by Anita Nair
The stories that the travellers brought back with them varied little in their outlines: all said how in India St. Thomas was universally believed to have arrived in AD 52 from Palestine by boat; that he had travelled down the Red Sea and across the Persian Gulf, and that he landed at the great Keralan port of Cranganore, the spice entrepot to which the Roman Red Sea merchant fleet would head each year to buy pepper and Indian slave girls for the Mediterranean market. In Kerala St. Thomas was said to have converted the local Brahmins with the aid of miracles and to have built seven churches. He then headed eastwards to the ancient temple town of Mylapore, on the outskirts of modern Chennai. There the saint was opposed by the orthodox Brahmins of the temple, and finally martyred. His followers built a tomb and monastery over his grave which, said the travellers, was now one of the principal pilgrimage centres—for Muslims and Hindus as well as Christians—in southern India.
Although the historicity of the legend is ultimately unprovable, the modern St. Thomas Christians, as they still call themselves, regard this tradition as something more than a myth: for them it is an article of faith which underpins not only their religious beliefs but their whole identity and their place in Indian society. Moreover they are agreed—as, amazingly, are many of their Hindu neighbours—that St. Thomas is not dead: that he is still present in Kerala, guarding over his followers and guiding his church.
This was a conviction that I came across all over southern India when I travelled through the region this January, making a BBC documentary on the legend. It was particularly palpable at the small ‘Miracle Church’ of Putenangadi, south of Kochi. At a time when in North India the violent conflict between India’s Hindus and Christians was making headlines across the world, members of both faiths could be found side by side crammed into the same church, all quite convinced that St. Thomas was personally present in the building, and that he could not fail to answer the prayers of his devotees. At the back of this church I came across an old Hindu woman named Jaya. I asked her why she, a Hindu, chose to come and pray in a Christian church.
‘So that I can be relieved of all my troubles,’ she replied. ‘I believe that St. Thomas can do that. It is that faith that brings me here. If there’s anything I need, I ask St. Thomas for it.’
‘But as a Hindu why would you come to a Christian church?’ I asked. ‘Why not go to the temple?’
‘Because I have faith,’ she repeated simply. ‘When I have difficulties, St. Thomas solves them for me. Of course, I go to the temple too. But any big problem I have, I come here and I pray, and my prayers are always answered.’
I asked her what she asked St. Thomas for.
‘I had a lot of trouble constructing a home for my family,’ she replied. ‘I came here and prayed and slowly things sorted themselves out. I also had other problems at home—but that has changed. Today I have what I need: I don’t live in luxury but I don’t want for anything …’
‘So do you believe that St. Thomas is somehow alive and looking after you?’
‘For me St. Thomas is definitely alive,’ she said. ‘He’s not dead. At all times he is in my thoughts and often he appears in my dreams. That’s why I come here. Today I didn’t really have the time, but I made the time to come. I feel very uneasy if I don’t come and pray here every Friday.’
‘So you’ve actually had a glimpse of him in a dream?’
‘I have him in my thoughts always,’ repeated Jaya. ‘Whenever I pray to him, he comes and answers me. Every evening when I light the lamp in my home, I call to him.’
Later, Jaya introduced me to her Christian friend, Miriam.
‘In my experience, praying to St. Thomas here is always effective,’ said Miriam. ‘Whatever I need I pray for and my prayers are heard and answered. I pray for good health and strength. I pray to be delivered from any enemies. I don’t pray for money or wealth—I simply put myself in St. Thomas’s hands and ask that he protect me. You see, I didn’t get married because I didn’t want to. So now I come and pray here because I’m on my own. I look to St. Thomas for his protection and he has blessed me until today.’
‘So St. Thomas is your protector?’
‘I have no one else,’ she replied. ‘St. Thomas is the apostle of India. This church is built in his name. Of course there is God, but it is St. Thomas’s name that we call. Before I go to bed every evening, I pray to St. Thomas and it gives me courage and strength. He is all I have.’
The trail of St. Thomas’s journey to India begins thousands of miles from Kerala in the deserts of the Middle East.
In the late sixth century, the Byzantine Empire was beginning to crumble under a wave of attacks. The great classical cities of the East Mediterranean were slowly falling into ruin and decay. As their libraries and universities were burned down or deserted, many of the most important manuscripts were preserved in the library of a remote monastery in the deserts of the Sinai, now known as St. Catherine’s. The great walls of St. Catherine’s, and its sheer isolation, preserved it from attacks for centuries. Protected from their enemies, the monks were able to accumulate one of the greatest treasuries of icons and illuminated manuscripts in the Christian world.
When the first European travellers began penetrating this region, they were astonished to find in the monastery a library of unmatched richness containing lost works by great classical authors and the oldest extant copy of the New Testament. But perhaps the strangest discovery of all was a previously unknown early Christian text dating from the fourth century AD. The manuscript was entitled the Acts of St. Thomas.
The manuscript told a strange story that had been completely forgotten in the traditions of the Western Church. According to the Acts, St. Thomas was Jesus’s twin (the Syriac for Thomas—Te’oma—means twin, as does his Greek name Didymos); like his brother he was a carpenter from Galilee. After Jesus’s death, according to the Acts, the apostle had been summoned to India—and his martyrdom—by the mysterious King Gondophares.
