1881–1923

Book 450, and the man who made it

The Jesuit archives at Shembaganur still hold the volume: Book 450, “Diary by Fr A. Caussanel S.J. at Vadakenkulam, 1881–1923”. It is not a diary kept here day by day from 1881. Caussanel was ordained only in 1884 and reached India in 1888; the Society’s Roman catalogues set him at Vadakankulam in 1914 and elsewhere before and after, and the parish’s own roll of its priests gives him the years 1910 to 1919. What the Jesuits’ own magazine says he did here is the better story: he wrote “diaries, a history of the country”, and he “searches out the old manuscripts and deciphers them”. Book 450 is that work — this parish’s past gathered up out of older papers by a man who lived among them. It survives; we have not yet read it.