Saint Thomas Christians: Background information when reading The Covenant of Water

Saint Thomas Christians

This article relates to The Covenant of Water

One of the overarching themes in Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water is faith, in all its various guises. For the character Big Ammachi and her family, it is their proud history as Saint Thomas Christians that sustains them in their bleakest hours.

The novel refers to the legend of Saint Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, landing in 52 CE along the Malabar Coast, in the modern-day state of Kerala. He is believed to have converted a few Brahmin (high-caste Hindu) families to Christianity, and Verghese writes that those first converts, Saint Thomas Christians, "stayed true to the faith and did not marry outside their community. Over time they grew, knitted together by their customs and their churches."

In 1498, Portuguese travelers led by the explorer Vasco da Gama were shocked to find Christian groups thriving along the southern part of the subcontinent, and equally surprised at their certainty that their church was established by none other than Saint Thomas himself. Today, Saint Thomas Christians, also called "Kerala Christians," number around six million in Kerala, and are dispersed in smaller numbers via diaspora around the world.

In India, Saint Thomas Christians are a vibrant part of communities that are majority Hindu and Muslim. A recent Smithsonian article claims that while Christians make up only 18.4% of Kerala's population, "The church spire is as much a part of the landscape as the temple tower and the mosque's minaret," and Christians "remain a prominent presence in all sectors of social, political and economic endeavor."

As historian William Dalrymple explains in a piece for the Guardian, although the legend of Saint Thomas in India is not provable as fact, Saint Thomas Christians "regard this tradition as more than a myth: it is an article of faith which underpins religious beliefs, identity and their place in Indian society." Even though Christianity has never been a major faith in India, it is one with very deep roots and has survived tenaciously, despite the odds. As Dalrymple concludes (and as the Christians in The Covenant of Water might agree):

"The church here has remained faithful to the tradition of St Thomas's journey from Palestine to India. It is a story long forgotten in a west which has come to regard itself as the true home of the faith, forgetting that in essence, Christianity is an eastern religion."

View from inside a Saint Thomas Christian church in the village of Malayattoor in Kerala, India
Photo by Mamichaelraj (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Covenant of Water. It originally ran in May 2023 and has been updated for the May 2023 edition. Go to magazine.