Who came, and when
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52
The Thomas Christian tradition
By long tradition, the St Thomas Christians trace their church to the apostle Thomas, said to have reached the Malabar coast and died a martyr in the south.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.46
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345
Thomas of Cana and the Persian Christians
Old tradition tells of Thomas of Cana, a merchant who arrived with a body of Persian Christians and helped build up the church at Cranganore — a figure the community always kept distinct from the apostle. Their treasured grant-plates, and a long bond with the East-Syrian church of Persia, anchor a Christian presence on the Malabar coast deep in the first millennium.
Sources: mundadan-history-vol1 p.120 · mundadan-history-vol1 p.140 · brown-indian-christians-thomas p.85
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1542
Francis Xavier on the Fishery Coast
The Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived in 1542 and gave shape to the faith of the Parava fishing communities along the southern coast.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.55
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1599
The Synod of Diamper
In 1599 the Portuguese archbishop Menezes called a synod at Diamper that bound the ancient Thomas Christians under Rome and recast their Syriac worship in a Latin mould — a forced reordering that many among them never inwardly accepted.
Sources: neill-beginnings-1707 p.235
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1606
Roberto de Nobili at Madurai
The Italian Jesuit Roberto de Nobili learned Sanskrit and adopted a Brahmin manner of life at Madurai in an effort to reach high-caste society.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.76
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1653
The Coonan Cross oath
In 1653, after the Portuguese seized and lost a bishop the Thomas Christians had longed for, a great crowd gathered at Mattancherry and swore they would no longer submit to the Jesuits — not a break with the pope, they insisted, but the end of their patience with Latin rule.
Sources: neill-beginnings-1707 p.345 · neill-beginnings-1707 p.346
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1706
First Protestant missionaries land
On 9 July 1706 Ziegenbalg and Plütschau stepped ashore at Tranquebar — the first Protestant missionaries to reach India.
Sources: neill-history-1707-1858 p.50 · frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.59
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1712
A printing press for Tamil
By a royal order of 1712 a printing press was sent out to Tranquebar so the mission could put Scripture and teaching into Tamil itself; Ziegenbalg, already deep in translating the New Testament, would no longer have to work in a language with no press behind it.
Sources: lehmann-tranquebar p.104 · lehmann-tranquebar p.91
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1719
Death of Ziegenbalg
Ziegenbalg died in 1719, still a young man, after years of language work and a bruising clash with the local Danish authorities.
Sources: neill-history-1707-1858 p.52
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1750
Schwartz begins his long service
Around 1750 Christian Friedrich Schwartz began a mission career in South India that would run nearly half a century without a break.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.62
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1792
The Baptist Missionary Society is founded
In October 1792 a small group of Baptists at Kettering formed the society that would send William Carey to India.
Sources: carey-myers-life p.31
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1793
Carey reaches Bengal
Carey sailed in 1793 and reached Calcutta in November, the first missionary of the new Baptist society.
Sources: carey-myers-life p.39
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1795
The London Missionary Society is founded
In 1795 a group of ministers in London launched the London Missionary Society, part of a wave of new voluntary societies inspired by Carey's example.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.68
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1798
Death of Schwartz
Schwartz died in 1798, ending a celebrated career that closed with him trusted as guardian and tutor at the Thanjavur court.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.62
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1799
The Church Missionary Society is founded
The Church Missionary Society was established in 1799, the evangelical Anglican agency that would later open the Telugu mission.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.68
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1800
The first Hindu baptism at Serampore
At the end of 1800 Carey baptized Krishna Pal, a carpenter, in the Ganges — the mission's first Hindu convert, later a Bengali hymn-writer.
Sources: neill-history-1707-1858 p.220
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1806
Henry Martyn arrives
Henry Martyn reached Calcutta in May 1806 as a Company chaplain, beginning six years of intense translation work.
Sources: neill-history-1707-1858 p.279
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1813
The Charter Act opens India to missions
When the East India Company's charter was renewed in 1813, it granted foreign missionaries legal entry into British-held India for the first time.
Sources: frykenberg-christians-missionaries p.69
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1818
Serampore College is founded
In 1818 the Serampore trio founded Serampore College, joining higher learning to the mission's printing and translation work.
Sources: carey-faithful-witness p.18
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1829
Widow-burning is banned
A long campaign that Carey and others had pressed for years helped bring the 1829 government ban on the burning of widows.
Sources: carey-legacy-mangalwadi p.33
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1830
Duff opens his Calcutta school
Alexander Duff opened his English-medium school in Calcutta in July 1830, helped past local suspicion by the reformer Rammohun Roy.
