Christianity’s advent in India is a hotly debated topic. But the widely held – and disputed – belief is that it started with the arrival of St Thomas the Apostle on Kerala’s Malabar coast in 52 CE. The popular claim is that the apostle converted the Namboodiri Brahmins of Kerala, giving rise to the present-day Nasranis or Syrian Christians. This was followed by the arrival of Pantaenus, a missionary from Alexandria, in 189 CE, and later, a group of Christians, led by Thomas Cana, from the Middle East in 345 CE.
The Christian missions took off only with the arrival of the Portuguese missionary St Francis Xavier in 1542 and the Italian Jesuit Robert de Nobili in 1605 in Goa, followed by the German Pietists (Lutheran missionaries) Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau in 1706 in Tranquebar.
The Tranquebar missions were responsible for instating the printing press and the first ever print of the Tamil Bible – evidence of which one can still see at the Ziegenbalg House in Tranquebar. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the establishment of British rule in the presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and the subsequent amendment of the East India Company’s charter in 1813, gave way to...
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