After my stay in Sayan, I visited convents in Chancay, Churrin, Cusco, and Arequipa. I stayed with the nuns and traveled with them to different villages for pastoral and mission work. Interestingly, unlike the Malayali convents in the Global North, where they own and work in the institutions owned by the diocese, the nuns serving in Peru mostly engage in pastoral work.
Throughout the trip, I had elaborate insightful conversations and conducted some formal interviews as well. I went with a focused plan prioritizing the themes I will address in my monograph and hence, I had very structured and precise questions in mind. After finishing my monograph, I would love to go back and visit more Malayali mission regions in Peru and other parts of South America for a more detailed and larger study.
In the book, I will look at two more locations, Italy and Iraq, to better understand the transnational religious labor migration from Kerala’s female religious congregations. While the Malayali missions in South America tell us the story of its most recent expansions, these other two locations help us understand the routes of gendered religious labor migration facilitated through the affective historical links of the Syro-Malabar church. The Syro-Malabar church with its peculiar affective history is hierarchically part of the Roman Catholic papal hierarchy and at the same time liturgically affiliated to the Chaldean Catholic church, which has its headquarters in Iraq.
I would like to highlight that my fellowship at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute helped significantly in facilitating my fieldwork in Peru. It allowed me to utilize connections and networks of Harvard alumni and affiliates who connected me with the religious networks in Peru. I am particularly grateful to Ms. Britt Ludsvigen, a Peruvian Harvard alumni and affiliate, and Jimena Codina, the program coordinator of the David Rockefeller Centre for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, for introducing me to several scholars and officials working on South America. The amazing resources at Harvard and the connections that open up through the networks of Harvard affiliates made this fieldwork viable.
And yes, no one can come back from Peru without exploring the Peruvian highlands and the wonderlands of the mighty Incas! I enjoyed the splendor of the cultural remains at Machu Pichu, read and learned a lot about the Inca civilization, and petted cute baby llamas in the Andean ranges.