ROBERT NOBILI – THE FIRST EXPERIMENTS

With the opening of the seventeenth century the centre of interest in Christian missions in India moves southwards to the Tamil country, the Pāṇḍyan realm, and within it to the greatest city of that realm, Kūdal of the four towers to give it its ancient Dravidian name, Mathurai as it is more commonly known today. Now as then, the four great gopurams, gateway towers of the Mīnākṣi temple standing high above the flat South Indian plain, beckon the traveller from afar. Then as now, the great temple, served by countless Brāhmans, was the scene of an almost endless round of ceremonies and festivities. Then as now, Mathurai was a great centre of Tamil culture, almost the purest form of the Tamil language being spoken in the city and its environs. It was a great centre of education, being the home of something like a university in which students from many areas streamed together to be instructed in logic and in the various forms of Hindu philosophy.

The first beginnings of Christian penetration had taken place before the end of the sixteenth century. A number of Portuguese were resident in the outskirts of the city; and some families of Parava Christians engaged in trade had moved inland from the coast. To care for them a Jesuit priest Fr Gonçalo Fernandes had been sent to the great city.