This book is not about Christianity in India but about Thomas Christians, with special reference to relations with the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This began when two Thomas Christians seamen piloted Vasco da Gama's ships from Mombasa to Calicut in 1498. Two Thomas Christian bishops then recorded how the Portuguese attacked Muslim shipping in Calicut harbor. The Thomas Christians whom the Portuguese encountered, tracing their origins to the arrival in India of the Apostle Thomas in 52 a.d., were a powerful and prosperous merchant-warrior elite along the Malabar Coast of India. Indian in culture, Christian in faith, and “Syrian” in liturgy, with links to the Chaldean “Church of the East,” this community initially welcomed the “Farangi” Catholics in joint worship services and ceremonies.

Soon, however, in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, they found themselves called “heretics,” “Nestorians,” “Judaisers” and pagans. Some of their bishops were intercepted en route to or from “Chaldea” and imprisoned by the Inquisition of Goa. Jesuits established seminaries among them and ordained increasing numbers of Thomas Catholic priests. In 1599, at the “Synod of Diamper” convened by Archbishop Aleixio de Menezes of Goa, Thomas Christians not submitting to Rome were anathemized, and many Syrian traditions and Syriac treasures held for 1,200 years were demolished.

Catholic ecclesiastical domination did not go unchallenged. Fifty years of resistance, led by Archdeacon (Ramban) George of the Cross, culminated in Thomas Christian clerics (kattanars) meeting at Koonen Cross in 1653 and swearing a solemn Oath. Renouncing all ties to Rome, they consecrated their own High Metran, naming him Mar Thoma I. Numbers of Thomas Christians remained Catholic and retained its Latin Rite; and the community was rent asunder. More schisms would follow.

All this is well-known, and much more. Little new is added to our historical understanding by Clara Joseph. A Thomas Christian and a professor of English and Religious Studies at Calgary, her interest is not so much in historical contextualization as in literary criticism. What she has produced is an exercise in discourse analysis, deploying a liturgy for genuflecting before the high altar of a Saidian-Marxist ideology. In a currently fashional argot, she uses a closed, pseudo-scientific vocabulary to “deconstruct,” “interrogate,” and “unpack” the evils of colonialism, i.e., European domination over non-Europeans. Ironically, and typically, her study is itself Eurocentric. Her sources are almost entirely Portuguese, or derivative thereof. Indeed, half her entire book focuses on the Journada of Archbishop Menezes.

Yet the central concern of this book is laudable. This is to counter the commonly held notion, vigorously pursued by the militant Hindu nationalist regime now governing India, that all Christianity in India is not only alien but an exclusively Western imposition that needs to be eradicated. The argument of this work—namely that, in the face of great pressure, Thomas Christians took an “anti-colonial turn” against ecclesiastical domination and refused to submit to Rome and made clear the Indianness of their Christianity—is correct. Despite an anachronistic conceptual use of “colonialism” (which is never defined), persistence of the profound Indianness of the Christianity held by the Thomas Christian is clear. This, however, is a trait shared with almost every other form of Christianity in India. Alas, the “Indianness” of virtually all Christianities in India is not acknowledged in this book. Yet, this very feature is increasingly recognized by scholars—as can be seen in a volume of essays, entitled India and the Indianness of Christianity put out by Richard Fox Young in 2009 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans). But, for the most thorough, contextualized, nuanced, and penetrating historical understanding of relations between Thomas Christians and Portuguese, no scholar in our day can compare with Pius Malekanthathilå, Professor of Medieval Indian History at JNU-New Delhi. Fortunately, his works have been consulted by Clara Joseph.

Thomas Christians of Kerala remain among the most privileged and powerful elite communities of India. From their mansions (theravads), they rule estates that still produce spices, nuts, teas, and other lucrative commodities. Even the less well-off among them are the best educated and energetic and enterprising, occupying good positions in business, professions, and government service. Their diaspora are scattered throughout South Asia and the world. There is hardly a Christian denomination where Thomas Christians are not to be found.