They knew Marco Polo's story and knew, too, that the "Thomas" revered by Syrian Christians at Mylapore was not a martyr. This was not a very satisfac… - Ishwar Sharan

The myth of St. Thomas in Malabar and Mylapore, which we have reviewed in this essay, is an Indian Christian communal fable that was exposed decades ago by the "St. Thomas" Christian historians T.K. Joseph and Rev. Dr. G. Milne Rae – the latter a reader at Madras Christian College. That it is advertised by the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese as Indian history is to be expected of this criminal branch of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; that it is accepted without critical review by the Government of India, and promoted by a racist Tamil Nadu state administration on political platforms to disparage Hindus, is quite another. 77 Their conduct as secular administrators is mala fide to say the least. It is a new twist to the old tale of treachery in the Acts of Thomas, but it is in keeping with the spirit of the original Syrian legend. The Acts tells us that Jesus sold his brother Judas called Thomas the Twin as a carpenter slave to the trader Abbanes for a handful of silver. Are we Hindus so ready and willing to do the same today to our own Bharatiya brother with this anti-national, culture- denying Portuguese tale?

Whatever the faults of the Indian Express in the 1990s, it had an honourable beginning and still had some of the moral authority it acquired in the Freedom Movement. This is not true of The Hindu which was established with the sole objective of making money from the British Raj. It was known as "The Sapper" prior to 1947 – even the British- owned Mail was more nationalistic - and after the White Sahib went away it was called "The Old Widow of Mount Road". 1 Its formula for success is a studied, high-tech mediocrity – name and form and no content – and a faithful toeing of the Chinese government line. It is class-conscious, casteist and fashionably anti-Hindu. Its moral response to any media- created national crisis – such as the demolition of an unauthorised Muslim building in Ayodhya – is to fill its columns with the lugubrious drivel of various popular Marxist professors. In short, The Hindu is self- righteous and boring unless one is looking for a suitable girl for a suitable boy with B.Com. and an American Green Card.... . Today in 2010 it is called "The Chindu" because of its slavish pro-China editorial policy. The Hindu has been a quisling newspaper throughout its whole career though it calls itself India's national newspaper.

The church also has paintings of St. Thomas and his Hindu assassin. One of them, on the reredos of the altar, depicts an Iyengar Brahmin with namam about to stab the praying apostle from behind. It defeats its purpose inasmuch as Vaishnavas did not wear namam, the sectarian U- shaped forehead mark, until after Ramanuja introduced it in the eleventh century. The other painting, very large and part of a series of the apostles and their various modes of death, shows St. Thomas with a book, a lance, and his sturdy Hindu assassin, who, this time, does not wear sectarian marks or orthodox dress.