I suppose my professional working life falls into the conventional three stages, with transitions between. The first major block was teaching in the theological college in South India for CMS. Then I became a chaplain to a psychiatric hospital in England. Then I practised as a Jungian analyst till I retired. At the time, each was important. I wouldn’t have missed any of them.
Since I retired, I’ve developed my interest in Tamil culture and religion, picking up a thread from my time in India. I belong now to Holy Cross Church, Motspur Park, in south-west London, where I occasionally preach.
My mother was born in India: her father was in the Indian Civil Service; her two brothers were, too. My great-grandfather went into the ICS the year after the Indian Mutiny. I’d gone to the Graduate School of Study at Bossey, Switzerland, and among the students on the course was the principal of the theological college in South India. He invited me to come and join his staff; so it was a direct and inescapable challenge.
The principal happened to be a Tamil person, the college was in Tamil country, and I had to learn Tamil to teach there. I soon discovered that Tamil was a rich and ancient language — a bit like Greek and Latin, to which I’d devoted long years in my youth. The important difference is that Tamil has a continuous history to this day, and survives as a spoken language.
The Tamils, along with the three other major linguistic groups in South India, are ethnically Dravidians, and quite different from the Indo-Europeans, such as ourselves and the North Indians. They like to trace their history back to the Indus Valley culture of the third millennium BC. They live in the bottom right-hand corner of India, and have resisted conquest and colonisation by the Aryans and Muslims, preserving their own culture through the centuries.
Tamil language is quite different from the Indo-European languages, with its own grammar and syntax. In the tenth and 11th centuries, the Tamils penetrated as far north as the Ganges, into Sri Lanka, and through the Straits of Malacca to Malaya, Indonesia, and Thailand. That was their golden age, when art, sculpture, and literature flowered. There are about 80 million Tamils in South India.
We hear more about the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. They’ve been an oppressed minority for the past 20 years. That struggle has now come to a bloody end.
I’ve heard there are about 200,000 Tamils in this country, and 32 Saivite temples in London. Most Tamils here are refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka, and we meet them as doctors, at the check-outs, at cash-points. Most Londoners think of them as nondescript Indians. . .
The Periya Puranam tells the lives of the Saivite saints who worshipped Shiva as the supreme god. They were responsible for the reconversion of the Tamil people to Hinduism from Jainism and Buddhism in the sixth and seventh centuries. There was this amazing revival movement by the poet-saints, who sang their people back to Shiva and Vishnu as they travelled the country. I came across the book when I first went to India. It’s the national epic of the Tamils, written in the 12th century.
There’s been no complete translation of this ever published in the West before. To have this translation in their hands means a lot to them.
The title of “Devout Follower of the Universal Faith” has been conferred on me. The phrase bears translation in several different ways. I’d translate it as: “One who follows the noble path of reconciliation”.
My own Christian background was Evangelical when I first went to India, and I took part with my Indian colleagues in traditional forms of evangelism which now, 40 years later, I wouldn’t be so comfortable with. There’s a long tradition — perhaps dominant — in Christianity of exclusiveness, but there is an inclusive tradition, perhaps represented by Peter in the house of Cornelius: “In every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
Conversion is a really hot potato in India at the moment, because some sections of the Hindu community have greatly resented both Muslim and Christian proselytising. Christians have been very rude about Hindus down the years — there’s a long history of offence. Of course, it all becomes political as well.
Tamils here are not so easy to draw into interfaith endeavours. Like most first-generation expats, they have their own strong cultural organisations, and seek to preserve their cultural identity and pass it on. They tend to be rather inward-looking — like the British in India.
Music has been very important in my life, from the age of 14 onwards. Beethoven was my first love in adolescence — he does seem to appeal to that age group. I’ve moved on to Mozart now.
My big regret is that, though I learned the piano in my youth, I never really got hold of it. I used music when I was a chaplain in the psychiatric hospital. I got a whole lot of tapes of popular hymns and Sunday-school choruses and would play them in the wards of long-stay patients. They really responded to that.
I have advanced renal cancer. For the past few years I’ve been kept alive with a couple of exorbitantly expensive drugs. So the path I’m following now is — like the rest of us — to that bourne from which no traveller returns.
Life with cancer is like walking on thin ice. At the moment, so far as I know, the disease is stable, but you never know when it’s going to wake up.
My father had a distinguished career in the Navy, and was brought up in Scotland. I’m married to Margaret, who was a doctor and is now a yoga teacher. I have a daughter who works in the NHS and has just completedan Open University degree in the Classics. We watch rugby together.
I feel at this stage of my life . . . gratitude — for all the rich things I’ve been privileged to experience. I’ve had a good innings.
I’ve very little aspiration to be remembered in 100 years’ time. Who knows if there’ll be a planet?
I find the whole Bible enormously exciting and enriching, but Paul stands out for his deep vision and psychological insight. Karl Barth opened that up for me. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country — I cannot read the conclusion without tears.
One man in my past who stands out was a man called John Inchley, a CSSM children’s evangelist who ran summer camps in the Quantock Hills which I used to attend. He was the best kind of Evangelical: he made a great and lasting impression on me by his simplicity and devotion.
I’ve always tried to buy Fairtrade tea and coffee. It’s sometimes difficult to get Fairtrade and decaffeinated and organic — but we do our best.
I get angry when I’m interrupted in the middle of saying something. I was also angry last year about MPs who claim to represent me and yet do not know the difference between right and wrong.
I pray by myself most mornings in a kind of meditative silence based around what some traditions call a mantra. Something like, “Heal me, Lord, and I shall be healed.” It’s about being quiet and open. On most days I sit down with Margaret, and we have got a long list of friends and family whom we remember together.
I would like to be locked in a church with Rembrandt. In his late self-portraits, he gives the supreme artistic expression of justification by grace. I’d like to get him to talk about the inner experience reflected there.
Robin McGlashan was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
The History of the Holy Servants of the Lord Siva: A translation of the “Periya Puranam” of Cekkilar is published by Trafford Publishing; 978-1-425-14589-7.