India (East Syriac ecclesiastical province)
Metropolitanate of India was an East Syriac ecclesiastical province of the Church of the East, at least nominally, from the seventh to the sixteenth century. The Malabar region of India had long been home to a thriving Eastern Christian community, known as the Saint Thomas Christians. The community traces its origins to the evangelical activity of Thomas the Apostle in the 1st century. The Christian communities in India used the East Syriac Rite, the traditional liturgical rite of the Church of the East. They also adopted some aspects of Dyophysitism of Theodore of Mopsuestia, often inaccurately referred as Nestorianism, in accordance with theology of the Church of the East. It is unclear when the relation between Saint Thomas Christian and the Church of the East was established. Initially, they belonged to the metropolitan province of Fars, but were detached from that province in the 7th century, and again in the 8th, and given their own metropolitan bishop.
Due to the distance between India and the seat of the Patriarch of the Church of the East, communication with the church's heartland was often spotty, and the province was frequently without a bishop. An eleventh-century reference states that the metropolitan province of India had been 'suppressed', due to communication difficulties. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Indian Church was again dependent on the Church of the East. Although India was supplied with bishops from the Middle East, the effective control lay in the hands of an indigenous priest known as Arkkadiyakkon or Archdeacon. He was the community leader of Saint Thomas Christians. Even in times when there were multiple foreign bishops, there was only one archdeacon for entire Saint Thomas Community. As such, the Indian church was largely autonomous in operation, though the authority of the Patriarch was always respected.
In the 15th century, the Portuguese arrived in India. Initially, the relationship between native Saint Thomas Christians and the Portuguese were friendly. But gradually, the ritual diversities widened and the relationship deteriorated. After a section of the Church of the East became Catholic in 1553, both the Nestorian and Chaldean Churches intermittently attempted to regain their old influence in India by sending their bishops to the Malabar Christians. In 1565, the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Angamaly was established to provide jurisdiction for the Chaldean Church in India. On occasion the Vatican supported the claims of Catholic bishops from the Chaldean Church. However, the Portuguese ascendancy was formalised at the Synod of Diamper in 1599, which effectively suppressed the historic East Syriac metropolitan province of India. Angamaly, the former seat of the East Syriac metropolitan diocese, was downgraded to a suffragan diocese of the Padroado Archdiocese of Goa.
Today, the Chaldean Syrian Church of India is the continuation of the East Syriac ecclesiastical province in the Indian subcontinent, being an archdiocese of the Assyrian Church of the East. It has around 15,000 communicants.
India-Persia Church relations from 3rd to 14th Century
Sassanian period
The bishop David of Maishan, who flourished c.285, during the reign of the bishop Papa of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, left his seat to evangelise India.The Nestorian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who visited the Christians of India around the middle of the 6th century, mentioned three distinct areas of Christian settlement in India: in northwest India, around the trading port of Calliana near Mumbai, from which brass, sisam logs and cloth were exported; along the Malabar coast in southern India 'in the land called Male, where the pepper grows' and Sri Lanka. By the end of the Sassanian period the Christians of India had accepted the leadership of the church of Fars, which also claimed Saint Thomas as its founder. Cosmas noted that the Christians of Calliana had a bishop appointed from Fars, while the Christians of the Malabar coast and Ceylon had priests and deacons but not bishops. The connection with Fars went back at least as far as the late 5th century, when the metropolitan Maʿna of Rev Ardashir sent copies of his Syriac translations of Greek devotional works to India for the use of the Indian clergy.
Umayyad period
The patriarch Ishoʿyahb III raised India to the status of a metropolitan province, probably because of the unsatisfactory oversight of the metropolitan Shemʿon of Fars. A number of letters from Ishoʿyahb to Shemʿon have survived, in one of which Ishoʿyahb complained that Shemʿon had refused to consecrate a bishop for 'Kalnah', because the Indian Christians had offended him in some way.According to the fourteenth-century writer ʿAbdishoʿ of Nisibis, the patriarch Sliba-zkha created metropolitan provinces for Herat, Samarqand, India and China. If ʿAbdishoʿ is right, India's status as a metropolitan province must have lapsed shortly after it was created by Ishoʿyahb III. An alternative, and perhaps more likely, possibility, is that Sliba-zkha consecrated a metropolitan for India, perhaps in response to an appeal from the Indian Christians, to fill the place of the bishop sent there by Ishoʿyahb half a century earlier.
