The Jesuit Bollandist Peeters and Maurice Winternitz, Professor of Indian Philology and Ethnology at the German University of Prague, categorically d… - Ishwar Sharan

The practice had indeed been followed from time immemorial, in the first Shiva temple where it originated, whose place on the beach was now usurped by the Portuguese church. The practice was to take the festival image around the temple and lower them three times to the ground, at the sanctum door before the muladeva. The Hindus were continuing the ritual in the second temple, and by taking the festival images to the church on the beach were reverencing the ancient mulasthana – even if Christians and Gaspar Correa vainly thought otherwise.

Indeed, since this book was published in 1995 the clean-up and rebuilding of San Thome Cathedral's compound, the second "St. Thomas” tomb, and the whole area surrounding the church on St. Thomas Mount has been total. All evidence of Hindu temples has been clandestinely removed and the ancient rubble disposed of in an unknown place. We have an eye-witness account of this nefarious work done by the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese later in this book. The Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits who destroyed the temples of Goa, Kerala, Pondicherry and along the Tamil coast-line, were generally more circumspect than their Muslim counterparts. They did not leave much evidence behind in the churches they built on or near temple sites. But it is also true that Indian archaeologists have not studied Christian churches as closely and in the same probing manner that they have studied mosques and other Muslim monuments. The exception is German scholars whose work on Indian churches is yet to be translated and published in English. They assert that most sixteenth and seventeenth century churches in India contain temple rubble and are built on temple sites.

The first Christians to emigrate to India came in 345 CE. They landed at Cranganore in Malabar, the ancient port of Muziris on the mouth of the Periyar River where it joined the Arabian Sea. They were four hundred refugees from Babylon and Nineveh, belonging to seven tribes and seventy-two families. They were fleeing religious persecution under the Persian king Shapur II. He had driven them out of Syria and Mesopotamia because he considered them a state liability. Rome, Persia’s arch enemy, had begun to christianise under Constantine, and Shapur had come to suspect the allegiances of his Christian subjects.