Encounters with Christ in India

The Apostle Thomas & the Brahmins of Palayur

Tradition holds that the apostle Thomas came ashore on the Malabar coast around AD 52 and, at Palayur, met Brahmin priests casting water toward the sun as an offering. He is said to have thrown water into the air that hung there as a sign, and many were baptised. It endures as the founding memory of one of the oldest Christian communities on earth.

King Gundaphar & the Palace in Heaven

The apocryphal Acts of Thomas tells of the apostle hired to build a palace for a northern king, Gundaphar, who gives the building fund to the poor and tells the king a palace has been raised for him in heaven. Long dismissed as fable — until the king's name turned up on real coins and a dated stone inscription. Gondophares was a genuine Indo-Parthian ruler of exactly the right era: a true historical name inside a legendary tale.

Thomas of Cana (Knai Thoma)

The Southist (Knanaya) branch of the Kerala church remembers a Syriac merchant, Thomas of Cana, leading dozens of Christian families from Persia to Kodungallur and receiving privileges from a local ruler — knitting the ancient Indian church more closely to the Church of the East. The traditional date is AD 345, though a number of scholars place the migration centuries later.

Cosmas Indicopleustes

Around AD 550 an Alexandrian merchant-turned-monk, remembered as Cosmas the “India-sailor,” described organised Christian congregations — complete with clergy and a bishop — on the Malabar coast and in Ceylon. His account is among the earliest outside evidence that a functioning church already existed in India centuries before any European mission.

Marco Polo at the Shrine of Thomas

On his long voyage home from China around 1292, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo recorded stopping near Mylapore, where the tomb of the apostle Thomas was venerated. He noted the pilgrims — Christian and non-Christian alike — who came to the shrine seeking healing, a rare medieval glimpse of the living Thomas tradition.

Francis Xavier

The Jesuit Francis Xavier landed at Goa on 6 May 1542 and spent the next decade walking the fishing coasts of south India and beyond, baptising in great numbers and learning to teach the faith in simple local terms. His restless energy set the pattern for Catholic mission across Asia.

Robert de Nobili

Arriving in Madurai in 1606, the Italian Jesuit Robert de Nobili chose to live as a Tamil scholar-ascetic — adopting local dress, language and custom — to reach high-caste Hindus who had recoiled from the foreign-looking faith. His “accommodation” method was fiercely debated in his own day and has been studied ever since.

John de Britto

The Portuguese Jesuit John de Britto laboured in the Madurai mission in de Nobili's style, living simply among the Tamil people, until he was put to death in 1693 for his preaching. Rome later canonised him; in India he is sometimes remembered as a second Xavier.

Constanzo Beschi (Viramamunivar)

The Italian Jesuit Constanzo Beschi — known in Tamil as Viramamunivar — mastered Tamil so deeply that he composed a celebrated Christian epic, the Thembavani, and produced early Tamil dictionaries and grammars. He is remembered as much in the history of Tamil literature as in the history of the mission.

Devasahayam Pillai

Devasahayam Pillai, an official at the Travancore court, converted and took a name meaning “God is my help.” Fierce opposition led to his death in 1752. In 2022 he was declared a saint of the Catholic Church — the first Indian layman to be canonised.

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg

On 9 July 1706 Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg stepped ashore at the Danish outpost of Tranquebar as the first Protestant missionary to India. He learned Tamil, opened schools, and translated the New Testament into Tamil — putting Scripture into an Indian language in print for the first time.

Christian Friedrich Schwartz

The German Lutheran Christian Friedrich Schwartz gave nearly fifty years, from 1750, to the missions at Tranquebar, Tiruchirapalli and Tanjore. So plainly honest that Hindu and Muslim rulers trusted him as a go-between, he was even asked to tutor the young Raja Serfoji of Tanjore.

