TRAVEL-ROUTES TO INDIA

In our third chapter we have raised the question of intellectual contacts between India and the West, reckoning with the possibility of Indian influence on Western thought, and of the infiltration of Western art and philosophical thought into the Indian world. But little has been said about Christians resident in India, and about the conditions under which they lived. It appears that, about the year AD 800, Christians were a well established community in Kerala, though limited both in numbers and in the range of their operations, and still retaining something of a foreign impress though already long resident in India. When, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began their exploration of the Indian world it was not long before they encountered this flourishing Christian community, prosperous and strong enough to exercise some influence on the affairs of the area in which it was settled. What had been happening to these Christian communities in the seven centuries which had elapsed between the period of earlier evidences and the beginning of the modern world?

It is to be regretted that there is remarkably little to record. With one possible exception, we have no single document from an Indian source in which notice is clearly taken of the existence of Christians. Again, with one doubtful exception, we have no knowledge of any Indian Christian having visited the west during this period.