Kochi

Picture courtesy:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Chinese_porcelain_tiles,_Cochin_synagogue.jpg

18th Century hand painted porcelain tiles from Canton, on the floor of the Jewish synagogue in Cochin, Kerala.

These are referred to in Salman Rushdie's 'The Moor's Last Sigh'...

"Scene after blue scene passed before her eyes. There were tumultuous marketplaces and crenellated fortress-palaces and fields under cultivation and thieves in jail, there were high, toothy mountains and great fish in the sea. Pleasure gardens were laid out in blue, and blue-bloody battles were grimly fought; blue horsemen pranced beneath lamplit windows and blue-masked ladies swooned in arbours..."

An essay by Timothy Weiss "At the End of East/West: Myth in Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh" examines the novelist's 'cultural hybridity' and explores ideas about narrative and myth-making.
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v4i2/WEISS.HTM
"The vignette of the Cantonese tiles is one among numerous tales in miniature that illustrate the creative, mythmaking process of the novel as a whole. 'In the end, stories are what's left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist,' muses the dying Moor..."

Smashing Glass

The Greeks aren't the only ones smashing things. In the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, the penultimate part is the Sheva Brachos, or seven blessings. After the blessings, the couple share (for the second time) in drinking a cup of wine, and the groom breaks a glass with his right foot by stamping on it. This custom apparently dates back to Talmudic times and is intended to symbolise the Temple in Jerusalem being destroyed. A utensil is broken to show identification with the sorrow of Jewish exile – a breaking of hearts. Everyone then shouts Mazaltov! and the band starts playing and all begin dancing.

A modern interpretation is that this is the last time the groom gets to put his foot down...or that it is a warning to the couple that life together won't always be as happy as that day...or that human relationships are fragile.

Or it means breaking ties to the past...or refers to a broken world...

Modern ceremonies might have the couple breaking the glass together and sometimes a Rabbi might say "May your marriage last as long as it takes to put the glass back together", which is of course forever since the glass cannot be repaired. Although it could be reblown, rather like reincarnation in another life...

A symbol of plenty – the shards represent the children from the union...

Perhaps it's the bride's hymen about to be broken...(or is that the veil?)

There is also the custom of breaking the plate - at the beginning of the wedding the mothers of the bride and groom get together and smash a very large plate. The pieces of the plate are given to the bride-to-be. If the plate is decorated with words from the Torah and she gets a piece with a whole word on it, she feels very lucky. Left over pieces might be made into a mosaic...

Blimey, wedding customs are pretty weird stuff, and there are so many similarities across religions...veils, canopies, silver spoons...breaking a cake over the bride's head...even though customs may be old and inherited, they are also borrowed, added to and tampered with...worth a project in itself.