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Most ethnic and religious communities localise their myths of origin when they migrate to new lands and establish themselves there permanently. This … - Ishwar Sharan
" "Most ethnic and religious communities localise their myths of origin when they migrate to new lands and establish themselves there permanently. This is part of the psychological process of becoming a native. The tradition they bring from abroad is altered enough to identify its main themes and characters with local places. Time does the rest and the second and third generation soon forget the original story and its foreign locales. Inter-community relationships will mix in local legends with the imported myth. In the case of the Syrian Christians, the process was irresistible because the charismatic, semi-legendary Thomas of Cana who led the first Christian immigrants to Malabar from Persia and Mesopotamia in 345 CE, was not really any different a community hero than the charismatic, semi-legendary Thomas the Apostle. The fact that both leaders were also known as Thomas of Jerusalem would have made the identification of the fourth century merchant with the first century saint inevitable. None of this would amount to anything more than an ethnological curiosity except that the Syrian Christian tradition of St. Thomas became the property of the Portuguese and the Roman Catholic Church. Both imperialist powers needed more than anything else in their ideological arsenals this emotionally-charged fable to legitimize their presence and justify their violent, viciously bigoted conduct in India.
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About Ishwar Sharan
Ishwar Sharan, also known as Swami Devananda Saraswati, is a Canadian author and convert to Hinduism.
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I. Sharan,Swami Devananda Saraswati,
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Now the fact that the South Indian St. Thomas story was not written down until 1892, as T.K. Joseph testifies, is an extraordinary circumstance for so famous a piece of Indian “history”. It also brings Bishop Medleycott of Trichur back into the picture. He was the great St. Thomas advocate in South India from 1887 to 1896, and had the motive and means to assist Varghese Palayur in writing his “ancient” composition. The Vatican had declared the apostolate of St. Thomas in South India as unverified after studying the Rabban Pattu, but the Roman Catholic Church in India then and now is still the only entity that reaps any benefit from the propagation of the myth among Indians.
While the belief that Thomas settled in South India came about as an honest mistake, the claim that he was martyred by Brahmins was always a deliberate lie, playing upon a possible confusion between the consonants of the expression “be ruhme”, meaning “with a spear”, and those of “Brahma” (Semitic alphabets usually don’t specify vowels). That was the gratitude Hindus received in return for extending their hospitality to the Christian refugees: being blackened as the murderers of the refugees’ own hero. If the Indian bishops have any honour, they will themselves remove this false allegation from their discourse and their monuments, including the cathedral in Chennai built at the site of Thomas’s purported martyrdom (actually the site of a Shiva temple). Indeed, they will issue a historic declaration expressing their indebtedness to Hindu hospitality and pluralism and pledging to renounce their anti-Hindu animus.
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The “martyred” St. Thomas has existed since the Acts of Thomas, ca. 210 CE, in which he is executed by King Mazdai for social crimes and sorcery. The Portuguese added the Brahmin assassin after 1517 and he has remained the first choice of the Roman Catholic Church since, for without him the Hindu community cannot be successfully maligned and the continuing cover-up of the destruction of temples in Mylapore cannot be successfully maintained by the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese and its anti-Hindu secular sponsors in the government .
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