DURING THE SECOND half of the nineteenth century, British tea planters cleared away great swathes of forest from the hills around Munnar in what is now Kerala. They used the cleared areas to grow tea bushes. To achieve this transformation and to maintain and harvest the tea gardens Indian workers, many of them Tamil, were brought into the area. Amongst them, there were some who had become Christians, most of them Catholics.

Anticipating the Christian workers’ needs for practising their religion,  Spanish missionaries from the Archdiocese of Verapoly climbed up the treacherous paths to Munnar, risking attacks by tigers, wild elephants,  leeches, etc. They were of the Carmelite Order.

The first of these missionaries was Father Alfonso (1854-1916) who was born in the Spanish Basque country.  He arrived in Verapoly (in Kochi on the Malabar Coast) in 1883. When he first went up to Munnar in 1897,  there were no roads linking the place with the plains below it.

To cut a long story short, Father Alfonso managed to acquire a small plot of land in Munnar from the tea company that owned all of the land in the area. There, he built a church. It was a basic affair with a coconut leaf roof. Later, this was replaced by a more substantial edifice. Between  1934 and 1938, a new church replaced the second one, and that, with later modifications,  is what can be seen standing proudly above Munnar town’s bazaar area. Father Alfonso died of malaria while visiting Munnar, and his grave is in the existing Mount Carmel church  in Munnar.

Alfonso and his fellow missionaries did not come up to the hills merely to supply the Christian workers with their spiritual requirements.  While visiting their ‘flock’, which was scattered amongst difficult to reach settlements, they managed to convert many of the other labourers to become god-fearing Roman Catholics.

I have distilled this information from a fascinating book I bought in Munnar: “Mother Church of the High Ranges. Munnar Church. First Missionary Accounts”,  which contains extracts of letters written by the early Spanish missionaries to a Spanish Catholic journal.

What is notable amongst these accounts is the missionaries’ antagonism to the mainly British Protestants in the Munnar area. They also felt that the workers were being exploited, and that all of their readers should remember this while enjoying cups of tea.