christianity as clients of the Portuguese colonial authorities. As a result the Paravas can be grouped with the Tamil-speaking Muslim weavers, fishermen and traders of the Coromandel coast, and with the region's Tamil and Malayali-speaking Mukkuvas, most of whom also became Christian converts during the colonial period. Unlike these other maritime caste groups though, many of the people who came to be known as Paravas were able to move into more lucrative and prestigious occupations. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the group had thrown up a powerful élite of maritime trading clans. This new wealth and the opulent caste lifestyle which it supported created a marked distinction between the Paravas and the poor and relatively homogeneous fishing communities of Malabar, Andhra Pradesh and the northern Tamil coast. So what did ‘conversion’ mean for such people, and what was the relationship between them and the surrounding society?

The Paravas owed their rise to an accident of geography. Their original homeland was the strip of coastline which runs along the Gulf of Mannar from southern Ramnad to the extreme tip of the Coromandel coast.