Note: Following excerpts were taken from Khushwant Singh’s non-fiction work ‘India: An Introduction’.
Christianity came very early to India. Thomas Didymus, the apostle, came to Malabar in the year AD 52. Although his mission was to convert Jews who had preceded him to India, once in the country, he decided to take on the gentile heathen. For his pains, the gentiles murdered him. Nothing more was heard of Christianity in India for three centuries.
In the year AD 345 Thomas of Canaan, a merchant prince, brought 72 Christian families (about 400 men and women) from Syria. They became the nucleus of the Syrian Church in Malabar. After the Arabs became master of the seas, there was little communication between the Syrian Christians of India and the Christians of the Middle East.
The Syrian Christian community of present-day Kerala is one of the oldest in Christendom. Many of their names derive from the Old Testament, e.g., Matthai (from Matthew), Verughese, and Thomas from their founder and patron-saint.
In AD 1498 Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut. At that time, it is estimated that the number of Syrian Christians had increased to 200,000. Portuguese seamen were welcomed by the Syrians as well as by the Hindus. The fraternisation was brief, because by now the Syrians had come to share the Hindus’ abhorrence for beef and were somewhat put out by the high style of living of the Portuguese Fathers. The Portuguese were unable to mix with the natives and came to be known by the pejorative parang (foreigner).
The first important Catholic settlement began in 1510, when the Portuguese commander, Albuquerque took Goa. He brought Franciscan and Dominican priests with him. Goa remains to this day the main centre of Catholic Christianity in India. The Protestant Christianity, on the other hand, arrived through the Dutch, the Danes and the English.
Kalampedia 