Krishna Mohan Banerjee

A gifted young Bengali from a Kulin Brahmin family, caught up in Calcutta's ferment of reform, Krishna Mohan Banerjee was baptised in 1832. He became a noted scholar and one of the first Indians ordained in the Anglican church in Bengal, arguing that Christ answered the deepest longings already present in India's own scriptures.

Baba Padmanji

Baba Padmanji, a Marathi writer, came to faith after a long inward struggle that he later set down in his own autobiography — a book counted among the first works of Marathi Christian literature. He was baptised in 1854 and spent his life writing for ordinary readers in his own tongue.

Narayan Sheshadri

Narayan Sheshadri, a Deccani Brahmin educated in Bombay, was baptised in 1843 and gave his life to preaching among the Marathi people and to rescuing outcaste and famine-struck families. His long labour earned him the affectionate title “Apostle of the Marathas.”

Imad-ud-din Lahiz

Imad-ud-din Lahiz, a Punjabi Muslim maulvi who had once helped argue the Islamic case against Christianity, was baptised in 1866 after his own searching changed his mind. He became a CMS Anglican priest and a prolific Urdu author — even producing an Urdu translation of the Qur'an for study.

Pandita Ramabai

A Sanskrit scholar and high-caste widow honoured across India for her learning, Ramabai was baptised in 1883 and founded the Mukti Mission near Pune to shelter widows and famine orphans. In 1905 a remarkable prayer revival broke out there. She set down her own account of the long road that brought her to Christ.

Narayan Vaman Tilak

A proud Marathi Brahmin poet, Tilak was handed a New Testament by a stranger on a train who dared him to read it through for a year. He did — and by the end Christ had won him. Baptised in 1895, he insisted an Indian pastor perform the rite, and became one of India's finest Christian poets, setting the gospel to hundreds of Marathi hymns.

Brahmabandhab Upadhyay

Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, a Bengali thinker and Hindu ascetic, was baptised in 1891 and set himself to express Christian faith in the language of Vedanta, living as a Christian sannyasi. His bold, contested project — to make the gospel at home in Indian philosophy — still stirs debate a century on.

Sadhu Sundar Singh

Grieving his mother and bitter toward the missionaries' faith, the teenage Sikh Sundar Singh burned a Gospel in protest, then resolved to throw himself under the morning train unless God showed him the truth. He said a vision of the living Christ met him before dawn in December 1904. Baptised the next year, he spent his life as a wandering Christian sadhu in a saffron robe.

V. S. Azariah

Convinced that Indians themselves should carry the gospel, Azariah helped found indigenous mission societies and, on the last day of 1912, was consecrated the first Indian bishop in the Anglican Communion, at Dornakal. His life answered the charge that Christianity in India was merely a foreign import.

The Naga Awakening (E. W. Clark)

In December 1872 the American Baptist E. W. Clark reached the Ao Naga village of Molungkimong and helped gather its first church. It was the seed of a movement that, over the century that followed, would make Nagaland one of the most Christian places on earth.

E. Stanley Jones & the Round Table

Rather than attack other faiths, the American missionary E. Stanley Jones invited India's Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders to a “round table” to share their own deepest experience — and then lifted up the person of Christ. His 1925 book The Christ of the Indian Road carried that approach around the world, and he counted Gandhi among his friends.

Amy Carmichael

The Irish missionary Amy Carmichael settled at Dohnavur in the Tamil south and built a family of refuge for children rescued from temple servitude, staying in India for over fifty years without a single furlough. Her early book Things as They Are told the hard truth of that work to readers back home.

Lesslie Newbigin

The British missionary Lesslie Newbigin gave nearly forty years to India, becoming a bishop in the newly united Church of South India. His later writings on the gospel and modern culture made him one of the most influential mission thinkers of the twentieth century.

Mother Teresa — the “call within a call”

Already a nun and schoolteacher in Kolkata, Mother Teresa described a “call within a call” on a train to Darjeeling in September 1946 — to leave the convent and serve the poorest of the poor. Four years later she founded the Missionaries of Charity. She was canonised in 2016.