We hold no copy of this book. Nobody working on this website has opened it — and we would rather tell you that than show you a page we have not read.
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.
DocumentedThis moment rests on 3 sources.
What this source establishes
Book 450 survives in the Jesuit archives at Shembaganur. We have not read it. Anyone who suspects a parish of inventing its own past may go and ask for the book — which is exactly why we name it, and exactly why we will not pretend to have opened it.