Nineteenth-century biblical scholars were at first very sceptical of the Acts of St. Thomas. They correctly pointed out that the story contained many clearly apocryphal Gnostic elements, and that the earliest surviving version of the text, which had been written in fourth century Mesopotamia, dated from at least two centuries after the events described; indeed, up to the beginning of this century the document was sometimes dismissed as a pious romance. Nevertheless, over the last hundred years, as research has progressed both into ancient Indian history and the links between India and the Roman Middle East, there have been a series of remarkable discoveries which have gone a long way to prove that the story contained in the Acts seems to be built on surprisingly solid historical foundations.
Firstly, British archaeologists working in late nineteenth-century India began to find hoards of coins belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the Raja Gondophares, who ruled from AD 19 to AD 45. If St. Thomas had ever been summoned to India, chronological logic demands that it would indeed have been Raja Gondophares who would have done it, just as the Acts had always maintained. Moreover, the fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the name of an obscure Indian raja, whose name and lineage had completely disappeared from the face of the earth, implied that it must contain at least a nucleus of genuine historical information dating from the first century.
Archaeological discoveries have since confirmed many other details of the story, revealing that maritime contacts between the Roman world and India were much more extensive than anyone had previously realized. In the 1930’s, Sir Mortimer Wheeler discovered and excavated a major Roman trading station on the South Indian coast, while other scholars unearthed references showing that at the time of Thomas, the trick of sailing with the monsoon had just been discovered, reducing the journey time from the Red Sea to India to just under 40 days. Indeed, according to a previously overlooked remark by Strabo, in the mid first century, no less than 200 Roman trading vessels a year were making the annual journey to the bazaars of Malabar and back again. M
ore intriguing still, analysis of Roman coin hoards in India has shown that the Roman spice trade peaked exactly in the middle of the first century AD, building up under Augustus and building to a climax under Nero. All this showed that if St. Thomas had wanted to come to India, the passage from Palestine, far from being a near-impossible feat, would in fact have been easier, more frequent and probably cheaper than at any other time in the next one thousand five hundred years—until Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the Indies in 1498.
Scholars discovered further conformation of the Acts in the practices of the St. Thomas Christians themselves. Since the Second World War, theologians have become increasingly aware of the Jewishness of Jesus and his first disciples in Jerusalem: it has become apparent, for example, that the very first Jerusalem Christians would have carried on going to the temple, performing sacrifices, obeying the Jewish food laws and performing circumcisions on their children. If St. Thomas had carried Christianity to India, it is likely that he would have carried with him a distinctly more Jewish form of the religion than that brought to Europe by St. Paul. Hence the importance of the fact that some of the St. Thomas Christian churches to this day retain Judeo-Christian practices long dropped in the West, such as the celebration of the solemn Passover Feast. Hence also the significance of the fact that the St. Thomas Christians still use the two earliest Christian liturgies in existence: the Mass of Addai and Mari, and the Liturgy of St. James, once used by the early Church of Jerusalem. More remarkable still is the fact that these ancient church services are still at least partly sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by both Jesus and St. Thomas.
The more you investigate the evidence, the more you are irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that whether or not St. Thomas did himself come to India, he most certainly could have come, and if he didn’t personally make the journey, then it seems certain that some other very early Christian missionary did, for there is certainly evidence for a substantial Christian population in India by at least the third century. And if there is no documentary proof finally to clinch the case, then there is at least a very good reason for its absence: for the entire historical documentation of the St. Thomas Christians was reduced to ashes in the sixteenth century—not by Muslims or Hindus, but by a newly arrived European Christian power: the Portuguese.
As far as the Portuguese colonial authorities were concerned, the St. Thomas Christians were heretics, an idea that was confirmed by their belief in reincarnation and astrology, and the Hindu-style sculptures of elephants and dancing girls found carved on their crosses. Notions that they might also have maintained early Christian traditions predating the arrival of the faith in Europe were dismissed out of hand. The Inquisition was brought in, and the historical records of the St. Thomas Christians put to the flame.
Yet the old stories did survive, locked in a place that the Inquisition could never touch: in the minds and memories of the Christians of the most inaccessible Keralan backwaters. For in their songs and dances, passed on from father to son and teacher to pupil, the St. Thomas Christians preserved intact many of their most ancient traditions. Scholars now believe that if the answer to the riddle of the legends of St. Thomas lies anywhere, it is in this rich and largely unstudied oral tradition.
The man who has done more than anything to preserve this ancient Keralan heritage of St. Thomas songs and dances is a plump Catholic priest and village school teacher named Fr. Jacob Vellian. Working in isolation, in his spare time, with very little help and pitiful resources, Fr. Jacob has since 1973 single-handedly travelled from village to village in Kerala, systematically collecting the Christian songs and dances which talked of St. Thomas’s travels and exploits. On two occasions, hidden in remote villages, he stumbled across ancient palm leaf books, which preserved other fragments of the songs and ballads in tiny one millimetre high Malayalam lettering: the oldest surviving documentation of the St. Thomas Christians.
