Three Calendars and an Argument: The Clock Tower of the Mattancherry Paradesi Synagogue

The queue for the Mattancherry Paradesi Synagogue forms in a lane, and while you stand in it you are looking at the most interesting object in the compound. The white clock tower at the end of the lane is free, permanently on view, and almost nobody stops at it. It was put up around 1760 to 1761 by Ezekiel Rahabi, the merchant who acted as the Dutch East India Company’s agent in Cochin, and it stands about forty-five feet.

A clock with an audience problem

Rahabi had a practical difficulty. The people who needed to read this clock did not share a calendar. His own community reckoned by the Hebrew calendar. The Cochin court reckoned by the Malayalam era. The Dutch he traded with reckoned by the Christian one. A single dial would have quietly told one of the three that the clock was not for them.

So the tower was given faces on more than one side, each numbered for a different audience — and this is the part worth walking round for.

Read the three together and they are the same year written three ways. That is the whole design: a single instrument that refuses to make anyone convert. In a lane where a Jewish congregation, a Hindu court and a Protestant trading company all had business, that is a piece of diplomacy built into masonry.

The face that argues

The east side is blank, and the blankness is disputed.

In 1929 A. B. Salem — the Kochi lawyer better known for taking on the colour bar inside the synagogue itself — recorded a fourth dial on the eastern face. Salem is not a careless source. He was a meticulous man who documented his community closely, and he was writing about a building he stood in front of constantly.

The difficulty is photographic. Images of the tower from 1906, 1923 and 1947 have been examined, and none of them shows a dial on the east. Salem’s note sits in the middle of that sequence, with photographs on both sides of it that appear to contradict him.

There is no resolution to offer. A dial may have been added and removed between photographs. Salem may have been describing an intention, a plan, or something painted rather than fitted. He may have been mistaken. What is certain is that a careful local witness and the photographic record do not agree, and neither of them can now be cross-examined.

What to do with it as a visitor

Walk round the tower before you join the queue, and read the three faces in order. It takes two minutes and it reorganises the visit, because the synagogue then stops being a curiosity behind a ticket and becomes what it actually was: the religious building of a community that did business with everyone in the lane and needed all of them to be able to tell the time.

Then look at the east face and notice that you cannot tell. That is a fair introduction to Jew Town generally, where a great deal is documented and a great deal is asserted, and the two are not always the same set of facts.