Sources: neill-history-1707-1858 p.331
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1878
Famine relief and the Telugu mass movement
The American Baptist mission among the Telugus — so small it was called the “Lone Star” — was transformed by the great famine of 1876–78. At Ongole, John E. Clough took a contract to dig part of the Buckingham Canal and set famine-stricken Madiga labourers to work for wages, carrying many through the disaster; when the rains returned, people asked for baptism in overwhelming numbers, more than two thousand on a single day in July 1878. It became one of the largest movements of India's poorest castes to the Christian faith, and in the years that followed spread north across the Telugu country into the Telangana districts of the Nizam of Hyderabad's dominions — Karimnagar, Medak, Mahbubnagar and Nalgonda.
Sources: frykenberg-christianity-india p.271 · frykenberg-christianity-india p.272 · frykenberg-christianity-india p.274
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1889
Ramabai opens Sarada Sadan
In 1889 the scholar Pandita Ramabai, lately turned Christian, opened Sarada Sadan in Bombay — a home and school where high-caste widows, among the most shut-out people of their day, could be sheltered and taught.
Sources: firth-indian-church-history p.195
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1895
Amy Carmichael reaches India
Amy Carmichael arrived in India late in 1895 under the CEZMS, beginning the work that would settle in the Tamil south.
Sources: carmichael-chance-to-die p.116
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1896
The Mukti Mission at Kedgaon
When famine swept the central country in 1896, Ramabai travelled through the stricken districts and gathered far more orphaned girls than she could house; out of that emergency she founded Mukti at Kedgaon, which grew into a settlement of over a thousand women and children.
Sources: firth-indian-church-history p.196
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1901
The first temple child is rescued
In March 1901 a small girl named Preena escaped temple dedication and reached Amy Carmichael, beginning the rescue work at the heart of Dohnavur.
Sources: carmichael-chance-to-die p.171
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1905
Sundar Singh takes the saffron robe
In 1905, baptized that year at Simla, a young man from a wealthy Sikh family did something startling: he took the saffron robe of a Hindu holy man and wore it as a Christian — a sadhu who owned nothing and walked the roads of North India and the Himalayas to preach Christ.
Sources: streeter-appasamy-sadhu p.17 · streeter-appasamy-sadhu p.26
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1905
The National Missionary Society is founded
In 1905 young Indian Christians meeting at Serampore founded the National Missionary Society (Bharat Christya Sevak Samaj) — a mission to be paid for by Indian money and carried by Indian workers. Among its leaders were V. S. Azariah and K. T. Paul, and it marked the Indian church setting out to evangelise its own land.
Sources: firth-indian-church-history p.254
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1912
Mass movements in the Nizam's Dominions
In 1912 V. S. Azariah was consecrated the first Indian bishop of the Anglican Communion, his see set at Dornakal in the Telugu country of the Nizam of Hyderabad's dominions. That territory — much of today's Telangana — became a heart of the great depressed-class mass movements, where Anglicans at Dornakal, British Methodists at Medak and American Methodists at Vikarabad saw the poorest communities turn to Christ in their thousands.
Sources: firth-indian-church-history p.201 · firth-indian-church-history p.253
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1918
The sadhu's preaching reaches the world
From 1918 the sadhu's preaching, until then poured out across North India and Tibet, widened into far journeys — through South India and Ceylon, and on to the Far East, Europe, America and Australia.
Sources: streeter-appasamy-sadhu p.17
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1927
The Dohnavur Fellowship is registered
Having parted from the older societies in 1925, the work was registered in its own right as the Dohnavur Fellowship in 1927.
Sources: carmichael-chance-to-die p.280
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1931
Carmichael's fall
A fall in October 1931 left Amy Carmichael badly injured and largely confined for the rest of her life, though she kept writing from her room.
Sources: carmichael-chance-to-die p.318
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1947
The Church of South India is formed
On 27 September 1947, weeks after independence, the Anglican dioceses of the south joined with Methodist and South India United Church congregations to form the Church of South India — the first union in modern times to bring episcopal and non-episcopal traditions into a single church.
Sources: firth-indian-church-history p.239
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1958
Indian-led missions arise
The faith so long carried by foreigners began sending its own. Bands like the Friends Missionary Prayer Band, formed in 1958 out of Tamil prayer cells, and the Indian Evangelical Mission of 1965, marked Indian Christians taking the work of mission into their own hands.
Sources: hedlund-christianity-indian p.243 · hedlund-christianity-indian p.244