There were, he discovered, still current in the Keralan countryside, literally hundreds of songs recording the deeds of St. Thomas, as well as two ancient full-length ballads, the older of which, The Margam Kali Pattu or Song of the Way was of epic proportions. Both of these ballads certainly predated the coming of the Portuguese and both, from their very archaic language, showed every sign of dating from the very earliest centuries AD. In many cases the two ballads had become hopelessly intertwined and it was a job of considerable complexity to unravel the two, quite apart from writing down the correct musical accompaniment and the choreography that went with them.
Almost everywhere Fr. Vellian found the oral tradition on the verge of extinction, with the young people unwilling to carry on the job of learning by heart the complex stanzas of the ballads. In several places he was able to record lost fragments of the epics just weeks before the last of the ashans (or village bards) died, taking their songs to their grave.
‘Over the years I have tried to meet with every Christian ashan in Kerala,’ Vellian told me. ‘Most of them were illiterate: isolated old men who were only barely aware of the importance of what they were clinging onto. Some had a few disciples and were very eager to teach what they knew; others had none. But no one was trying to write down what they had preserved. No one was promoting them or rewarding them for their work. As a result, much must have been lost. No one ashan knew the whole of the two longest ballads: some knew twenty per cent; some seventy per cent. But the fourteen sections that we now have seem to be the whole of The Song of the Way, and the job now is to study this—and to make sure it is passed on.’
To that end, Vellian has been building on another, almost lost Keralan tradition: the Dancing Nuns of Malabar. Fr. Vellian has spent the last few years training the nuns of Kerala to dance the ancient dances of St. Thomas, and all over Kerala groups of wimpled sisters can now be seen swaying uncertainly to the beat of the tabla as they attempt to master the dances which tell of the apostle’s travels. In this way, what may be the last surviving link with the tradition of the apostles is now being preserved by a group of South Indian Whoopy Goldbergs. For all the unintentional comedy of this, Fr. Vellian is adamant that the oral traditions of Kerala have accurately preserved a series of texts that may well hold the vital clues which could help prove the St. Thomas legend.
‘The palm leaf documents that we have collected show how accurately the bards have preserved the text,’ he says. ‘Here or there a word may have changed in the three hundred years since the earliest of these texts was written down, but by and large the versions we have collected in the fields are consistent both with each other and these palm leaf texts. These traditions are an authentic and incredibly valuable and ancient source of Christian history, and should be respected as such.’
Vellian is, of course, right. For while Christianity has never been a major faith in India, it is a religion with deep roots in the soil, and one which has clung on with incredible tenacity, despite all the odds. Above all, the Church here has remained faithful to the tradition of St. Thomas’s journey from Palestine to India. It is a story long forgotten in a West which has come to regard itself as the true home of the faith, forgetting that in its essence Christianity is not a Western but an Eastern religion.
Before leaving Kerala, I asked Fr. Vellian whether he really believed that his work would eventually provide some conclusive evidence to prove St. Thomas’s journey.
‘In the end we are the evidence,’ said Vellian. ‘We have a very ancient, unbroken tradition in the community that St. Thomas was the founder of the Church in India. Our traditions are unanimous that he came here, and that is something we have held onto, despite persecution, for seventeen hundred years. Our spirituality is very close to that of the early Church and we believe our Church is as old as any Apostolic Church in the world. Our songs and traditions are quite clear about this. In the end, it is these traditions that we base our belief on: not something on paper or stone, which is secondary. In the end, it is our fidelity to St. Thomas that is most important to us.’
The Blue Light
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer
This story was published in Malayalam Literary Survey, published by Sahitya Akademi, Trissur.
This is the story of one of the amazing incidents of my life. No, not just an incident. It is better to call it something out of the ordinary, something supernatural which took place. I have tried to understand it by using scientific logic. But I have not succeeded. Perhaps you may be able to do it—analyse it. I call it an amazing happening … yes, what else can I call it?
This is what happened.
The day, the month and the year do not matter. I was in search of a house. That was nothing new. I am always in search of a house. I never get a house or a room that I like. The place where I stayed I found had a hundred faults. But to whom could I complain? If I didn’t like it I could just go away. But go where? And so I lived there full of resentment. How many houses there had been, how many rooms, with which I had been dissatisfied! It wasn’t anybody’s fault. I did not like them. So I left. Someone else would come in my place and he or she would like it. That is the character of rented houses.
Those were the days when there was a scarcity of rented houses. What could once be rented for ten rupees could not now be got for fifty. And so I wandered about in search of a house and there it was!
It was a small one-storeyed house. Far from the bustle of the town; somewhere near the municipal limit. There was an ancient board—‘To let.’
I liked it on the whole. Upstairs there were two rooms and a balcony. Four rooms on the ground floor, and a bathroom in addition. There was also a kitchen and running tap water. Only there was no electricity. There was a well in front of the kitchen. Nearby, in a corner of the compound, was a lavatory. The well was an old one with a low stone wall round it. There were plenty of trees in the compound which was walled in on all sides. One great advantage was that there were no neighbours. The house abutted on a main road.
