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What the Jesuit Catholics achieved in Goa is a story of blood, power, and suppression—the might of a naval empire propelled by the zeal of a faith system that had already overhauled European culture itself. Gods ran—or rather, were taken away from—the Goan confines to make way for another God, one accompanied not by angels or saints, but by guns and cannons. If anything, it was a testament to the idea that the might of man was less a product of the deity he prayed to than of the violence he could unleash.
However, when the same Portuguese ships sailed along the Malabar Coast, what they saw was not a land ripe for utter cleansing by the works of fallen angels, as they had perceived in other pagan territories. In Goa and elsewhere, all they saw were the dwellings of demonic forces in Hindu idols. But in Kerala, they encountered a different kind of world altogether—a land where an early memory of the Anointed One took root independently—while the Iberian world was still debating the nature of the Divine in Latin forums.
Here was a coastal society where the seeds of Christianity had taken root before canon and creed were formalized in the West. Although associated with the Persian Church since the arrival of Thomas of Cana himself, they never identified with Rome, nor were they truly Mesopotamian in their practices. The Nasranis (Nazarenes) of Kerala had established a native social fabric that was in communion with the land—through the syncretic language, music, art, and architecture they embraced. The faith was not an imported article of salvation; it was an integral part of cultural identity, shaped through over a millennium of isolated evolution. In other words, what the Paranki—a local term for the Portuguese—faced in Kerala was not mere heathenry they could easily obliterate; it was Civilization itself.
The encounter between the Catholic colonizers and the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala would become one of the earliest and most profound ideological and spiritual confrontations in Indian history. The resistance was not simply against conversion or cultural hegemony—it was against the idea that faith had to wear European garments to be legitimate. This conflict culminated in episodes like the Coonan Cross Oath of 1653, where thousands of Malabar Christians swore never to submit to Roman ecclesiastical authority, setting the stage for centuries of schism.
Moreover, the Portuguese were stunned by the political and cultural complexity of Kerala. Unlike Europe—fractured by the disunity of feudal principalities and the overreach of the Holy Roman Empire—the Islamic world to their east had already consolidated under powerful "Gunpowder Empires": the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. There, authority lay in a synthesis of religious legitimacy and imperial might. Power stemmed from one’s ability to command armies and souls alike. Religious freedom was but a gift from the monarch—well-organized, of course, but never strong enough to topple the authority claimed to have been bestowed upon the Shahanshahs and Sultans by the Almighty himself.
Kerala—a coastal strip that never birthed empires of scale—offered a contrast that baffled and challenged this worldview. Here was a society where pluralism was not a symptom of chaos or conquest, but a carefully negotiated coexistence. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians operated in overlapping spheres of trade, worship, and diplomacy—without one erasing the other.
The ideological clash in Kerala was thus not just a story of colonial overreach, but of cultural resilience. It revealed that Christianity was not born in the West, nor did it require Western approval to thrive. The consequences of this confrontation echo through Kerala’s society to this day—through its divided denominations, its assertive regional identity, and its deep-seated wariness of religious homogenization. A reality many Indians themselves fail to truly comprehend, resulting in the embarrassingly uninformed caricatures of the Malayali existence.
In the end, what the Portuguese encountered on the soil where Da Gama once set foot was not merely a resistance to imperialism—but a refusal to forget. Kerala did not reject the Cross—it refused to be crucified by it.
For further reading:
1. Gods, Guns and Missionaries; Manu S. Pillai
2. Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South Asia; Corinne G. Dempsey
3. Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala; M. G. S Narayanan
4. The Courtesan, The Mahatma and The Italian Brahmin; Manu S. Pillai
5. The Last Jews of Kerala; Edna Fernandes
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