Abbasid period
After several centuries of intermittent dependence on the Persian-speaking metropolitans of Fars, who also boasted of their descent from the apostle Thomas, the Saint Thomas Christians of India were again brought under the authority of the patriarchs of Seleucia-Ctesiphon towards the end of the eighth century. The patriarch Timothy I, who was determined to break the power of the bishops of Rev Ardashir, definitively detached India from the province of Fars and made it a separate metropolitan province. There is also a tradition in the Indian church that two 'Syrian' bishops, Shapur and Peroz, were sent to Quilon from Mesopotamia in 823, the year of Timothy's death. They were accompanied by 'the famous man Sabrishoʿ', perhaps a metropolitan consecrated by Timothy for India. This tradition was recorded by Mattai Veticutel in the following words:
In the year 823, East Syriac fathers again came, Mar Shapur and Mar Peroz, accompanied by the famous man Sabrishoʿ. They came to the town of Quilon, went to the king Shakirbirti, and asked for lands. The king gave them as much land as they wished. So they too built a church and town in the country of Quilon. Thereafter East Syriac bishops and metropolitans came more often by order of the catholicus, who used to send them.
A few decades later, according to the sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Diogo do Couto, the Malabar church sent a delegation to Mesopotamia to ask for new bishops to be sent out to them. Their old bishops were dead, and their church had now only one deacon surviving. The catholicus thereupon consecrated a metropolitan named Yohannan for India, and two suffragan bishops, one of whom, 'Mar Dua', was appointed to the island of Soqotra, and the other, Thomas, to 'Masin', traditionally identified with southern China. Yohannan fixed his metropolitan seat at Cranganore. These events seem to have taken place around 880, perhaps during the patriarchate of Enosh.
Neither India nor China are listed as metropolitan provinces of the Church of the East in the detailed list of metropolitan provinces and dioceses drawn up in 893 by Eliya of Damascus. Eliya's list contains very few errors, and it is possible that neither province had a metropolitan at this period. This is certainly likely in the case of China, in the wake of the expulsion of Christians from the capital Chang'an by the emperor Wuzong in 845, though perhaps less so in the case of India.
Seljuq period
According to the eleventh-century Mukhtasar, a detailed list in Arabic of ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses of the Church of the East, the metropolitan province of India had been suppressed 'because it has become impossible to reach it'.Mongol period
At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Indian church was again dependent upon the Church of the East. The dating formula in the colophon to a manuscript copied in June 1301 in the church of Mar Quriaqos in Cranganore mentions the patriarch Yahballaha III, and the metropolitan Yaʿqob of India. Cranganore, described in this manuscript as 'the royal city', was doubtless the metropolitan seat for India at this time.In the 1320s the anonymous biographer of the patriarch Yahballaha III and his friend Rabban Bar Sauma praised the achievement of the Church of the East in converting 'the Indians, Chinese and Turks'.
India was listed as one of the Church of the East's 'provinces of the exterior' by the historian ʿAmr in 1348.
Appointment of East Syriac bishops for India, 1490–1503
At the end of the fifteenth century the Church of the East responded to a request by the Saint Thomas Christians for bishops to be sent out to them. In 1490, two Christians from Malabar arrived in Gazarta to petition the Nestorian patriarch to consecrate a bishop for their church. Two monks of the monastery of Mar Awgin were consecrated bishops and were sent to India. The patriarch Eliya V consecrated three more bishops for India in April 1503. These bishops sent a report to the patriarch from India in 1504, describing the condition of the Nestorian church in India and reporting the recent arrival of the Portuguese. Eliya had already died by the time this letter arrived in Mesopotamia, and it was received by his successor, Shemʿon VI.Bishops from traditional and Chaldean Patriarchates and clashes with the Portuguese, 1503–99
Rival bishops Abraham and Joseph Sulaqa reaching India
One of the bishops consecrated in 1503, Mar Yaʿqob, worked alongside the Portuguese ecclesiastical hierarchy in India until his death in 1553. After the death of Metropolitan Mar Yaʿqob and of a schism in the Church of the East, which resulted in there being two rival Patriarchs, one of whom entered communion with the Catholic Church.Both patriarchs - the Nestorian patriarch and Chaldean Catholic patriarch - began sending bishops to India. Apparently the first bishop came to Malabar was Mar Abraham sent by the traditionalist Nestorian patriarch. It is not known exactly when Abraham reached Malabar, but he must have been there already in 1556. Approximately at the same time, the Chaldean Patriarch Abdisho IV also sent out a bishop Joseph Sulaqa, the brother of the first Chaldean patriarch Yohannan Sulaqa, to Malabar.
Mar Joseph was sent to India with letters of introduction from the Pope to the Portuguese authorities; he was besides accompanied by Bishop Ambrose, a Dominican and papal commissary to the first patriarch, by his socius Father Anthony, and by Mar Elias Hormaz, Archbishop of Diarbekir. They arrived at Goa in November 1556, and were detained at Goa for eighteen months before being allowed to enter the diocese. when the Portuguese were finally alerted by the presence of Mar Abraham and allowed Mar Joseph to occupy his see. Proceeding to Cochin they lost Bishop Ambrose; the others travelled through Malabar for two and a half years on foot, visiting every church and detached settlement. Mar Elias returned to his own archbishopric of Diarbekir in Mesopotamia. In this way, nominally there were two rival East Syrian bishops in Malabar until 1558.