ABSTRACT
Maryam was a Syro-Malabar Catholic 1 woman in her late forties, who, by the time I contacted her in 1996, had been living in Rome for 30 years. 2 She was recommended by a Malayali priest as the right person to know about ‘the life of Malayali Christians in Rome’. Yet Maryam was visibly annoyed at being identified as the spokesperson for questions pertaining to religion. ‘Religion only created problems in my life,’ was her first comment. Trained as a Latin Catholic sister in Italian convents in the 1960s, at the age of 19 Maryam abandoned religious life because of persistent difficulties with Italian sisters and found employment in Rome. She married an Italian man and, despite her rejection of returning to India – ‘no one wanted me back when I left the convent’ – she supported the arrival of many younger relatives from Kerala. In helping them finding a job, she often used the issue of ‘common Christianity’ with Italian employers to enhance the trustworthiness of the young Malayalis. Maryam was proud of her skills as a self-made woman and as one of the progenitors of a fast-growing kinship network. As I came to know her, I started to understand her ambivalent sense of closeness to Italian Catholicism, which coexisted with the feeling of being marginalised as an ‘inferior believer’. Her relation with the Syro-Malabar Catholic church in Kerala was no less tense. It was a priest from her home village who recruited her when she was 15 and promised a good life and education in Italian convents. As did many women of her generation, she kept away from the religious activities of youngsters that, since the mid-1990s, had started to delineate the contours of Malayali collectivity in Rome. Christianity was a source of change in Maryam’s life, a possibility of ‘moving out of Kerala and having a different life’, as she recalled. Yet, she also refrained from any form of uncritical identification with religion, came close and rejected it according to her temporal and spatial experiences of migration.
