Hemis Monastery stands inside a gorge, a lone ranger surrounded by vast swathes of red and brown mountains, bare valleys peppered with poplar trees and a vivid blue sky. I reach the courtyard of the monastery after a steep climb, my city lungs working overtime in the thin Ladakhi air, wondering how it would’ve felt for a young and lost Jesus Christ to have walked this very path more than two thousand years ago.
The rumours of Jesus’s visit to India, which are still being passionately argued upon with a documentary made a decade ago, were started by two gentlemen much before internet became the fighting ground of conspiracies. Louis Jacol
liot, a French barrister who lived several years in India between 1865-1869, wrote ‘La Bible Dans I’Inde’ (The Bible in India) where he compared the accounts of the life of Krishna, one of the prominent Hindu avatars of Vishnu, with that of Jesus Christ in the Gospels and concluded that there were far too many similarities in both these accounts and hence they were of the same person.